The Odds of Lightning

by Jocelyn Davies

  “Are you sure we should be here?” Tiny’s voice came out of the dark beside Lu. For a minute she’d forgotten Tiny was there.

  “Of course,” Lu said. She threw her shoulders back. Before Tiny could stop her, Lu reached over and readjusted the crop top, where Tiny had been tugging it down. “Look, it’ll be fine—it’s a party. Everyone will be drunk. You can talk to Josh.”

  “I’m not making any promises about that, by the way—”

  “Yes, you are—”

  “It’s a fact-finding mission.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Lu didn’t understand people like Tiny, who wanted things to be different but refused to do anything about them. Lu was a doer. Sometimes she was impulsive and did things without thinking, but at least she did them at all. She didn’t settle for the status quo. She changed things. She got her way.

  “Do you think anyone will even be here? Maybe everyone’s stayed home to study.”

  “Oh, seriously, fuck the SATs! I am so sick of that being all anyone can talk about!”

  Lu had a mouth like a trucker. She cursed inappropriately all the time.

  Lu, realizing she didn’t have enough change for a soda from the vending machine: “Fuck!”

  Lu, knocking over a canister of pens in the fifth-floor quiet study lounge: “Fuck!”

  Lu, banging her funny bone on a bus full of old ladies: “Fucking shit!”

  “Lu,” Tiny said quietly. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Lu snapped. “I’m fine.” She hadn’t told Tiny about Owen. There wasn’t anything to tell. “Sorry.” Lu sighed. “Look,” she said, leaning against the front door and absently fiddling with the leaves on one of the cone-shaped shrubs. “I’m just trying to get you to live your life. It’s for your own good. I mean, if I hadn’t had the guts to approach Owen at his show this summer, we wouldn’t have started hooking up in the first place.”

  “In secret.”

  “Not important,” said Lu, waving her hand around dismissively. “The point is that you could absolutely kiss Josh tonight if you wanted to. You just have to”—here she put both hands on Tiny’s shoulders and squeezed like those guys who stand behind boxers in boxing rings, coaches or whoever they were—“believe. You. Can.”

  “Thank you, Luella.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “‘You’re welcome’ would be nice.”

  “You can mock me all you want,” said Lu, “but I’m just looking out for you. Besides, I am impervious to mocking. Sticks and stones and all that crap.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, and Lu knew it. Yesterday she had made the mistake of wearing her A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE . . . AND THE SENATE shirt to school. The soccer boys had had a field day.

  Daybrook didn’t have a football team. A lot of city schools didn’t. So the soccer team was the catchall for every testosterone-addled brain in school. The soccer team at Daybrook wasn’t like football teams at other schools or in the movies or whatever. For one thing, they weren’t a bunch of dumb jocks or all, like, Texas forever. They were, for the most part, a special breed of boy Lu liked to call “smart rich assholes.” They slunk around the school and down the street in a Harvard-bound pack, like they owned the island of Manhattan, money rolling off them in waves. For another thing, they sucked. They were the lowest ranked team in all five boroughs. Probably.

  They surrounded her in the fifth-floor hallway, a bunch of hyenas circling a gazelle. Was Lu a feminist? Did she let her armpit hair grow wild under that T-shirt? Would she bake them a pie? Was she going to beat them up? Usually, when this happened (and Lu had a lot of cool shirts, so it happened more than she cared for), Will kept his mouth shut or pretended to check his cell phone or suddenly found the selection of lunch options fascinating. And Lu ignored him, and she ignored the rest of them. She couldn’t let Will see her crack. Any of the others, maybe. But not Will. Never Will.

  But yesterday Will had said, “Hey, Lu, I heard you burned all your bras. Good thing you don’t need them.” The guys had howled. And Lu couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She wheeled on him.

  “If feminists hadn’t burned their bras in the 1970s,” she said, “we would never have had advancements in women’s rights. If we’d never had advancements in women’s rights, the Supreme Court would never have tried a case like Roe V. Wade. If the Supreme Court had never tried Roe v. Wade, abortion would never have been legalized. If abortion hadn’t been legalized, Rachel Keyes wouldn’t have been able to get one last month. And if Rachel Keyes hadn’t gotten that abortion last month, you”—she pointed her finger at Ben Sternberg—“would be a dad before graduating high school. So,” she said, “what else did you have to say about feminism?”

  No one else said anything.

  “You guys shouldn’t talk so loud in assembly,” Lu said, and went to class.

  She hated Will Kingfield. She hated Will Kingfield.

  So why did she still think about him so much?

  Lightning flashed above the rooftops.

  Lu looked at Tiny and grinned.

  “One Mississippi . . .”

  Tiny grinned back. “Two Mississippi . . .”

  “Three,” they said together as thunder rumbled warningly on three. “Ooh, it’s close!” Lu cried, clapping her hands. “Stormpocalypse, here we come!”

  “Just ring the doorbell,” Tiny said, looking dubiously up at the sky. “It’s gonna pour, like, any second.”

  “You do it.”

  “Let’s do it together.”

  “Fine.”

  And then they rang.

  Wil1

  Will pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. When he pulled them away, black spots floated across his vision like morbid balloons.

  Things had escalated pretty quickly. Now instead of five guys drinking Buds and playing virtual Golf in the den, there was something like fifty people at his house. They’d brought booze and mixers, like they always did. It was just another party at Will Kingfield’s house.

  Except to Will, this one felt different. More desperate somehow. He knew Jon was just kidding when he’d said it could be the end of the world, but something about this storm really did feel that way. Maybe it was because of the test the next day too.

  Maybe he was just in bad shape today because he was still feeling guilty about what had happened with Luella. He knew he shouldn’t have said anything. He should have just left her alone. But if anyone would appreciate the unlikely phenomenon of the exact right zinger flying out of your mouth at the exact right time, it was Lu. It must have been her influence on him. He hadn’t even had a chance to think about it before he was saying it and then regretting it. The guilt was eating away at him, but that was nothing new.

  A lot of things were eating away at him lately.

  Sometimes, especially in moments like this when Will was standing in the middle of a party, people swarming around him, he would float out of his body for a second. And when he looked back down, he didn’t recognize himself.

  He would wake up in the middle of the night, gasping from some dream he couldn’t remember. He would lay awake in bed for hours, trying to remember it, his brain churning. He would be exhausted the next day and fall asleep in class and fuck up in practice. He was fucking up more and more.

  He had wanted this life. He wanted to be cool. And popular. And known. He wanted to be someone people would remember. Someone different than who he was. He had wanted protection from the fleetingness of the world and the stability of doing the same thing every day after school and hanging out with the same people on the weekends, people like Jon Heller who was the kind of guy everybody wanted to be. He didn’t want the first thing people noticed about him to be that he was fat, and goofy to make up for it. So he got un-fat. He worked hard at it. He was strict about what he ate, and worked out obsessively, and weighed himself regularly. It changed his life. Now, he was all of those things he had wanted to be. He had everything he had wanted. He was someone differe
nt.

  So why did he still feel like he was running away from something that would eventually catch up to him?

  New Will was like a tidal wave he’d gotten caught in. He couldn’t stop it and he couldn’t swim against it. He just had to let the current take him where it wanted to go.

  Swimming against the tide was how you drowned. Right?

  Will could run however long or fast he wanted, do soccer drills till he was red-faced and panting and puking on the field; he could surround himself with people and parties and distractions and everything else that could drown out the noise. But he couldn’t outrun that feeling of being stuck. Like so many things, it was an inevitability that was woven into the intricate parabolic equation of his life, drawing nearer and nearer to something he couldn’t quite grasp and could never, ever quite reach.

  He hadn’t dated anyone in years. He hadn’t even made out with anyone. On the outside, he was cool, he was unflappable, he was the star of the school, but on the inside he was so crowded with anxious dark thoughts that the truth was, there was no room for anyone else.

  But like a spinning wheel of fortune, his heart seemed permanently stuck on the very last face it had beaten for, the last first thought he’d wake up to in the morning, and the last first face he’d think about as he slipped off into a doomed sleep. Someone he hadn’t really spoken to since the night before freshman year of high school. A night he wished so hard that he could take back. Or do over. Or obliterate from existence. Or all of the above.

  Luella Jane Austen. His first and last love.

  And the one person in the world who hated his guts.

  “Kingfield, you’re up,” Kenji said.

  Will blinked. Everyone around the big kitchen table was staring at him, the beer pong game momentarily suspended as they waited for him to take his turn. He stepped up to the edge of the table and took the Ping-Pong ball from the cup of water on his right.

  He took his shot. And in the moment of silence between when the small white ball left his fingers and when it dropped with a small plunk into a cup of beer not four feet away—

  In that silence, the doorbell rang.

  Nathaniel

  The doorbell jolted Nathaniel out of his thoughts. He was standing in the corner, holding his beer, trying to figure out how to get himself out of the mess he’d gotten into. The beer was warm. The party was loud. Nathaniel was pissed off.

  He told himself it was at Will, for luring him over with the promise of studying, then throwing a party instead. But really it was at himself, mostly:

  For not having the guts to say no.

  For not turning in his application on time.

  For not trying to salvage his life by studying for the SATs like he knew he should.

  But no time seemed like the right time to leave. And there was part of Nathaniel—a secret part that made him totally ashamed—that was having fun. And part of him that thought if he stayed, if he enjoyed his beer and forgot about the application and the test and had some fun, then maybe he and Will could be friends again. Real friends, not the kind of friends who ignored each other at school and then sometimes needed help studying when no one else was around to care.

  Nathaniel had been studying for the SATs for months. He’d even gotten a tutor, paying for it with the bar mitzvah money he’d never spent and that had been languishing in some bond his grandfather had set up for him when he was thirteen. Tobias had gotten a perfect score. He’d won the Anders Almquist Scholarship. He’d gotten into MIT EAPS early admission. Nathaniel couldn’t settle for anything less.

  His brother had always been smarter. Cooler. And knew exactly what he wanted. Ever since Nathaniel was old enough to have memories, Tobias was the one calling the shots and Nathaniel followed along like some of his brother’s magic might rub off on him.

  Girls, especially, were really into him. One girl in particular. The only one who mattered.

  Tobias’s magic had never rubbed off on that particular area of Nathaniel’s life.

  Nathaniel wanted to be a geophysicist. He wanted to study energy and the way it moved through the earth. He wanted to one day stand at the tops of mountains, the sky expanding above him and the wind blowing through his hair, and conduct lightning through lightning rods and feel the phantom movement of ancient lava beneath his feet. He wanted to experience something bigger than himself. Energy was the biggest thing there was. Energy was everywhere.

  But the Anders Almquist Earth Science Scholarship felt like a mountain he couldn’t climb. And Daybrook had a reputation for producing winners, like his brother. He’d been working on his project for months, but even up until the night before it was due, something just didn’t feel right. Something was missing. That magic zing. That spark. And he couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

  He wished he didn’t care so much. Life would be easier if he didn’t care about everything so intensely. If he could just be like Will, who didn’t seem to care at all. Half the senior class was here now, and no one seemed to care about anything except getting drunk.

  When they were little, he and Tiny and Will and Lu used to play Science Club together. They performed experiments with magnets and grew potatoes in soil and mixed solutions in beakers.

  Sometimes Nathaniel still felt like a kid playing at science.

  Tobias had made it look easy.

  Then the doorbell snapped him out of it.

  What was he doing here?

  He had worked so hard. He couldn’t just throw everything away now. Being at this party was not going to get him any closer to being the best he could be. He was only wasting time. He should leave.

  Nathaniel put the beer down on a table and slung his backpack full of SAT workbooks over his shoulder. Will was taking his turn at beer pong; Nathaniel wouldn’t even bother saying good-bye. He made his way through the crowd. He opened the door—

  And came face-to-face with Tiny and Lu. His two childhood friends.

  “Nathaniel,” Tiny said, surprised.

  “Uh, hi,” Nathaniel said, the tips of his ears turning an involuntary shade of red.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.

  What was he supposed to say? Will had asked if they could study together, then had thrown a party instead? How pathetic would that make him look?

  “Um, what are you doing here?”

  Maybe this, though—maybe it was a good thing. He had just been thinking about them, and there they were. His last link to the past. To that last summer he was really happy. His former fellow Science Club members. Right as he was about to leave.

  Nathaniel didn’t believe in signs. They weren’t based in anything scientific. Signs had to do with faith and belief and the unknown. They weren’t rooted in fact.

  “See?” said Lu, turning to Tiny. “If this isn’t a sign that we should be at this party, I don’t know what is. Nathaniel.” Lu grinned. “Lead us to the alcohol.”

  And so he put his backpack down. And he did.

  Tiny

  They followed Nathaniel inside, and the past came rushing back around Tiny as loud and vivid as the party itself.

  The vaulted ceiling of the two-story main foyer towered above them. Tiny hadn’t been there in a long time, not since the four of them used to hang out. The wall to her right was made of exposed brick, stretching so Everest-like above her head that there were, like, clouds obscuring the top. Right in the middle was a real working fireplace—a total rarity in a New York City apartment (Tiny’s family kept stacks of books in their nonworking one)—and over the mantel hung a series of Picasso paintings that looked suspiciously like real paint—not like the framed prints her parents brought home from museum gift shops. Through the crowd, toward the back of the large open room, a wrought-iron spiral staircase curved seductively, like a beckoning finger, upstairs.

  “It’s like the fucking MoMA in here,” Lu muttered under her breath.

  To their left, the wall was made entirely of white custom bookca
ses, stacked with huge glossy art books and strategically placed decorative stoneware. In the center of the bookcases was a swinging door, and when someone barreled through it, Tiny could just make out a kitchen table cluttered with a rainbow of liquor bottles.

  The giant foyer was packed with upperclassmen. It looked the way parties did in movies—except the music didn’t stop abruptly, and it didn’t feel like she and Lu were walking in slo-mo or anything. No one even noticed Tiny as she stood by the kitchen door, pulling at her crop top, staring nervously into the madness. A handwritten sign with the words IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT AND I FEEL FINE scrawled in red Sharpie was taped to the wall above the couch. A couple of kids were wearing pith helmets, and one had a parachute. Down the hall, someone was wearing a snorkel. Because a snorkel is the first thing you reach for in case of an emergency.

  There was no sign of Josh.

  “Lu . . . ,” Tiny whispered.

  “Don’t worry,” Lu said before she could even hear the rest. She linked a reassuring arm through Tiny’s, and smiled grimly. “We’ll be fine.”

  Outside the living room window, lightning flashed bright across the sky.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three—

  Thunder rumbled ominously.

  “Nathaniel!” Lu cried like a war general. “Onward to the drinks!”

  “You’re still very bossy,” Nathaniel said. Tiny snorted. Lu frowned. Nathaniel pulled the sleeves of his sweater down over his hands. “They’re in the kitchen,” he said. Tiny noticed the tips of his ears were red. “This way.”

  Lu unlinked her arm from Tiny’s and followed Nathaniel through the swinging door, but Tiny paused. Her heartbeat sped up. She wanted to tell Lu to stop, that she just wanted to go home. She felt awkward in Lu’s crop top and cut-offs, and what if she really did see Josh? It’s not like she was actually going to talk to him. She was beginning to think this whole night was a terrible mistake. She should have just stayed home.