“Oh, don’t worry. I believe you.” Iris winced as she tried to stand. Her head screamed mercy. “I felt it.”
She wobbled on her feet, and her brother helped to keep her steady. Something crumbled into her eyes. She picked at her lids and came away with a dozen singed eyelashes.
“They’ll grow back,” Ivan said, trying to sound reassuring. “I’m taking you to the hospital. You need to at least get checked.”
Iris shoved him away, remembering the reason she’d run out into the rain in the first place. “No. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of you having a life. Besides, I’m sure you’ll be spending plenty of time in the hospital over the next three years after you get pummeled by ’roided-up human bulldozers.”
Though her head felt as though it might crack open like an egg and spill out the scrambled yolk of her brain, Iris walked on her own back inside the house. She didn’t realize the dark cloud had followed her inside until she was in her bedroom. She lowered herself onto the mattress she’d slept on since she was five (she’d peed the bed on it a number of times back then, but her mom refused to buy a new one) and when she lay back, she saw it. The black mass bunched above her. She reached up and raked her fingers through it. The cloud looked so substantial, so dense and tangible, but it was no more solid than a thought.
“Rain,” Iris said, and the cloud contracted, as though experiencing a muscle spasm. Then she felt droplets of water land on her face. She opened her mouth and took them on her tongue. Her skin felt hot, fever-sick, and the coolness of the rain was a small relief.
She let the cloud rain on her as she went to sleep, and when she woke, it was still drizzling, and her old mattress was soaking wet. Iris decided to throw it out and get a new one, even if she had to use the money she’d saved for new school clothes to do it.
She didn’t really need clothes for school, anyway. The point of starting school every year with a new wardrobe was to make the best first impression possible. But when Iris looked in the bathroom mirror and took in her new image, she realized the only kind of impression she’d be making was a shocking one.
Her hair and eyelashes had fallen out. Her scalp, where the lightning had struck her, was etched in a veiny red mark the size of her fist.
But when Iris stripped off her wet clothes to take a shower, she found that the scar she shared with Ivan was gone, as though it had never been.
Wearing a hoodie pulled up over her head even though it was a muggy ninety-five degrees, Iris rode her bike to the library the next day. She told her cloud to stay home, and it did, tucking itself into a corner of the room. Iris loved that the cloud did what she told it to do. At least she had control over one thing in her life. But she wanted to understand why. Why had it appeared after she was struck by lightning, and why did it obey her?
There was a one-hour-per-person limit for using the library computers, but Iris begged the librarian for more. The librarian, a black woman with yellowing corneas and wires of gray protruding from her braids, peered at Iris suspiciously across her desk. Iris could tell she was wondering about the hood.
“I got a really bad haircut,” Iris told her.
The librarian’s hard stare melted into a sympathetic smile and she handed Iris another password. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.”
Iris thanked her and returned to her search, reaching under her hood to touch her smooth scalp. It was not as smooth as it had been that morning. Already a light fuzz of hair had sprouted. Iris was surprised. Her hair had never grown particularly fast.
By the time she had exhausted the librarian’s patience with her overuse of the Internet, Iris had discovered three things about lightning and people who were struck by lightning that she considered applicable to her situation.
1. Lightning is one of the most mysterious forces on the planet, and no one really understands it.
2. Aftereffects of being struck by lightning range from but are not limited to: death, burns, amnesia, personality disorders, blindness, deafness, learning disorders, and changes in brain function. Cases where being struck by lightning has healed a person of a virus or degenerative illness have also been recorded.
3. Being struck by lightning sometimes leaves behind a veiny, red Lichtenberg figure on the skin. Lichtenberg figures fade shortly after a person has been struck.
A week later, the Lichtenberg figure on Iris’s scalp still had not faded, but she could no longer see it because her hair had grown in to cover it.