2. Annie
Chapter 2
Annie
7 Years Ago
May 18 th
I t’s incredibly awkward to stand on a front porch knowing the two men speaking in hushed voices behind the SUV parked in the street are talking about me. Not quite as awkward as answering questions from my entire extended family will be, so I adjust my bag over my shoulder and gently close the door.
Justin told me to stay inside while he talked to his friend about me tagging along on their storm chase this weekend, and I can see why. Chris—who I’ve never met—isn’t exactly quiet in his disapproval.
“You promised this wouldn’t become a thing,” he says to Justin. “We missed a photographic cone because the last one wouldn’t pee in a field. And the one before was worse—she complained the entire time about how bored she was. If she’s not a meteorology major, she can’t come.” His voice is rising as I walk down the driveway. “And after a long-ass day on the road, the last thing I want to do is go take a walk so you two can have the room to yourselves for an hour.”
Whatever Justin says in response is spoken in a volume too low for me to hear. It doesn’t matter as I round the back of the SUV because Chris’s eyes immediately jump to me.
I don’t know what I expected, but he is not it. He’s taller than Justin or me, and we’re both a tiny bit shy of six feet. He’s broad, too, his t-shirt stretched lovingly across his chest and shoulders. Tan. A face that’s a little on the sharp side, softened by the shaggy brown hair curling out from under a faded OU baseball cap. It’s his eyes, though. Summer sky blue but not half as warm.
He’s made up his mind, and panic flutters in my chest.
I shift, glance down at Chris’s faded sneakers, and decide to tell him the truth. He’ll look down on me for it, but maybe he’ll have mercy. “I dropped out. My family is having a big reunion this weekend, and I can’t face them.” Even my favorite uncle—the black sheep of his generation and the only person in my family who understands me—will be disappointed in me. I need to get out of town.
Justin turns my way, offering me an encouraging smile. He doesn’t try to put his arm around me, for which I’m grateful. I get the feeling placing any emphasis on girlfriend will get me a ‘no way.’
“I won’t complain, and I’ll pee in a cornfield if I have to.” I don’t know if I want to reassure him I won’t be any trouble or if I want him to know I heard every word he said.
Justin turns back to Chris, who’s still looking at me with those damned eyes. “Just for this weekend? Last time, I swear.”
Chris sighs and looks up at the sky as he rubs the back of his neck. “Fine.”
I know better than to fist pump, but I also don’t want to give him time to change his mind, so I open the back door and climb into the SUV, buckling my seatbelt like it will stop him from kicking me out if he changes his mind.
Justin returns to the house to grab his bag while Chris climbs into the driver’s seat.
“This is dangerous,” he says. He might be trying to discourage me, but his voice is resigned, his eyes fixed on a point down the street.
“I know.”
A muscle in his jaw ticks. “We probably won’t see anything.”
That’s where he’s wrong. “There’s always something to see.” It might be a grasshopper on the side of the road, a bird on a fence post, or even the vast sky and a flat, barren stretch of land, but there’s always something. I’ve got my Nikon D7100, a few lenses, and the ability to entertain myself.
At that, he gives me a look I can’t decipher in the rearview mirror. “We aren’t driving back tomorrow if you hate it. You’re with us for the next three days.”
The fluttery panic in my chest eases, and my muscles relax as I sink into the seat. “Perfect.” The alternative—pretending to be sick—won’t work. Someone would come by. But helping my boyfriend and his friend gather some data for his PhD? That excuse will fly with my parents.
Justin climbs in, and we hit the road. And drive and drive and drive. They talk about things I don’t understand—cape, wind shear, and mid-level something. Justin answers my questions with a good-natured smile. Chris remains silent, but I catch him glancing at me in the mirror like he can’t figure me out and hates that he wants to.
We reach some dust-baked stretch of highway in the early afternoon hours. And we sit.
“Those white fluffy clouds” —Justin points out the windshield— “are these.” He points to the corresponding puffs on the satellite image on the laptop mounted between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat. “They’re feeding off the warm, moist air from the south. In an hour or two, we’ll have some storms.”
An hour passes, and I spend it taking photos of whatever catches my interest. Wildflowers. A snake slinking across the road. Barbed wire wrapped around a wooden post. A curious horse lets me pat it before joining its buddies grazing. Chris and Justin talk with the odd chaser who pulls up, but I stay out of the way, happy to be doing my own thing.
Storms fire up like Justin said they would, dark patches in the sky that don’t look impressive from a distance. We race down highways and county roads to catch up, but the storms are moving fast. The guys get increasingly tense with each other as the storms envelop us, lashing the SUV with wind, rain, and small hail. Not a single storm on the radar is tornado-warned. Since they haven’t asked me to take a shift driving, I sit back and marvel at how close the sky is and how angry it looks as lightning arcs across it. Even in the shelter of the SUV, it’s unnerving to feel so exposed. Exhilarating, too.
I have no clue where we are when the guys finally call it, but the sun is setting. The storm we’ve been following is racing off without us, the billowy top glowing yellow over the deep blue-gray below.
“Can I take some photos?” I ask. Chris might have been ready to say no, but Justin is behind the wheel, and he pulls over.
I take photo after photo as the gorgeous storm drifts into the distance. I don’t know how long the guys indulge me, but the brilliant yellow slips into pink and then goes blue before I realize I’m not alone. Chris is standing at the back of the SUV, watching me. He doesn’t say anything, so neither do I. But when I open the backseat door, I discover Justin lying across both seats, snoring. I climb into the front passenger’s seat instead. Chris gets behind the wheel. It’s a silent drive to a cheap hotel. We eat greasy burgers and wash them down with milkshakes at a diner. No one talks much. Exhaustion and disappointment have soured these two, but I’m feeling good. I enjoyed today. Even Chris’s grumpiness isn’t getting to me.
Because we’re broke-ass college students—Chris and Justin are both working toward their PhDs, and I’ll have to pay back loans sooner than planned—we share a room with two beds. I crawl under the covers next to Justin. If Chris was worried about having to give us alone time, he shouldn’t have. I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow.
I’m up early, slipping out from under Justin’s arm and quietly taking my bag to the bathroom so I can shower and dress. Justin’s still asleep when I come back out, but Chris’s bed is empty.
The hotel has a continental breakfast, so I follow the scent of coffee and toast, and there’s Chris, a baseball hat pulled low on his head, a bowl of cereal—something suspiciously healthy like Raisin Bran—forgotten in front of him. He’s too engrossed in his laptop to notice me, so I get my breakfast—Lucky Charms and coffee—before I sit across from him.
“Good morning,” I say because while I won’t bother him with conversation, I’m not rude.
He glances at me, eyebrows furrowed, and mumbles a greeting.
I drink my coffee and eat my Lucky Charms, watching him draw circles and scratch notes on a map. He slowly becomes aware of my attention. It must irritate him because he finally puts his pen down. “What?”
I tap the map. “Is this your forecast? Where you want to chase?”
He takes a long drink of coffee. “Yeah.”
“You could talk me through it.”
He gives me a doubtful look. He’s probably wondering why a dropout like me wants to know. Or if I’d be able to understand. I grab the container of sugar packets and start rearranging them. “I didn’t drop out because my grades were bad. And maybe I wasn’t a meteorology major, but I’m curious.”
His eyes widen in surprise. Maybe because I said what he was thinking out loud or because he wasn’t thinking that at all. He doesn’t say anything either way; he spins his laptop so I can see it and gives me a crash course in storm prediction for the next twenty minutes. He has a way of explaining that makes it easy to understand without dumbing it down. He’s not even annoyed by my questions once he gets going. The way he shows it is subtle, but this is a topic he’s passionate about.
The data he gathers—mainly through video footage, but he also has instruments that measure wind velocity, temperature, and air pressure—is part of a larger project involving multiple chasers in the field and work he needs to do for his PhD. He’s not just doing this for fun or the adrenaline rush.
Justin joins us, looking deliciously sleep-rumpled and planting a quick kiss on my head. Chris abruptly gets to his feet, picking up my empty mug and his. “Want a refill?”
“Yes, please.”
“He’s warming up to you,” Justin whispers once he’s gone.
“Maybe he’ll tolerate me by the time we get home,” I whisper back.
Justin bumps my shoulder with his. “I think he’ll ask you to join the team.”
I doubt it, but I smile at the sentiment. It feels good to be doing something new. I won’t complain about spending more time with Justin, either. We’ve only been seeing each other for a few weeks, but I really like him. He’s kind and easy-going, and our chemistry is good, which is more than I can say about the string of toxic relationships I’ve had over the last few years.
Justin wraps an arm around me and tries to kiss me, but I push him away with a laugh. “I won’t get to join the team if you do that.”
He laughs and turns to his breakfast. “When he realizes how much cheaper it is splitting everything by thirds instead of in half, I bet you’ll be in anyway.”
Chris comes back with our coffees, and I listen while I drink mine. They argue over the day’s plan, which is apparently how they decide things.
We’re on the road soon after, leaving Alva, Oklahoma, behind. Two hours later, we’re outside of Dodge City, Kansas. We grab some fast food for lunch and spend the afternoon waiting. Bubbly cumulus towers bloom up and merge. Little green blobs of precipitation show up on Justin’s radar app. We readjust our position further to the south.
There’s a surprising amount of traffic blowing by, mostly other chasers. A few chasers stop, and Justin goes over to talk to them. After setting up a camera on a tripod, Chris hangs back near the vehicle. It doesn’t feel like he’s keeping an eye on me until I wander close to the road, too engrossed in the view through my camera, and he tugs me out of the way of an oncoming truck via a fistful of the back of my shirt.
I thank him, promising to pay attention, but he stays close by.
After a few minutes of snapping photos of the storm, I lower my camera and turn toward him.
That. Right there.
I raise my camera and snap a couple of shots. In the first few I capture, Chris’s eyes are locked on the storm, and there is a look of intense focus on his face. The last one I take? He’s scowling at me.
“I’ll delete it if you want,” I say quickly, moving closer to show him the first photo. “But this was too perfect not to take.”
He glances at the camera and away. “It’s fine.”
I decide not to show him the scowling pic, although he must know I took it. I turn back to the storm, but don’t know what I’m looking at. I think the clouds are moving in ways we didn’t see yesterday. Or maybe this only feels different. There’s a tension in the air that has nothing to do with the man standing next to me.
Chris points—in a different direction from where I’m aiming my camera—at the U-shaped cloud at the south end of the storm. “That’s where it’ll happen,” he says, then points back to what I had been looking at: the inky blue smudge of a storm stretching away to the northwest. “That’s the forward flank downdraft. It’s all heavy rain and hail that way. This”—his finger sweeps back to the left—“is the updraft. It’s the rotating part of the storm. This is what we’re watching.”
“A tornado can happen anywhere in there?”
“See how the cloud is bowing out like a horseshoe? Watch the northern side of that cloud—on the right from where we’re standing at the moment. If a tornado forms, that’s where it will happen.”
I push some strands of hair out of my face. The warm wind blows it right back. “So that’s the wall cloud?”
To his credit, Chris doesn’t sigh. “There’s no wall cloud yet, and not every tornado will have one. It’s more useful to identify the updraft.”
“That’s the horseshoe-shaped cloud?”
“Yeah, but it starts as a flat, rain-free cloud on the southeastern end of the storm. Warm, dry air—the rear flank downdraft—is wrapping around the storm from the outside. When forced toward the ground by more complicated processes inside the storm, it pushes the cloud into that shape. It means the storm is getting ready to try to spin up a tornado. That entire area under the updraft is the bear’s cage—the tornado is the bear, obviously—and we never want to get too close.”
I nod. I don’t want to get too close to any bear cage. Or bear. Or tornado.
“See that cloud that looks like a tail feeding into the updraft? That’s another useful feature we look for called an inflow band. You can follow it to the part of the updraft where tornadoes usually form.”
A car flies by, far enough on the shoulder to hit us with a spray of pebbles. Chris steps closer, herding me further into the grass, muttering something about snakes and stomping his feet to scare any off.
The storm is closer now. I can smell the rain over the pungent scent of the field before us. The air feels charged against my skin, and my pulse picks up in response. I catch a flash out of the corner of my eye. The massive boom that follows makes me jump.
“Are we safe standing here?” I ask. There are no buildings around us, no trees. Nothing tall to attract the lightning away from us.
Chris shrugs. “You can sit in the car if you want.”
I don’t want to. “You’re a few inches taller than me. I’ll take my chances.”
He slouches until I’m the taller of the two of us.
“Your face is still more smite-able,” I retort, raising my camera to hide my smile. Maybe Chris is warming up to me.
His laugh as he straightens is mostly a chuffing sound, but I’m counting it.
“Wall cloud,” he says a few minutes later, pointing to where—just like he said it would on the north end of the horseshoe—ragged clouds are rotating. “Watch at the ground now. Sometimes, they kick up debris before you can see an obvious funnel.”
I glance toward Justin, but he’s standing with another group of chasers, talking as they watch. He meets my eyes, flashing an excited grin and a thumbs up. I go back to watching the storm.
A slight breeze ruffles the grass in the field before us, but it suddenly feels eerily still.
“It’s like the storm is holding its breath,” Chris says in a low voice that feels closer to me than it is. I realize I’ve been holding my breath.
“Any minute now,” he continues, “it’ll blow out a tornado.”
Goosebumps rise along my arms and neck.
Chris walks over to adjust his tripod. I follow, partly because he’s taller, so lightning should hit him instead of me, but also because it feels too vulnerable to stand by myself with a storm bearing down on us.
“There,” Chris says softly, and I see it. A slender needle, as black as the clouds spinning around it, dropping down. I take a few photos, but mostly I watch.
Cheers go up as dust lifts off the ground below the funnel, and I can hear Justin’s voice in the mix, but I can’t look away. The space between the debris and the thickening funnel fills in within a handful of heartbeats. It’s like having some mythical beast land before you and realizing your imagination never came close to capturing even a tenth of the truth. I watch until I remember my camera, then take a few photos and watch some more.
It looks like a skinny elephant trunk sweeping along the ground. But it doesn’t stay that way. It widens at the top while the bottom retains its narrow point. It sounds like a waterfall.
“Cone,” Chris says, adjusting his tripod.
“And look at that,” I say with a smirk. “You didn’t miss it because of me.”
He winces but turns to me. “I shouldn’t have said that. I understand why she wouldn’t want to pee in a cornfield. But the data I can collect is more important than playing tour guide to Justin’s—” he cuts himself off.
I nod because I don’t want to talk while this absolute miracle is on the ground in front of us, and I don’t care about Justin’s exes.
Chris doesn’t say anything else.
I’m transfixed. The tornado appears to be spinning in place. I could stand here watching it for hours.
“Two minutes until we need to go,” Chris says to me, then shouts, “One minute!” to Justin.
I lower my camera, my heart lurching to my throat. “It’s coming this way ?”
“Yeah.” He’s packing up his tripod now, but there’s no sense of urgency.
In him. I’m already moving to the SUV.
Chris puts his stuff in the back.
“Justin!” I shout.
My boyfriend holds up a hand, still chatting with the other chasers.
“I told him one minute, knowing he’d take three,” Chris says as he walks past me to the driver’s side door. “It’s still miles away. We’ve got at least five minutes.”
I’d laugh, except there’s a tornado coming toward us, and I don’t want to find out how close is too close for these guys.
My heart is pounding because now I can see it’s coming closer. It’s a field or two away from us, not the miles Chris claims. I don’t know, maybe he’s right. I’m not a good judge of these things, and definitely not when I’m about to die.
“For fuck’s sake, Justin,” I whine under my breath.
Chris takes his eyes off the tornado and studies me for a long second. He opens his door and hops in, giving Justin a few blasts on the horn as he starts the SUV up. The other chasers haven’t yet moved to get in their vehicles, but Justin obediently jogs over and climbs in.
“We’ve got heaps of time,” Justin says as Chris looks both ways before pulling back onto the road.
“Annie’s nervous,” he says.
I glance sharply at him, but there’s no accusation in his voice. Nothing to make me think he feels inconvenienced by me. I turn around in my seat to watch the tornado behind us.
“Sorry, Annie,” Justin says, sounding sheepish. “I should have stayed with you.”
“I had Chris,” I say distractedly.
“I explained tornado-genesis,” he says to Justin in a low voice. It reminds me of Baby in Dirty Dancing saying, “I carried a watermelon.”
Chris turns down another road and pulls over a minute or two later. “It should pass by a few miles to our north,” he says.
It does. We stand beside the vehicle as it roars by, and suddenly, it’s no longer this dark, menacing thing. From here, the colors shift to a lighter gray and finally a ghostly white. The sun is at our backs, and a brilliant rainbow arcs over emerald-green fields next to the ethereal tornado. I know the photo I take of it will be my favorite.
This is why I dropped out. Not the tornado specifically, but the adventure of going out into the world and seeing something mind-blowingly beautiful. I don’t want to be trapped in a classroom or an office when I could be experiencing something like this. I’m more convinced now than when I impulsively handed my paperwork in to end my college career a few days ago.
My parents won’t understand, and this won’t help with our already strained relationship, but this is what I want my life to look like—camera in hand, somewhere interesting.
“Roping out,” Justin comments as the cone dramatically tightens into a wisp of a snake. Thirty seconds later, it’s gone.
“Your first tornado!” Justin says to me, scooping me up and swinging me around with a laugh before giving me a long kiss. “How does it feel?”
“Amazing.” I can’t help but laugh, too. That was awesome.
I pull free from Justin’s arms and turn to give Chris a high-five, which he probably doesn’t want, but he’s already climbing back into the SUV.