3) He heard the crack and saw the lightning in slow-motion, watching in awe as it descended in jagged steps from the sky
4) He knew exactly which tree it was going to strike
5) Before he knew what had happened, he’d beaten the lightning to the tree.
The whole thing took less than a second.
He wasn’t just a hero; he knew that now. The lightning had turned him into a superhero.
Thinking about it in a glass-half-full kind of way, getting struck by lightning and turning into a superhero was sort of the culmination of all his comic-book-reading childhood dreams. He must have experienced some kind of kinetic absorption, pulling energy from the lightning and converting it into a kind of power he’d never felt before: physical strength, sharper senses, a keener mind, superhuman instinct. He could do anything he wanted. He could be anything he put his mind to.
He could have a cool nickname, like Lightning Man or The Zag.
But if he looked at his situation in a glass-half-empty kind of way, that presented a problem. In the years since he’d been a child, he’d grown up into someone who didn’t want to be a hero. He didn’t want to be responsible for having that kind of power over someone else’s life. That was something he’d learned the hard way. Nathaniel had spent the past three years working toward someone else’s dream. Trying to fill someone else’s shoes. He’d let Tobias be the one to lead, the one to shine. And Nathaniel had followed. He had never felt worthy of finding his own thing to shine at. He had never thought he could.
Now that he could—he didn’t know how.
Before he could think about it too much, he sensed another bolt of lightning brewing in the sky above. In a flash that was all but invisible to the naked eye, he caught another tree in his hands and tossed it to the side. Zipping to the other side of the stage, he pushed a group of kids out of the way of a jagged flash of white.
But he couldn’t be in two places at once. There was a limit to his powers.
And across the clearing, another tree fell on the generator, exploding in a shower of sparks. The power cut out and plunged the park into darkness, except for the orange glow of the makeshift wooden stage smoldering and bursting into flame. Kids around them were screaming, pushing into one another to try to get out of the way. He had to get back to Tiny, Will, and Lu.
His ears perked up.
It was like his brain was picking up radio waves on a superhigh frequency.
Across the field, he could actually hear someone knock into Will, who knocked into Lu, and now they were bickering.
His eyesight sharpened.
It was like his eyes had a super high-tech autofocus zoom function.
And he saw Tiny standing there, the action swirling around her. She was trying to help. But no one seemed to see her trying or helping.
The hair on his arms stood on end. He could feel it. The collision of opposite charges in the clouds above them. Crackling with energy. Ready to strike.
He was off and running before the lightning zapped, before it even hit the tree towering over her. He came crashing into her, pushing her out of the way.
The two of them went flying, knocking over Lu and Will and rolling 55 feet, 7 inches, and 2.25 centimeters (superbrain!) before landing in a heap on the grass.
“Oof,” said Tiny. She actually said the word oof.
Nathaniel’s senses were in overdrive. He was picking up so many things.
Lu’s voice complaining loudly.
Tiny breathing.
The gritty sting of branches and dead autumn grass scraping along his arms and legs. The adrenaline pulsing through his head and the crashing of atoms in the air all around him.
He opened his eyes. Tiny was lying under him, staring back.
“Uh, hi,” Nathaniel said. He was lying on top of her, arms on either side of her head.
“Hi,” said Tiny.
“I’m trying not to crush you.”
“Better you than the tree.”
Nathaniel smiled. “Just trying to keep things in perspective.” The two of them struggled to stand up. “Um,” Nathaniel said, looking at her, all concerned. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so. Just some scrapes.” She squinted and frowned. “Did you hit your head?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I am?”
“Right there,” Tiny said, pointing.
Nathaniel brought a hand up to his forehead, just above his right eyebrow. A trickle of blood made its way down his cheek. “Oh man. I guess I did.”
Tiny smiled. “You saved us. That was . . . brave. It reminds me of . . .” Then suddenly the smile faded from her face.
She didn’t have to finish. Nathaniel knew what she was going to say.
Something suddenly looked different about Tiny. It could have been the glow of the fire crackling around the stage, but her face seemed to flicker, just for a moment. He thought he saw the grass through her skin.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She looked up at him. “I don’t think so. I’m worried I—”
“Dude!” Will barreled into him, still looking like Owen. “You have a head trauma!”
Nathaniel coughed and changed the subject. “Do you think I need stitches?”
“I said no way,” Lu said, hobbling over. “No hospitals.”
“Yeah,” said Will. “We agreed. Besides, that’ll heal up overnight. Don’t worry—I get hit in the head all the time.” Lu looked at him. “What?”
A siren blared. Blue and red police lights cast their faces in blue, then red, then blue again. “Break it up!” Kids scattered everywhere. “Anyone without ID is going to jail. Move it!” A couple more cop cars were pulling up, as well as a few ambulances.
“Run!” said Will.
“This way!” said Nathaniel, leading them in the direction of the park entrance, toward the street.
They were a bleeding, possibly concussed mess. Where did they go from here? It crossed Nathaniel’s mind that they could go home; they should go home. Home was safe and dry. Home had Band-Aids and late-night snacks and parents who knew everything, or thought they did. But what else waited for them there? More of the same?
Not tonight. Tonight there was no going home.
What made him think that the solution to their problems would be at home within the safe walls of their apartments, other than instinct and a sense that that was where the solution had always been?
At home there were Band-Aids, yeah. And study aids. And a warm dry bed safe from the rain that was supposed to begin before morning. Home was where trustworthy newscasters advised them to be, and the walls of their concrete buildings would protect them from the lightning that seemed to be tracking them like they were some kind of prey on the nature channel.
But there was an emptiness at home too. And out here in the city streets there was thunder and lightning and music. Here, in the middle of the city, where he should have felt like a speck of dust floating in the cosmos, here—surrounded by Tiny, Lu, and Will—for the first time in three years he wasn’t lonely.
Nathaniel didn’t know how to see the future—that wasn’t one of his superpowers, at least as far as he could tell—but he knew they couldn’t go home yet. They had to stay together. They had to fix this, whatever it was, together.
They ran down the street, in and out of the shadows of streetlamps, as more cop cars descended on the park.
The music had stopped when they weren’t paying attention.
THEN
THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER BEFORE HIGH SCHOOL
THREE YEARS AGO
3:00 P.M.
THE DOWNWARD STROKE
Nathaniel
He and Tiny walked across the park to the West Side.
They walked quietly, not saying much, just coexisting in comfortable silence. It was always comfortable with Tiny.
Nathaniel didn’t feel like going home. Tobias had been packing for colleg
e all week, and the apartment was covered with suitcases, clothes, books, and all kinds of gadgets. There was no room for Nathaniel. Every time he was there, he felt like he was in the way or in the process of being crowded out.
He was happy for his brother, in theory. Tobias was smart and worked hard. It was just that he kind of got everything he wanted. He nailed every conceivable academic achievement. His parents worshipped everything he said and did. It was a little hard to compete. He felt like a carbon copy of his older brother—almost the same, but not quite as good.
He wondered what life would be like when Tobias was at college. Would he have to work twice as hard for their attention? He couldn’t help but be afraid that unless he was Tobias, they just wouldn’t care that Nathaniel was still right there.
It wasn’t just his parents who he was worried about. He stole a glance at Tiny, walking next to him.
Things were changing, whether he wanted them to or not. He felt . . . things.
It was just . . . he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure how.
But he thought about how Tobias always said that sometimes you have to take a risk, even if the odds are stacked against you. If you don’t experiment, the answer will always be no.
The day was hot and humid, and he wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. He was sweating for other reasons too.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, yourself,” said Tiny.
“So there’s this natural disaster movie film fest at IFC next weekend.”
“Cool,” said Tiny. “Are they showing Twister? Nothing is as good as Twister.”
“They are, indeed, showing Twister!” Nathaniel’s heart had migrated up behind his eyeballs, and he became momentarily blind from nerves. “Want to go?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Tiny. “Obviously. What else are they playing?” Nathaniel’s heart now popped happily in his brain. “Luella is going to be so excited. Are they playing Armageddon? That’s her favorite.”
The pieces of Nathaniel’s deflated heart sunk back down to his chest.
“Armageddon is not even a disaster movie,” he said. “It’s a space movie.”
“It is so a disaster movie. Are you kidding?”
“Well, they’re not playing it. Sorry.”
“Fine,” Tiny said. “Jeez. Why are you being weird?”
But while she was talking, a new fear was blooming in Nathaniel’s brain. Suddenly he wasn’t as scared of asking Tiny out. Suddenly he was more worried that once high school started, they wouldn’t stay friends at all.
“Because I am weird,” Nathaniel said. “This is how I am. I’m just being me.”
Heat lightning simmered in the distance.
“I don’t know. Maybe if you think I’m so weird, we shouldn’t even be friends anymore.”
“Stop,” Tiny said. “That’s not what I meant.” She exhaled loudly. “Besides, it’s not like I’m so normal, or whatever.”
But she was. At least, compared to him. And now the seed was planted in his head. Was he weird? Was it normal to be so obsessed with facts and hard science?
He thought about those charges colliding up in the sky, the necessary conditions for lightning. He realized it was true: nothing can stay the same; it went against every law of physics. Things were already in motion. And an object in motion stays in motion. It was just the way the world worked. It was just science.
Tiny
The comfortable silence wasn’t so comfortable anymore.
Tiny walked away, a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. Nathaniel was being so weird lately.
Like, the other day.
She had been over at his apartment, hanging out. It was a hot, humid afternoon, and the only sane place to exist was somewhere with AC. Nathaniel, Will, and Luella had gone out to get snacks, and it was Tiny’s job to find a good movie on Netflix. She had volunteered, because Tobias was home.
Tiny went right to the eighties movies and started scrolling. Tobias strolled in like he was just on a casual walk around the apartment and happened to pass the den. He plopped down next to her, kicked off his hiking boots, and put his feet in her lap.
“Gross!” said Tiny. “Get your sweaty feet off of me.”
“What?” Tobias wiggled his toes. “These feet?”
“Um, yes, why are you even wearing socks in summer?”
“Because I was wearing shoes,” Tobias said, like it should have been obvious.
Tiny refocused on the TV. “Sixteen Candles!”
Tobias groaned. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Quirky high school girl has a crush from afar on an older, unattainable guy, but through a series of hilarious yet heartfelt misunderstandings, they end up together? Please. No. Barf.”
“It could happen,” Tiny said.
“Not likely. Keep scrolling.”
“St. Elmo’s Fire. Eighties-era Rob Lowe!”
“No,” said Tobias. “Only girls like that movie. Next.”
“Are you even watching this movie with us? Who gave you veto power?”
“No one. I don’t wait around for people to give me things. I carpe them.”
“Okay, well carpe this: The Big Chill!”
“Depressed grown-ups having affairs. Pass.”
“Pretty in Pink?”
“She should have ended up with Spader. No.”
“Ugh, you’re the worst! Here.” She handed him the remote. “You pick.”
He scrolled. “Weird Science,” they said at the same time, as Tobias pressed select.
“I should have guessed,” said Tiny.
Tobias grinned. “Two boys scientifically engineer the girl of their dreams? Classic.”
When Tobias said “girl of their dreams,” Tiny blushed for no reason. Or maybe there was a reason. Maybe her brain had turned it all around and thought he was talking about her.
Being around him made her skin instantly warmer, like she was a kettle that had just been put on a burner. All she wanted was to lean in and put her head on his shoulder. To feel his breath rising and falling under her. She didn’t even want it in a conscious way, the way you want an A on a term paper or a bagel sandwich for lunch. It was like her body had a mind of its own. She couldn’t stop staring at his lips, especially when he took his glasses off to wipe them on his T-shirt, and she knew he couldn’t see. When he put his glasses back on and smiled, she fought a full-body urge to run her fingers through his curly hair. She wanted to feel his arms around her. To know what it felt like to be held tight by someone other than her mom, or Luella.
She thought about him when she closed her eyes at night, and in the morning when she opened them.
Tiny was half afraid that any minute now she’d lose control entirely, forget all basic sense of human decency, and lean right in and kiss him.
“Are you hot?” Tobias said.
“What?” Tiny blinked.
“It’s too hot in here. Let’s go lie on the kitchen floor.”
The kitchen floor was widely known as the coolest place in the house, especially in summer when the tile was nice and cold from the air conditioner.
Tiny’s arms were stretched all the way above her head, and she had been trying for at least a minute or two to get herself as straight as humanly possible, straight as a board. It was an impossible feat, and one of those things you do for long spaces of time without really thinking about it; though she was concentrating hard, she wasn’t really there at all. Her mind was floating upward, like a balloon, like the heat. Lying next to Tobias was making her giddy. Their arms were both extended over their heads, and their fingertips were barely touching. The Spencers’ dog, Isaac Newton, kept nosing Tiny’s armpit, and she desperately wanted to snap her arms down and push him away, but she didn’t want to disrupt the moment with Tobias. Isaac Newton couldn’t get enough of people’s armpits.
“Are you all packed?” Tiny asked.
“No.”
Tiny kicked Tobias’s socked foot with hers. “Why do
you wear hiking boots all the time?”
“I don’t know. Because it reminds me that if I keep hiking, eventually I’ll get where I’m going.”
“I’m so jealous,” Tiny said. “You’re doing, like, real things. You wrote a paper that’s been published.” She rolled over onto her stomach and rested on her elbows. “I’d give anything to be published.”
“You will be. You’ll be a famous author one day, and I’ll come to your book signings. What are you working on now?”
“A short story about a boy and a girl who meet on the moon.”
“How are they on the moon? Do they work for NASA?”
“It’s the future. She’s in one of the last colonizing missions from Earth, and he was born on the moon and grew up there. He can breathe in the moon’s atmosphere and she can’t, so she has to keep her helmet on all the time. They hold hands in zero gravity, and they can only communicate through a sign language that they made up.”
Tobias shifted over to his side. “So what happens? In the story?”
“Eventually she wants to kiss him so badly the girl takes off her helmet and dies. It’s very tragic.”
“A tale of star-crossed love,” Tobias mused.
“Yes.” Tiny smiled. “Literally. Because of—”
“The stars. In space. I get it. You,” he said, laughing, “are a singularity.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yeah.” He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at her. “It’s a good thing.”
Goose bumps exploded across her skin like fireworks. She coughed to break the silence. “Well. What are you reading?”
“Right now I’m reading a book about the discovery of gravity,” he said. “So, you know, star-crossed love. Tragic ending. Same sort of thing.”
“Sounds like a real page-turner.”
“Actually, it is. I love gravity. It’s my favorite of all the fundamental forces.”
“You have a favorite force?”
“What, don’t you? To me, the coolest thing about gravity is a constant. That once things are on a certain trajectory, it’s almost impossible to change them.”
The Odds of Lightning Page 11