The Odds
I can’t say exactly what we were discussing when the lightning hit—those memories were obliterated by a split-second arc of crackling violence. I can only tell the long years of aftermath.
The gang and I were in our last year of high school when Patrick slipped into the convenience store, hunting for somebody to buy us beer. He burst out a minute later, pregnant lump under his dirty leather jacket. “Go, go, go,” he hissed, pushing me to run as the clerk started yelling “thief!” Clouds massing, gray rimmed and black.
Little Max met us at the edge of the lot, sparking a joint as he ran, despite a cig already burning in his mouth, despite shouts that the cops were coming. Sun going dark.
Racing to the park, sirens starting to wail, we found Becky waiting in her usual tube-top and cut-offs. When Patrick pulled out the six-pack, she caught a whiff of his jacket. “You reek,” she said, gagging and edging away. Electric shimmer arcing between clouds.
At the top of the park’s hill was my girlfriend, Van, smartest girl in school, watching the cops streak toward the store below. “What up, prude?” Becky said, throwing her a high five, and Van flinched as if hit. I tried to kiss her, but Van was clutching her necklace, anxiously glancing at hazy-eyed Max, who offered her the joint, the cig, then both. Peals of distant thunder.
As we passed the stolen beers, the memory gets spotty, goes mute: mouths move, cans open, all in perfect silence. The only words I remember are from Patrick, ending a complaint with a humorous “my God!” when the bolt struck less than a foot from our circle.
Air humming, throbbing with force. Everyone’s face lit bright, uranian blue and starlight white. Thunder so ear-splitting and instantaneous, it sounded like a hole torn through reality, voice of a deity booming through.
And then it was over: ionized tang of ozone, our ears ringing, a patch of ground scorched black and smoking next to us. The reason I still remember what Patrick said is because he kept repeating it, stunned, “my God, my God, my God . . .”
The rest of us held our breath, then all burst out at once: “Everyone’s okay!” I yelled as though I could make it true. “Everyone’s fine—”
“Patrick’s so tall but wasn’t hit!” Max said, dropping both smokes, “I’m too high, anyone know the odds of—”
“I felt it!” Becky said, showing us the hair on her arms standing on end, as if the current had traveled through the ground, into her body. She grabbed the closest person, Patrick, and sheltered into the crook of his arm while he blankly mumbled “my God—”
Van took my hand and placed it on her breast, the first time she’d let me. “Feel my heart,” she said, gold crucifix dangling off her neck. She looked in my eyes, searching and hungry, while her insides sped like a marathon. “So crazy—”
We started laughing, nervous at first and then uproarious, as if it were all a joke, an absurdity, a trifling thing that had happened. But at school the next day, they were already strangers.
I caught Max on the way to math class, but he looked . . . wrong: his gaze brighter, reactions sharper, movements cleaner. Like Max but amplified.
“You wanna skip?” I asked. A surge of freshmen in the hall around us.
He shook his head. “Got something I wanna ask the teacher.” He’d never before missed a chance to cut class.
And during the lesson, he stunned everyone: he raised his hand.
“Well, Max, an unexpected surprise,” the teacher said, halfway through writing an equation on the board. “First time for everything.”
“Yeah, what are the odds of being struck by lightning?” he asked. The entire class turned to witness, whispering about an unprecedented event.
“In a lifetime?” the teacher said. “I suppose about 1 in 15,000.”
“What about lightning missing and hitting right next to you?” Max asked. “How would you, like, calculate that?”
Then it clicked: by this time of day, Max was usually high or drunk or both. Today he was stone cold.
At lunch, I found Becky sitting in the cafeteria, still twisted around Patrick: her hand on his waist, his arm around her neck.
“So you guys are an item now?” I asked.
She usually tested the limits of the student dress code, but today she was in a full skirt—and Patrick had left the spiked belt and jacket at home.
“Just a hook-up,” Becky said, looking at him and smiling shyly.
That afternoon, in a back hallway near the gym locker room, I charged right by two people hardcore making out before recognizing—one was my girlfriend. Van with some guy’s lips on her neck, Van with his grimy hand up her shirt. I’d never seen this dude in my life, a complete alien, but his fingers were on her chest, right where mine had been.
Her cheeks flushed, her eyes closed. She’d never even kissed anyone before me.
“Hey!” I yelled. “What the hell!”
The intruder leaped back, held up his hands, but Van burst out laughing.
“We almost died,” she said, seizing me by the shirt. “We could be dead right now!” She was glowing, never more gorgeous, more alive. Crucifix missing from her neck.
By the end of the week, she’d dumped me. Becky and Patrick went steady. Max flushed his stash. And I became convinced of the randomness of the world, of the meaningless of everything. Brokenhearted, I became a teenage nihilist. And they kept mutating, growing ever stranger.
The next month, the math teacher dropped our midterms on our desks and gave Max a long, cautious look as the class started whispering again.
“Might apply to college after all,” Max said to me. He flashed his test, an A+. “If I can get my GPA up in time.”
I looked at him sideways, ignoring the other kids. “I thought the plan was we’d work at the ice rink after graduation.”
Driving the Zamboni, scarfing nachos, flirting with girls, I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend a few years—suddenly Max could. But then, this wasn’t the Max I’d known.
“What about the rest of our lives,” he said.
“You sound like a parent.” I looked at my midterm, a fat C- inked across the top. “College is pointless.”
No one had seen Van in days, but I was desperate to talk to her, even for a second, to tell her what was happening to our friends. At lunch, I found a crowd roiling the cafeteria, buzzing with weird energy, jeering and murmuring about a “true miracle.” I charged through, hoping to find her—but found Becky and Patrick at the center, conducting the rapt attention of so many restless kids. They were transformed, utterly unrecognizable: Becky in yards of fabric down to her ankles, no makeup; Patrick in a white button-up that smelled of soap.
“I took the Lord’s name in vain,” Patrick said, “and down came the lightning.” They were holding forth to a central cluster of orbiting sophomores, their new inner circle.
“Patrick, so brave, should have been struck,” Becky said. She gazed up at the drop-tile ceiling, at flickering fluorescents. “But He saved us.”
One thing I did recognize: a familiar gold crucifix swinging from Patrick’s neck.
“What the hell is that?” I burst through the core of sophomores, finger pointing. “Is that
Van’s? Did she give that to you?”
Patrick clutched it, took a step back, grit his teeth. The crowd’s eyes strobed, closing ranks around us.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
“Why are you being so weird?” Becky said.
Sophomores pushed in, crashing up against me. Hot breath on my neck, fists clenched.
“The lightning was nothing!” I said. “My God! It was a freak accident!”
I cut class after lunch to loiter around the student parking lot—when a motorcycle, all chrome and rubber, roared up. It came to a sudden, screeching halt near me.
On the back was Van, screaming. A black bruise down one leg. She ripped off her helmet, stumbled from the bike, limped through the parking lot.
“Are you okay?” I said, running toward her.
“Such a rush!” she said, clearly drunk.
“Does that guy even go to this school?” I asked. Another dude I’d never seen, another interloper, recklessly driving that bike.
She glanced back at him, glassy-eyed. “Who knows.” She laughed, waving as he revved the engine. “Only met last night.”
I still yearned for her, still wanted her pulsing in my arms, still wanted to tell her I loved her. “This is meaningless,” I said instead. “You’re nothing.”
“Neither are you.” As she shoved past, her face contorted into a look I’d never seen, like a jackal grinning. “You really changed.”
“I’m the only one who’s still me!” I yelled as the door clapped shut behind her.
By graduation: Van, a straight A student, had dropped out. Max, who’d been the one about to drop out, went to state college. Becky, who’d once loudly declared her preference for low-stakes hookups, had married Patrick, a former atheist memorizing Bible verses.
I drove the Zamboni and didn’t flirt with anyone. None of it meant a thing.
Seasons crashed, whole years burst. People scattered on the current of their lives.
When I visited one year, Becky and Patrick had a whole litter of children underfoot, too many to keep straight.
“Van’s bouncing from state to state,” Becky said, watching one son slap another on the back of the head. The victim started wailing.
“Partying hard,” Patrick said, still wearing her necklace. “Seems like she’s having fun.”
“Sinful though,” Becky said, picking up the crying boy.
“I hear Max’s professors are excellent,” Patrick said, ignoring a baby spitting up.
“He’s studying to be a probability mathematician,” Becky said, putting down the crying boy to wipe the baby’s face. “Headed for greatness.”
But greatness turned into Vegas. Years later, I flew out and Max offered a tour of hotel rooms and casinos, games of chance and ringing jackpots, gleaming brighter at night than noon.
“You hear Patrick’s starting a church?” he asked as we sat at a blackjack table.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Exactly!” He winked.
“How’s your thesis going?” I asked.
He was quiet as the cards struck the table. Peeking at the hand, he sighed. “I’m done with that,” he finally said, but it sounded like defeat, not triumph. “Anyway, what’s new with you?”
A man in a stiff suit approached, leaned down close to Max. “You’ve been warned not to return. Police are on their way.”
We regrouped at a seedy spot way off the strip, fraying carpet and flickering lights, a joint that hadn’t banned Max because they hadn’t yet noticed him counting cards. Last time I ever saw him—playing the odds hunched over a hand, scamming his way to riches, or at least rent.
Those oddballs, together we’d experienced the absurdity of cosmic wrath, the best friends I ever had. I still reach out from time to time, but they rarely call back: I hear only periodic updates, see only flickers.
“God would have found me,” Patrick said. His tenure as a preacher cut short by rumors of embezzlement, adultery.
None of them credits our fate to that day, that moment.
“True love is meant to be,” Becky said. She raised nine kids and never left his side.
In a matter of seconds, they’d been irrevocably changed.
“You’re obsessed,” Van said. “Stop calling.” A junkie for excitement and adrenaline, she eventually found opioids.
With no way back, day after day, year after year, they kept on changing.
“Odds are I’d be the same person,” Max said, last time we talked. A few days later, he was shot dead in an alley off the strip. Hard to be shocked when nothing means anything.
Whole decades flared and were gone.
On the anniversary, I went up to the park, carting a six-pack like old times. Cracking a beer, I waited for that charge in the air, for hairs trembling at attention—and caught a flash of Van.
Shocks of gray, tattoos covering her arms, marks dotting her inner elbow, Buddhist prayer beads on one wrist. She trudged up the hill, rolled her eyes at me, but asked for a beer. “Shoulda figured you’d be here,” she said. “Remember what we talked about, right before the lightning?”
“Not a word.” Hard living, but she didn’t look bad.
“Your buddies tried to convince me to stay with you,” she said, pulling the tab, “telling me you were such a good friend, optimistic and supportive: ‘He’s going places, my God.’ But after the lightning, we all noticed, you weren’t yourself.”
I looked in the gleam of her eyes, breath catching. “That’s not true.”
She took a long slug of beer, a flush in her cheeks. “We all expected you to be something, somebody big.”
I’d spent years working at the ice rink, in warehouses, perpetually bored.
I set my teeth, inhaled deep. “It’s everyone else who changed.”
“We grew up.” She smirked, took another sip.
I never married, no kids, found it difficult to connect, to find ground, with anyone else.
“I’m the same!” I said, back stiffening.
“Isn’t that the problem?” She started laughing, the sound of another age, and tossed the can. “Anyways, my wife’s waiting.”
A red truck was idling at the bottom of the hill, bare arm dangling from the window.
“See you in the next life,” she called over her shoulder.
But she was right: the bolt, I realized, had fried my capacity for awe, made me immune to wonder, to change.
Or no.
I’d let it.
Watching her dwindle down the hill, I was struck—I was ready to believe. After all that time, as she entered the truck and rumbled off, I was ready to admit it meant something.
I finished the beers alone as the clouds rolled in, sirens wailing way off in the distance.
It meant everything.
Ryan Alan Boyle is a Brooklyn-based editor, writer, and music journalist. His fiction has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Salt Hill, Atticus Review, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. He has also copyedited and proofread multiple New York Times bestsellers and has written and published liner note essays for Grammy-nominated archival albums released by the Numero Group. ryanalanboyle.com