Struck Read Online Free PDF

quake. People who have not been found.”
    I thought of my mom, buried in the Waste with the rest of the dead, waiting for her air to run out. What if she’d never been found? Would I have posted her picture on thiswall, hoping that someone had seen her? Hoping she was still alive, lost in the shuffle at some hospital or clinic?
    I felt panic rising inside me. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t seem to get any oxygen to my lungs. The heat that lived in my chest flared, like a hot coal that never quite went out.
    The girl in black tilted her head and watched me curiously, a dreamy sort of expression on her face. “Are you okay?” she asked.
    I bolted. I needed out of that hallway, with all those dead and missing people gazing at me from their photographs. With its stench of flowers that belonged in a funeral home, not a school.
    And more than anything, for reasons I didn’t understand, I had to get away from the girl in black.

4
    I COULDN’T GO to class. Not yet. I needed a moment alone to get myself under control. I was already late, so what was another few minutes?
    I found myself in the ladies’ lounge on the first floor. I wasn’t sure who had started calling the girls’ restroom “the lounge ,” like you’d step inside and be greeted with velvet sofas, blood orange martinis, and downtempo remixes, but the name stuck. Still, it was just a school restroom, like any other. Gray walls. Gray tile floor. Gray-painted stalls. Even the light humming from the flickering fluorescent tubes overhead had a grayish hue. If a person wanted to know what she’d look like after being embalmed, all she had to do was check herself out in the lounge mirror.
    It was silent inside except for the drip-drip-drip of a leaky faucet, but I peered beneath the stalls to make sure I was alone before removing my gloves. People probably wondered if I had scales under my clothes. Nope, just Lichtenberg figures. That’s the technical name for the lightning scars, which are supposedly caused by electron showers through the skin. For most people struck by lightning, the marks fade within a few days. Mine never did. They kept growing every time I was struck. Only my face had been spared,and I had to be thankful for that. It wasn’t a bad face. Big gray eyes. A kiss-shaped mouth. Round cheekbones. But if I were to be struck again … the lightning scars would almost certainly grow, and they had nowhere to go but up.
    I ran the water until it was ice cold and then splashed it on my face. That’s what movie characters always do when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Splash a little water on the face, right? But somehow the women manage to do it without messing up their makeup. There must be some trick to it, because I ended up with heroin-addict eyes. I tried to rub off the mascara stains drizzling down my cheeks and only smeared them around, staining my hands.
    This day just kept on getting better.
    I squirted soap into my cupped palms and rubbed them until they were frothy, used a foamy fingertip to scrub the mascara from my eyes, leaving them red and irritated and a little gray around the sockets. Then I felt the sting of soap in my eyes and squeezed them shut.
    “Excuse me. May I ask you a question?” The voice was polite, inquisitive, and it immediately put me on high alert. I peered up with my face dripping water to discover who had crept up behind me and was now trespassing on my personal space.
    Her long-sleeved white shirt was buttoned so tight at the neck it was a wonder she could breathe, and her hair was pulled back severely enough to make her eyes bulge from their sockets. But even without the masochistic ponytail and strangulating collar, I imagined her eyes would bug out. She had that kind of intensity about her. That fervor the Followers of the Light, the Followers of Rance Ridley Prophet, seemed to possess.
    But she hadn’t always looked this way. Squinting at her reflection in the mirror, I recognized her. It was like looking