When Lightning Strikes (3 page)

Ruth wiped her nose with the cuff of her sweatshirt. "And we had to duck for cover in your church?"

"Only you wouldn't go in farther than the awning," I said.

Ruth laughed through her tears. "Because I thought God would strike me dead for setting foot in a goyim house of worship."

I was glad she was laughing, anyway. Ruth can be a pain in the butt, but she's been my best friend since kindergarten, and you can't exactly dump your best friend since kindergarten just because sometimes she puts on sweatbands or starts crying when it rains. Ruth is way more interesting than most of the girls who go to my school, since she reads a book a day—literally—and loves playing the cello as much as I love playing my flute, but will still watch cheesy television, in spite of her great genius.

And, most times, she's funny as hell.

Now was not one of those times, however.

"Oh, God," Ruth moaned as the wind picked up and started whipping hailstones at us beneath the bleachers. "This is tornado weather, isn't it?"

Southern Indiana is smack in the middle of Tornado Alley. We're number three on the list of states with the most twisters per year. I had sat out more than a few of them in my basement; Ruth, not so many, since she'd only spent the last decade in the Midwest. And they always seemed to happen around this time of year, too.

And, though I didn't want to say anything to upset Ruth any more than she already was, this gave all the signs of being twister weather. The sky was a funny yellow color, the temperature warm, but the wind really cold. Plus that wacked-out hail …

Just as I was opening my mouth to tell Ruth it was probably just a little spring storm, and not to worry, she screamed, "Jess, don't—"

But I didn't hear what she said after that, because right then there was this big explosion that drowned out everything else.

C H A P T E R
2

I
t wasn't an explosion, I figured out later. What it was was lightning, hitting the metal bleachers. Then the bolt traveled down the metal pole I was leaning against.

So I guess you could say that, technically, I got hit by lightning.

It didn't hurt, though. It felt really weird, but it didn't hurt.

When I could hear again, after it happened, all I could hear was Ruth screaming. I wasn't standing in the same place I'd been a second before, either. I was standing about five feet away.

Oh, and I felt all tingly. You know when you're trying to plug something in and you're not really looking at what you're doing and you accidentally stick your finger in there instead of the plug?

That's how I felt, only about times three hundred.

"Jess," Ruth was screaming. She ran up and shook my arm. "Oh, my God, Jess, are you all right?"

I looked at her. She was still the same old Ruth. She still had on the sweatband.

But that was the start of me not being the same old Jess. That was when it started.

And it pretty much went downhill from there.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm fine."

And I really felt okay. I wasn't lying or anything. Not then. I just felt sort of tingly and all. But it wasn't a bad feeling. Actually, after the initial surprise of it, it kind of felt good. I felt sort of energized, you know?

"Hey," I said, looking out past the bleachers. "Look. The hail stopped."

"Jess," Ruth said, shaking me some more. "You got hit by lightning. Don't you understand? You got hit by lightning!"

I looked at her. She looked kind of funny in that headband. I started to laugh. Once, when I went to my Aunt Teresa's bridal shower, nobody was paying attention to how many glasses of pinot grigio the waiter poured me, and I felt the same way. Like laughing. A lot.

"You better lie down," Ruth said. "You better put your head between your knees."

"Why?" I asked her. "So I can kiss my butt good-bye?"

This cracked me up. I started laughing. It seemed hysterically funny to me.

Ruth didn't think it was so funny, though.

"No," she said. "Because you're white as a ghost. You might pass out. I'll go try to flag down a car. We need to take you to the hospital."

"Aw, geez," I said. "I don't need to go to any hospital. The storm's over. Let's go."

And I just walked out from underneath those bleachers like nothing had happened.

And, really, at the time I didn't think anything had. Happened, I mean. I felt fine. Better than fine, actually. Better than I'd felt in months. Better than I'd felt since my brother Douglas had come home from college.

Ruth chased after me, looking all concerned.

"Jess," she said. "Really. You shouldn't be trying to—"

"Hey," I said. The sky had gotten much lighter, and underneath my feet the hailstones were crunching, as if someone up there had accidentally overturned some kind of celestial ice cube tray.

"Hey, Ruth," I said, pointing down at the hailstones. "Look. It's like snow. Snow, in April!"

Ruth wouldn't look at the hailstones, though. Even though she was up to the swooshes of her Nikes in them, she wouldn't look. All she would do was look at me.

"Jessica," she said, taking my hand. "Jessica, listen to me." She dropped her voice so that it was almost a whisper. I could hear her fine, since the wind had died down and all the thunder and stuff had stopped. "Jessica, I'm telling you, you're not all right. I saw … I saw
lightning
come out of you."

"Really?" I grinned at her. "Neat."

Ruth dropped my hand and turned away in disgust.

"Fine," she said, starting back toward the road. "Don't go to the hospital. Drop dead of a heart attack. See if I care."

I followed her, kicking hailstones out of the way with my platform Pumas.

"Hey," I said. "Too bad lightning wasn't shooting out of me in the cafeteria today, huh? Jeff Day would've really been sorry, huh?"

Ruth didn't think this was funny. She just kept walking, huffing a little because she was going so fast. But fast for Ruth is normal for me, so I didn't have any trouble keeping up.

"Hey," I said. "Wouldn't it have been cool if I'd been able to shoot lightning at assembly this afternoon? You know, when Mrs. Bushey got up there and dared us to keep off drugs? I bet that would've shortened that speech of hers."

I kept up in that vein the whole way home. Ruth tried to stay mad at me, but she couldn't. Not because I am so charming or funny or anything, but because the storm had left some really cool damage in its wake. We saw all these tree branches that had been knocked down, and windshields that had been shattered by the hail, and a few traffic lights that had stopped working altogether. It was totally cool. A bunch of ambulances and fire engines went by, and when we finally got to the Kroger on the corner of High School Road and First Street, where we turned off for our houses, the
KRO
had been knocked out, so the sign just said,
GER
.

"Hey, Ruth, look," I said. "Ger is open, but Kro is closed."

Even Ruth had to laugh at that.

By the time we got to our houses—I mentioned we live next door to each other, right?—Ruth had gotten over being scared for me. At least, I thought she had. When I was about to run up the walk to my front porch, she heaved this real big sigh, and went, "Jessica, I really think you should say something to your mom and dad. About what happened, I mean."

Oh, yeah. Like I was going to tell them something as lame as the fact that I had been hit by lightning. They had way more important things to worry about.

I didn't say that, but Ruth must have read my thoughts, since the next thing she said was, "No, Jess. I mean it. You should tell them. I've read about people who've been struck by lightning the way you were. They felt perfectly fine, just like you do, and then,
wham
! Heart attack."

I said, "Ruth."

"I really think you should tell them. I know how much they have on their minds, with Douglas and all. But—"

"Hey," I said. "Douglas is fine."

"I know." Ruth closed her eyes. Then she opened them again and said, "I know Douglas is fine. All right, look. Just promise me that if you start to feel … well, funny, you'll tell somebody?"

This sounded fair to me. I swore solemnly not to die of a heart attack. Then we parted on my front lawn with a mutual "See ya." I It wasn't until I was almost all the way into the house that I
realized
that the dogwood tree just off the driveway—the one that had been in full, glorious bloom that morning—was completely bare again, as if it were the middle of winter. The hail had knocked off every single leaf and every single blossom.

They talk all the time in my English class about symbolism and stuff. Like how the withered old oak tree in
Jane Eyre
portends doom and all of that. So I guess you could say that if this
statement
of mine were a work of fiction, that dogwood tree would symbolize the fact that everything was not going to turn out hunky-dory for me.

Only of course, just like Jane, I had no idea what lay in store for me. I mean, at the time, I totally missed the symbolism of the leafless dogwood. I was just like, "Wow, too bad. That tree was pretty before it got ruined by hail."

And then I went inside.

C H A P T E R
3

I
live—since it's probably important to give my address in this
statement
of mine—with my parents and two brothers in a big house on Lumley Lane. Our house is the nicest one on the street.

I am not saying that to brag. It's just true. It used to be a farmhouse, but a really fancy one, with stained-glass windows and stuff. Some people from the Indiana Historic Society came once and put a plaque on it, since it's the oldest house in our town.

But just because we live in an old house does not mean we are poor. My father owns three restaurants downtown, only eight or nine blocks from our house. The restaurants are: Mastriani's, which is expensive; Joe's, which is not; and a take-out place called Joe Junior's, which is the cheapest of all. I can eat at any of them anytime I want, for free. So can my friends.

You would think, because of this, that I would have more friends. But, besides Ruth, I only really hang out with a couple of people, most of whom I know from Orchestra. Ruth is first chair in the cello section. I am third chair in the flute section. I socialize with a couple of the other flutists—second and fifth chair, mostly—and a few people from the horn section, and one or two of the other cellists who've gotten Ruth's seal of approval, but other than that, I keep pretty much to myself.

Well, except for all the guys in detention.

My bedroom is on the third floor. My bedroom, and my bathroom, are the only rooms on the third floor. The third floor used to be the attic. It has low ceilings, and dormer windows. I used to be able to fit my whole body in one of the dormer windows, and I liked to sit up there and watch what was going on on Lumley Lane, which usually wasn't very much. I was up higher than anybody else on the street, though, and I always thought that was kind of neat. I used to pretend I was a lighthouse keeper and the dormer was my lighthouse, and I'd look out for boats about to crash on our front lawn, which I pretended was a treacherous beach.

Hey, come on. I was a little kid back then, okay?

And, in the words of Mr. Goodhart, even then I had issues.

Anyway, to get to the third floor, you have to take the staircase that is right inside the front door, in what my mom calls, in this French accent, the foyer (She pronounces it
foi-yay
. She also calls Target, where we buy all our towels and stuff,
Tar-jay
. You know, as a joke. That's how my mom is). The problem is, right off the foyer is the living room, which has French doors that lead to the dining room, which has French doors that lead to the kitchen. And so the minute you open the front door, my mom can see you, all the way from the back of the house, through all those French doors, way before you have a chance of making it up those stairs without anybody noticing.

Which was, of course, what happened when I walked in that night. She saw me and yelled—since the kitchen is actually pretty far away—"Jessica! Get in here!"

Which, of course, meant I was in trouble.

Wondering what I could have done now—and hoping Mr. Goodhart hadn't gone ahead and called her anyway—I put down my backpack and my flute and everything on this little bench by the stairs and started the long walk through the living room and dining room, thinking up a good story for why I was so late, in case that was why she was mad.

"We had band practice," I started saying. By the time I got to the dining room table—which has this buzzer built into the floor beneath the chair at the head of the table, so the hostess can step on it and signal to the servants in the kitchen that it's time to bring out dessert, which, since we have no servants, is just this huge annoyance, especially when we were growing up, since it's impossible for little kids to keep from buzzing something like that all the time, which drove my mom, who was usually in the kitchen, postal—I was rolling with it.

"Yeah, band practice went long, Mom. On account of the hail. We all had to run and stand under the bleachers, and there was all this lightning, and—"

"Look at this."

My mom held a letter up to my nose. My brother Mike was sitting, kind of slumped, at the kitchen counter. He looked unhappy, but then, he had never looked happy a day in his life, as far as I can remember, except when my parents got him a Mac for Christmas. Then he looked happy.

I looked at the letter my mom was holding. I couldn't read it, since it was too close to my nose. But that was okay. My mom was going, "Do you know what this is, Jessica? Do you know what this is? It's a letter from Harvard. And what do you think it says?"

I said, "Oh, hey, Mikey. Congratulations."

Mike said, "Thanks," but he didn't sound very excited.

"My little boy." My mom took the letter and started waving it around. "My little Mikey! Going to Harvard! Oh, my God, I can hardly believe it!" She did a weird little dance.

My mom isn't normally so weird. Most of the time she's pretty much like other moms. She helps my dad out sometimes with the restaurants, like with the billing and payroll, but mostly she stays home and does stuff like regrout the tile in the bathrooms. My mom, like most moms, is totally into her kids, so Mike getting into Harvard—even though it's really no big surprise, seeing as how he got a perfect score on his SATs—was this really big deal to her.