Electric Current

Marcus adjusted his snapback, pulling the brim lower. The hat was his armor against everything—the fluorescent lights of the water park, the way Jessica's laugh carried across the wave pool, the fact that he was working minimum wage while everyone else was having the time of their lives.

"You good, man?" Tyler asked, kicking back against the lifeguard stand. "You've been staring at that pyramid of empty cans for like ten minutes."

The soda pyramid—some juniors' masterpiece before they got kicked out—gleamed in the afternoon sun. "Yeah. Just thinking."

"About Jessica?" Tyler grinned. "Dude, just talk to her. She's not some mythical creature. She's a person who happens to be gorgeous and popular and completely out of—"

Thunder cracked. The sky, blue thirty seconds ago, turned that weird greenish color that means trouble.

"Everyone out!" Marcus's supervisor yelled. "Storm coming in FAST."

Chaos erupted. Parents herded screaming kids toward the exits. Marcus grabbed a stack of towels as the first fat drops hit the concrete. Then he saw her—Jessica, stranded by the lazy river, her phone dead, everyone she came with already gone.

A jagged fork of lightning split the sky. The power died.

"Hey!" Marcus called over the rain, suddenly pouring sideways. "Maintenance shed! There's an overhang!"

She ran toward him, mascara already streaking. They huddled under the tiny shelter as lightning lit up the sky every few seconds, close enough that the air tasted like ozone.

"Thanks," she said, teeth chattering. "I'm Jessica, by the way."

"Marcus. I know. We have pre-calc together."

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry! I'm terrible with names. Wait—you sit by the window? Always wearing that hat?"

He smiled. "Yeah. That's me."

They talked for twenty minutes while the storm raged—about how much pre-calc sucked, about her anxiety about college applications, about how he actually loved writing poetry but never told anyone because what seventeen-year-old guy admits that?

"You should show me sometime," she said, and the way she looked at him made him forget about his stupid hat and his stupid job and the stupid social pyramid that had kept them apart for two years.

The rain slowed."Would you?" Marcus asked, his heart hammering like the thunder.

Jessica pulled out her phone—charged now, somehow. "Give me your number. And Marcus?"

"Yeah?"

"You don't need the hat. You've got a really nice face."

He didn't wear it to school on Monday. And when he sat next to her at lunch, nobody even looked twice. Lightning, he figured, could strike anywhere. Even at the bottom of the food chain.