Thunder in My Chest

The lightning crackled across the sky like nature's own strobe light, perfectly timed with Maya's house party bass drops. I stood by the snack table, nursing a flat soda, feeling like a certified zombie after three hours of pretending to be social.

Then I saw him.

Jordan. The guy I'd been lowkey crushing on since seventh grade. He was wearing this ridiculous orange hoodie that should've looked terrible but somehow worked on him. We made eye contact and my heart decided to reenact a full electrical storm.

"Hey," he said, grabbing a handful of chips. "Bears quarterback really choked tonight, huh?"

I stared at him. Was he talking about football? I knew nothing about football except that people got weirdly aggressive about it.

"Yeah," I managed, my voice cracking like I was still twelve. "Total bear." Wrong usage. I knew it. He knew it. The universe knew it.

Jordan laughed though. Not mean laughing. The genuine kind that made his nose crinkle. "I'm Jordan, by the way."

"Chloe."

His dog — who'd been somehow allowed into the party — chose that exact moment to knock over a nacho cheese fountain. Chaos erupted. Cheese everywhere. Some poor freshman slipped in it like it was a cartoon banana peel.

We spent the next hour cleaning up nacho cheese disaster while everyone else kept partying around us. It should've been mortifying. Instead, it was... actually kind of perfect. We talked about everything — our ghost stories, his obsession with horror movies, my secret dream to be a writer instead of taking over my mom's accounting business.

"You know," he said, wiping cheese off his sleeve, "most people would've bailed. You stayed. That's... that's actually really cool."

The lightning flashed again, illuminating his stupid orange hoodie and his stupid perfect smile and the whole messy, beautiful night.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess I'm not as much of a zombie as I thought."

And for the first time in forever, I actually believed it.