When Lightning Strikes (2 page)

Ruth went, "Oh, I drove it home after school, then got Skip to bring me back and drop me off."

Skip is Ruth's twin brother. He bought a Trans Am with his bar mitzvah money. As if, even with a Trans Am, Skip is ever going to have a hope of getting laid.

"I thought," Ruth went on, "that it would be fun to walk home."

I looked at the clouds that earlier in the afternoon had been over the car wash. They were now almost directly overhead. I said, "Ruth. We live like two miles away."

Ruth said, all chipper, "Uh-huh, I know. We can burn a lot of calories if we walk fast."

"Ruth," I said. "It's going to pour."

Ruth squinted up at the sky. "No, it's not," she said.

I looked at her like she was demented. "Ruth, yes, it is. Are you on crack?"

Ruth started to look upset. It doesn't actually take all that much to upset Ruth. She was still upset, I could tell, over Jeff's piano-case statement. That's why she wanted to walk home. She was hoping to lose weight. She wouldn't, I knew, eat lunch for a week now, all because of what that asshole had said.

"I'm not on crack," Ruth said. "I just think it's time the two of us started trying to get into shape. Summer is coming, and I'm not spending another four months making up excuses about why I can't go to somebody's pool party."

I just started laughing.

"Ruth," I said. "Nobody ever invites us to their pool parties."

"Speak for yourself," Ruth said. "And walking is a completely viable form of exercise. You can burn as many calories walking two miles as you would burn running them."

I looked at her. "Ruth," I said. "That's bullshit. Who told you that?"

She said, "It is a fact. Now, are you coming?"

"I can't believe," I said, "that you even care what an asshole like Jeff Day has to say about anything."

Ruth went, "I don't care what Jeff Day says. This has nothing to do with what he said. I just think it's time the two of us got into shape."

I stood and looked at her some more. You should have seen her. Ruth's been my best friend since kindergarten, which was when she and her family moved into the house next door to mine. And the funny thing is, except for the fact that she has breasts now—pretty big ones, too, way bigger than I'll ever have, unless I get implants, which will so never happen—she looks exactly the same as she did the first day I met her: light-brown curly hair, huge blue eyes behind glasses with gold wire frames, a fairly sizable potbelly, and an IQ of 167 (a fact she informed me of five minutes into our first game of hopscotch).

But you wouldn't have known she was in all advanced-placement classes if you'd seen what she had on that day. Okay, in the first place, she was wearing black leggings, this great big EPHS sweatshirt, and jogging shoes. Not so bad, right? Wait.

She'd coupled this ensemble with sweat-bands—I am not kidding—around her head and on her wrists. She also had this big bottle of water hanging in a net sling from one shoulder. I mean, you could tell she thought she looked like an Olympic athlete, but what she actually looked like was a lunatic housewife who'd just gotten
Get Fit With Oprah
from the Book-of-the-Month Club, or something.

While I was standing there staring at Ruth, wondering how I was going to break it to her about the sweatbands, one of the guys from detention pulled up on this completely cherried-out Indian.

May I just take this opportunity to point out that the one thing I have always wanted is a motorcycle? This one purred, too. I hate those guys who take the muffler off their bikes so they can gun it real loud while they try to jump the speed bumps in the teachers' parking lot. This guy had tuned his so it ran quiet as a kitten. Painted all black, with shiny chrome everywhere else, this was one choice bike. I mean
mint
.

And the guy riding it wasn't too hard on the eyes, either.

"Mastriani," he said, putting one booted foot on the curb. "Need a ride?"

If Ernest Pyle himself, famous Hoosier reporter, had risen from the grave and come up and started asking me for journalistic pointers, I would not have been more surprised than I was by this guy asking me if I wanted a ride.

I like to think I hid it pretty well, though.

I said, way calmly, "No, thanks. We're walking."

He looked up at the sky. "It's gonna pour," he said, in a tone that suggested I was a moron not to realize this.

I cocked my head in Ruth's direction, so he'd get the message. "We're
walking
," I said, again.

He shrugged his shoulders under his leather jacket. "Your funeral," he said, and drove away.

I watched him go, trying not to notice how nicely his jeans hugged his perfectly contoured butt.

His butt wasn't the only thing that was perfectly contoured, either.

Oh, calm down. I'm talking about his face, okay? It was a good one, not habitually slack-jawed, like the faces of most of the boys who go to my school. This guy's face had some intelligence in it, at least. So what if his nose looked as if it had been broken a few times?

And okay, maybe his mouth was a little crooked, and his curly dark hair was badly in need of a trim. These deficiencies were more than made up for by a pair of eyes so light blue they were really pale gray, and a set of shoulders so broad, I doubt I would have been able to see much of the road past them in the event I ever did end up behind them on the back of that bike.

Ruth, however, did not seem to have noticed any of these highly commendable qualities. She was staring at me as if she'd caught me talking to a cannibal or something.

"Oh, my God, Jess," she said. "Who
was
that?"

I said, "His name is Rob Wilkins."

She went, "
A Grit
. Oh, my God, Jess, that guy is a
Grit
. I can't believe you were even talking to him."

Don't worry. I will explain.

There are two types of people who attend Ernest Pyle High School: the kids who come from the rural parts of the county, or the "Grits," and the people who live in town, or the "Townies." The Grits and Townies do not mix. Period. The Townies think they are better than the Grits because they have more money, since most of the kids who live in town have doctors or lawyers or teachers for parents. The Grits think they are better than the Townies because they know how to do stuff the Townies don't know how to do, like fix up old motorcycles and birth calves and sniff. The Grits' parents are all factory workers or farmers.

There are subsets within these groups, like the JDs—juvenile delinquents—and the Jocks—the popular kids, the athletes, and the cheerleaders—but mostly the school is divided up into Grits and Townies.

Ruth and I are Townies. Rob Wilkins, needless to say, is a Grit. And for an added bonus, I am pretty sure he is also a JD.

But then, as Mr. Goodhart is so fond of telling me, so am I—or at least I will be, one of these days, if I don't start taking his anger-management advice more seriously.

"How do you even know that guy?" Ruth wanted to know. "He can't be in any of your classes. He is definitely not college-bound. Prison-bound, maybe," she said with a sneer. "But he's got to be a senior, for Christ's sake."

I know. She sounds prissy, doesn't she?

She's not really. Just scared. Guys—real guys, not idiots like her brother Skip—scare Ruth. Even with her 167 IQ, guys are something she's never been able to figure out. Ruth just can't fathom the fact that boys are just like us.

Well, with a few notable exceptions.

I said, "I met him in detention. Can we move, please, before the rain starts? I've got my flute, you know."

Ruth wouldn't let go of it, though.

"Would you seriously have accepted a ride from that guy? A total stranger like that? Like, if I weren't here?"

I said, "I don't know."

I didn't, either. I hope you're not getting the impression that this was the first time a guy had ever asked me if I wanted a lift or anything. I mean, I'll admit I have a tendency to be a bit free with my fists, but I'm no dog. I might be a bit on the puny side—only five two, as Mr. Goodhart is fond of reminding me—and I'm not big into makeup or clothes or anything, but believe me, I do all right for myself.

Okay, yeah, I'm no supermodel: I keep my hair short so I don't have to mess with it, and I'm fine with it being brown—you won't catch me experimenting with highlights, like some people I could mention. Brown hair goes with my brown eyes which go with my brown skin—well, at least, that's what color my skin usually ends up being by the end of the summer.

But the only reason I'm sitting at home Saturday nights is because it's either that, or hanging out with guys like Jeff Day, or Ruth's brother Skip. They're the only kind of guys my mother will let me go out with.

Yeah, you're catching on. Townies. That's right. I'm only allowed to date "college-bound boys." Read, Townies.

Where was I? Oh, yeah.

So, in answer to your question, no, Rob Wilkins was not the first guy who'd ever pulled up to me and asked if I wanted a ride somewhere.

But Rob Wilkins
was
the first guy to whom I might have said yes.

"Yeah," I said to Ruth. "Probably I would have. Taken him up on his offer, I mean. If you weren't here and all."

"I can't believe you." Ruth started walking, but let me tell you, those clouds were right behind us. Unless we went about a hundred miles an hour, there was no way we were going to beat the rain. And the fastest Ruth goes is maybe about one mile an hour, tops. Physically fit she is not.

"I can't believe you," she said, again. "You can't go around getting on the back of Grits' bikes. I mean, who knows where you'd end up? Dead in a cornfield, no doubt."

Almost every girl in Indiana who disappears gets found, eventually, half-naked and decomposing in a cornfield. But then, you guys already know that, don't you?

"You are so weird," Ruth said. "Only you would make friends with the guys in detention."

I kept looking over my shoulder at the clouds. They were huge, like mountains. Only, unlike mountains, they weren't stationary.

"Well," I said, "I can't exactly
help
knowing them, you know. We've been sitting together for an hour every day for the past three or four months."

"But they're
Grits
," Ruth said. "My God, Jess. Do you actually
talk
to them?"

I said, "I don't know. I mean, we're not allowed to talk. But Miss Clemmings has to take attendance every day, so you learn people's names. You sort of can't help it."

Ruth shook her head. "Oh, my God," she said. "My dad would kill me—
kill
me—if I came home on the back of some Grit's motorcycle."

I didn't say anything. The chances of anybody asking Ruth to hop onto the back of his bike were like zero.

"Still," Ruth said, after we'd walked for a little while in silence, "he
was
kind of cute. For a Grit, I mean. What'd he do?"

"What do you mean? To get detention?" I shrugged. "How should I know? We're not allowed to talk."

Let me just tell you a little bit about where we were walking. Ernest Pyle High School is located on the imaginatively named High School Road. As you might have guessed, there isn't a whole lot of stuff on High School Road except, well, the high school. There's just two lanes and a bunch of farmland. The McDonald's and the car wash and stuff were down on the Pike. We weren't walking on the Pike. No one ever walks on the Pike, since this one girl got hit walking there last year.

So we'd made it about as far down High School Road as the football field when the rain started. Big, hard drops of rain.

"Ruth," I said, pretty calmly, as the first drop hit me.

"It'll blow over," Ruth said.

Another drop hit me. Plus a big flash of lightning cracked the sky and seemed to hit the water tower, a mile or so away. Then it thundered. Really loud. As loud as the jets over at Crane Military Base, when they break the sound barrier.

"Ruth," I said, less calmly.

Ruth said, "Perhaps we should seek shelter."

"Damned straight," I said.

But the only shelter we saw were the metal bleachers that surround the football field. And everyone knows, during a thunderstorm, you're not supposed to hide under anything metal.

That's when the first hailstone hit me.

If you've ever been hit by a hailstone, you'll know why it was Ruth and I ran under those bleachers. And if you've never been hit by a hailstone, all I can say is, lucky you. These particular hailstones were about as big as golf balls. I am not exaggerating, either. They were huge. And those mothers—pardon my French—hurt.

Ruth and I stood under these bleachers, hailstones popping all around us, like we were trapped inside this really big popcorn popper. Only at least the popcorn wasn't hitting us on the head anymore.

With the thunder and the sound of the hail hitting the metal seats above our heads, then ricocheting off them and smacking against the ground, it was kind of hard to hear anything, but that didn't bother Ruth. She shouted, "I'm sorry."

All I said was "Ow," because a real big chunk of hail bounced off the ground and hit me in the calf.

"I mean it," Ruth shouted. "I'm really, really sorry."

"Stop apologizing," I said. "It isn't your fault."

At least that's what I thought
then
. I have since changed my mind on that. As you will note by rereading the first few lines of this
statement
of mine.

A big bolt of lightning lit up the sky. It broke into four or five branches. One of the branches hit the top of a corn crib I could see over the trees. Thunder sounded so loudly, it shook the bleachers.

"It is," Ruth said. She sounded like she was starting to cry. "It
is
my fault."

"Ruth," I said. "For God's sake, are you crying?"

"Yes," she said, with a sniffle.

"Why? It's just a stupid thunderstorm. We've been stuck in thunderstorms before." I leaned against one of the poles that held up the bleachers. "Remember that time in the fifth grade we got stuck in that thunderstorm, on the way home from your cello lesson?"