Electric in the Rain

Maya's thumb hovered over her iphone screen, the concert venue's bathroom fluorescent flickering overhead. Three unread texts from her mom. Two from friends wondering where she'd disappeared to. She'd come with the cool crowd—the ones who wore vintage band tees and knew all the lyrics—and now she was hiding in a stall because she felt like a fraud.

Outside, thunder rattled the metal door frame. Someone screamed as lightning illuminated the cracks beneath the door. The storm had turned the outdoor festival into a chaotic mud pit, but the band kept playing. Of course they did. They were the kind of band that played through lightning.

Maya's palm was sweating against the phone case. She'd spent forty-five minutes perfecting her eyeliner before leaving home, carefully curating the casual-messy hair that now hung in damp strings. She'd borrowed her older sister's fedora because it made her look mysterious, artsy. Someone who belonged at indie concerts, not someone who'd only discovered the band last week.

Another crack of thunder. This time, the lights flickered and died completely. Emergency floodlights washed the bathroom in harsh red. Maya's heart pounded. She could leave now, blame the storm. Call her mom from the uber and curl up in her bed with Netflix.

Instead, she shoved her iphone into her pocket and pushed the door open.

The rain was torrential, a wall of water that instantly soaked through her clothes. But the crowd—her crowd—was still there. Jumping. Mud-splattered. Screaming every word. The lead guitarist stood center stage, arms wide like he was conducting the weather itself. As another bolt of lightning cracked the sky, white-hot and electric, the crowd erupted. Something in Maya's chest cracked open too.

She grabbed her hat before it could blow away and ran toward them. Ran toward the mud and the strangers and the rain, palm outstretched like she could catch the lightning herself. Someone grabbed her hand. A girl with blue lipstick and drenched hair screamed "THIS IS THE BEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE" in Maya's face, and Maya laughed so hard she couldn't breathe.

By the third song, she knew every word. By the encore, she'd lost the hat somewhere in the pit and her phone had died in her pocket. Her feet were bare—shoes sacrificed to the mud—and she was shivering, soaked to the bone, grinning like she'd never known how to stop.

The morning after, Maya woke up to her sister's furious texts about the fedora. Her mom made her wash three times before breakfast. Her iphone still wouldn't turn on. But in her jacket pocket, she found a crumpled set list someone had pressed into her hand, and she thought maybe—just maybe—she was finally the kind of person who belonged at shows like that.

The kind who didn't need the costume. The kind who danced through lightning storms.

Her palm still had mud under the fingernails. She decided to leave it there a little longer.