Lucy by Laurence Gonzales

killed them.”
    “Oh, my God, that’s horrible. I am so, so sorry.”
    “Thanks.” Lucy didn’t know what else to say.
    “Why don’t you sit with me at lunch? I can introduce you to some people.”
    “That would be splendid.” Amanda gave her an odd look. Lucy thought that she had probably said the wrong thing. She felt that she knew so little. How would she learn it all?
    As the teacher began the class, Lucy sensed a change in the flow of The Stream. People had seen Lucy and Amanda in conversation, seen their expressions. Silent messages were flying around the room. Lucy could sense what had happened: By talking to her with true feeling, Amanda had conferred some of her status on Lucy.
    As soon as they were seated in the cafeteria and Amanda had introduced Lucy to her friends, three girls and a boy, the conversation stopped and they all brought out sleek and colorful phones and began touching them. They weren’t talking, just staring down at their phones and poking them. Lucy watched, fascinated. She leaned over to Amanda and whispered, “What are you doing?”
    “Didn’t you ever leave the jungle?”
    “No. I was born and grew up there. Sorry.”
    “No, I’m sorry. That was rude. It’s called texting. Take out your phone and I’ll show you how.”
    Lucy froze. She didn’t know what to say.
    Amanda gave her a long suspicious look. “You don’t have a phone?”
    Lucy hung her head in shame.
    “Hey, guys,” Amanda announced. “Lucy doesn’t have a phone. Is that cool, or what?”
    “Word,” said the boy named Matt.
    “Sweet,” said a blond girl named Melissa. “I wish I could get rid of mine. But how do you, like, live?”
    Lucy felt her face flush hot.
    “I don’t even remember not having one,” Melissa said.
    “That’s because your brain has been fried from doing too many bong hits,” Matt said. Everyone giggled.
    Lucy leaned over to Amanda and asked, “What are bong hits?” Amanda looked at Lucy with a blank expression. “Bonk Kits?” Lucy asked, and everyone laughed. Lucy felt her desolation expand to fill the universe.
    “Oh, man. We are so going to teach you some stuff.”
    •  •  •
    The school day was ending. Lucy was moving down the hall among the crowds of people when she heard a familiar sound coming from behind a set of double doors. The noises stopped her in her tracks. She cocked her head, listening intently with the hair on her arms standing up. She recognized the sound instantly, but it struck her as impossible: She was hearing bonobos screaming to one another in jubilant surprise at a sudden heated conflict. It reminded Lucy of the sound—at once thrilling and appalling—that everyone had made the day that old Lucretia had bitten the finger joints off of Zeus’s hand. Only somehow this was different. The pitch was too low. She felt a rush of emotion, a quickening in her blood. Lucy could not ignore it. Someone was being hurt.
    Without thinking, she slammed through the double doors and saw two boys entangled on the floor. One was wrenching the other’s leg painfully behind him. The other was crying out in agony, even as the people sitting all around looked on and hooted and howled and screeched in horrible revelry. Lucy dropped her books and leapt to the rescue. She grabbed the attacker, raised him easily above her head, and simply flung him away. Then she extended her hand to help the wounded one to his feet. “Are you all right? Are you all right?” Odd, she thought, that he had no blood on him.
    “Are you nuts?”
    Lucy felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. He had some sort of padded contraption on his head and wore a bright red skintight suit.
    Only then did Lucy notice that the entire room had fallen silent. Lucy’s senses began to return to normal speed. She heard a low moan coming from the boy she’d thrown. A stunned and shaken grown-up man with something shiny clenched in his teeth was moving purposefully toward her now. Lucy prepared