The Lightning Summer

The summer Asha Pembridge turned thirteen was the summer of the storms.

They came in from the west, rolling across the hills above the village of Crendle in the late afternoon almost every day from June onward, great dark structures of cloud that turned the sky the colour of a bruise and dropped rain so heavy it bounced off the pavements. The thunder was the kind that you felt rather than heard, a deep vibration that lived in the chest rather than the ears. The lightning was frequent and spectacular and had, by the middle of August, struck the old oak at the edge of the village green twice, a tree that had stood for three hundred years and was now missing a significant portion of its upper branches.

Asha loved it.

This was not the general consensus among the residents of Crendle, who mostly shut their windows and put the kettle on and waited for the storms to pass with the stoic patience of people who had grown up somewhere rainy. But Asha was the kind of person who ran toward interesting things rather than away from them, a quality her parents called recklessness and her grandmother called curiosity and Asha herself considered simply a basic orientation toward life.

She had a dedicated notebook for the storms. She recorded the time each one started, the direction it came from, the approximate duration, the intensity of the lightning. She had read three library books about meteorology and understood now, better than she had before, the mechanics of what she was watching: the convective cells, the pressure differentials, the extraordinary electrical activity of a fully developed cumulonimbus cloud. Understanding how something worked did not, in her view, make it less wonderful. It made it more wonderful.

She was standing at her bedroom window at six in the evening on the fourteenth of August, watching a storm build over the western hills, when she first saw the boy.

He was standing at the far end of the garden, at the edge where their grass met the beginning of the open field that stretched away toward the hills. He was about her age, slight, wearing what looked like a dark jacket despite the heat of the pre-storm air. He was standing perfectly still, looking at the sky.

Asha looked at him for a moment, then looked up at the sky, then looked back at him. He was still there, still looking upward, with the posture of someone who was paying absolute attention.

She went downstairs and out through the back door.

The garden was empty.

She walked to the far end, to the edge where the grass met the field. No one was there. The field was open and flat and entirely visible all the way to the hedgerow at the far side, and there was nobody walking across it.

She looked back at her bedroom window. Whoever had been standing here was gone, with no time to have crossed the field and no way to have passed her without her seeing.

The storm broke twenty minutes later, and she stood in the garden in the rain and let herself get thoroughly soaked, which was not the point but was a pleasing side effect of being too interested in things to go back inside.

At dinner, slightly damp despite her best efforts with a towel, she asked her mum if anyone was renting the field.

"Not at the moment," her mum said. "Why?"

"I thought I saw someone," Asha said.

"Probably someone using the footpath," her dad said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the public right of way that ran along the far side of the village.

Asha nodded. She ate her dinner. She thought about the stillness of the boy at the end of the garden, the way he had been looking at the sky with that quality of absolute attention she recognised because she felt it herself, that particular kind of looking that was more like listening.

She opened her storm notebook after dinner and added a note at the bottom of the day's entry.

Boy at end of garden. Dark jacket. Looking at the sky. Gone before I got there.

She saw him four more times over the following two weeks.

Always during a storm, or just before one. Always at the same position, at the garden's edge. Always looking at the sky with that same focused stillness. Twice she tried to reach him before he disappeared and twice she failed, the garden stubbornly empty when she arrived. Once she called out from the window and he turned, just slightly, in the direction of her voice, but then the lightning flashed and when her eyes adjusted he was gone.

The fourth time, she was cleverer about it.

She had noticed that he appeared roughly five minutes before the storm broke. So the next time the western sky started its pre-storm darkening, she went quietly to the end of the garden and waited.

She stood at the garden's edge for ten minutes, getting slowly warmer in the heavy pre-storm air. The clouds built and spread. The light turned that particular yellow-green colour that made everything look both more vivid and more ominous.

The boy appeared.

Not gradually, not from any direction. Simply: there. One moment the garden's edge was empty and the next moment he was standing two metres from Asha, looking at the sky, and she was close enough to see his face clearly for the first time.

He was about her age, possibly a little older. Pale skin, dark hair pushed back from his forehead, eyes that she couldn't make out the colour of in the storm light. His dark jacket was old-fashioned, she thought, not in the way of clothes deliberately styled as vintage, but in the way of clothes from a different time, cut differently, with buttons down the front rather than a zip. His expression was the one she'd noticed from a distance: concentrated, absorbed, directed entirely upward.

Then he glanced sideways and saw her.

His eyes went wide. Then, remarkably, instead of vanishing, he stayed where he was.

"Hello," Asha said, keeping her voice completely steady, which was an achievement she was proud of.

The boy stared at her. He looked as startled as she felt, which she found reassuring for reasons she couldn't immediately articulate.

"Can you hear me?" she asked.

His mouth moved. She couldn't hear anything. She watched his lips and thought he might be saying something, one word, twice, the same word. It might have been yes.

"My name is Asha," she said. "I've seen you before. Out here, in the storms."

He nodded. Definitely nodded. She could see that clearly.

"Do you know where you are?"

He looked away from her, up at the sky again, and then back at her. He nodded again, but slower this time, less certain.

The thunder came in then, a long rolling boom from the western hills, and with it a crack of lightning that lit the entire sky white for a fraction of a second.

When her vision cleared, he was gone.

Asha stood at the end of the garden in the first heavy drops of rain and thought about a boy who appeared in storms and looked at the sky and disappeared when the lightning came. She thought about how startled he had looked when he'd realised she could see him, as though being seen was not something he had expected.

She went inside to research.