The Dangerous Doors of Shannon Anderson

Chapter One

I should have been studying. But with Aidan and Dad away at a baseball tournament all weekend, and Mom working out of Los Angeles for the last month and a half, I did what any self-respecting fat girl stranded in an Iowa cornfield with the house to herself would do: I ordered a pizza, cranked Strange Days by the Doors up to eleven, and spent the better part of the evening dancing around the living room in my underwear.

Thunder rattled the house, making my record skip. It had been pouring all night, raining so hard that I felt bad for the pizza guy who had risked life and limb delivering my supper and showed up on the porch looking like a drowned rat. (I tipped him accordingly.)

Lightning flashed outside the living room window and thunder boomed again, I wondered what the storms were like in Greenwich Village. Did the clouds roll over Washington Square with the same get-on-your-knees-and-pray mercilessness that they had when they washed over the fields out here? In three months I would know. In three months I'd be getting the hell out of Iowa and escaping to the fine shores of Manhattan to study theater production and design at New York University. Or, as I liked to think of it, finally embarking on the kinds of adventures that would make me interesting. Adventures that did not involve cow tipping. (For the record, I have never tipped a cow. But I know people who have.)

All this adventuring was contingent on me passing my finals, of course. I really should have been studying, but it was hard to get motivated with spring coming on and the promise of summer on the horizon. Harder still with the prospect of never having to set foot in St. Rita of Cascia Catholic High again looming large just out of reach. Hardest of all with Jim Morrison crooning about unhappy girls locked in prisons itching to fly off to more mysterious places (e.g. me). So German could wait; tonight I -

CRACK!

The living room burned a violent bright blue, a blinding flash of electricity that exploded like illegal fireworks, so close that it knocked me backwards. My head hit the wood floor, the music cut out, and the house went dark. I could feel the electricity buzzing in my bones, making the hairs on my arms stand straight up, making it feel like my heart had been shocked into overdrive.

I lay blinking in the dark for a moment before sitting up slowly, ears ringing, the ghost of the electric flash streaked across my field of vision. I wiggled my toes and fingers, touched the back of my head where it had hit the floor, and cracked my neck. Everything seemed to be in working order.

With my physical health accounted for, I could feel my survival instincts kicking in. Or, more accurately, I started wracking my brain to remember the activities I'd had to do to earn my emergency preparedness patch back when I was in Girl Scouts, and everything that Dad had taught us on our camping trips. I'd weathered plenty of storms like this in my lifetime, so losing power didn't freak me out or anything, but somehow the house being struck by lightning seemed a lot more serious than a run-of-the-mill blackout.

I stood up and stumbled through the pitch-blackness into the kitchen where I rummaged through the junk drawer for a flashlight. The explosion sounded like it had come from Dad's den, so I headed to the back of the house to investigate the damage.

The air smelled burnt, like electricity and fried plaster. Dad's wall-spanning bookshelf was completely empty; every carefully alphabetized title had been blasted to the floor. The green law lamp on his desk had fallen and shattered against the hard wood, and the papers that had been neatly organized on his desk had blown everywhere.