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telling herself to calm down. It was only a dream. A nightmare, really, but there was no need to get technical.
    Caroline rubbed her face, shaking off the fogginess of sleep as her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light in her room. It had been a decade since she’d seen her mother, and yet the angry way her mother had kicked her out of the house still came back to haunt her dreams now and then. In the beginning, right after Caroline left home, she had dreamed about her mother almost every night. Caroline had spent her childhood working hard and doing her best to make her parents proud. She had studied hard in school, and graduated valedictorian of her class at the expensive, private school her parents had sent her to. She had used her spare time to volunteer for multiple nonprofit organizations, and she had coordinated multiple food and clothing drives for homeless and poor people in her hometown. Caroline had been a model citizen. On paper, she was perfect. She had been accepted to every university she applied to, including the big names like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. Caroline’s family had come from old money, and they were very proper and traditional. Caroline had been raised to follow all of the social graces expected of the upper class, and she never failed to make her parents look good.
    She was the perfect child, until she wasn’t.
    Caroline’s rapid fall from grace had been triggered by one thing: an innocent love of painting. Caroline had been enrolled in painting classes from the time she was old enough to hold a paintbrush. Her parents hadn’t thought much of it—the classes were just one more thing in a long list of activities that they thought a well-off young woman should be proficient in. Sandwiched between ballet and violin lessons, the painting classes amounted to one more box to check on Caroline’s well-rounded education.
    But Caroline had fallen in love with painting. As she got older, and school became more demanding, ballet, violin, and sports had become less important. But Caroline had never given up on her painting lessons. By the time she graduated high school, she felt that she had real talent, and she wanted to take a chance on being an artist. She didn’t think it was necessary to go to college to do what she wanted to do, but she offered to major in art just to at least get a degree and satisfy her parents. But this had not been enough for them. The tension in the house had grown, until Caroline’s mother had called her a disgrace and kicked her out the day after her high school graduation.
    At first, Caroline had thought her mother was bluffing. Surely, after a few weeks, her mother would come around. Her parents loved her, after all. She was an only child and had been their life for the last eighteen years. But, as the weeks and then months wore on, Caroline realized that her mother had been serious. Any attempt to contact her parents was met with silence. So, Caroline decided to launch off on her own. She moved to San Diego, rented the tiniest apartment she could find, and began painting like crazy. The early years had been very hard. She often ate nothing but ramen noodles for weeks on end. But, eventually her hard work had paid off. She began to get noticed, and, soon, she was selling paintings faster than she could make them.
    Her obsession with storms had begun the night she left her parents’ home. As she had left, confused and heartbroken, a huge storm had broken out. The thunder had been louder than she had ever heard it before. Some might have taken the storm as a sign of turmoil, but for Caroline it had been comforting. She had felt as though the universe was somehow telling her not to worry. That despite the chaos of the personal storm she was going through at that moment, nature and the cosmos were bigger than anything she might be dealing with. Nature always recovered after a storm, and so would she.
    Anyone who knew Caroline at that time would have laughed at the idea