Payton lived with his mother in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. They
represented the older residents hanging on, not the newer ones moving in. Their
apartment was a small, rent-stabilized one-and-a-half bedroom with two windows that
worked and two the management company would never fix because they never fixed
anything. The management company wanted Payton and his mother to move so they
could rent the place to “some trust-fund douchebag,” or so his mother said. When other
things broke around the apartment his mother cursed them and the management company
for a few days, and then eventually fixed them herself, if they could be fixed. The
windows couldn’t be, they had to be replaced, so they stayed broken. The one in
Payton’s tiny room was stuck open half an inch, freezing in winter.

Payton had only a few friends, two he ate lunch with at school and one who lived in his building. Aaron, the one who lived by him, had Xbox, and his parents didn’t mind if Payton came over. With his two friends at school, Hector and Edward, he talked mostly about MMA fights, wrestling, and movies.

He was ten, the prime age for bullying. The fifteen blocks he walked to school every
day usually cost him money, pain, or dignity, on the way there or on the way home, but
he never complained to his mother. She had her own problems. He wasn’t very happy
most of the time but he wasn’t unhappy either. He had his life and was muddling through
it. While he hated almost every particular aspect of it, he didn’t think about his overall
happiness or unhappiness except in awful bursts, limping home from an unwanted fight.

To keep his books from bullies, most of the time Payton left them at school and did
what homework he could in class. He wasn’t a very good student. But the day before a
major test on India, Payton decided he needed to bring his World Studies book home. He
thought he might be about to fail the class, which in turn might keep him back a whole
grade, and it was already late spring so this was about his last chance.

As long as he stood near the front-door security guard he was safe, so he waited there
for all the other kids to leave. It took nearly an hour. Since the weather had turned warm
they hung around outside school much longer. At last he got on a bus, figuring that that
way he’d only be exposed for the three blocks between the bus stop and his building.
The second he got off, though, he ran straight into a bunch of kids from his school.
They’d taken the same hour to meander just that far, punching and yelling at each other
the way boys did when they weren’t scared to draw attention.

One of them, a chubby light-skinned black kid with reddish hair, immediately stole Payton’s bag. He pressed it to his body with one hand and probed far up his nose with the forefinger of the other until he extracted a giant booger, half dry and half jelly.

Aaron’s father happened to be passing on his way home from work and rescued him.
He retrieved Payton’s bag (to a chorus of “We were justpl ayi ng”) and walked him the
rest of the way to their building. He didn’t offer Payton any advice on the way about
how to deal with bullies. In fact he hardly said anything at all.

When his mom came home that night he waited until she’d taken off her white shoes
and drunk most of her second glass of wine and then asked how he could reach his own
father.

She sat back in her easy chair and squinted at him. “Honey, the only man I’ve had anywhere near me for years runs on electricity.” She chuckled. “That’s the daddy you ought to worry about. He’s the one who keeps me happy. Daddy electricity.”

This meant nothing to Payton, so he soon forgot the details of what his mother had
said and in the weeks to come developed the conviction that his father had been a bolt of
electricity, or perhaps Electricity itself. He mentioned this theory to his friends, who
naturally didn’t believe it. Hector said that if he were really the son of Electricity he
should have electrical powers, and he obviously didn’t.

just something his mind did to him when he was alone and not busy with anything else.
If he could shoot lightning from his hands no one would steal from him or try to make
him eat snot. Or if he could give a shock by touching someone, like an electric eel. (The
electric eel had been the first real thing to come up when he Googled “electric powers,”
after pages of power company sites with slogans explaining that they loved the
environment more than anyone and therefore burned only the cleanest coal.)

He couldn’t ask his mother about it again. The second time he tried, she was tired
from the hospital as always and he only got as far as the word “father” before she cut him
off.

Which was frustrating because the longer he thought about it, the more questions he
had. How had his mother met Electricity? Where did Electricity live? Did Electricity
have a penis? If so, how had he put it inside his mother without shocking her, and if not,
how had Payton been made? Could Electricity see them from the wall outlets?

The last of these was the most important. Payton spent a lot of time contemplating
those outlets and wondering if his father was in them even occasionally. Sometimes
when his mother wasn’t around he tried shouting into them, but never when she could see
him.When school let out for summer he was supposed to go to day camp, but often he

stayed home instead, and Aaron wasn’t around so much he had a lot of time by himself,
bored. He even grew sick of TV. There wasn’t much on the air for kids his age in the
middle of the day.

One day he used the screwdriver from the junk drawer to open up an outlet and see
what was behind the faceplate. The answer was: not much. A little metal box with
sockets nested inside. He’d seen his mother fix one of these and knew there was still
more behind that, the wires that carried the electricity, but the sockets were affixed in the
metal box with Phillips-head screws and he’d only found the flathead screwdriver. He
stuck it behind the sockets and wiggled it, and found that he could rock them a little to