Nathaniel

A few blocks away, a row of Citi Bikes came into view, shiny and blue and locked firmly in place. “Nathaniel,” Tiny said. “Can you use your superstrength to steal us a couple of bikes? We’ll get there faster.”

Nathaniel grinned.

They rode across town through the night, the four of them. The wind howled around them. It still hadn’t rained, but the sky pressed down on them like a fist, making it hard to breathe.

Every few seconds thunder roared, angry, like a lion descending from the sky. And then the lightning would crack closer, closer, ever closer.

Nathaniel kept turning around to check on Tiny.

“I’m still here!” She would say. “Stop checking on me. I’m fine!”

“Good! Hang on! Don’t disappear yet—we’re almost there!”

“How much farther?” Will groaned.

“A couple of minutes!”

Nathaniel pushed on through the atmospheric pressure and the wind. At this point the streets were nearly deserted. The subways were boarded up. The buses had stopped running. All the cars had made their way home. Everyone in the city was inside, waiting for the flooding rain to come. Waiting for Stormpocalypse.

The city was shut down.

They had the road to themselves.

That was when the sky lit up, and the first bolt of lightning came crashing into the street itself, zapping down just behind Nathaniel’s bike.

He heard Tiny scream, and whipped around in time to see her veer automatically to the curb and onto the sidewalk to avoid the seared black hole now smoking in the street. He narrowly missed another bolt of lightning as it came shattering down just ahead of him.

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!” Lu yelled. “We’re all going to die!”

“No!” Nathaniel called over his shoulder. “This is a good thing! We need the lightning!”

“That’s crazy, Nathaniel!”

He threw a wild smile over his shoulder.

“Good crazy, or bad crazy?”

“There’s only one kind of crazy!”

“Lu!” Tiny called. “The lightning is our friend, now!”

Sparkling phosphorescent light was streaking down around them on all sides.

“Keep going! We’re almost there!”

They wove together and apart in the street. Sometimes Nathaniel lost sight of Tiny amid the streaks of too-bright light.

“Nathaniel!” Tiny called. “It’s following us. You were right!”

“Is it bad that I wish it weren’t?” He dodged another bolt of white heat.

Up ahead was the on-ramp to the bridge. A big flashing road sign said: CLOSED TO TRAFFIC DUE TO STORM.

They all dropped their bikes in the street.

Nathaniel couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same place where his brother had dropped his own bike, three years ago.

He stopped.

“Guys,” he said. Tiny turned around, then Lu, then Will. Nathaniel looked at his bike lying on its side. He looked up at Tiny, who came over and laid her bike in a right angle against his. Then Will did the same thing. Then Lu. Their four bikes formed a square at the base of the bridge.

“To Tobias,” Nathaniel said. “Thanks for everything, brother.”

“To Tobias,” the others echoed. The wind blew between them, rattling the bikes, pushing their hair in their faces.

They turned to the bridge.

“Here goes,” Nathaniel said, and took the first step.

It was the superpowers talking, he knew. But maybe it wasn’t. He had been brave before tonight. Just maybe in his own, slightly weird, Nathaniel-ish way.

The wind was blowing so hard, they had to hold on to the bridge cables so they didn’t get blown away. Thunder shook the pavement, and lightning sprayed across the sky, brighter than the city lights below. Ahead of them, through the twin arches of the bridge, was Brooklyn. To their right, the glittering lights of downtown Manhattan. To their left, the famous Midtown city skyline. Below them, the black water of the East River churned furiously, spitting up white caps of foam.

They were the only living, breathing things standing on that bridge.

His heart was pounding.

It was pounding for his genius brother, who tried so hard to understand the unexplainable. It was pounding for what they were about to do. It was pounding because there was something he knew—something he’d realized back there in the library at school—that he hadn’t told anyone yet.

The thing he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since then.

The lightning would course through them. It would change them. The charge in lightning had changed the properties of the subjects he studied drastically—sometimes unrecognizably. If the lightning was following them—following Tiny, really—and if it struck them, however impossibly, again, it was true that there was a chance what happened earlier would work in reverse. Every particle would realign, every cell would go back to the way it was. They would all go back to normal.

But here was what bothered him about that.

If their cells were completely reconfigured to revert back to their starting state, then everything about this night would rewind. To the way things were before they got hit. It would be like a time machine, basically. Everything about them would go back to the way it was. Exactly how it was. Their bodies—and their minds.

Their memories.

They would forget this night had ever happened.

If this really did work—if it proved Nathaniel’s research right, everything he’d been working so hard on—if he surpassed Tobias—if it did change them back—

He wouldn’t remember it.

What’s more, Nathaniel didn’t want to forget the rest of the amazing things that had happened to him tonight. The things and people that had led him to stop believing so much in facts and to learn to finally believe in magic.

To learn, really, to start believing in himself, instead of trying so hard to be someone he wasn’t.

But he was maybe beginning to realize something. There were some things from your past you couldn’t hold on to. Tobias was one of them. Tiny was another.

You had to let go of the past in order to keep trekking forward in your hiking boots into the future.

He didn’t want to forget about this night. But he didn’t want Tiny to disappear. And he didn’t want Lu to be numb forever. And he wanted Will to be himself again.

So which was worse? Was it worth it?

Maybe, if he wanted it bad enough . . .

Nathaniel grabbed Tiny’s hand tighter in his.

If he willed hard enough . . .

“Whatever happens,” Tiny said, looking into his eyes, “this night was worth it.”

He could make himself remember . . .

“If we have to go, we’re going out in a blaze of smog and electricity.”

He could hold on . . .

They stood there. Waiting.

He looked down at Tiny, almost completely part of the darkness now. He needed to believe that life could be different if he let it. He needed to believe there were some things in this world that couldn’t be explained with facts and research.

He needed to believe that some things were just magic.

He couldn’t promise that everything would turn out the way they wanted. He couldn’t tell her that they were going to fix things. He couldn’t ask her why she’d felt so ignored for so long—so desperately invisible that she attracted the most powerful energy force out there. He reached out, trying to pick her hand out of the night. Near-invisible fingers squeezed his. She was still there. She was still there. And maybe if he believed they could find each other again, he could finally let go.