I am NOT Electricity, Julie Steimle [hardest books to read .TXT] 📗

Chapter One
Turbulence


My brother writes comic books. He’s famous for it. Perhaps you have heard of them. Electricity?
Yeah, I thought so. You are now looking at me funny, wondering what everyone else wonders. So I will tell it straight out. Yes, he did pattern her after me—physically anyway. In reality he patterned her after my father and my mother, using me as the image for his electric-manipulation superhero. I get it all the time.

People ask me, “Are you Saul Christian Eber’s sister?”

I have to say ‘yes, I was’ every time. It is hard not to. Saul draws very well and his super heroine looks a lot like me. He gave her my haircut even. I mean, how many superhero women walk around with a chin length bob? My black hair also gives it away.

My brother started writing comic books in high school with a bunch of his friends for the fun of it. They visited comic book conventions and later they got more serious about starting their own comic book when they saw how well received their hero was to their classmates. At first they just printed it off themselves and sold them just above cost. But later they got a deal with a small publishing house to print and sell in stores. It is history from there on. Now a freshman in college, the comic Electricity pays for his tuition and his trumped up housing costs, let alone his extra expensive textbooks.
But really, all this free publicity is unnecessary. My parents consider it a nuisance, especially since they work for the government.

My dad’s an electrical engineer. He works secret projects for the military sometimes. My mother is a mathematician. Chinese-American, she works for the FBI. Cryptography, I think. They don’t really tell me the details of their work, actually. I’m just guessing. The only thing I do know is that my brother made Electricity like them in intelligence and ability.

You’ve seen how she can turn on electrical objects just by rubbing her hand near them. That’s my mother. Not so extreme, my mother does have a natural electrical charge in her body. She can’t wear watches. They speed up. She doesn’t wear jewelry. Her skin eats the gold and the other metals. Some say her skin is acidic and that is why she has these problems, but I have seen her just run her hand over a lamp you normally have to press and hold the button on to start and it lights right up without all that. Her fingertips sometimes spark. Static electricity is her enemy. She hates wearing skirts and loves drier sheets. She keeps a box in her purse all the time so she can look presentable in meetings.

My father, he is the brains of the comic hero. He seems to understand computers and all things electrical. You should see him wire up the house at Christmas. He has one master panel he made himself to control when certain lights flash and twinkle, as well as when they turn off to conserve power. Also jokingly, my father often says he can just touch a computer and he already knows what is in it. Programming is a snap to him. He says he can read all those ones and zeroes as if it were English. I think he’s a tad loopy.

So, what about me? What is so interesting about Hanna Evelyne Eber that made my brother have to use me for the model of his hero?

I don’t know.

I guess he just didn’t want to leave me out.

Hanna looked over her essay for her English class and shrugged. It wasn’t complete. It was due Monday.

Glancing out the window of the airplane, she leaned on the armrest and stared at the cold frost that formed on the edges and also at the growing blackness as the sunlight was vanishing from the horizon. It was another trip to Washington DC.

She sighed. It would be another day in a hotel while her parents were off on assignments. They never told her what they were working on exactly, but they always dragged her along. It annoyed her somewhat, feeling as if her parents didn’t trust her to stay at home for even a brief weekend. After all, she was sixteen. It wasn’t like she was a kid anymore. She had her driver’s license.

Glancing over at her dad, she thought maybe he’d let her walk over to the Smithsonian while they were on business. It wasn’t far from where they usually stayed. That, and she felt she was done with her homework. There wasn’t more to write anyway.

Hanna put her penned essay into her school folder and snapped the binder shut.

Her father turned his head and smiled at her. “We’re almost there.”

The light above their seats flickered.

Hanna looked up and then smirked at her mother.

“I didn’t do it,” her mother said, lifting her hands.

The lights flickered again. The airplane rocked, bumping from turbulence.

“Buckle your seat belt,” her father said, nodding at the small light shaped like a seat belt that suddenly flickered on.

Hanna moaned, but did as he said. The seatbelt was so constricting.

The airplane shook again, dropping a bit more. Her stomach lurched as she felt free-fall for a brief moment. Hanna clenched the arms to her seat. Looking up, she saw the stewardess brace herself against a seat back, calling for people to buckle up still.

The plane shook. It took another drop before leveling off again. As usual, the weatherman got it wrong. He had not predicted it to be so rough for traveling that morning. They didn’t like to take planes through rainstorms usually. They would have taken a shorter flight and taken a rent-a-car to avoid the turbulence.

Her father glanced over at her mother, swallowing and staring with a growing panic.

The air masks dropped.

The lights went out.

“What’s happening?” Hanna’s voice shook as she heard someone in the back scream.

The airplane dropped again. This time it did not level off.

Everyone scrambled for their facemasks, though some were just screaming. Her father had his on and pulled Hanna’s over to her face. She reached up, taking the plastic cup and letting him slip the elastic over her head. However, the plane plummeted downward with nothing working to hold them up. It was over. As Hanna clenched her teeth, only one thought passed through her mind—Monday was nothing to worry about anymore.

Closing her eyes, Hanna wished as the humming of the plane falling through the atmosphere grew louder and louder that she could keep it aloft, just enough for them to survive.

Hanna did not believe in magic. She was of a practical mind and loved to read books about science, with real-life heroes. She thought her brother’s comic books were silly pieces of escapism. Yet, as if her wish had been granted, the airplane suddenly leveled off, and the lights flickered on again.

She panted, her heart pounding in her chest. And suddenly she felt so tired, tired enough to sleep the rest of the way.

Looking over to her father, she smiled. “We’re going to make it.”

His eyes smiled back, blinking at her. Her mother’s eyes were still closed, braced for impact. When she opened them and glanced over at Hanna, her eyes widened with an overwhelming smile of love.

The plane bottomed out, dropping again.


The fire blazed up in the dark sky, filling it with blacking smoke that would mingle with the smog. Luckily the airplane did not hit any buildings. It had even made it to the airfield, scraping a deep gash in the earth that buried part of the aircraft in a monumental wreck.

Emergency vehicles reached the scene, each rescue worker scrambling out with the fire trucks to put out the blaze. Not all the plane was on fire. One end merely crumpled where it hit the earth, and there the firemen tore apart the doors and exit windows to see if anyone survived the crash at all. Climbing in, they peered about the cabin with their large flashlights casting beams through the smoke. Listening, they heard coughing and moans.

“There are survivors!” a fireman shouted out the door. “Get stretchers here quick!”

Their boots crunched through the aisle, flashing their lights at the passengers. Many were mangled, held up only by the tubes to the air masks. One stewardess groaned with her arm flopped over the back of one chair and her head thrown back. Three rows down, they found a man pushing on the seat in front of him. He called out, saying he was stuck, hacking on the fumes. A baby was crying further inside.

Sirens echoed outside. The spray of water to put the fire out dribbled through cracks and broken windows, dousing the charred seat backs and passengers. In the back they heard the drip drip drip of water seeping through the ceiling. Another person cried out. “Help me.”

One of the fire fighters lifted his flashlight, looking at the source of the voice. It was a man with third degree burns all over his skin, and what looked like a nasty break on his collarbone.

A cough came from the seat behind him. The fireman moved his light as his partner tore apart the seat pinning the man with burns, shining it on a teenaged girl covered in blood. Half of her face was blackened, raw red, charring also a part of her scalp. Her arms still had flames burning into them.

“Daddy?”

The fireman reached over the two seats to where she was pinned against the wall. Pieces of glass stuck into her shoulder, broken out of the window. He smothered the flames on her arm.

“Stay still, we’ll get you out.” He pulled back and looked at the two adults sitting beside her. Right next to her, sandwiched between his chair and the one before him was a middle-aged man. His eyes stared blankly upward. His skin was also burned. The Chinese woman in the aisle seat was also dead, her neck bent out of shape.

The girl coughed again, moaning. “What happened? Daddy?”

The fire fighter winced, knowing this child would not get an answer. He drew in a breath and said, “Lie still. You have been in a plane crash.”

She moaned, closing her eyes. “I hurt.”

“We’ll get you out.” The fireman turned working at once to separate the seats on the row in front of her. The man with the burns had just been carried out of the wreck.

Groaning, she shifted in her seat. She was also pinned. Perhaps all her bones were broken. Looking at her, the fireman did not believe that she would last the night.

More rescue operators climbed in the crashed airplane, tearing off the seats and heaving over a stretcher.


Out of the eighty or so on the airplane, only seven survived. Out of the seven that survived, only one came out without wounds, and that was a very well bundled up baby. Her mother did not live.

Hanna lay on a stretcher,