Thunder Thighs and Lightning Strikes

I never thought I'd be thankful for my dad's old cargo shorts until the thunderstorm hit during track practice. Coach Miller had us running suicides in the parking lot — uphill, both ways, basically torture. My legs were burning, my lungs felt like they were filled with cotton, and I was seriously reconsidering my life choices.

"Pick it up, Martinez!" Coach barked from under his umbrella, dry as a bone while the rest of us drowned in humidity. "College scouts don't recruit quitters!"

I wanted to scream that college scouts weren't exactly lining up to watch some sophomore finish last in every meet, but I kept my mouth shut and kept running.

That's when I saw it — lightning forked across the sky like some cosmic Photoshop edit. A split second later, thunder shook the ground under my sneakers. The whole team froze.

"Inside! NOW!" Coach waved us toward the gym.

Everyone bolted. Except Jenna.

She'd twisted her ankle on the last suicide and was hobbling toward the building, wincing with every step. The popular girls — Taylor's squad, obviously — were already halfway to the gym, giggling about something that definitely wasn't Jenna sitting alone in the middle of the empty lot.

I hesitated. We weren't exactly friends. Jenna was the kind of quiet who sat in the back of AP Bio, and I was the kind of struggling to pass AP Bio. But she was also the only person who'd actually helped me when I dropped my entire binder in the hallway last week, while Taylor's crew literally stepped over my scattered papers.

The lightning flashed closer now, the air tasting like ozone and pending disaster.

I ran back.

"Need an arm?" I asked, trying to sound chill instead of like I was about to have a heart attack from either the storm or the fact that I was voluntarily putting myself in this situation.

Jenna looked up, surprised. "You don't have to —"

"Yeah, I know." I shrugged. "But Coach would kill me if I left a teammate behind. Also, I'm pretty sure that lightning bolt was aimed specifically at Taylor's abandoned Gatorade bottle, so we should probably move."

She laughed — actually laughed — and let me help her up. We made it to the gym just as the sky opened up, rain drumming against the roof like it was trying to break in.

"Thanks," Jenna said later, once we were sitting on the bleachers watching the storm through the gym's fogged-up windows. "For, you know. Not being like them."

I watched Taylor and her group taking selfies in the corner, completely ignoring the fact that someone had been left behind in a literal thunderstorm.

"No problem," I said, and realized I meant it. "Hey, do you want to study for the bio test together? Because I am definitely failing."

Jenna smiled. "I thought you'd never ask."