The Odds of Lightning by Jocelyn Davies Read Free Book Online Page A

about anything except getting drunk.
    When they were little, he and Tiny and Will and Lu used to play Science Club together. They performed experiments with magnets and grew potatoes in soil and mixed solutions in beakers.
    Sometimes Nathaniel still felt like a kid playing at science.
    Tobias had made it look easy.
    Then the doorbell snapped him out of it.
    What was he doing here?
    He had worked so hard. He couldn’t just throw everything away now. Being at this party was not going to get him any closer to being the best he could be. He was only wasting time. He should leave.
    Nathaniel put the beer down on a table and slung his backpack full of SAT workbooks over his shoulder. Will was taking his turn at beer pong; Nathaniel wouldn’t even bother saying good-bye. He made his way through the crowd. He opened the door—
    And came face-to-face with Tiny and Lu. His two childhood friends.
    â€œNathaniel,” Tiny said, surprised.
    â€œUh, hi,” Nathaniel said, the tips of his ears turning an involuntary shade of red.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” she asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.
    What was he supposed to say? Will had asked if they could study together, then had thrown a party instead? How pathetic would that make him look?
    â€œUm, what are you doing here?”
    Maybe this, though—maybe it was a good thing. He had just been thinking about them, and there they were. His last link to the past. To that last summer he was really happy. His former fellow Science Club members. Right as he was about to leave.
    Nathaniel didn’t believe in signs. They weren’t based in anything scientific. Signs had to do with faith and belief and the unknown. They weren’t rooted in fact.
    â€œSee?” said Lu, turning to Tiny. “If this isn’t a sign that we should be at this party, I don’t know what is. Nathaniel.” Lu grinned. “Lead us to the alcohol.”
    And so he put his backpack down. And he did.

Tiny
    They followed Nathaniel inside, and the past came rushing back around Tiny as loud and vivid as the party itself.
    The vaulted ceiling of the two-story main foyer towered above them. Tiny hadn’t been there in a long time, not since the four of them used to hang out. The wall to her right was made of exposed brick, stretching so Everest-like above her head that there were, like, clouds obscuring the top. Right in the middle was a real working fireplace—a total rarity in a New York City apartment (Tiny’s family kept stacks of books in their nonworking one)—and over the mantel hung a series of Picasso paintings that looked suspiciously like real paint—not like the framed prints her parents brought home from museum gift shops. Through the crowd, toward the back of the large open room, a wrought-iron spiral staircase curved seductively, like a beckoning finger, upstairs.
    â€œIt’s like the fucking MoMA in here,” Lu muttered under her breath.
    To their left, the wall was made entirely of white custom bookcases, stacked with huge glossy art books and strategically placed decorative stoneware. In the center of the bookcases was a swinging door, and when someone barreled through it, Tiny could just make out a kitchen table cluttered with a rainbow of liquor bottles.
    The giant foyer was packed with upperclassmen. It looked the way parties did in movies—except the music didn’t stop abruptly, and it didn’t feel like she and Lu were walking in slo-mo or anything. No one even noticed Tiny as she stood by the kitchen door, pulling at her crop top, staring nervously into the madness. A handwritten sign with the words IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT AND I FEEL FINE scrawled in red Sharpie was taped to the wall above the couch. A couple of kids were wearing pith helmets, and one had a parachute. Down the hall, someone was wearing a snorkel. Because a snorkel is the first thing you reach for in case of an