For a Monday, school was the bomb. I got an A on Mrs. Davies’ math test. We had pizza for lunch, and Erika Harris, the cutest girl in school actually spoke to me. Erika is the number one “IT” girl in the whole school. She isn’t just the prettiest girl in school, she’s smart too. She’s captain of the debate team and the starting point guard on the girls’ basketball team. Her mom is the chief physician at the local hospital and her dad is one of those hot shot lawyers you see on TV with the crazy phone number like 1-800-sue-them-all or something like that. Not to mention her brother is the quarterback of the high school football team. The Harris family has it going on, so having Erika say hi to me, was pretty much like hitting the lottery on my birthday while on vacation in Hawaii. What made life even better was that I hadn’t bumped into Hoody since the umbrella incident.

After school, I met up with Denise and couldn’t stop thinking about what a great day I was having. We were halfway home when it started to rain. I let Denise put on her poncho first because I didn’t want to huddle under the umbrella with her until it was absolutely necessary. Then the rain really started to come down in buckets. As I pulled out the umbrella, I noticed Erika on the corner getting soaked. I couldn’t believe my luck, here was my chance to play the hero. I took a deep breath, walked over to her and offered her my umbrella. She took it and gave me a smile that made my ears tingle. Her smile soon faded when she couldn’t open it. She handed it back to me but I couldn’t get it open either. All of a sudden Hoody shows up.

“Give it to me wimp, I’ll open it for you,” he said as he snatched the umbrella out of my hands.

“I got it, Hoody!” I shouted and snatched it back. Next thing you knew we were in a tug-of-war fighting for control of the umbrella. We were yanking and pulling so hard that neither of us noticed that we had knocked Erika and Denise down. We had our hands on the umbrella handle when it finally opened. Something slimy and sticky oozed down onto our hands. It was so sticky that I couldn’t let it go and neither could Hoody.

There was a strange odor too, like how the air smells after a fireworks show. I felt goose bumps all over and the hair on my arms stood up. That’s when it happened. Suddenly, there was a tremendous KA-BOOM and a huge bolt of lightning blasted out of the sky and zapped the umbrella. A dark cloud of smoke covered us as the ground trembled. A painful jolt shot through my body and then everything went black.