The Odds of Lightning (28 page)

When they pulled apart, it started to rain.

Tobias bent down and wrote something on her sneaker in yellow chalk.

“There,” he said. “Words to live by. Get home quick, before this washes off and you forget tonight forever.”

“I don't need help remembering.” Tiny's heart was pounding. “Tonight was—”
Electric,
she thought.

“Yeah,” Tobias said. “I felt it too.” He started to get on his bike, then turned and smiled.

There was so much Tiny wanted to say. So much was welling up in her, fighting for space in her head, crowding her mouth with words.

“Later, Tine-O,” he said, kicking off. “Get home safe.”

The minute he had turned the corner and was out of sight, she bent down to see what he'd written on her sneaker.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. —Carl Sagan

From down on one knee, she heard tires screeching, a sickening splash, the scrape of metal against metal. The unmistakable spinning of bike wheels in the hot end of summer night.

She looked up.

It had been three years.

As she'd stood at the foot of the bridge that night, everything had felt beautiful and alive. It was just the two of them and the stars, and the beating of her heart, and her lips against his.

It was just that one moment, but it changed everything. She tried to hold on to it, but it slipped through her fingers no matter how tightly she grasped.

Before she knew what was happening, there were sirens and flashing lights, and a gurney carrying a body into an ambulance. There was so much blood in the street. (She later read a statistic that bike accidents cause the most blood.) She was in the backseat of a cab to the hospital. The driver's name was Gus. She stared and stared at his taxi driver's license. And then she was in the hospital waiting room. And there was Nathaniel, looking pale and awful, and his parents, in shock. And Lu bursting through the doors. And ten minutes later, Will.

And there was this moment, when the four of them just stood there, staring at one another. Like so much had changed in just one night, they had no idea how to be anymore.

At some point, she realized that the rain had washed the yellow chalk from her shoes.

Tiny's parents made her go to the first day of school, to take her mind off things. She saw Lu there too, and Will. Nathaniel came back a week later. He spent the first semester of school playing catch-up. In some ways, he would always be playing catch up.

And Tiny did the only thing she could do: she got quiet. She got small. She wrote everything down. When her notebook was full of stories and poems, she started a new one. Instead of living out loud, she lived on the page. And then at the end of the day she closed up her notebook and herself with it.

She wrote about everything. How it tore them apart. How Nathaniel retreated from the world, reeling from the loss of his hero. How Lu and Will pushed each other away like oppositely charged magnets, and how they wouldn't speak again until tonight. How Lu never knew how to act around her anymore, didn't know how to ask the right questions, so she pretended everything was fine. How Will joined the soccer team and soon had turned into someone else entirely. How their group of four fell apart.

Tiny was right that no one cared about her after Tobias. There had been someone out there who had seen her, but no one seemed to see her anymore. Or maybe it was that she didn't want to show herself to anyone. It was like Gus the cab driver said. She'd let the bad fear guide her. And it was making her disappear.

For three years she'd kept that kiss bottled up inside her, telling no one. It became part of her, like an organ or something else she needed to live but took for granted. A spleen, maybe. Tobias was like her spleen. She had no idea what her spleen did, but somehow it was vital to her daily existence. She had needed it. She didn't know why anymore, but she did.

But maybe tonight it was finally time to let go.

  *  *  *  

“The last time I saw him, we had a fight,” Nathaniel said. He was blinking really fast, like he might have been trying not to cry. “I wished something bad would happen to him.” His voice cracked. “I really miss him.”

“Me too,” said Tiny.

“Me too,” said Lu.

“And me,” said Will.

“Why weren't we there for each other more?” Tiny said. “Why couldn't we talk about it?”

Nathaniel shrugged. “We each had so much going on, we couldn't see that everyone else was hurting too.”

They all looked at one another.

“What if . . . ,” Tiny said. “Nathaniel, isn't your research inspired by Tobias's?”

Nathaniel's face turned red.

“I guess. Yeah.” He paused. “I was trying to take it one step further.”

“So we'll look at your paper for the answers.”

“Mine? No way. It's nowhere near good enough.”

“Haven't you been working on it all year?” said Will.

“Yeah, but it's not . . . I don't feel . . .”

“I'm sure it's amazing,” said Tiny.

“Besides, we don't have a whole lot of options at this point,” Lu added. Tiny elbowed her. “You're lucky I couldn't feel that,” Lu said through gritted teeth.

“And we have to reverse the lightning,” said Tiny. “I feel it now more than ever. I don't want to be invisible anymore.”

“And I want to feel again,” said Lu.

“And I just want to be me,” Will said.

Nathaniel scratched the back of his neck. “And I don't want to feel like I have to try to be super anymore.”

They all looked at one another, then. All four of them. And it felt like it did in the hospital waiting room that night three years ago. Like something was about to happen, and they were waiting to find out what.

“We all believe in you,” Tiny said. “If it helps. I mean, we were able to get this far, thanks to you. We can't give up now.”

“But I didn't finish it!”

Will blinked. “What?”

“I didn't finish it. I couldn't. I bit off way more than I could chew. I was trying to use Tobias's research as a jumping-off point and take it one step further, but guess in the end I wasn't smart enough. There's a hypothesis, and lots of research. But there's no direction. No focus. I couldn't figure out a conclusive answer. Not like Tobias had.”

Slowly, he pulled the beaten-up précis out of his back pocket. He spread it out on the table in front of them.

Tension hung in the air over all of them like a cartoon raincloud.

There was barely any time left. The test was supposed to start right downstairs in the cafeteria in what, a couple of hours?

“What was your hypothesis?”

“It's kind of weird.”

“Tell us.”

“Well, okay. I guess, um, that big cities, like New York, for example, have their own gravitational pull, and give off their own electric charge. That, combined with the poorer air quality, thinner atmosphere, and increasingly erratic weather due to climate change made me wonder if lightning that strikes in big cities can change the property of matter in unusual or unexpected ways.”

“Do you think it can?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I couldn't prove it. Not until all this happened.” Nathaniel took a deep breath. He furrowed his eyebrows and studied the page. “E equals MC squared is Einstein's theory that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. It shows how a small amount of mass can release a big amount of energy. So basically, hidden inside a very small object could be enough energy to wipe out an entire city. But I argue that it can also interact with that city.”

Nathaniel wasn't looking at them. It was like the gears in his superbrain were working on high speed.

“Matter can't be created or eliminated. It can't disappear. It can only be redispersed or converted into something else. The amount of energy and mass in the universe is constant.”

Tiny was beginning to put the pieces together. She was beginning to understand.

Nathaniel had this superintense look on his face. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I hope it's not the craziest thing that's happened tonight. What if somehow, when the lightning struck us back on that roof, it, like, reacted with the high electrical charge of the city and the energy we, ourselves, were already emitting, and it . . . well, it reconfigured us?”

He turned to them, finally. There was fire in his eyes. Fire and stars and planets.

“Think about it. It changed all of us. It took who we were, and it redistributed our energy in ways we never could have imagined. It changed our bodies and our brains. It turned us into our fears.”

Tiny glanced at Will and Lu, afraid they we going to look skeptical or roll their eyes. But they were hanging on Nathaniel's every word.

He swallowed. “I wonder, if our energy combined with lightning again, I mean, maybe it would convert back into its original form. We've been running from the lightning. It's been following us. Well, actually, it's been following you, Tiny.”

It was something, on some level, she'd known all along.

Nathaniel's eyes found hers. “Maybe it's time to stop running.”

“What do you mean?” Tiny whispered. But she knew. Of course she knew.

Nathaniel ran his fingers through his wild hair. “You're a small person. But there's a lot of energy inside you. Energy that affected all of us when the lightning struck us the first time. If we let lightning strike us again, there's a chance it would reconfigure us—the matter that makes us who we are, the energy inside us—back to the way we were at the beginning of the night. We'd go back to normal. We could all be happy.”

“But we'd have been hit by lightning,” Will pointed out.

“Well, yeah.”

“Twice.”

“Yeah.”

“On purpose.”

“Yep.”

“Do you know how insane this sounds?”

“I'm not saying we should actually
do
it! It's a totally untested theory. Every inanimate object I've ever studied has blown up or been burned to a crisp. It would probably kill us. But in theory, it could work.”

Tiny realized something, then. In that moment. That Tobias hadn't been the only person who saw her for her. Nathaniel had too. This whole time. And she'd never noticed.

Tiny watched Nathaniel scan the paper again. His eyes went wide.

“What?” she said. “Did you think of something else?”

Nathaniel coughed. “No. Nothing. Nothing important.” She wasn't sure she believed him, but she let it go—for now.

Tiny put her hand on his shoulder. She could feel his heart beating through his T-shirt. He looked up at her. And in that moment she understood how this had to end.

“We have to do it anyway,” Tiny said finally.

Lu looked up at her sharply. “Tiny, no.”

“We have to, Lu.”

“We don't. There has to be another way!”

“There isn't. We have no time left, and no other answers. This is the
only
way.”

“But how—?”

“Tiny,” said Nathaniel. “All my test subjects essentially
blew up.
There's no scientific proof that this is going to work. It's not worth it. We'll find another way.”

“When?” Tiny said, panic rising in her. “When will we find another way? How? I'm disappearing, Nathaniel! I'm almost gone! I'm hanging on as hard as I can, but we're running out of time! I mean, maybe we don't need scientific proof. We just have to believe that some things can't be explained with facts. The world is big and mysterious. I
attracted
that lightning earlier on the roof.”

“How do you know that?”

Tiny thought about that night on the bridge with Tobias, and how it had seemed like she'd attracted the lightning then, too, just because of everything she was thinking and feeling and wanting inside. “It doesn't matter how I know. But I got lightning to strike me before. We just have to believe I can make this happen again.”

“I don't know about this,” said Nathaniel. “I don't know about this at all.”

“Shit,” said Will. “This could actually kill us, you know.”

“Will, stop,”
Lu hissed, shooting a glance at Nathaniel.

“Sorry,” Will said. “Sorry, man.”

“It's okay,” said Nathaniel, although it clearly wasn't.

“On the other hand,” said Tiny, “it could save us. We won't know unless we try.”

“If it works,” Nathaniel said, “this will prove everything I've been working on for the past three years, right? Even if I can't win the scholarship anymore. At least I'll know.”

“Wait.” Lu put her hand on Tiny's almost-gone arm.

“What?” Tiny said. Lu swallowed. She looked at Nathaniel and then back at Tiny.

“How will we know when—
if!
—the lightning is going to strike? How will we be ready?”

“We'll know,” Tiny said quietly. “I'll know.”

Lu's eyes got watery. For the first time all night, she looked scared.

“What if this doesn't work? Or . . . what if it does, but . . . not in the way we want? What if we go back to normal, and life is just the same as it was?” She paused and then swallowed. “What if you get hurt this time?”

Tiny remembered standing at the entrance to Central Park earlier that night, almost paralyzed by choice. She remembered standing on the Brooklyn Bridge three years ago, making a wish that never came true.

“The thing is,” Tiny said slowly, “Tobias was right. The one constant in this world is that things change and nothing stays the same. You change too, or you get left behind. We all have. It's not a bad thing. It's just life. And there's no way to know how it will all turn out until we get there.”