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TO BEST FRIENDS EVERYWHERE, ESPECIALLY MINE
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
—Albert Einstein
And if I ever was myself, I wasn’t that night.
—Wilco
NOW
Eventually, there would be lightning.
Not the kind of lightning that’s over before you know it, that flickers briefly in the space between two tall buildings and leaves you wondering if it was ever there at all. But the kind of lightning that cracks with a vengeance. That rips through your soul and sends your heart knocking along your spine for luck. The kind that brings with it a courageous, unpredictable magic, a feeling that time—and certainly the present—no longer matters.
The kind that keeps you up all night.
This isn’t a story about superheroes, even though that’s how we felt sometimes. It’s not about extraordinary creatures. It’s just about us, and the extraordinary things that happened to us when we were least expecting them.
We were smart kids. We were friends once, but the four of us hadn’t been friends for a long time. Now, we knew of one another. We saw one another in the halls. We heard one another speak in class. One of us had been in the school play that the rest of us had been forced to go see. One of us had written something for the literary magazine. The byline read “Anonymous.” We’d wondered who had written it.
But sometimes to be super—to be more than ordinary, greater than the sum of our parts—it takes doing something you didn’t think you had in you.
If we hadn’t gone to that party, none of this would have happened in the first place. We never would have found one another again.
We never would have been struck by lightning.
FRIDAY NIGHT
8:00 P.M.
(12 HOURS LEFT)
IF IT WAS THE END OF THE WORLD, WOULD YOU STAY AT HOME?
Tiny stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She opened her eyes.
Still there.
She tried to see herself as someone else might see her.
Her hair was a nothing brown.
Her eyes were a nothing brown.
Her skin was pale and freckled. Her cheeks were a little too squishable. Her nose unremarkable. Her lips totally unkissable.
It was amazing anyone saw her at all.
The box of hair dye on the sink promised to give her multifaceted blond hair. If the model on the front was any indication, it would also give her a great complexion and a carefree attitude toward life.
That would be nice.
She was going for something cool and fun, something that would get Josh Herrera’s attention. She and Lu had it all planned out.
Tiny and Josh would lock eyes on the bus the next morning. And instead of ignoring her like he always did, this time he would smile. He would say hi. He would brush his hair out of his face and ask her if she wanted to go to a reading sometime at Housing Works Café. They’d sit together, sharing one of those giant chocolate chip cookies, and every so often their knees would bump into each other. They’d sit there even after the reading was over, talking about their favorite authors and how they wished the school English curriculum let them read better books. They’d sit there for hours. Outside, the rain would come down and they would sit there until it had stopped enough for them to run to the subway.
That’s where they would kiss for the first time.
But so far Tiny hadn’t even worked up the nerve to open the box.
She hadn’t always been like this. But things had changed.
Sometimes she was afraid she was the kind of person who would always be stuck, holding the box of hair dye, wondering if she even wanted to open it.
* * *
One subway stop downtown from where Tiny was staring into her bathroom mirror, Lu was procrastinating.
She drummed her fingers restlessly against the scenes she was supposed to memorize for that fall’s drama department production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even though a voice—a small one in the back of her mind—was urging her to study for the SATs instead. One of the reasons Lu loved acting was the complete and glorious feeling of pretending to be someone else. Getting to escape into a character’s life. She could say anything she wanted, do anything she wanted, and there were no consequences. It was the best feeling in the world.
If her mom weren’t out teaching a class for her psychology postdoctoral students, she would say it was Lu’s choice whether she wanted to study or not. Her mom was all about choices. She respected Lu’s sense of agency. Her mom had said to call her cell if she needed anything. But she hadn’t come home when the news reports had gotten worse. Some parental figure. Her dad would never have let that happen. Even when he was sick, Lu was the one to remind her mom to make the doctor’s appointments and the pill charts and the organic recipes. Maybe if her mom weren’t always doing stupid, flighty stuff like this, her dad wouldn’t have left them for the nurse at the hospital as soon as he got better.
Outside the windows of the small apartment Lu now shared with just her mom, the wind was kicking up, howling through the slats of the creaking rusty fire escape, and she could hear thunder rumbling up from the depths of the earth. All people were talking about online was how the news had predicted that what was supposed to be just your typical, run-of-the-mill thunderstorm was actually part of a larger storm pattern rolling up from Florida, where it had left a trail of flooding and devastation in its wake. The city was suspending bus service and said it might suspend subway service if the storm got bad enough. They were urging people to stay indoors.
By four o’clock the Duane Reade on her corner was completely out of bottled water, granola bars, and D batteries, which Lu knew because she’d popped in for a pack of gum and a magazine on her way home from school. Staring at the surge of people stockpiling for the apocalypse, she wondered if they would cancel the SATs, but she didn’t get her hopes up. They never canceled stuff like that. Her school had only had one snow day in her entire life, when she was eight. School hadn’t closed for any reason since, including the 3.0 earthquake she’d thought was just the coffee grinders at Starbucks on full blast.
She couldn’t imagine some rain was going to stop the SATs.
Lu smiled.
If there was one thing she’d always loved, it was a good thunderstorm. She couldn’t wait for the rain to start. How could she possibly be expected to study on a night like this? It was too dark and stormy to do anything practical.
Lu turned up the moody indie rock wafting out of her computer speakers, and pulled her knees into her chest.
When her phone buzzed on the desk in front of her, her first thought was that it was her mom, texting to say she’d changed her mind and was coming home after all, or her dad, coming out of months of hiding to say he would never leave her all alone when the sky looked like it was about to fall and smoosh them all and the biggest test of her life was the next morning.
But it was not her mother and definitely not her dad. It was Owen.
HEY, WE SHOULD TALK.
The thunder outside seemed to rattle her bones. Nothing good ever started with those words.
CAN YOU COME TO THE SHOW TONIGHT? HURRICANEFEST. CENTRAL PARK. MIDNIGHT.
A weird feeling
stirred in her chest. Something restless and uncomfortable was beginning to build. The sensation was physical. It grabbed at her heart and squeezed.
He was about to break up with her. The night before the SATs!
I’LL BE THERE.
Lu wrote. And she meant it. Like hell she was about to let that happen. Lu didn’t like whatever this was that she was currently experiencing—this feeling of being raw and cracked open. Vulnerable. Screw the SATs. Screw the storm. She’d get to that show in Central Park if she had to swim there. Getting dumped was for the weak of spirit. She’d never been dumped, and she wasn’t about to start now. She imagined a force field surrounding her. Fortress walls that no mere mortal could penetrate.
She texted Tiny.
WE’RE GOING OUT.
* * *
At that same moment, across Central Park, Will Kingfield had just gotten off the phone with his parents, who were stuck in an airport in Spain. Flights in and out of all New York–area airports were canceled. It hadn’t started raining yet, but pressure systems were intense, the wind was wild, and visibility was low.
“We’re trying to get on the next flight we can,” his dad said. “Just stay put, okay, my man? Study. Watch a movie. Call your grandma. Do not go out in the storm.”
“Whatever.” Will rolled his eyes. He didn’t plan on it.
His phone pinged with a message from Jon Heller, his soccer co-captain.
LET’S GO OUT. STORMPOCALYPSE!!
NAH, DUDE, Will wrote back. STORM + STUDYING = STATIONARY
LAME.
IF YOU WANT TO GET RAINED ON, Will wrote, BE MY GUEST.
IF IT WAS THE END OF THE WORLD, WOULD YOU STAY AT HOME?
IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. IT’S JUST A BIG THUNDERSTORM.
The little ellipses at the bottom of the conversation stopped and then started again. Will watched them like a Magic 8 Ball.
YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN A BIG THUNDERSTORM WILL TURN INTO THE END OF THE WORLD.
More ellipses.
LIVE IT UP WHILE YOU CAN.
Will didn’t write back. He threw the phone onto the bed. Jon didn’t need to worry about the SATs because his mom was a legacy at Cornell. Will’s parents were rich like Jon’s, but unluckily for him they hadn’t gone to college anywhere his guidance counselor thought he should go. So he actually had to work.
But it wasn’t like he was about to sob on about being nervous for the big test or anything. He’d get Nathaniel to come over and help. Will grabbed his phone and called him.
“Dude,” Will said. Nathaniel was such a nerd. They’d had that in common once. They’d gone to nursery school, elementary school, and middle school together before high school. They’d gone to math camp together every summer. At least, they had until freshman year, when Will joined the soccer team and Nathaniel started spending all his time in the science lab after school like he was working on a cure for cancer or something. Now they only hung out when it was convenient, like when there was a test the next day, or there was no one else around to see.
If Will knew Nathaniel, he was probably studying away in his bedroom, the door closed to keep his parents from barging in to check on him every five minutes, and a lifetime supply of Cheez-Its to snack on. Maybe he was doing that thing where he took the hardest test first and then worked his way backward to the easiest one. Will idly picked a Nerf basketball up off the carpet in his room and tossed it at the mini hoop above his closet door.
“If you come study with me for like, two hours, I’ll play you in Playstation Golf as a reward for being exceptional and focused on our futures.” He held his breath. Will still always felt vaguely guilty when he suggested they study together, like it was a business transaction or something. He got the feeling Nathaniel didn’t love it either.
The Nerf ball circled the rim.
“Yeah,” Nathaniel said after a pause. “Sure.”
Swish. Will hung up. “Whattup?” he said to no one.
Will took a few more shots (swish, swish, swish), then opened a practice test book and chewed on his pencil eraser. It tasted salty and kind of satisfying. He didn’t stop chewing right away.
His phone pinged again.
PARTY was all Jon said this time. YOUR PLACE.
Will chewed on the eraser some more. If he said no, the whole team would be mad at him.
JUST THE GUYS? Will wrote back.
TOTALLY. AN INTIMATE PRE-STANDARDIZED-TEST AFFAIR.
OKAY, SCREW IT. LET’S HAVE A PARTY.
PARTY!!!!!!!
Will took a deep breath. He was doing this.
PARTY!
He wrote back.
Will chucked the phone back onto his bed and rubbed his face.
He changed out of his Daybrook Athletics sweats and tried not to think about how much he’d changed since he and Nathaniel had been friends. Real friends.
And how different he was now. Unrecognizable, even.
He barely knew who he was anymore.
* * *
Nathaniel hung up the phone and looked down at his bed. His practice books were all laid out the way he’d arranged them half an hour before, in an arc from hardest to easiest so he’d end the night on a note of confidence. His box of Cheez-Its was waiting for him on the desk.
But he hadn’t looked at any of the books since he’d finished arranging them. Instead he kept folding and unfolding the Anders Almquist Earth Science Scholarship application.
For the past three years Nathaniel’s dream in life was to follow in his brother’s footsteps and win the Anders Almquist and get into MIT’s EAPS program—Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences—to study geophysics. As far as Nathaniel was concerned, space got all the credit for being mysterious. Like, do wormholes exist? Are there other universes besides our own? What happens if you get sucked through a black hole? But if Tobias taught him anything, it was that there were enough mysteries within the Earth itself to occupy the rest of his life. The shifting of tectonic plates, electromagnetic currents crashing together in clouds, the kinetic energy of falling objects, the inescapable gravitational pull of the Earth’s core. And how each of those mysterious forces conspired to control our lives. The spin of the Earth might cause a car to crash, for instance, or a bicycle to spin out of control on a humid late-summer night.
Tobias taught him that everything was connected.
The application for the Anders Almquist Earth Science Scholarship had been due on his adviser’s desk no later than eight a.m. that morning.
Nathaniel had stayed up until three, working on it. His parents had warned him not to save it all for the last minute. But they were so used to Tobias, perfect Tobias, who never saved anything till the last minute. And, of course, Nathaniel had lied. Every time they checked in, he said he was fine. He was almost done. So they went to bed, and before he knew it, he stopped hearing cars on the street below and started hearing the clanking of predawn garbage trucks, and then the next thing he knew he was starting awake and it was 8:05 and the sun was streaming in through his window and there was a puddle of drool on his computer keyboard. On the screen, the cursor was blinking in the middle of an unfinished sentence.
He made it to school, disheveled and disoriented, the printed-out unfinished application clutched in his hand.
But he was too late.
Tobias would never have let something like that happen. He would have finished it early and he would have gone to bed early and not slept through his alarm and he would have made it to school in time to hand it in and he would have done it all without breaking a sweat.
Nathaniel had been sweating.
He unfolded the application again and smoothed it out on top of the first test book (the hardest one). It had four distinct lines creased into it, from being folded into quarters in his pocket all day.
Because he knew, deep down, that he would never be up there onstage presenting his paper like his brother once had. Not now and not ever. He would never be as good as Tobias. His brother was, like, a superhero
. And Nathaniel was just so . . . not.
The creases were really ugly. He folded the application up again and stuffed it into his back pocket in disgust. That was one dream he could give up on. He shoved the books on his bed into his backpack, knocked his cell phone off the desk, and into the front pocket, and crashed out the door.
As he left, his backpack hit the desk chair, sending Cheez-Its cascading across the carpet.
* * *
Tiny slid to the floor, leaning her head back against the cool tile.
She opened the box. Did the tube in her hand have life-changing properties? Would she look cool? Would she look stupid? Would anyone notice? Was it worth the risk to find out?
She twisted off the cap. Some of the hair dye dripped into a puddle of water on the tiled floor, making crazy patterns before turning the entire puddle a muddied brown. Tiny stared at it. She wished she could be a drop of dye swirling in water, twisting and unfurling in clouds and billows and patterns like there was no stopping her.
* * *
Lu sat at her computer, repeating Hermia’s lines over and over, resolved that it didn’t matter one zillionth of an ounce what she got on the SATs if she wasn’t going to college. In the middle of shouting “What, can you do me greater harm than hate?” Will Kingfield popped up in her news feed.
STORMPOCALYPSE PARTY! COME OVER IF YOU DARE.
Lu suddenly got quiet.
Josh Herrera would be at that party.
She and Tiny didn’t go out a lot together these days. Tiny would want to play it safe and stay home. Lu would need a great reason to convince her to leave the apartment during a storm like this, especially with the SATs the next day. And now she had one. Kissing Josh.
That, and Lu always accepted a dare.
* * *
The party wasn’t Will’s fault, really. Or that’s what he was telling himself.
It wasn’t his fault that he had trouble concentrating. It wasn’t his fault that he could never say no to his teammates. It wasn’t his fault that Nathaniel took his sweet time getting there. It wasn’t his fault that Jon Heller, standing over his shoulder while Will typed, pushed post and made the most epic status update ever official.
The Odds of Lightning Page 1