Adrenaline coursed through my body and made me begin to pant. Every ounce of energy I had left, every small whisker of emotion that remained, was all about to be channeled into that one moment. I had been waiting months for this to come. Finally, god had answered my prayer. Actually, more like the weather man had heard my plea.

Anyhow, I felt the warm breeze on my arm and the hairs on my arm stood on end apprehensively. Clouds rolled in from the Far East and a dark fell over everything. It was a sweeping, blanketing sensation that reminded me of the night.

It was only a summer ago. I had just eaten dinner with the rest of family and was clearing the table all by myself because my older sister was sitting on the lawn waiting for the storm that we had just heard the radio alert for. She was a lighting freak and a self-declared nerd. I had just set the dishes on the counter when a bright flash made me jump. Glasses that had been on the edge dropped to the floor and smashed. Meanwhile, my sister let out an exclamation of excitement and I walked over to the window to tell her what a lunatic she was. That was when I saw it. It was a light that was blindingly closer than before, and I didn’t have to hear the screams to know what had happened. Well, actually, it was only one scream, but I smelled the burnt flesh and I ran. There was nothing else I could do. She had died in front of me; died! As I ran up the stairs and to the attic, my parents passed me on their way down.

No one ever asked me what I saw and how it affected me. My parents had gone through months of therapy, but not a soul had glanced at me. I was left sobbing by the attic window while my parents and the police whirred off in their cars.

So there I was, a year later, waiting for the same demise that my sister had. My parents were inside drinking the alcohol that they had become addicted to. In fact, they were probably drunk to a state that they didn’t know they had a daughter. Tears began to to flood down my cheeks as the first raindrops fell. I was holding the same piece of metal that had attracted the lightning to my sister the night she had died. Slowly I began to rock back and forth until I heard the thunder. It ripped across the sky and echoed off from the house. I saw the first flash of lightning and knew that this storm was going to be good. There was a single moment in which I wished I could stop and rethink all of this, but it passed just as quickly as it had come.

I just sat and watched the lightning get closer and closer. My eyes shut and I relived the flashes and the scream. I waited for my own scream, my own flash, but it never came. Instead, I felt the metal being ripped from my hands. There was a voice, too, that was yelling my name. “Kaitlyn! Get over here now before you kill yourself!”

At first I thought that it was my parents. If it had been, I would’ve yelled back. Instead, I recognized it as the voice of one of my classmates. “Kaitlyn!” The person yelled again, but this time their voice was much more desperate. I felt their arms wrapping around my waist and dragging me through the grass. I kicked and screamed as they pulled me up into the backseat of a car and slid in beside me.

The door closed loudly and I jumped. Tears began to flood down my cheeks again as I realized that I had been caught. But instead of reprimanding me or insulting me, the person wrapped their arms around me and leaned against the door. “Kaitlyn, it’s alright. It’s just me, Luke, your classmate.”

I leaned into his shoulder and sobbed even harder. Luke sat and watched as I cried, rocking slightly in hopes of comforting me. And so I sat, in the arms of the biggest jock at our school, sobbing as the storm passed, realizing that someone cared. Someone cared enough to pull me in from the ledge I had built for myself to stand on- Luke cared.