Good for him.
Now that I think about it, though, it does seem awful quiet. No rain pelting the building. The wind and thunder quieter than they’ve been all day. I put my shoes on and walk out to the main hallway of the high school. LED lights are hanging on the walls, plugged into surge protectors and jury-rigged to car batteries. I wonder if we’ll be in the dark for a few days or weeks until the solar panels we’ve been using are repaired. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they won’t be damaged at all. They were probably created to withstand strong winds, right?
Sandbags have been placed at the entrance doors. Beyond them I can see the world outside, and the moon reflecting off the still surface of the water, which is almost up to the high school doors.
The moon?
Is the storm over? Maybe it was a tropical storm, not a full-on hurricane. Sure, the area seems to be flooded, but only a few feet.
Someone is whispering at the top of the stairs to my right. A door opens and then slams shut. I follow the sounds up to the second-floor hallway and onto an outdoor breezeway.
Outside on the hallway-slash-balcony, there’s a line of about ten people staring up at the sky. I step to the end of the line and look up, then almost gasp.
The storm isn’t over. And it’s a hurricane, all right.
The black clouds swirl around us for miles, and right in the center is the open, starlit sky and a bright full moon. Clouds spin into tendrils along the eyewall. The sky lights up with a line of lightning, which follows the path of the churning clouds.
Everyone “oohs” as though we’re watching fireworks.
It’s beautiful. Scary, but beautiful.
I head back down to the gym. Things may be awkward between Jamie and me, but this is something he needs to see. I shake him lightly.
“Jamie, wake up.”
He doesn’t wake, so I shake him a little harder, hoping not to scare him. But there’s no way I can describe to him later how cool this is.
“Hey! Jamie!”
He opens his eyes, then startles when he realizes we’re not in our bedroom.
“It’s okay! But I want to show you something.”
Jamie sits up—the side of his hair that he was sleeping on is sticking straight up and I can’t help but smile, feeling a warm pang of love in my chest. He looks around again and shakes his head. “No. Sleep now. Show later.”
“There is no later for this. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and you need to get your ass up right now before you miss it.” I pull his legs off the cot and start putting on his shoes. He groans but works on tyingthem. “I’m getting Cara, Daphne, and the others, too.”
I cross the room and tell them they have to see what’s going on outside. “The kids will be okay for a few minutes.”
Then we all head up the stairs. More people have woken their friends, and the number of people outside on the second floor has tripled. But we still have a great view.
“Holy shit,” Jamie says as the sky lights up blue again. Thunder rumbles as if in answer.
“Told you you didn’t want to miss this.”
“As usual, you are correct.”
“Usual?” Cara says under her breath.
I ignore her and pretend to hold a microphone up to Jamie. “Sorry, can you repeat that once more for the viewers at home?”
“Uh, sure.” He bends down, pretending to speak into my fake microphone. “Andrew once had a wet dream about Gillian Anderson.” Cara snorts.
“You said you’d never tell!” I throw the invisible microphone off the balcony.
After ten minutes or so, Jamie turns to me and says, “Thanks. For waking me up.” He says it like he would have expected me to let him sleep through it, and it makes me feel awful.
“Of course.” I hate this. How we talk in stilted, awkward sentences. Walking on eggshells. I never knew what that saying meant until we started arguing. Maybe that’s not even the right saying for us. We’re more like this storm, our past arguments and insecurities—hi, that’s me—swirling around us. And then moments like this, where we’re fine and there is no arguing. Just trying to keep up with the eye,avoiding the destruction that the storm causes.
