A soft giggle danced past her smiling lips, and it warmed my soul. “Okay, but you have to swear you won’t call me a liar. Regardless of how farfetched it might sound, you can’t doubt it. Well, you can, but don’t voice your skepticism. Deal?”
If she ended up telling me something really lame after getting me this excited, I’d be disappointed. “Yes, yes. Deal. Just spit it out already.”
“In middle school, a really bad storm hit while I was helping a friend paint her bedroom.”
“You’re right, Kenny. I don’t know if I can trust anything you say from now on.”
Her lips split wide as unrestrained hiccups of laughter filled the room. I’d seen her laugh like this once before, when she really got going, and I was happy to see it wasn’t a fluke. The way the bridge of her nose wrinkled, the lines that fanned out from her squinted eyes. The way her top lip thinned as if stretched too tight, exposing more of her straight white teeth than normal. It got to me. It penetrated my defenses and made a home in my chest.
Right next to my beating heart.
Without thinking, I tapped the camera icon on the front of my cell screen and captured the sight. Her head tilted back, her body completely committed to the amusement rolling through her. This would be the photo I’d look back on when I was old and alone, remembering the one time in my life when I didn’t feel lonely.
“Are you going to let me finish?” she asked as her laughter tapered off. “Anyway, the power went out, and we were all in the living room with candles, waiting for it to pass. I swear, I thought it would last forever. I started freaking out and was on the verge of a panic attack.”
I found myself hanging on every word that rolled off her tongue.
“Her parents had no idea what was going on, so they started trying to get me to talk. Finally, I was able to explain that thunderstorms frightened me. I told them about my fear and where it stemmed from, and her dad got up and left the room. Several minutes later, he came back with a photo album.”
I had no idea what part of this was unbelievable, but it certainly had me waiting—literally—on the edge of my seat to find out.
“So his brother, my friend’s uncle, had been struck by lightning seven times.”
Yeah, I could see where people might doubt her story now.
“The first time was when he was young. Based on the pictures, he looked around my age now. The other six times took place within an eight-year span when he was an adult. Not sure how, but he managed to survive each one.”
“Did he have metal rods in his body or something?”
She giggled—still the best sound in the world. “No. I don’t remember how it happened the very first time, but all the other times were on the job. He was a park ranger.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I have no idea.” The most beautiful smile I’d ever seen lined her lips—her extremely kissable lips. “We ended up going to different high schools and losing touch.”
As much as I wanted to know more about this guy and how he could’ve possibly been struck that many times, I wanted to know about Kenny even more. “So that got you over the fear?”
She shrugged and picked at her thumbnail. “Pretty much. Because my mom was so afraid during storms, and because my grandmother died during one, I think I had convinced myself they’re deadly. So to learn that someone had been struck that many times and lived to tell the tale, it eased my concern.”
“Did you know that the saying lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice is a myth? It’s actually really common for it to hit the same spot more than once.”
Her eyes lit up with interest. “No, I didn’t know that. I thought it was like winning the lottery. It happens to very few, and if it happens to you once, it will never happen again. Is this something you learned while watching the weather reports with your dad?”
I nodded and leaned back against the cushion, getting comfortable to give her more useless information about Mother Nature. “Yeah, and I also learned that Americans have a one-in-three-thousand chance of getting struck, and nine out of ten people will survive. And I bet you didn’t know that you can’t have thunder without lightning.”
“You’re right, I didn’t know that,” she said with a smirk. “Are you going to tell me why?”
“I wasn’t sure if you cared to hear it. They’re all just really stupid weather facts.”
“Of course I do. I find it all rather interesting. And you impress me with your wisdom.”
If I were a betting man, I’d say my face just flushed. Hopefully, she didn’t notice. And if she did, I hoped she’d find it rugged and manly. I shook my head before I laughed at my own thoughts and started to tell her facts about storms she probably already knew. I only wished I wouldn’t bore her to death.
“Well, thunder comes from the actual lightning bolt. When the negative energy from the cloud meets with the—” I had to stop after nearly putting myself to sleep. “That’s all scientific, but in laymen’s terms, it gets so hot that the air inside the channel explodes. The first sound it makes is, like, a tearing sound. That really loud cracking noise I’m sure you’ve heard before comes a few seconds later. That’s when it’s extremely close. And as the frequency inside the channel goes from high to low, it becomes distant rumbling.”
“That’s insane.”
I convinced myself that she was captivated by my knowledge, not bored of it. “The craziest part is that it gets hotter than the sun. When the two energies meet, it gets something like fifty thousand degrees. And once it hits, it shoots back up to the cloud at, like, sixty thousand miles per second.”
“Per second?” Oh yeah, that impressed her.
And her being impressed stopped me from obsessing over how many times I used the word like. I knew I wasn’t a jock; what I didn’t know was that I had somehow turned into a Kardashian. All I needed were a few totallys and Oh-Em-Gees. Seriously, is it that much more work to say oh my god? There was a reason I didn’t have many girlfriends—aside from not being a jock.
“Yeah. If you think about driving a car, it would be around two hundred million miles per hour.” I let that sink in for a moment while I soaked up the sight of her wide, cerulean eyes, slightly gaping mouth, and the color of interest in her cheeks.
“Really, Drew, how do you know all this stuff?”
“I told you…nightly forecasts with my dad.”
“There’s no way you learned this from a two-minute news segment each night.”
Answering her could potentially make her view me as a nerd. Most people did. Nevertheless, I decided to give away my secret anyway—I was a total dork when it came to useless facts. “We would talk about the weather, which would create a bunch of questions. And to get answers, I had to look them up. So that’s what I did while normal kids were kicking balls around their neighborhoods with their friends. Being isolated out here meant I had a lot of free time on my hands to research stupid shit.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid at all. In fact, I find it incredibly interesting.”
Being a walking encyclopedia of useless knowledge had its advantages. Such as, many people enjoyed listening about things they probably had never thought to question. I’d made friends easily in school. Impressing a girl enough to see me as more than a friend, however, was a bit more complicated. And while I knew that Kenny would be leaving in several days, with no chance of being anything more than friends, it didn’t change the fact that I suddenly felt like I was in high school again.