Nathan and Henna sit on a log, huddling next to each other, even though it really isn’t cold out here.
He even puts his arm around her.
“Quit staring,” Jared says, dragging me down to the little dock that serves this cabin and a bunch of others. He’s the first one in, shucking off his swimsuit and jumping into the black water in a cannonball of his big, hairy body. The splash hits us on the dock and is unbelievably cold. Jared pops up, gasping. “Now, that will wake you up.”
I take off my clothes and jump in next, keeping my back to my sister and Steve to give us all some privacy. The water is a shock, it’s true, but not as bad as I was fearing. I surface and start to freestyle swim out a ways to warm myself up. By the time I swim back in, Steve and Mel are in the water, Steve not too happily.
“My family is from Honduras!” he shouts. “Where the ocean is warm!”
“Have you ever been to Honduras?” Mel asks him, her teeth chattering.
Steve smiles. “Shut up.”
I swim over to where Jared is treading water. He’s watching Nathan and Henna. They’re just leaning against each other, talking, lit up by the single outside light from Mr Shurin’s cabin. “Hey, Henna!” Jared calls. “Turn off the light. Let’s just have the light of the moon!”
“Ooh, good idea,” she says, leaving Nathan on the log by himself.
“Thanks,” I say to Jared.
He looks a little surprised. “For what?”
The light goes off and the effect is sort of incredible. The sky is clear aside from just the fewest clouds lingering around the summit of the big Mountain. Otherwise it’s just the moon, not even full, but when that’s all there is, nothing else competing with it, it’s bright enough that our heads cast shadows on the water.
“I think I’ve endured enough fun,” we hear Steve say, and he climbs back up on the dock. His body is a little heavy but almost completely hairless. He’s got a little paunch that I bet he’ll never get rid of.
It makes him seem like the most normal guy in the world. I kind of love him for it. He wraps a towel around himself quickly, then holds one open for Mel to step into as she gets out of the water, too.
“Is this an endurance test?” I say to Jared. He smiles and splashes me with his hands. I’m enjoying it, but I can already feel how I won’t be in five minutes. I start to swim back to the dock to get out.
That’s when Nathan stands up from the log.
“Look!” he says, pointing beyond us, across the lake back in the direction of town. We see the reflection even before we turn.
There are flashes and streaks of blue light criss-crossing the sky, fast, frantic, like a lightning storm, over our town. We can’t see the town itself, only the trees that line the lake, but even at this distance, which is at least seven or eight miles, the sky above where we just were is like a town-sized fireworks display.
“My parents are okay,” Henna says, hanging up her phone. “They want me to come home, though.”
“Is that when you said, There’s no way in hell?” Mel asks.
“Yes. Yes, it was.”
Meredith is in the capital with our mom, who had to be down there for campaign stuff in the morning and wasn’t – this is how much we’ve abandoned hope for my dad – going to leave her with just him to watch her. Meredith answered on the first ring anyway, having seen video and feeds of it online. “It’s only small towns,” she said. “Remote ones like ours, but they’re all calling it ‘freak lightning’.”