Wired by Francine Pascal Page A

engaged, intercepting them.
    Gaia had always suspected that she was at heart a coward. People mistook her willingness to go to bat as bravery, but she knew, intrinsically, that the oppositeof brave was not fearless. Fearlessness allowed her the luxury of avoiding bravery; to her, bravery meant putting aside fear and leaping into the fray. Through her fearlessness Gaia actually managed to avoid actively choosing bravery. It was almost ironic.
    Today, not once but twice, Gaia had managed to be brave. Either that or deeply stupid. Possibly both. She had deliberately thrown herself into conflict on two separate occasions this afternoon. Despite being terrified at the moment of intervention.
    Only now it was this evening. She took a deep breath and found that when she inhaled, even her ribs hurt. Fabulous. Now that the details of the fight were flooding back to her, she peered more closely up and down the street.
    She was sitting in the
gutter
.
    Literally, the gutter. Her pants were torn at the knee, and the skin visible through the frayed cloth glistened wetly with sticky blood. Her palms were caked with dirt. Tangled snarls of hair curled around her face where they’d fallen loose from her ponytail.
    She’d been passed out in the
gutter
, for chrissake. Like some crack addict who didn’t even know what day it was. Was
that
bravery?
    Gaia shivered. She looked at her watch and saw that it was later than she’d even first thought. She’d been out cold for at least an hour. An hour that she’d been lying in the gutter, helpless, practically begging tobe jumped, mugged, raped, dismembered…. She hugged her arms to her chest, lost in thought.
    She was going to have to find a balance. She was relieved, on a certain level, to discover that even in the face of true terror, she was capable of bravery and low-level heroism. The fact that she was able to rationalize through the fear and kick ass was not insignificant. But she would be putting herself in danger, time and again, if she didn’t learn to manage the exertion, to get herself to safety. Teenage girls couldn’t go passing out in the gutters of New York, she knew. This was a fundamental truism.
    She saw a dark spot hit the pavement in front of her before she realized she was crying. She pressed her palms into her eye sockets and willed herself to stop. This was, what, the second? third? crying fit today. That she even had to think back and count was a serious problem.
    She rummaged through her messenger bag in search of a tissue, knowing it was a futile effort. She wasn’t a portable-pack-of-Kleenex type of girl—which was funny since lately she
was
the prone-to-random-fits-of-crying type of girl. Her fingers brushed against her cell phone, buried deep within the recesses of the bag, and she paused.
    Liz
. She wasn’t totally sure whether or not she could or should give Liz a call. True, Liz had been totally normal with her this afternoon at school, soshe was
probably
over Gaia’s weird behavior at her father’s party. But
probably
still left room for self-doubt, which Gaia seemed to have in spades these days. Still, she wasn’t ready to go back to the boarding-house, that was for sure. So she wouldn’t even call Liz, then, she’d just go by and see. Surprise Liz.
    Seeking out company—seeking out comfort when shaken or stressed—this was the normal reaction to being upset. Gaia was glad she recognized that. Suddenly stopping by Liz’s apartment just to say hi seemed like a very regular-girl thing to do, and Gaia was going to act on this unexpectedly normal impulse. She didn’t need to collapse in Liz’s arms in disarray or even to tell Liz what she had been up to these last few fun-filled hours—though Liz might, of course, wonder why she was so banged up—but that wasn’t even why she was going to head over. She just wanted to hang out for a bit, relax, unwind, and perhaps consume