The Odds of Lightning (5 page)

There was a flourish of pencils, pens, and people ripping the corners off notebook pages. The results were never announced at the meeting—that would have been too humane. You had to wait agonizingly until the issue came out at the end of the year to see if your piece was accepted.

Malin collected the shreds of paper, marking cryptically in her notebook one tally mark for each vote. When all the votes were in, she looked up and smiled grimly.

“Next,” she said . . .

Josh didn't look at Tiny once.

Maybe he
knew
, maybe he could just
tell
, because they shared some mind connection he hadn't even realized yet. If Tiny wished it hard enough, maybe she could make him notice her in the way she wanted to be noticed.

It's just that no one noticed her, not really. Not since that night three years ago.

There wasn't anything worth noticing, anyway.

The black lacquered door to Will's brownstone loomed before them like the gateway to Dante's Inferno. His family owned all three floors, and the whole school probably could have fit in there if they'd been stalking him on Facebook and knew about the party too. Or maybe they did. Lu had no idea how these things worked, and she didn't care.

“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.

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 different.

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.

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.