“Why not?”
He looks at me like he’s looking at me for the first time. Really looking at me.
“Because … because then it might actually hurt you.”
His name gets called to come on stage and I follow behind him as he carries out his machine in his hands, glancing back at me one more time with a look of uncertainty on his face.
As Roland’s facing the audience and explaining his experiment, I turn the voltage up on his equipment and then stand in front of it, positioning myself so that he can’t see what I’ve done.
“You can stand back a little,” he says after he turns back to me to start the experiment.
“I’d like to stand up here a bit closer to the audience,” I say, feeling the rush of eyes as they fall on me. “I am, after all, part of this show too.”
He rolls his eyes at me and gives me the classic “why do popular kids have to be so much work” sigh. Too bad I’m not popular enough to make it a valid gesture. Certainly not now that the boys are gone. Now that they’ve abandoned me.
“Whatever,” he says. “I just need the remote anyway.
With one final sentence to the audience, he directs all of their attention to me and to the effects that they should see on the screen that he’s hooked his laptop up to.
“Ready?” he asks me.
“Fire away,” I say. I’ve never been zapped with electricity before.
Before today.
I don’t have too long to think about it before I feel a rush of voltage go through my body. The sensation is wild, almost like the burning that happens when you swallow hard liquor too fast down the wrong pipe. Except with this, it feels like the sensation is going through every vein in my body.
There are a few gasps in the audience as the people react to seeing my body quiver with the bolt of electricity and the data on the screen jump up.
Roland’s brow furrows, something about the reading on my screen and the reaction. He leans over to me and whispers something about how I don’t need to be such an overly dramatic actor.
“This isn’t about you,” he whispers, “you’re not actually going to get hurt.”
I don’t care enough to correct him.
All I can think about is wanting to feel it again.
“Do it again,” I say, and then when he hesitates, add, “Scientists never just do things once, right?”
That, and the stares of the expectant audience, seems to resonate with him because he goes ahead and gives me another zap. This time I writhe against the chair, my hands clutching at the arm rests until my knuckles go white. I think even he is impressed by how much the experiment is working.
He glances over at the electrical readings again, muttering something into the microphone about how he’s going to have to make some adjustments. That the electricity levels aren’t really that high.
The laugh that ensues is a little nervous. Unsettled.
Like me.
“Again,” I say, louder this time. “Go again.”
Driven by my own wild eyes and the faces turned towards us, he does as I ask.
Every zap sends that scorching feeling through my veins and I can even feel it in the muscles in my face and behind my eardrums. I think that it’s causing a weird, high-pitched vibrating sound in my ears, but then I recognize that sound again.
It’s a howl.
A faint, unnaturally high-pitched howl that sounds like a wolf in pain.
“Do it again,” I say even louder this time. “Do it for longer this time.”