The Odds of Lightning

by Jocelyn Davies

  “Sorry!” Nathaniel shouted. “Uh, sorry.”

  “Are you okay?” said Tiny.

  “Me? Oh yeah. Fine.” He brushed himself off and grinned. “Ow, though.”

  She laughed, and he breathed out.

  “Are, um. Are you okay?” He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. “Because you seem maybe”—he tried to think of the right word—“not.”

  She looked down, and a swath of brown hair fell across her face like a curtain. He felt a hiccup in his heart. She angrily wiped away a tear.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Do you want some company?” He took a step forward. “For old time’s sake?”

  Tiny didn’t say anything. But she nodded. Nathaniel sat down next to her and crossed his legs.

  “Hey,” he said, nudging her a little with his elbow. “Want to know why the moon’s like that?”

  She looked at him like maybe he was a little crazy. But she said: “Yeah. Why?”

  “It’s the atmospheric pressure. From all the wind and the storm clouds.”

  “Cool,” she said. She smiled, wiping away another tear. “Tell me more cool earth science facts.”

  “Really?” He sat up straighter. “You really want to know more weird arcana?”

  She laughed. “Yes. I really want to know more weird arcana.” She looked at him. “That is a total SAT word, by the way. You’ve been studying, too.”

  “Busted.”

  “Totally busted.”

  Nathaniel glanced over at her, but he didn’t say anything.

  Lightning flashed. One Mississippi . . .

  Thunder rumbled.

  “Whoa,” she said. “It’s getting really close.”

  “Well,” Nathaniel said slowly. “Do you want to know why there’s thunder and lightning but no rain?”

  “I don’t know,” Tiny said. “Do I?”

  “It’s probably better that you know. In case it comes up on the test tomorrow, or something.”

  “Right,” Tiny said. “I should be prepared.”

  “Yeah. You could use the extra studying, since you’re at a party tonight and everything.”

  “Ugh, don’t remind me.”

  “Sorry,” said Nathaniel. “Well, it’s a dry storm. They get them all the time out west, but they’re really rare on the East Coast because of the climate. It’s because we’ve been having an Indian summer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An unseasonably hot, dry fall.”

  “Oh, Nathaniel.” Tiny patted him on the knee. “You really did grow up to be a scientist.”

  He grinned and hoped she couldn’t see the back of his neck turn pink in the dark. “We haven’t had rain in months, right? It’s why everyone’s freaking out about all the rain we’re supposed to get tonight.” Nathaniel paused and tugged at his sweater sleeves. Was he rambling? Did he sound dumb? She wasn’t telling him to stop. “That, and the lightning. There are some powerful electrical currents in the air tonight.”

  “Aren’t the odds of getting struck by lightning really small, though?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Nathaniel. “They’re, like, this big.” He held up two fingers. “You have a greater chance of dying from getting hit in the head with a falling coconut.”

  Tiny laughed. “Is that a real statistic, Bill Nye?”

  “Totally real. Besides, when lightning is grounding a foot in front of you, you run like hell or else—”

  “You’re forked?”

  Nathaniel looked at her. She was smiling. Her cheeks were dry.

  “Sitting on this roof probably isn’t doing much to decrease our chances, though.”

  Another bolt of lightning zigzagged between the buildings. Nathaniel felt the muscles in his chest clench. He pushed away the memories; he was sure she was doing the same. He turned to her and grinned.

  “One more?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, this one’s cool. Lightning follows the path of least resistance. It forks because it’s finding its way through the spaces in the atmosphere that allow it to pass.”

  Tiny stared at the sky, so he looked up too, and together they watched as the beautiful bright forks found their way in the night.

  “I know how that feels,” she whispered. She shifted to face him. “So why are you at Will’s party tonight, if the SATs are so important to you?”

  “Will invited me over to study,” Nathaniel said sheepishly. “So everything is really going according to plan.”

  “I didn’t know you guys were still friends.”

  “We’re not. Not really. What about you? What are you doing here?”

  Tiny paused. “Lu made me come.”

  “I didn’t know you guys were still friends.”

  “We’re supposed to be. We say we are. But sometimes I think it’s just something we say.” She squeezed her knees in tighter. “I just didn’t feel like being alone. I thought—there’s this guy, and if I could get him to notice me . . .” She looked away.

  Nathaniel looked down at his hands. “Is that why you’re crying?”

  “No.” Tiny laughed. “He hit my head with the door and it really hurt! And it was just . . . embarrassing, I guess.”

  Nathaniel reached out to feel where she was pointing.

  “There’s a bump.”

  “I know!”

  “I think you should have a really great night tonight, just to show him,” Nathaniel said.

  “I don’t know,” said Tiny. “The night’s almost over. Something really good would have to happen to turn it all around.”

  “Well.” Nathaniel grinned. “I wasn’t going to show you these, but . . .” He pulled a stack of flash cards out of his jeans pocket and handed them to her. “Since you like arcana.”

  Tiny smiled without saying anything. She split the stack in half and handed one set to Nathaniel. She’d always had a really nice smile. It just sort of lit everything up.

  “Cacophony,” Tiny said.

  “The sound of the party downstairs.”

  Tiny laughed. “Good one.”

  “Thanks. The definition of E equals MC squared,” he said.

  “Energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared. Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

  “That one was easy.”

  “For you, maybe. Um.” She rifled through her deck. “Faith,” she said.

  “Faith,” Nathaniel recited, his eyes closed and one hand to his forehead like a tarot card reader. “The firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” He opened his eyes. “In other words, the opposite of science. Did I get it right?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” Tiny said, smiling. “You’re just going to have to have faith.”

  He grinned and nudged her with his elbow. She nudged him back.

  The sky flashed. A gust of wind came along and whipped the flash card right out of Tiny’s hand.

  “Oops,” she said. They watched it spiral away into the night. She shivered.

  “Are you cold?” he said. “Here.”

  He pulled his sweater off and handed it to her.

  “Oh,” she said, turning red. “You don’t have to—”

  “It’s okay. I’m warm enough. This is actually a down T-shirt.” He smiled, lopsided, and pushed his glasses farther up his nose with one hand while handing her the sweater with the other. “Superthin. Advanced technology.”

  She slipped it on and poked her finger through one of the holes. She smiled at him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. My mom keeps trying to buy me new ones, but this is my favorite sweater. It has character.”

  “I remember this sweater.”

  “You do? Do you remember its name?”

  “Of course!”

  “Marcel,” they said at the same time. They smiled in the darkness.

  “Well, thank you for keeping us warm, Marcel.”

  The pause in conversation grew into a comfortable silence between them.

  They stared at the sk
y.

  “Oh man,” said Nathaniel. “This storm is going to be crazy. You can just tell.”

  The door swung open with a bang.

  “Luella, just listen!”

  Lu came bursting onto the roof. “No!” she yelled as Will materialized behind her.

  The door slammed shut behind both of them. Will spun around.

  “Oh shit,” he said. “No. No!”

  “What’s wrong?” said Lu. “What happened?”

  “The door,” Will said, his voice rising. “It locks from the inside. Where’s the brick?”

  “What brick?”

  “The brick that’s supposed to keep it open? Where is it? It’s always right—”

  “There,” Nathaniel said, suddenly feeling sick. He pointed to the thing he’d tripped over. “That brick?”

  The four of them looked where he was pointing.

  “Shit,” said Will. “Shit.” He took out his phone and pressed something, holding it up to his ear. “Jon’s not picking up. It’s too loud down there for anyone to hear us. We’re never going to get back inside! Now we’re stuck out here right as it’s about to storm.” He kicked the brick and it went skidding across the roof.

  Lu looked deflated. “Noooo. I have to get to Hurricane Fest! Or else—”

  “Or else what?” said Will pointedly.

  “None of your business.” Lu crossed her arms.

  “We can’t just sit here; we have to find a way out,” Nathaniel said, panic rising in his chest. “What about the SATs?” Now that he’d overslept and missed the scholarship deadline, that was all he had left. “My whole future depends on that test!”

  A brilliant flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed immediately by a thunderclap so loud it shook the roof beneath them.

  “I’m more worried about the lightning,” Tiny said quietly.

  Will yelled and hit the door with his palm. “We’re going to get stuck out here and we’re all going to die.” He crouched by the door, his head in his hands. “This is bad. This is so bad.”

  The sky had grown dense with clouds, purple and angry.

  Nathaniel couldn’t see the moon anymore.

  And the wind howled and the thunder clapped and the storm was coming. Nathaniel could feel it. They all could. The storm was coming, and it was coming for them.

  There was another crack of thunder, and lightning coursed through the clouds, flashing bright like the middle of the day, and he could see Tiny and Lu and Will, all of them, their faces turned up toward the sky and the lightning that was crashing down on them, hard and loud and bright.

  There was a jarring zappish noise, like when the power goes out.

  But they were outside. And there was no power. Only the lightning. It snaked through them like blood, lighting up their bones, electrifying everything.

  And then it was dark.

  And then it was quiet.

  THEN

  THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER BEFORE HIGH SCHOOL

  THREE YEARS AGO

  NOON

  THE COLLISION OF OPPOSITE CHARGES

  Wil1

  Black. White. Black. White. White.

  Will watched with steely determination as the soccer ball careened in a near-graceful arc toward his head.

  “Get it!” Nathaniel shouted from behind him. “Head the ball!”

  As if in slow motion, Will aimed his head at the ball, thinking about how awesome he was going to be at soccer tryouts in the fall.

  Then an image of Luella popped into his head, and instead of heading the ball with grace and athleticism, it smacked Will in the side of his head and he went down.

  “Oh my god.” Nathaniel came running over. “Dude. I’m so sorry. I thought you saw that! Are you okay?”

  “Ow,” Will mumbled.

  “You have to stay focused, always watch the ball,” Nathaniel said, kicking the ball up and bouncing it from knee to knee.

  Will sat up and rubbed his head.

  “You’re really good. Remind me again why you’re not going to try out with me?”

  Nathaniel grinned. “No time. I’m creating my own independent study on geophysics. Plus, I had to beg and do an extra credit research paper to get into advanced earth science. I’m going to be superbusy.” He dropped the ball and rested his foot on it. “Besides, I have a fundamental skepticism of the whole team mentality. I don’t believe in organized religion or sports.”

  “Right. I bet that makes Bubbe Spencer thrilled.”

  Nathaniel’s grandma was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her dream in life was for Nathaniel to marry a nice Jewish girl and have Jewish babies and one day start an all-Jewish medical practice. Every time he went over for family dinners, Will had to watch Nathaniel explain to his Bubbe that just because he was into science, didn’t mean he wanted to be that kind of doctor. He also wanted to be able to marry whoever he wanted. That last part always made Will laugh, because the thought of any girl getting over Nathaniel’s awkwardness enough to marry him was absurd.

  “Look, I’ll drop it if you tell me to, but are you sure you want to be part of this whole team thing? Some of those guys on their own are nice and stuff, but when you get them all together in a pack, it’s like—”

  “A well-oiled machine?”

  “I was going to say a bunch of hyenas, but okay. I just don’t get why this is so important to you.”

  “One day, when you want to win a girl, Nathaniel, you’ll understand.” Will said this sagely, like someone who had won a lot of girls, when in fact he had won no girls and Nathaniel knew it.

  Nathaniel threw the ball at him, and Will caught it with both hands.

  “You sound like a giant douchebag,” Nathaniel said.

  “‘Douchebags are hygienic products; I take that as a compliment. Thank you.’” He quoted Wet Hot American Summer and stuck his tongue out.

  “Who is this girl you’re trying to impress, anyway?”

  “Anyone. Any girl, Nathaniel. I’m just tired of people looking at me, and my weight being the first thing they see.” That was a lie. There was a girl, one girl, but Will wasn’t ready to talk about her yet.

  “No one sees that first but you.”

  Will threw the soccer ball back at Nathaniel, who kneed it gracefully and let it rest in the grass. “We’ve been indoor kids our whole lives. We’re starting high school now! We have the chance to be completely different! Look. I’m a different person than I was in June. And I don’t want to go back to the way things were. I have to keep moving forward.”

  “Okay.”

  “Like a shark cutting tirelessly through the dark waters of the ocean.”

  “I get it.”

  Will clapped a hand on Nathaniel’s back. “It comes down to this. High school will be different than middle school. Do you want to go through the next four years being defined by the last four?”

  “I guess not,” Nathaniel said.

  “I just want to be happy,” said Will. “Can you let me do something I think will make me happy?”

  Nathaniel kicked up the ball and headed it toward Will.

  “As long as we’ll still be friends when you’re a hotshot soccer star,” he said.

  Will watched the ball sail over his head and roll through the grass a few feet away. Nathaniel groaned.

  “I was distracted!” Will said. And he was. Because standing at the edge of the field, watching them and laughing, was Luella.

  * * *

  This was how the whole thing with Luella had started.

  It was back at the beginning of the summer. The first day of his summer math enrichment program, which met on the Hunter College campus. Luella was the last person he had expected to see in the cafeteria. It looked like she had managed to make the cereal dispenser explode, and now she was wading in an ankle-deep sea of Rice Krispies.

  “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap,” Luella muttered as she dropped quickly to the floor, trying to scoop as many handfuls of the tiny rice puffs as she could into her empty stan
dard-issue, cafeteria-size bowl.

  Will didn’t know anyone else quite like Luella. She was a force of nature. Most girls were just confusing and scary and kind of foreign. They eyed him up and down, always making sure to linger on his extra chub and his glasses. They made him nervous.

  But, man, not Luella, with her bangs and skinny elbows and chipped nail polish flailing all over the place. She was really something else. She had black hair and olive skin and green eyes and looked like a cat, like the kind of cat who might squirm around a bit but who’d snuggle up to you eventually, and not the kind that might maul you to death when you stopped paying attention (like Melissa Sissler, who had been in his class since second grade and who was definitely the secret-mauling type). Any other girl, and he wouldn’t have cared so much if she embarrassed herself in the cafeteria. Besides, girls didn’t ever really embarrass themselves anyway, right? They were, like, impervious to that kind of thing. They were all just so shiny and happy and giggly that they never seemed to care.

  “Hey, Luella,” he said, helping her up. “Are you okay? Have you drowned in the sea of Rice Krispies?”

  “Nah, I’m wearing floaties.” She looked up at him and cracked a sly smile, full of braces. She suddenly reminded Will of one of those little elves on the Rice Krispies box.

  Will grinned. “I should call you Keebler from now on.”

  They were standing up now, and Will had already taken a clean bowl from the stack and traded it for the one with the floor-cereal. The line behind them was backing up.

  “So,” Will said. “What are you doing here? You’re not doing nerd camp too, are you?”

  “Nerd camp?” Luella looked dubious.

  “Uh, yeah. Isn’t that why you’re here . . . ?”

  “Oh, no,” Luella said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m taking acting classes this summer, and we use the Hunter theater.” She grinned. “Nerd camp?”

  “It’s a summer math enrichment course,” Will mumbled.

  “Well, listen, I’m sure you have all kinds of exciting numbers to get back to.” She grabbed an apple, tossed it coolly in the air, and then dropped it.