Lightning Fox Run

The party was already dead when Marcus arrived, fashionably late by accident rather than design. Rain slashed against the windows like nature was trying to crash this thing harder than he already had.

"Bro, you made it!" Jordan yelled from the kitchen, already holding that red cup like it was a trophy. "This party's actually hitting different now."

Marcus forced a grin. Jordan had been his friend since seventh grade, back when friendship was just sitting together at lunch and trading Pokémon cards. Now friendship meant showing up to parties where you knew three people and feeling like everyone else had received a secret handbook on how to be cool that you'd somehow missed.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, electric veins pulsing through purple clouds. Someone had turned the music down to watch it.

"That's what I'm talking about," said this girl leaning against the counter—fox eyes, fake leather jacket, energy like she was simultaneously bored with everything and entirely too interested in nothing. "Nature's doing it better than Spotify."

Marcus had seen her around school. Riley something. She transferred in junior year and moved through the halls like she was trailing her own weather system.

"You're Marcus, right?" she asked, and his stomach did that stupid thing where it forgot how to organ function. "Jordan's told me about you. Said you're fast on the track."

"I mean, I guess."

"Lightning fast," she said, grinning like she knew something he didn't. "That's what Jordan calls you."

Jordan, on the other side of the room, was now shouting about some bull story involving a stolen golf cart and the principal's driveway. Everyone was laughing. Marcus felt it—that tightness in his chest, the feeling that he was watching his own life from somewhere outside himself, always slightly offbeat in the rhythm.

Then Riley's eyes lit up. "Let's go running."

"What?"

"In it. The rain. Unless you're scared."

Marcus looked at her like she'd grown a second head. Then at Jordan, still holding court, being the person everyone liked because he didn't overthink it. Then at the rain hammering the glass.

"Yeah," he heard himself say. "Let's go."

They burst through the back door, rain instantly soaking through everything, and Marcus realized he'd never felt more alive in his stupid, awkward teenage existence than running through a storm with a girl who called him lightning.