Read The Odds of Lightning for Free Online Page B

sky. “It’s gonna pour, like, any second.”
    â€œYou do it.”
    â€œLet’s do it together.”
    â€œFine.”
    And then they rang.

Wil1
    Will pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. When he pulled them away, black spots floated across his vision like morbid balloons.
    Things had escalated pretty quickly. Now instead of five guys drinking Buds and playing virtual Golf in the den, there was something like fifty people at his house. They’d brought booze and mixers, like they always did. It was just another party at Will Kingfield’s house.
    Except to Will, this one felt different. More desperate somehow. He knew Jon was just kidding when he’d said it could be the end of the world, but something about this storm really did feel that way. Maybe it was because of the test the next day too.
    Maybe he was just in bad shape today because he was still feeling guilty about what had happened with Luella. He knew he shouldn’t have said anything. He should have just left her alone. But if anyone would appreciate the unlikely phenomenon of the exact right zinger flying out of your mouth at the exact right time, it was Lu. It must have been her influence on him. He hadn’t even had a chance to think about it before he was saying it and then regretting it. The guilt was eating away at him, but that was nothing new.
    A lot of things were eating away at him lately.
    Sometimes, especially in moments like this when Will was standing in the middle of a party, people swarming around him, he would float out of his body for a second. And when he looked back down, he didn’t recognize himself.
    He would wake up in the middle of the night, gasping from some dream he couldn’t remember. He would lay awake in bed for hours, trying to remember it, his brain churning. He would be exhausted the next day and fall asleep in class and fuck up in practice. He was fucking up more and more.
    He had wanted this life. He wanted to be cool. And popular. And known . He wanted to be someone people would remember. Someone different than who he was. He had wanted protection from the fleetingness of the world and the stability of doing the same thing every day after school and hanging out with the same people on the weekends, people like Jon Heller who was the kind of guy everybody wanted to be. He didn’t want the first thing people noticed about him to be that he was fat, and goofy to make up for it. So he got un-fat. He worked hard at it. He was strict about what he ate, and worked out obsessively, and weighed himself regularly. It changed his life. Now, he was all of those things he had wanted to be. He had everything he had wanted. He was someone different.
    So why did he still feel like he was running away from something that would eventually catch up to him?
    New Will was like a tidal wave he’d gotten caught in. He couldn’t stop it and he couldn’t swim against it. He just had to let the current take him where it wanted to go.
    Swimming against the tide was how you drowned. Right?
    Will could run however long or fast he wanted, do soccer drills till he was red-faced and panting and puking on the field; he could surround himself with people and parties and distractions and everything else that could drown out the noise. But he couldn’t outrun that feeling of being stuck. Like so many things, it was an inevitability that was woven into the intricate parabolic equation of his life, drawing nearer and nearer to something he couldn’t quite grasp and could never, ever quite reach.
    He hadn’t dated anyone in years. He hadn’t even made out with anyone. On the outside, he was cool, he was unflappable, he was the star of the school, but on the inside he was so crowded with anxious dark thoughts that the truth was, there was no room for anyone else.
    But like a spinning wheel of fortune, his heart seemed permanently stuck on the very last face it had beaten for, the last