The Odds of Lightning

by Jocelyn Davies

  “It’s not a prank, Lu,” Jon said. “I promise. I’m—I’m not Jon. I’m Will. I just . . . look like Jon.”

  “Right.” She crossed her arms. “Okay. Tell me something only Will would know.”

  “God, Keebler, why don’t you just believe me?”

  Lu turned pale.

  “Keebler?” said Tiny. “Nice try, but no one calls Lu that.”

  “Actually,” said Lu. “One person does.” She cleared her throat. “Or did.”

  “I’m so confused,” Nathaniel said. “What are you trying to say, that you look like Jon Heller on the outside, but you’re Will on the inside?”

  Will/Jon nodded vigorously. “Yes! That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.”

  “Well, I’m just going to say it,” said Lu. “What the hell is going on? You can’t change everything about yourself in ten minutes!”

  “It would be nice if you could, though,” Tiny said.

  “Trust me, I know,” said Will, or Jon. “This is messed up.”

  “Maybe it was magic lightning.” Lu tightened her ponytail. “I wished something bad would happen to you, and it did!” She looked up at the sky. “I’d also like the SATs to be canceled!” Will/Jon gave her a withering look. “What? What’s your explanation?”

  Nathaniel stood and looked around.

  “There!” He walked to the center of the roof, and Tiny followed him, because listening to Lu and Will—Jon—whatever—was weirding her out. The four of them stood there, looking down at a giant, charred mark on the tin floor of the roof. It looked almost like a four-pointed star. “It struck the roof,” he said, “and then”—he made a zigzag motion with his hands between the four of them—“the current traveled through anything touching it. That’s why we have burn marks on our feet. That’s where the lightning entered us.”

  “Entered us,” Tiny repeated, shivering. “That is so. Creepy.”

  “Does that mean it’s still in us?” said Lu, sounding kind of manic.

  “Maybe,” said Nathaniel, thinking.

  “Maybe?” Will/Jon was yelling now. “Did the lightning really do this? Did the lightning make me look like Jon Heller?”

  Nathaniel looked thoughtful. “It could have. A major change in energy currents could create a corresponding change in a person’s cellular make up. Like how superheroes get their powers in all those origin stories. But real, I guess.”

  “So, what? Like Spider-Man? Or the Flash? You’re saying I’m like a superhero? And my power is that I can make myself look like my soccer co-captain?”

  “I don’t know why it would make you look like Jon, specifically.” Nathaniel paused, running a hand through his curly brown hair. “Only you could really know the answer. Maybe it has some sort of personal significance?”

  “Hm.” Will/Jon scratched his chin. “I don’t know. I mean, it was his idea to have the party tonight. And I just couldn’t really say no—”

  “Guys,” Lu said, “are you listening to yourselves? We are in the real world, not a comic book. We just got hit by lightning and you’re discussing the nuances of superhero powers?”

  Nathaniel and Will blinked. “Right,” Nathaniel said. “We should worry about getting off this roof first. Then we should tell someone. This is really dangerous. I mean, Lu’s right. The current could still be inside us. If we touch something with this amount of electric current running through us, it could . . .” He made an explosion noise.

  “Good,” said Will. “This night needed to get worse.”

  Tiny had been watching all of this quietly. She said: “We should go to the hospital. All of us. Together. This is serious. We can’t just figure this out on our own.”

  “No!” Everyone turned on her.

  “Why not?” she said, shrinking back. It felt wrong, but part of her was excited that Science Club was all back together again. She missed this. She missed them.

  “Well, okay, for starters, they’ll want to know why we were on the roof during a hurricane,” said Will. “And then we’ll have to say that we were having a party. And then they’ll call my parents in Majorca. And then when they come home, I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life. That is, if they even recognize me.” Will’s face—Jon’s face—whatever, was growing panicked. “Which they won’t. They’ll send me to live with Jon Heller’s parents. But no, wait”—more panicked—“Jon will already be there. Everyone will be terrified. I’ll be labeled a freak of nature and sent to Arkham Asylum.”

  “That’s a fictional place. Besides, you should have thought of that before you threw a party,” Nathaniel mumbled.

  “Sorry, what was that? Did you not come over and drink my beer?”

  “I came because I thought we were going to study!”

  “Well, I’m definitely not going to the hospital,” said Lu. “I hate hospitals.”

  Tiny only knew bits and pieces of the reason Lu hated hospitals, because for a person who loved to talk about herself, Lu didn’t really like to feel vulnerable. Tiny had figured out, through occasional comments and jokes, that Lu’s dad had been in the hospital for a while with early stage prostate cancer. He’d had chemo and everything, and had gone into remission. Not even a month after he came home and life got back to normal, he’d left Lu and her mom for his nurse at the hospital. Tiny thought this was probably a big part of the reason why she didn’t trust people a whole lot. Case in point: They were supposedly best friends, but Lu had never even told her this story outright.

  “Look, we can’t go to a hospital, and we can’t stay here!” said Lu. “We could get struck again!”

  “Well, how do you suggest we get off the roof, Luella? The door’s locked.” Will pointed. They all turned suddenly to the door. Nathaniel scratched his head and pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. Then he walked over to the door and jiggled the handle. “See?” Will said. Nathaniel pulled on it harder. “It won’t—”

  The heavy metal fire door came flying off. Like, literally, flying off in his hand. Tiny ducked. Nathaniel looked shocked as he chucked this big and heavy and solid piece of metal across the roof as if it weighed nothing more than a feather.

  “Whoa,” said Nathaniel, pushing up his glasses.

  “What the hell?” said Will. “How did you do that?”

  Nathaniel blinked in shock. “I have no idea.”

  “You just threw that thing away like the Hulk!”

  “It wasn’t that heavy,” Nathaniel said. “I just kind of tugged it a little, and it came off.”

  Tiny glanced at Lu, who was rubbing her arms as if she were cold.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” said Lu. “I just—I can’t feel anything.”

  “What?” Tiny asked.

  “I feel . . . I feel kind of . . . numb.”

  “Maybe you’re just cold?”

  “I think it’s the lightning,” Lu said darkly. “It’s still inside me. I can tell.”

  Tiny felt overwhelmed. She felt small. Mostly, she felt relieved that the lightning hadn’t seemed to affect her in the same bad way it had the other three. The shiny metal door lay at her feet. It sure looked heavy. She bent down to try to lift it herself.

  But when she saw her own reflection in the polished metal, her stomach jolted.

  Her image, pale as it was, especially now, was more than that—more than just pale, more than just easy to overlook. More than just another anonymous girl floating through the halls of school. No—this was something else. It flickered in and out, once, twice, like a winking flame. It didn’t look like she was really there. It didn’t look like she was solid.

  There was a distant rumble of thunder and a restless flash of lightning right above her, like someone was taking a picture. The sky flickered, the light casting shadows on her skin, playing tricks on her eyes in the middle of the night. Tiny stood up quickly, watching the light dance across her arm.

  No, she realized with a start. She watched it dance through her arm.

&
nbsp; It was like looking down at your body in a dark room. Like just being able to make out the faintish glow of skin. A rogue finger. The bony curve of an elbow. Everything just shy of translucent.

  That was what her hand looked like. Just shy of translucent. She could see through it. Right through her skin and bones to the roof below. For just a minute her hand looked like heat coming off the sidewalk in the dead of August.

  She looked almost—but no, it was too crazy to even think. She looked almost like she was turning invisible.

  This couldn’t have been happening. Just because Tiny felt invisible, didn’t mean she actually was. It had to be a trick of the light. She was just freaked out. That was it.

  She breathed in and out, trying to steady herself. It was nothing. It was just the wind and the lightning flashing steadily from beyond the clouds, and the contagious fear that something terrible had happened to them. It was just the light and her mind. Just her own mind.

  Could it be possible that somehow she was really, truly, in real life, turning invisible? That everything she had always secretly wanted and yet been so afraid of was coming true?

  “Well,” said Nathaniel. “Door’s open. I guess we have a way off the roof now.”

  “So, where do we go?” Will asked. “What do we do now?”

  “What? Why do I have to come up with a solution?” Nathaniel took his glasses off and wiped them nervously on his T-shirt.

  “Because you’re the smart one,” Will said.

  “Because you always used to,” said Lu.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Nathaniel. “It was my brother. He always knew what to do. I just followed along.”

  Tiny’s chest tightened.

  “But we can’t ask Tobias,” she said. She put a hand on his back. Nathaniel looked up at her. His Adam’s apple moved up and down, like he was swallowing hard. “I wish we could. So can we ask you?” Nathaniel looked down at his hands, fidgeting. “Will you help us?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nathaniel. “Why me? What makes you think I’ll know the right thing to do?”

  Tiny chewed her lower lip.

  “What about Tobias’s paper?” she said. “The one he wrote for that scholarship?”

  “The Anders scholarship?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Yeah. Could we get that? It might have answers.”

  “Where would it be?” Lu asked.

  Nathaniel paused. “School,” he said. “It’s bound and published in the school academic archives.” Something sparked in his eyes. “Actually, yeah, this could work. Tobias was storm chasing, kind of. His paper was on the relationship between climate change and electrical storms, specifically on the question of whether the atmosphere of big cities is more conducive to lightning. If we can get down there and find it, we may be able to figure out what to do without having to go to a hospital or tell our parents.”

  “Uh, what?” Will looked disgusted. “It’s a Friday night, and you want us to go back to school?”

  “You don’t have to come with us,” said Lu. “You can just stay that way forever.” She turned back to Nathaniel. “Okay, so it’s settled. We’re going to school to find the answers in your brother’s paper.”

  Tiny closed her eyes just as another flash of lightning lit up the sky behind the clouds. The storm seemed to be hovering right above her. For one brief, eerie moment, Tiny had the feeling that it was waiting for her to decide what to do.

  She could walk through that roof door and go home. Take off this stupid outfit and put on her oversize T-shirt dress. Crawl under the covers and wait, against all odds, to reappear.

  The SATs were tomorrow. Only the single most defining moment of her high school life.

  But it was hard to care about a stupid test when you were kind of disappearing.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “If we hurry, we can beat the rain.”

  Lu

  She wasn’t cold.

  It wasn’t even that cold out. And yet Lu could hardly feel her fingers. The skin on her arms felt numb, like her mouth felt that time she’d had a cavity filled.

  Would they think she was crazy if she said something? Wasn’t lightning supposed to hurt? Was it possible that it had made her numb instead? Or was she imagining it? It’s not like there was something outwardly wrong with her, like Will. Or that she’d done something totally crazy, pulling a door off its hinges like Nathaniel. She just felt kind of weird.

  Or actually, she didn’t feel anything at all.

  But they were already making their way through the door Nathaniel had muscled open, and Lu felt like the time for saying something had passed. Maybe it was better to just get downtown to school, find Tobias’s paper in the archives, and get the answers they needed as soon as possible. Maybe if she were lucky, the numbness would wear off by then and she wouldn’t have to say anything at all.

  It was just as dark inside as it was outside.

  The power was out.

  The couple was still making out on the couch as if nothing had happened. The four of them kept going, back through the upstairs hall, the many rooms, down the stairs, through the party. What a fucking castle.

  Inside, the place was in total chaos, and people were squealing and huddled together in clusters across the vast foyer. Every few seconds a lighter flicked open or a flashlight turned on, throwing pinpricks of light across the apartment like stars at a planetarium. Lu grinned at how fucking poetic she was sometimes.

  When they passed through the living room, Will/Jon muttered, “Crap. I hope it’s dark enough that no one goes mistaking me for the real Jon.”

  Lu shot a sidelong look at Will, and felt a twinge of satisfaction. Will got everything he wanted. So let him struggle for once.

  Except Will wasn’t exactly struggling. It wasn’t that dark, and people were definitely mistaking him for the real Jon Heller. As in, full-on moving out of his way to let him pass. There was some Red Sea–level parting going on. Lu gawked. Was this what life was like for Will, too? No wonder he’d wanted to be cool.

  As he squeezed between two brunette sophomores to get to the front door, one of them turned and put a hand on her hip, all like, Ex-cuse me. When Will moved out of a shadow, she instantly flashed him a smile. “Oh, hey, Jon!”

  Will looked freaked. “Uh, hey,” said Will. “Sorry, who are you?”

  The girl burst out laughing. “You are so funny!” she said, and turned back to her friends.

  Lu caught Will’s—or Jon’s—eye.

  “Shut up, Luella,” he said.

  Lu grinned. “I didn’t say a word!”

  They made their way through the party, past the leering IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT sign and the guy wearing the snorkel, laughing a sinister, horrible laugh, and out the front door, where Lu paused to take a giant breath. She made up a mantra that she repeated over and over in her head.

  I can breathe.

  I am not anesthetized.

  I am a renowned warrior.

  The four of them stood on the stoop for a second. Lu looked at the others.

  Flash—

  Tiny, her best friend, flickering in and out like she was some kind of hologram.

  Flash—

  Will, her onetime friend and maybe more, who had changed so much since the years in between, had completely transformed again into a totally different person.

  Flash—

  Nathaniel, the brains behind the operation, who had disappeared off the face of the planet or at least the high school social scene, and thrown himself into his work, was now, kind of, bizarrely, superhuman.

  And then there was Lu, cut off from everything, numb to the heat, the cold, the wind, and anything else that might come her way.

  They had been struck by lightning, all right. But the bigger question on Lu’s mind was: What the hell had the lightning done to them?

  The sidewalk was dark, but it hadn’t started raining yet. The clouds rumbled discontentedly, and she knew that it would rain soon. The sky was black, and
the clouds were heavy, and she couldn’t see the stars. The storm wasn’t over.

  It was only just beginning.

  Wil1

  They walked to the subway, hoping it hadn’t been shut down yet.

  On the way, Will thought about fear. He mentally cataloged all the things he’d been afraid of since high school started.

  Making the soccer team.

  Not making the soccer team.

  Lu loving him back.

  Lu not loving him back.

  Staying the same.

  Not staying the same.

  All his fears came in twos.

  Then Will thought about the thing that plagued him the most:

  Turning into someone he didn’t recognize anymore.

  He’d wanted to be someone different. Well, here he was. It’s like the lightning knew.

  Will flinched. He thought about how hard he’d worked the past three years to turn into the person he’d become. The crazy diets, the compulsive workout routines, waking up at five a.m. to run every day just to feel like he deserved his spot on the soccer team. Going along with the team groupthink mentality, letting the guys decide what he did and where he went and who he talked to. Lately the anxiety spirals, the nightmares. Pretending to be someone he wasn’t. No, not pretending. Believing.

  He turned to Nathaniel.

  “Hey, dude?”

  “Yeah,” Nathaniel said.

  “Even if we did go to a hospital, I don’t think . . .” He paused to think about how to phrase this. “I don’t think they’ll be able to fix the kind of problems we have.”

  Nathaniel’s expression darkened. But maybe it was just that they were passing between two streetlamps and a shadow had fallen over them.

  “I was thinking that too.”

  “Do you really think your brother’s paper will have the, um, answers?”

  “I don’t know,” Nathaniel said. “But right now I don’t have any other ideas.” He paused. “If anyone has answers, it’s Tobias.”

  If Tobias had the answers, then Will could get back to his normal self. Everything would be fine. He could return to the party, take the SATs, and then life would go back to the way it always was. Or at least, had been lately.