The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Jenna Fox Chronicles 1)

‘To what, darling? What?’ Mother asks.

‘To Kara and Locke. They’re calling me. I heard their voices.’

Father brushes my hair from my face and touches my cheek. ‘That’s impossible, Angel. You were only dreaming. That’s all.’

I don’t argue. There would be no point. But I didn’t dream the voices. I heard them. Fresh and now. Somehow, someway, they found me. They need me.

But I need them, too.

In the flash between darkness and light, between dream-world and reality, I cross a boundary. I remember the accident.

The Accident

Every detail. Sharp, like claws.

It wasn’t the Bio Gel, the searching neurochips, or any of the shortcomings of my new self. It was me all along. The grieving me. The shocked me. The in-denial me. But now, Kara and Locke are forcing me to remember.

I sit in the dark, a sliver of light from the hallway slashed across my bed. I listen to the faint wheeze of air entering and leaving my chest. Breathing. A new kind of breathing. Because of that night.

Keys flying in the air.

My fingers outstretched.

My fingers were throwing the keys. Not catching them.

‘I can’t drive, Locke,’ I told him.

‘You’re the only one with a car,’ he complained.

‘If you don’t drive, Jenna, then we don’t go,’ Kara added. ‘We need you!’

‘I’m not driving without a license. Besides, my voice commands aren’t even programmed into the car yet. I couldn’t start it anyway.’

‘Kara could drive,’ Locke says. ‘And starting it’s not a problem. There’s an override. You must have a code or keys around here somewhere.’

The kitchen drawer. Where Claire keeps all the extra keys.

I could have pretended I didn’t know where they were.

I could have distracted them.

But I didn’t.

I opened the drawer and pulled them out.

‘Yes!’ Locke says and snatches the keys from my hand. He throws them to Kara. They wait for my response. I hesitate. Wondering. Thinking. But not for too long. I nod.

So we went. Kara drove.

I gave her the keys.

I let her drive my car that even I wasn’t supposed to drive yet.

Mother and Father were away for the night. Maybe I was eager for a fall, the thing I feared most. I had been easing toward it, testing the water, not sure what I wanted, except not to be everything I knew I wasn’t.

It was a party. A stupid one. We were bored. Uninvited. No one knew us. We didn’t know any of them. It was crowded. Tight circles of strangers were drinking and smoking, oblivious to us. Crashing the party was a thrill that lasted five minutes. We were about to leave. But then the unexpected happened. A fight broke out. We didn’t know what might happen next. We were out of our neighborhood, out of our league. We were scared and we ran. I had the keys in my purse. Locke and I were on one side of the car. Kara on the other. ‘Hurry, Jenna! Hurry!’ It was dark. I frantically searched the black cavern of my purse for the keys. When I found them, I threw them to Kara, my fingers outstretched, trying to be sure of my aim.

There was yelling. Shouts. We were out of our element. Panicked. We were only rule-followers pretending to be renegades. Other cars screeched away.