“I was talking with Mia,” Helicity blurted. It wasn’t a lie, exactly—she had been talking to Mia earlier. “We were making plans to meet tomorrow. You know, for classes.”
Her father regarded her for another second, then pushed off the door and peered at the washing machine control panels. “Looks like these have a ways to go. In the meantime, did you take care of that other errand yet?”
“Other…?”
“Don’t tell me you forgot.” Mr. Dunlap crossed his arms. “M&M’S, remember?”
Relief flooded Helicity’s body. “Right! I was about to get them when my phone rang.”
Luckily, her father didn’t probe any further. If he had, Helicity suspected she would have cracked and told him all about her contact with Lana McElvoy.
“Come on.” Mr. Dunlap smiled. “We’ll get ’em together. Eat all the good ones before your mom can get her hands on them.”
“You know they all taste the same, right?”
Her father snorted. “Who told you that lie?”
Helicity slept on the pullout that night. In the morning, she put on one of her newly washed outfits and rode to the community college with her mother.
“Come to the office when you’re done,” Mrs. Dunlap said as they went their separate ways. “Oh, and by the way, I’ll contact that farmer today. Maybe later we can go see Raven.”
Helicity nodded happily and then left. She was very familiar with the campus and made her way straight to the front steps. Mia was waiting. They joined other sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students in the same auditorium where the previous night’s meeting had been held. By Helicity’s reckoning, nearly one-third of the middle school student body was absent. Many who were there were surreptitiously using their cell phones. Under normal circumstances, students weren’t allowed to have phones with them during school time. But these were far from normal circumstances. Helicity had overheard more than one classmate say their parents wouldn’t have let them come if they couldn’t keep their phones with them at all times.
As for those students who weren’t there, she assumed they had their reasons for not attending. For her part, she couldn’t wait to get out of the hotel room that morning, even though it meant going to school. As nice as their accommodations were, after two days the walls were starting to close in on her—and the occasional waves of tension between her parents were stressing her out.
Not that they’d be staying there much longer. Using his connections in the construction and real estate business, her father had found them a furnished three-bedroom house to rent for the summer while their own home was being rebuilt. She and her parents would move there on Saturday. Hopefully, Andy would be strong enough by then to join them.
“Good morning, students.” Ms. Stockwell, the middle school principal, stood in front of the stage. “Thank you for coming. As you know, there were two weeks remaining in the school year before the—the tragedy hit our town. The middle school was badly damaged, so having classes there was impossible. Fortunately, the community college has opened its doors to us.”
A student sitting in back stage-whispered a sarcastic comment about how unfortunate that was. Ms. Stockwell ignored him.
“We will not be holding classes as such,” she continued. “Instead, we will have study sessions to prepare you for end-of-term exams, which will be given the latter part of next week. In addition”—her voice turned somber—“we will be holding group counseling sessions to help you process what has happened to our community. We encourage you to sign up for at least one, if not more. Now, please find your homeroom teacher. He or she will bring you to your assigned classroom. Thank you.”
Helicity and Mia followed their homeroom teacher, Mr. Albright, to a lecture room. They were in all the same classes, so for the next few hours, they worked together creating study guides and review sheets for their upcoming exams.
Helicity did her best to focus, but a good chunk of her mind was wondering when she might meet up with Lana. She found out when Mr. Albright announced a one-hour break for lunch, adding that classes would conclude around two thirty. While other kids moved toward the college’s dining hall, Helicity sent Lana a message.
Lana’s reply came a moment later.
“Hey, Hel, you coming?” Mia called. “I heard Tater Tots are on the menu.”
Helicity put her phone away and joined Mia. She was grinning from ear to ear.
“Okay, what’s with the big smile?” Mia asked. “It can’t be the Tater Tots.”
“What? Oh, no, it’s not the tots.” Helicity quickly filled Mia in on her upcoming meeting.
Mia gave a low whistle. “You’re going to meet a woman who does exactly what you want to do when you’re all grown up? How cool is that?”
“I know! Hey, you want to come with me? I bet she wouldn’t mind.”
Mia shook her head regretfully. “Can’t. Mom’s picking me up at two thirty sharp. But call me after and tell me all about it!”
Two and a half hours later, Helicity stood in front of Lana McElvoy’s office. The door was ajar. She gave a tentative knock, then pushed it open when no one answered.
“Whoa.”
The office space was just big enough for a file cabinet, two chairs, and a desk with a widescreen computer and a neglected-looking ivy plant. On the wall behind the desk was an oversize bulletin board. Tacked to it were menus from local restaurants, tiny slips of paper from fortune cookies, a list labeled Emergency Contacts, and a yellowed newspaper clipping with the headline STORM CHASER CHEATS DEATH. There were also photographs of men and women posing at the back of a bizarre-looking vehicle stocked with electronics and weather equipment. Helicity recognized a younger Lana McElvoy in several of the photos.
But it was the framed artwork covering the wall opposite the desk that really took her breath away.
One section held spectacular photographs of different storms. Dusty-brown, sooty-black, and dishwatergray tornadoes shaped like thick columns, thin twisted curves, and wide-mouthed cones. Vast hurricanes captured by orbiting satellites, the storms’ circular eyes staring blankly up into space. Trees and street signs bent to the ground by violent winds. Drenching rains flooding city streets and rural pastures. One particularly arresting image was of a “mother ship”—a supercell thunderstorm of dense, layered clouds shaped like a squat cylinder—that hovered malevolently over an isolated farmhouse. What made it so fascinating was the sun-drenched blue sky peeking around it.
Helicity’s gaze traveled to the next section of images. These weren’t pictures of storms, but posters of movies that featured storms. The Wizard of Oz, with its famous house-whirling tornado, hung between the disaster films The Day After Tomorrow, about a superstorm that instantly plunges New York City into a deadly ice age, and The Perfect Storm, a true story about fishermen who underestimate the storms that hit their boat and consequently all die. When Helicity saw the next group of posters, she laughed aloud. They were for the Sharknado movies, absurd but hugely popular cult hits about massive tornadoes and waterspouts (basically tornadoes that occur over water)—that suck up and deposit deadly sharks in the storm-flooded streets of various major US cities.
Still chuckling, Helicity took a step back to get a better view of the wall as a whole. When she did, she bumped into the desk. The computer had been in sleep mode, but suddenly, the picture she’d sent Lana the night before materialized on the screen. She gasped.
Up until that moment, she’d only seen the photo on her phone’s tiny screen. Now her jaw dropped at the details revealed by the much bigger image and higher resolution. She leaned forward, intending to use the computer touch screen to zero in even more.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Leave that alone!”
Helicity jumped back, startled by the sharp voice. She turned to find a teenage boy scowling at her. His ice-blue eyes were fierce and penetrating. Although he wasn’t big—nowhere near Andy’s size—he filled the doorway, blocking the only way out. His spiky black hair, retro T-shirt with heavy-metal band logo, ripped jeans, black leather wristbands, and thick-soled combat boots made him even more intimidating. A black leather jacket hung from his finger over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” he demanded again, taking a step into the office.
Helicity shrank away from him. “Lana told me to—to meet her here,” she stammered.
The boy took another step toward her. “And did Lana also tell you to mess around with her computer?”
Helicity shook her head. “I just wanted to see my photograph better,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Wait.” The boy’s scowl vanished abruptly. “What do you mean, your photograph?”
Helicity pointed at the computer screen. “I took that picture.”
The boy looked from the photo to Helicity and back. “You took that? Seriously?” He dragged his fingers through his hair, making it spike up even more. One corner of his mouth lifted in a mischievous half grin, and his icy glare melted. “Then that makes you Helicity Dunlap. Sorry. She told me she was meeting you today. I didn’t know when. Also, I didn’t know you were so young.”
Helicity drew herself up. “I’m going to be fourteen this summer.”
“That old, huh?” he said in a teasing but not unfriendly tone. “My name’s Sam, by the way. I’m part of Lana’s team. And for the record, I’ll be eighteen next year.” The boy’s impish smile broadened, and a butterfly in Helicity’s stomach suddenly took flight.
Footsteps rapped in the hallway. A second later, Lana hurried in with an armload of books. She beamed at Helicity. “You’re here! Excellent!” She butted Sam with her hip. “Yo. Out of my way before my arms break.”
Sam shifted next to Helicity. He smelled outdoorsy, like newly mown grass and tropical-scented sunscreen with a hint of campfire smoke. It was a nice smell, she thought, and her stomach butterfly fluttered again.
Lana deposited the books on her file cabinet. Then she flopped into her desk chair with a sigh of relief, laced her hands behind her head, and swiveled to regard them. “So, you two have met. Sam, what do you think of Helicity’s camera work?”
“She captured a great image. It could be on your wall. People might even pay a decent amount of money for it,” he answered, jerking his chin toward the framed photographs.
Helicity blushed. “Thanks,” she said. “Do you want to see the others?”
“Yes,” Lana and Sam replied simultaneously.
Helicity pulled out her phone. Several taps and the whooshing sound of a sent e-mail later, Lana’s in-box pinged an incoming message alert.
“Ah, technology. How I love you,” Lana murmured. She swiveled back around to face her computer and downloaded the attachments. She clicked over to her Pictures folder and opened the images as a page of thumbnails. Helicity and Sam moved to stand on either side of her to get a better look.
Laid out together in sequence, the first photos followed the storm’s progress from billowing, sunlit clouds to dark, angry wall in minute detail. The next showed the clear area beneath the clouds turning into a gray haze of rain as the storm intensified. The last picture captured the start of the spinning motion beneath the wall.
Lana’s eyes shifted from one to the next. “Nice. Very nice.” She pointed to the last one, glanced back at Helicity, and murmured, “Your namesake.”
“You’ve got to send these to me, too,” Sam added.
Helicity bit her lip and nodded. As with the single photo she had seen enlarged for the first time on Lana’s computer, this was the first time she’d seen all her photos together on one page. Following their progression, she was suddenly catapulted back to the hilltop as the storm raged overhead. Her heart started pounding in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. The images swam in front of her eyes, her knees buckled, and she collapsed.