Cold Kiss

it on my bedroom floor right before Ryan called, and I was twisting it in one fist by the time he told me Becker was in the hospital and Danny was dead.
    It hissed and sputtered for a second before a hot, angry tongue licked out and burned my wrist. I dropped it on the floor, and the phone with it. Ryan was still talking, a tiny, distant voice.
    I don’t remember a lot of what happened after that, but the scorch mark is still there, a sooty black circle against the faded oak. Mom’s not sure it will ever come out completely, but she never once asked me how it got there.

CHAPTER TWO

    I WASN’T EVEN THIRTEEN YET THE FIRST TIME. It reminded me of a sneeze coming on, that tingling tension when you know it’s going to happen and you can’t stop it. But this feeling was bigger than that, a vibrating hum just beneath my skin that made me squirm all over.
    I was mad at my mother, which was pretty much a daily thing back then. She’d said no to a sleepover at Darcia’s because I hadn’t finished my social studies project, and in her words, “There’s no way I’m going to listen to you whine about it all day tomorrow, when you’re rushing to get it done.”
    Robin stuck her tongue out at me from across the kitchen table, and I made a face at her before I stood up. “Clear your place, Wren,” my mother said, not bothering to glance over her shoulder as she rinsed dishes in the sink.
    I didn’t even have a chance to mutter, “Do I ever forget?” because the humming was louder now, a hot, angry itch just beneath my skin, and then the lightbulb in the fixture over the kitchen table hissed and exploded in a white arc.
    Robin screamed and waved her arms, batting at her hair, brittle pieces of glass skittering over the table, until my mother cut through the noise. “Stop it! Just sit still.”
    I had frozen in place, my plate still in my hands, my mouth hanging open. The weird buzz had subsided, leaving behind a kind of dull sting, like the last day of a bad sunburn, but the kitchen was still crackling with electricity.
    This, I was pretty sure, was one of those Things We Didn’t Talk About. Like where our dad was or why Mom didn’t invite Aunt Mari to the house anymore.
    Or why, sometimes, even when the electric got shut off because Mom was behind on the bills, she could disappear into the basement and the lights would flare to life. Mom had broken her share of lightbulbs, and once the mirror over the bathroom sink, which cut us all in half diagonally for months before she replaced it.
    She could make other things happen, too, better things. Balloons that stayed afloat for days after Robin’s birthday party. Daffodils that budded long before anyone else’s. A fire in the fireplace that burned for hours on just a handful of newspaper and a stray twig.
    When I was really little, six or seven, and Dad had just left, I woke up crying almost every night, shrugging off nightmares like a tangled net. Mom would get into bed with me and sing, low, nonsense tunes that she said Gram had sung to her when she was a kid. And above me, the ceiling would swirl with gently sparkling lights, like summer fireflies, flickering in and out with the tune.
    Those moments were gifts, offered freely, as surprising and wonderful as unexpected gifts always are, unlike the broken mirror and, once, the smoking ruin of the backyard. But even the fairy lights and the balloons weren’t something Robin or I could ask about. The warning was always there in Mom’s eyes, a monster in the closet of a brightly lit room.
    Mom had never once mentioned it would happen to me, too, even though I knew Aunt Mari and Gram could do the same things. It seemed like one of those grown-up privileges, I guess, and not one Mom approved of anymore. But when Robin and I were little, she was totally free about it, and so were Gram and Aunt Mari.
    I remember one Christmas when Robin was really little, not even two, and Gram had taken me into the backyard with Dad. It was snowing, fat, lacy flakes swirling out of the sky, and the trees were dripping with icicles from the night before. Gram stood there wrapped in her big red coat as Dad and I caught snowflakes on our tongues, and she lit up all the icicles like Christmas lights with just a few whispered words.
    Dad had grinned, his teeth as white as the blanket of snow on the grass. “Nicely done, Rowan,” he said, and kissed her cheek. It was too cold to stay out much longer, but I held on to that moment after