We don’t bother to stick around for Zombie Rant. Emma and Toni wait for us backstage. “You guys were great,” Emma says.
“Really great,” Toni agrees.
“Could you even hear us though all the noise?” I ask.
Emma and Toni look at each other, not knowing how to answer. “That wasn’t your fault,” Toni says.
“It’s our fault that we couldn’t keep their attention,” I disagree. “I don’t know what went wrong. I thought we were good.”
“You were really good,” Emma says.
“Next time we have to be better, or louder.”
“Our amplifiers were turned all the way up,” Tom says. “We couldn’t have been louder.”
“Then we need stronger amps.” I want Electric Storm to be major, not an opening act. If we have to get better than we are … then that’s what we have to do.
Niles and I don’t talk much as we drive down Route 9 that night. We’re too bummed.
“Tomorrow might be better,” Niles says as he pulls into the gas station. We’re booked for the entire weekend.
“It’s already tomorrow,” I say without any enthusiasm.
Where did we mess up? The band rocked. I thought my vocals killed, but apparently I was wrong. It’s hard to hear yourself objectively. People singing in the shower think they’re awesome, when in reality … not so much.
While Niles pumps gas, I head into the convenience store for snacks. As I enter two guys a little younger than me are near the counter. “Hey, Electric Storm Girl!” the taller of the two says.
It’s surprising but nice to be recognized. “Hey,” I reply with a wave and a weak smile.
“I told you it was her, Adam,” the taller kid says to his friend. “I saw them on YouTube.”
“They’re on Twitter, too,” Adam says. Then he turns to me. “You played at The Second Chance tonight, right?”
“How did you know that?” We’re nearly ten miles away from there.
“I saw you and your band on Tumblr. It’s all over Twitter and Facebook, too. Want to see?” he offers, extending his phone.
“Sure.” Clicking the link brings me to a video of “Love Meltdown.” The audio is playing from a phone so it’s a bit tinny. Just the same, I’m smiling. We sound good.
Niles comes in so I show it to him. “Wow!” he says. “How come you can’t hear the background noise—all the people talking?”
“Someone standing in the wings must have taken it,” the taller kid says as I hand him back his phone. He scans it a moment before handing it back to me. “Catch this action,” he says.
The same video is on Twitter but with a different person tweeting. Hashtag: ZMBIRANTFANSRJRKS.
Thanks, Emma, I think. But a second look and I see it’s not from her. It’s a complete stranger who follows The Second Chance. The phone buzzes and Emma’s retweeted the video. And the mentions keep coming.
“You should respond—keep the buzz going,” Adam says.
“What should we say?” I wonder aloud.
“Write that the band and their fans suck,” Adam suggests.
“No,” Niles objects. “We have to see them again tomorrow.”
I dig my phone out and open the Twitter app. “We should take the high road,” Niles says. “It’s classier.”
So Niles and I each tweet about how Zombie Rant fans were just excited to see their band and how there’s room for everyone in music. Tom and Matt are more up for a fight in their tweets but they cool down quickly when they see what we’re tweeting.
“Instagram is on fire with you guys,” the shorter guy tells us as photo after photo of the band flash by.
“Do you have music for sale?” Adam asks.
Niles and I shake our heads.
“You should put some up online somewhere,” the taller kid says. “Do it right away.”
We thank the two kids. I treat them to the bag of chips and sodas they were about to buy and then pay for the Yoo-hoo, water, and pretzels we’re buying.
Outside, Niles has pulled his car to the side. We climb inside and put Matt and Tom on speaker on Niles’s phone. Together we figure out how to sell “Love Meltdown” for a dollar a download.
“That’s not very much,” I say.
“In ten hits we’ll have ten dollars.” When Niles puts it like that it suddenly seems possible we might make some money.
“Look on Facebook.” Tom’s voice comes from the phone resting in the console. “Your friend Emma’s post has two hundred likes already.”
Emma Likes the Electric Storm page, so they’re all seeing her post. She’s written: TALENT OVER TALK and posted the same video that the kids inside the convenience store showed us.
My phone buzzes with another notification. Someone has tweeted: ELECTRIC STORM GIRL ROCKS OUR WORLD.
I’m reading this as I sense that something is passing us at alarming speed. Before I can even look away from my phone, I hear the crash.
Niles and I leap from the car, leaving Matt and Tom shouting at us to tell them what just happened.
A driver has raced through the gas station and smashed into an idling car at one of the pumps. The car is now at a slant, with its trunk end up against a pump and its hood smashed into one of the pillars that support the roof covering the pumping area.
A woman screams. Turning, I see her, stunned and ashen, having just run from inside the store. Then I hear more screaming—screeching, really—from inside the car.
“Do you hear that?” I ask Niles.
“Hear what?” he asks.
The window is fogged but luckily my improved eyesight enables me to see clearly past the blur. A small boy is upside down strapped into his car seat. Instantly, I am all instinct, no thought.
Wrapping my bionic arm around the pillar, it’s easy to pull up onto the car and scramble to the back window. The back door won’t open. Locked. Hanging upside down, I attempt to crack the glass with my elbow, but it’s no good.
People shout suggestions and warnings at me but I can’t listen. I pull off the boot on my fake leg and use my titanium foot to kick the front windshield with all my strength—all of it, everything I can summon. I kick again, and once more. With a satisfying crackle, the safety glass forms a pattern of breaks along the windshield. More pressure and the glass gives way.
I chop at it with my heel until I’m able to slide through the opening and crawl to the red-faced boy. Fortunately, his seat unbuckles easily. He clings to my neck in a panicked embrace. Niles has climbed up onto the car, and reaches out his arms toward us. As I lift the boy through the car to Niles, I worry he’ll be scratched by the sharp edges of broken safety glass, but there’s nothing I can do about it. The important thing is to get him out.
Niles grabs the boy and passes him down to his mother.
As I climb out, sirens wail nearby. The woman sobs.
Niles grabs my left hand and pulls me away from the scene. “We should get out of here. This could all blow,” he says.
We hurry to his car but don’t get in because firefighters screech into the station, blocking our way out. They clear everyone away from the pumps before unleashing a torrent of water all over the area.
The local news van pulls into the far end of the station. Reporters and camerapeople head straight for me. “We’ve seen the videos,” says Kate Osmer, a reporter I recognize from TV. “Less than a year ago Mira Rains was involved in a near fatal car accident also. Mira, how did you find it in yourself to take action now? It must have brought back horrendous memories.”
She sticks the microphone in my face. I’m too stunned to speak. Horrendous memories? Oddly enough, no. After months replaying the accident in my mind, I’m suddenly blank.
“Will you be terrified to go to gas stations now? Your original accident occurred at a filling station, and now this.”
“It’s just a coincidence,” I answer calmly.
“How were you feeling when you saved that child?” Kate Osmer pushes me to speak.
> “Um … I wasn’t feeling anything … I was just moving.”
A man with a shoulder-mounted camera steps in front of us, and Kate Osmer faces him. “You heard it here,” she says. “Without a thought for her own safety, Mira Rains—the bionic girl turned swimming champion—leaped into harm’s way to selflessly save a small child.”
The cameraman swings the camera to Niles and me. The blinding light at the top of his camera makes me blink stupidly.
When I finally get home, Mom is wrapped in her blue chenille robe and sitting in the living room. She claps her hand over her mouth and starts to cry. Hard.
“What’s the matter?!” I hurry to her side, kneeling.
She can’t answer me because she’s sobbing.
“Mom, I’m fine.”
She places her hand on my cheek as she continues crying. “I saw it on the diner’s TV. It brought everything back.”
“It’s okay. I’m okay.”
Why is she being so emotional? She can see that I’m fine. I texted that I was on my way home.
Zack comes into the room, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He goes to Mom’s side to hold her hand. Lifting her head, she smiles up at him through her tears. His presence calms her. “I’m sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“You’re a hero,” Zack says.
“That car could have blown up,” Mom wails.
“I think she needs tea,” Zack tells me. Mom drinks chamomile tea when she’s upset.
With a nod, I go to the kitchen to boil water. When I return, Mom and Zack are watching a video someone took at the gas station. It’s on a regular TV station, not cable. It shows me passing the boy out of the car to Niles.
It’s not fair that I’m getting all the attention. It took a lot of nerve for him to climb onto that car.
“I almost forgot,” Mom says. “How did your performance go?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I say.
She studies me quizzically but doesn’t pursue it. “You must be exhausted,” she says.
Now that I think about it, I’m not. “No,” I say. Instead, I’m charged with energy. Probably it’s all the excitement.
On the TV they show a clip of me saying, “I was just moving.”
“You’re not a hero,” Zack says to me, his attention on the TV screen.
“No?” I ask with a smile.
“No.” He studies me as though attempting to work out some perplexing puzzle. “You’re a superhero now.”
It’s four in the morning. Sitting at the edge of my bed, I take off my left leg and my right arm. With my hand balancing me against my dresser, I stand to gaze at my image in the full-length mirror. I’ve taken off my makeup and my hair is up in a hair tie.
Some superhero.
My phone buzzes with a text from Niles. You OK?
Physically I feel fine. Nothing hurts. But isn’t that a little strange? I should have some ache or strain—a bruise, at least. As I climbed out the windshield some sharp glass cut my arm. I’m sure of it. There’s even blood on my sleeve. Now, though, there’s not even a mark on my arm. Could I have healed that fast?
Yeah, I’m fine. You? I reply.
A little shaken, and wondering why you’re not. Can you believe we were that close to another accident at a gas station?
Don’t I seem OK? I text Niles.
IDK. Too calm maybe. Get some sleep—good night.
Am I in shock? I don’t think I am.
But now I wonder if Niles is right. I should be relieved to have helped that boy. And I should be freaked out to have been so close to an accident after nearly dying in one less than a year ago. Yet I’m detached. It’s as though everything has happened to someone else.
In my dreams I fly in and around buildings in Manhattan. It’s thrilling and fun, so I’m grumpy about being awakened at eight o’clock by the buzz of my phone.
Leanna Humphrey? What does she want?
“Hello, stranger,” she says in a super-friendly way. “I won’t ask what you’ve been up to because it’s all over the news.”
“It is?”
“What? Do you live in a cave, Batgirl?”
“It’s kind of early.”
“I forgot. Rock stars stay up all night. You’d better go online.”
“I will,” I say, still groggy.
“Go ahead. And, in the meantime, let’s make a date to hang out. We have to catch up.”
“Yeah. Sure.” I don’t know why I agree to it. “I’ll call you.”
“Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
I feel as fake as my bionic limbs, and not nearly as energized. I’ve been just as phony as Leanna. But why? I admire people who don’t play stupid mind games. I resolve to be more honest with people, even those I don’t particularly like.
The next to call is Emma. I have to click with my left hand because I haven’t even strapped my arm on yet. “Madame Suza sent an email,” she tells me. “She says it’s important that we see her as soon as possible.”
“What?” This is weird.
“She’s had a psychic flash about you.”
Oh, man! First Leanna, now Madame Suza! It seems everyone is interested in me since I’m on TV. “Couldn’t she tell you about her flash over the phone?”
“I guess not.”
“My shift at the diner starts at three today. I can go with you tomorrow morning.”
“Not before work today?”
I’m not sure I’m up to seeing Madame Suza today. “Let me have breakfast and I’ll call you back,” I say.
“All right. I’m proud of you, by the way. What you did was really brave.”
“Thanks. It didn’t feel like I was being brave, though. I didn’t decide to help or anything.”
“But you did. That’s what’s important. Anyway, talk later!”
“Bye.”
Missed call from Sylvia Snap Girl, my phone says. That’s how I have her listed in my contacts. Her voice mail says she’s not there, so I leave her a message saying I’m calling her back.
Slipping my phone into the pocket of my white cotton robe, I head downstairs. When I reach the kitchen, Zack has finished breakfast.
“How did you sleep?” Mom asks me as she sips from her cup of coffee.
“Great!” I reply, peeling a slice of salami from the deli paper and folding it into my mouth. In the living room, I turn on the TV and surf the channels.
Leanna wasn’t kidding.
I am everywhere!
Some morning shows rerun my old interview with the network news. A clip of Electric Storm at The Second Chance gets played all over the place. One newscaster even tells viewers how to buy “Love Meltdown” online.
My phone buzzes with texts and notifications that I’m being mentioned in tweets and Facebook posts. I can’t keep up with it all but I do look at Matt’s text: 3000 copies of Love Meltdown sold already!!!!!
That can’t be right. I text back: 300 or 3000?
3 triple 0! And it’s only 8:30 a.m.!!!
Karen from the diner calls to tell me that Dimitri, the owner, wants me to not come in to work.
“Am I fired?” I ask, though I can’t imagine why I would be.
“I don’t know,” she answers, “but the place is already filled with people waiting for you to come in.”
“That’s good, though, isn’t it?”
“The crowd is good, I guess. But Dimitri thinks it’ll be chaos once you get here and people will stop ordering and just jam up the place.”
For a moment after I hang up, I feel disoriented. Working at the diner gave me somewhere to be every day. I used to be a girl who went to school. I used to play lacrosse on the school team. Later I swam on the team. I had a boyfriend named Jason.
All those things have been swept away, and the diner was what I had to hold on to.
How do I define myself now?
I’m a cyborg.
I have to face the fact. I know that, technic
ally, many people are somewhat cybernetic—hearing aids, implanted teeth, glasses and contact lenses, heart stents, plastic surgery of all kinds, metal rods and pins in bones, and performance-enhancing drugs.
But I’ve crossed the line from restorative cybernetics to enhanced cybernetics. I’ve had more than my lost parts and abilities restored. I’m better than before, enhanced.
The kitchen landline rings and Mom picks up. At first she’s pleasant but gradually her tone turns fretful. “I don’t know … I have to think about it … Will it really help her? She’s been through so much already.”
Mom’s face is a mask of worry as I enter the kitchen. “Dr. Hector wants to give you a more natural-looking arm and leg. He says they will be lighter and easier for you to manage.”
“So, let’s do it,” I say. This arm is very robotic looking, and I’d missed the older one, the one that looked more like a real arm. I wouldn’t mind a nicer one.
“Tell Dr. Hector I want it,” I say.
“There’s more,” Mom says. “They want to give you a leg that’s more like the arm you have now, only it won’t look robotic. It’ll look more like the new arm.”
“Count me in,” I say.
“Are you sure?” Mom asks, “Can you really cope with another surgery? He wants to see us at the hospital tomorrow.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “But it has to wait. We have to perform at Second Chance tonight and tomorrow.”
“Mira, this is important,” Mom says.
“So is Electric Storm,” I tell her.
Niles feels crummy. He’s not playing with us tonight, Matt replies when I text him.
You talked to him?
His mom texted me.
His mom? What’s wrong with him?
Didn’t ask.
Guys! How could he not ask?
He won’t answer me, I text.
He won’t answer anybody.
What’s going on with him?
IDK. We’ll pick you up around 5:00 tho, k?
I do not want to get into that van again, but what choice do I have?