“Okay, it’s okay. It’s just a minor setback.” Nathaniel paced. They were on the street again, in the dark. “We’ll figure something out.”
They’d only been underground for five or ten minutes, but somehow the street seemed even more deserted now than it had before. All the sane people were looking for shelter. They were going home, and the four of them were getting farther and farther away from it.
Nathaniel took out his phone to find the screen was full of alerts.
SUBWAY SERVICE: SUSPENDED.
BUS SERVICE: SUSPENDED.
METRO-NORTH AND LONG ISLAND RAILROAD SERVICE: CANCELED.
ALL FLIGHTS IN AND OUT OF JFK, LAGUARDIA, NEWARK: CANCELED.
REDUCED TAXI SERVICE.
TRAFFIC BAN: STAY OFF THE ROADS!
HURRICANE WARNING: IN EFFECT FOR THE TRI-STATE AREA.
FLOOD WARNING: IN EFFECT FOR NEW YORK CITY.
“Shit,” Nathaniel said. “These alerts all came in the last hour. The weather reports must be getting worse.”
“I knew I should have listened to the news,” Tiny muttered.
The others crowded around his phone as Nathaniel pulled up Weather.com.
“The rain is supposed to start tonight and continue through Sunday evening. It’s no longer being considered a hurricane. It’s now being called a superstorm.”
“Jeez. I was just kidding about the whole Stormpocalypse thing,” said Will.
“Superstorm Eileen,” Lu said. “Who comes up with these names? Sandy? Gloria? Iris? They all sound like grandmas.”
Nathaniel groaned. “They just need a Superstorm Bubbe, and my grandma will be happy.”
“Should we go home?” said Tiny. “Maybe we should all go home. We’ll be safe there, and maybe by the morning these weird side effects will have gone away. We can all FaceTime and check in.”
“I don’t know,” said Will. He still looked like Jon Heller, complete with the purposefully messy prep school hair and the perpetually squinty, kind of stoned look that girls were always saying made him look like James Franco. “The party’s still going on. What if I run into the real Jon? Or someone else mistakes me for him?”
“Yeah,” said Lu. “Plus, it’s just really creepy.”
“And I want to get to the bottom of this,” Nathaniel said. “Figure out what’s going on.” What he didn’t say was: it’s what Tobias would have done. Tobias wouldn’t have run home. He would have led the four of them downtown and he would have done the math and made it right. He would have used his superbrain to figure out how to fix things.
Nathaniel turned to face the empty street. No subway. No buses. No cabs.
“Should we hitchhike?”
“No way, dude. I may be big, but that’s how people get straight-up murdered.”
“Uh, guys,” Tiny said. “Where’s Lu?”
Lu wasn’t standing with them. She wasn’t down the block, in one direction or the other. Lu was gone.
Will looked stricken. “Where did she go?” He turned to Nathaniel and grabbed the neck of his T-shirt so tightly in his fist that he lifted Nathaniel off the ground. “Nathaniel! What should we do?”
Nathaniel had no idea what to do, to be honest. He wasn’t a leader, deep down. He couldn’t even wake up in time to turn in his scholarship application. Everyone was suddenly turning to him because he was the smart one, because tonight he had some kind of weird superpowers, and he felt like he had to live up to them. What they didn’t know was that he didn’t feel worthy of having them.
One minute he’d been getting ready to take the most important test of his life, and he got suckered into being at this party because he didn’t have the guts to say no.
And then the next minute there he was on the roof, wanting so badly to make someone smile. Hoping for something. It was something he hadn’t felt in so long.
The feeling of wanting to be a hero.
Because when the lightning had lit up the night so brightly like that, all of them, faces upturned, and he had looked over at Tiny—who had been just standing there, her eyes closed, all bathed in light—he’d thought for a moment that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. It was like he’d never really seen her before, not ever, and then all of a sudden there she was, like the lightning had cut a path through the darkness on the roof right to her, and he could see her so clearly, it was like her insides were lit up and there were her kidneys and her lungs and esophagus and liver and heart beating wildly like she was an X-ray that had been electrified.
She’d seemed so lonely up there on that roof, so tired of being invisible. And he suddenly had the weird feeling, small but persistent, pushing its way to the surface of his mind, that he needed her to understand she wasn’t alone. And maybe he needed to know for sure he wasn’t alone, either.
Where could Lu have gone? He felt responsible now, for the group. He had to lead them to the answer. Even if it took all night. And tomorrow. And the next day. They would make it through the storm, and they would come out the other side.
It was what Tobias would have done.