Chapter 8 #3
—stops, mouth dropping open, as he watches a huge bolt of lightning strike down dead in front of the market, not even a hundred yards away.
The boom of thunder is loud and immediate, making everyone in the room jump; it’s accompanied, barely a second later, by the blare of a variety of car alarms, spooked by the electric jolt.
“Jesus,” Casey mutters, moving towards the shop’s front windows. “That sounded close.” To Will, as he passes: “You see what it hit?”
“You’re looking for a lightly smoking fencepost, about forty yards to the left,” Will says.
The ease of the estimated distance surprises him; he’s famous in his insular scientific community for insisting on double- and triple-checking even the most inconsequential guess before hazarding it.
He’s been told many times it’s a sign of his brilliance, but equally often that it’s the single most significant impediment to his brilliance, which Will has always found somewhat annoying, since he’s pretty sure it’s neither.
Once, in his undergrad years, someone had asked Will about it directly, his refusal to risk an estimate.
It was, unhappily, before he’d quite gotten a grip on the critically important line between “Normal, relatable anecdote of a regular human childhood” and “A story that makes people look at you as though you have, with the enormity of the bummer you have conveyed unto them, peeled all the paint from their interior walls.” So unthinkingly, laughing about it, he had told the story of the summer he was eleven, when Bill had asked Will to calculate how much lumber they’d need to replace the new fenceposts.
He had gotten the math wrong and they’d ordered too much, far too much, enough that it was a significant expense.
After he’d explained how Bill had screamed and raged, cycled back to the topic to blow again for months and months, never quite let it go even years on, Will had shaken his head, concluded the story with a shrugging, “Fathers, you know?”
No one had known, though. They’d simply looked embarrassed, and left Will to stand there with a new, unfamiliar shame sitting uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach .
Thunder rolls overhead, and lightning slashes through the sky again, somewhere close—God, what is Will doing ?
Standing here with his arms full of pie, staring out into the storm lost in reverie?
It doesn’t matter, anyway, about the horrible summer with the extra lumber, and it certainly doesn’t matter that Will rattled off an estimate, any estimate, to Casey stupid Reeves. It doesn’t matter at all.
Still: “On second thought, Mrs. B, we’re going to hold on this for a second,” Will says, setting the pies down on the nearest counter. “I think we should give it a minute to calm down out there—not sure you want to drive in that.”
“That last strike hit the big red oak along the access road,” Casey adds tightly, still looking out the window. “Think the whole left side’s going to go, at least.”
Will groans, stepping up to the window next to him without thinking.
Sure enough, there’s a harsh, blackened damage line splitting the tree, the left half of it nearly cleaved from the right.
A strong enough wind, or enough time for gravity to do its work, and: “Crap. It’ll block the whole road when it does. ”
“Do you think—” Casey starts, his voice low and serious, like for some reason he genuinely wants to ask Will’s opinion on something. But before he can finish the thought, his phone rings. As he’s fishing it out of his pocket, Will feels a tap on his shoulder.
He turns. Mrs. Baumcombe is glaring at him. “I must say, young man, you are awfully familiar with me! Taking my pies, refusing to take my pies, referring to ‘Mrs. B.’ Do I know you?”
Far more interestingly, Casey is now saying into the phone “Hel—whoa, hey, slow down. Just—I can help, take a breath and tell me slow.”
“Probably?” Will says to Mrs. B, grimacing slightly. “Or at least, you probably knew my dad, Bill. He was… Noel, what is it?” The teen’s face has gone ashen, and they’re looking down at their phone as though it’s told them the date of their own death .
“I…” Noel says, blinking down at it. When they look up at Will, their eyes are wide, abruptly young in that horrible way of teenagers, who can’t help occasionally throwing into sharp relief the reality of adulthood.
One of the harshest lessons of that rocky transition is learning how much of who you are is shaped simply by what you’ve had to deal with.
Will doesn’t know Noel very well, but the look on their face is universal, and he can tell that whatever they just saw on that phone, it’s something that is reshaping them right now.
“Mere! Jesus, all right, let me find the keys,” Casey is saying, running towards the back of the market; half of Will is quite urgently tracking on that, ears particularly pricking at Mere’s name.
Mrs. Baumcombe is pulling on his sleeve, saying some other stupid, insipid thing—no part of Will is tracking on that at all , and he really hopes it won’t turn out to have been important.
Every spare thought that isn’t wondering what on earth is happening on Casey’s phone call is waiting to see what Noel’s going to say.
Thunder rolls.
“You grew up here, right?” Noel says, in a small voice, eyes back on their phone.
“So…so maybe you know. It’s an urban legend, right?
About that kid in the ’90s? And the bridge?
And the river?” A desperate, dangerous edge has entered their voice, as though they’re holding back tears.
“That didn’t happen. A flood couldn’t… It didn’t happen, right?
It’s an urban legend? Tell me it didn’t happen, man, okay! It’s an urban legend— say it.”
“Oh, God,” Will says, drawn back to the hideous summer of the extra lumber for a new, worse, and far more pressing reason. He knows what’s happened, or at least the broad, terrible shape of it, even before he sees Casey run past, keys in his hand, and hurry out the front door.
Will doesn’t think; the cheerful yellow door doesn’t even have a chance to land in its frame before he’s grabbing it and following Casey into the storm.