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“What are you talking about, brah?” Quinn demanded.
Sam held up his hands, turning his palms toward his friend. “I can…Dude, I know it sounds like I’m crazy, but sometimes this light just comes shooting out of my hands.”
Quinn barked a laugh. “No, man, that doesn’t sound crazy. Crazy is you saying you’re better than me at riding a curl. This is mentally ill. This is off the hook. Let me see you do it.”
“I don’t know how,” Sam confessed. “It’s happened four times, but I can’t just make it happen.”
“Four times you shot lasers out of your hands.” Quinn was on the line between laughing and yelling. “I’ve known you, like, half your life, and now you’re the Green Lantern? Right.”
“It’s true,” Astrid said.
“Bull. If it’s true, then do it. Show me.”
Sam said, “I’m trying to tell you, it only happens when I’m panicked or whatever. I don’t make it happen, it just happens.”
Edilio said, “Just now you said four times. I saw the flash at the fire. I saw it just now. What’s the other two times?”
“The time before was at my house. It made…I mean, I made…this light. Like a lightbulb kind of. It was dark. I had a nightmare.” He met Astrid’s steady gaze and suddenly a different lightbulb went off. “You saw it,” he accused her. “You saw the light in my room. You’ve known all along.”
“Yes,” Astrid admitted. “I’ve known since that first day. And I’ve known about Petey for longer.”
Edilio still wanted the basics l
aid out. “The fire, here, this lightbulb thing, that’s three.”
“First time was Tom,” Sam said. The name meant nothing to Edilio, but it did to Quinn.
“Your stepfather?” Quinn demanded sharply. “Ex-stepfather, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
Quinn was staring hard at Sam. “Brah, you aren’t saying what you sound like you’re saying, right?”
“I thought he was trying to hurt my mom,” Sam said. “I thought…I was asleep, I woke up, I come down the stairs, they’re both in the kitchen yelling, I see Tom with a knife, and there’s this flash of light shooting out of my hands.”
Sam felt tears stinging his eyes. It surprised him. He didn’t feel sad. If anything, he felt relieved. He hadn’t told anyone about this before. This was a weight coming off his shoulders. But at the same time, he registered the way Quinn drew back a step, putting distance between them.
“My mom knew, of course. She covered at the emergency room. Tom was yelling that I had shot him. The doctors saw a burn, so they knew it wasn’t a gunshot. My mom told some lie about Tom falling against the stove.”
“She had to choose between protecting you or supporting her husband,” Astrid said.
“Yeah. And Tom realized, once the pain was under control, he realized he would end up in the psychiatric ward if he kept talking about his stepson shooting beams of light at him.”
“You burned your stepfather’s hand off?” Quinn asked, his tone shrill.
“Whoa, back up. Did what?” Edilio demanded. It was his turn to be surprised.
Quinn said, “His stepfather ended up with a hook, man. They had to cut his hand off, like, right here.” He made a chopping motion on his forearm. “I saw him, like, a week ago, over in San Luis. He’s got one of those hooks now, you know, with, like, two pincers or whatever? He was buying cigarettes and handing the clerk money with his hook.” He pantomimed it, using two fingers for the pincers of the prosthetic arm.
“So you’re some kind of freak?” Quinn asked. He still seemed undecided whether he was mad or found it funny.
“I’m not the only one,” Sam said defensively. “That girl in the fire. I think she started that fire. When she saw me, she panicked. It was like liquid fire came out of her hands.”
Edilio said, “So you shot back. You did your thing at her.” Sam could see only the outline of his face in the darkness. “That’s what’s been dogging you. You think you hurt her.”
“I don’t know how to control it. I don’t ask for it to come. I don’t know how to make it go away. I’m just glad I didn’t hurt Little Pete. I was choking.”
Quinn and Edilio turned their attention to the little boy now. Little Pete rubbed sleep from his eyes and stared past them, indifferent to them, maybe not even aware that they existed. Maybe wondering why he was standing in the damp night air outside a nuclear power plant. Maybe not wondering anything.
