David

From the time David had been fourteen, he'd taken the train to the Chocolate Factory every morning. It was a strange, cynical name for school, coined by what should have been impressionable children. It was, of course, a very direct reference to a book mostly all of David's ilk had read in the third grade - a story of a boy who, by the power of good fortune and upstanding character, had lifted his house full of sickly grandparents out of poverty.

The analogy lost its legs quickly. Admissions were not a matter of luck but one of standardized testing, to the benefit of cram schools and university students who hoped to make a buck from tutoring far and wide.

Most of David's peers could be divided in two ways - those who had bought into this ecosystem of academic success at all costs and those who would do anything to prove that they were special and unique and not like all the other students.

It was, allegedly, a healthy and sustainable system that had been in place for decades - where the former estimated their self worth on academic success and the latter made trouble in any way they could.

Everyone took the train to school every morning, usually with or in the vicinity of the handful of friends and acquaintances they'd known their entire lives who also managed to find a golden ticket. The line in David's neighborhood ran every six minutes during rush hours and the same groups of people usually caught the same trains.

When David ran two trains late, he would always see Jack on the platform. They weren't friends but they were friendly. Jack was usually pretty funny but only because they caught up with one another infrequently.

Jack had the habit of telling the same jokes over and over until David could likely regurgitate them, verbatim. He came up with new material in the span of several weeks or months.

Even after years of practice, Jack was unable to keep a straight face before delivering a punchline, so he was always happy to see David, who would reliably attempt to find him funny.

"Most people don't survive getting hit by lightning but there was this one dude in Minnesota, man. Was it Minnesota? It was some hick state. He got hit by lightning, like, five times or something."

Jack would give a mournful look here, with a side of giggles which escaped from him like the sound of rusty door hinges. "He died recently. But not because of getting hit by lightning, of course. He killed himself. Committed suicide because his girl left him for some other dude. Imagine that. God himself couldn't kill the guy, so he decided to send in the experts."

The delivery was all Jack and, unfortunately, on par with what David had come to expect after years of experience. David wondered if it had been too clever a story for Jack to have come up with it on his own. Jack usually told jokes about farting or terrorism.

David knew that this was the most absurd train of thought anyone had ever had after being struck by lightning.

It was way better than thinking about the searing pain that had returned in his eyes. David supposed if nothing had happened, he would have felt pretty dumb about squeezing his eyes shut and leaning across a table to grab onto Alice dramatically.

But it had happened, so it was clearly just good sense. The dull, throbbing ache behind his eyes, which had mostly recovered from his first encounter with the storm, had returned to its original intensity or worse.

He was still clinging onto Alice, who still slept blissfully perched on her elbow like stilts, completely unfazed by the lightning.

In truth, David found himself underwhelmed. Mr. Watterson had been more than ten feet from the original point of impact. He looked to the windows which lined the wall behind Alice and their distinct lack of glass. Most of the damage had been caused by the blast but it still didn't quite add up when he looked towards the ceiling.

A jagged hole, slightly smaller than the one left by the first bolt, still tore the ceiling open to reveal the clouds overhead. David thought of the molten slag which would have started a fire had a water pipe not burst and dumped a constant flow of water onto it.

David had expected the pair of them to resemble the bubbling pile of roofing, timber and glass from the shattered lights.

He glanced at the pair of double doors marked with a glowing exit sign which didn't quite close. Maybe the Library wouldn't see much flooding after all, even if the creeping puddle formed by the first disaster had made it almost halfway through the library.

At least his sight hadn't gone blurry like it had after the initial explosion. He wasn't sure how long he'd been rendered unconscious after the lightning bolt which officially found him and Alice but when he'd jolted back into consciousness, his chin was on her shoulder and he was hanging at such an angle that the table between them supported more of his weight than his legs.

He wasn't sure why he'd not let go of her yet. The thought that he had a bad feeling about not being in her immediate vicinity sounded ridiculous and vaguely disingenuous even in his own head.

She was pretty and he liked talking to her. But she was also someone he didn't actually know very well, no matter how ridiculous it was that he'd been the only person who'd come to listen to her play the guqin.

But it was a bit of an unusual situation and it got more unusual still, when he noticed that Alice was very warm, too warm.

He was three inches from her, his feet firmly planted on the ground across the table from her when he realized that she was all but radiating heat - not quite hot enough to fry an egg on but definitely closer than anyone running a high fever.

But she remained as still as stone, as motionless as a portrait. She was still smiling slightly, still sleeping with deceptive lightness. She looked for all the world like a girl who'd dozed off in the library while reading something she really enjoyed.

Maybe how calm she looked was contagious. His heart had been pounding almost dangerously before the lightning strike. Now, as he held Alice in his arms, he could still feel his pulse with unnatural clarity, with each beat like the falling of a hammer. He expected that if it had been any more noticeable, he'd be physically convulsing.

His heartbeat was slow as the storm carried on up high.

He chose not to be concerned and discovered that it was pleasant. He'd been caught between desperation, panic and mania since the beginning of this ordeal. It was soothing, to believe that it had passed, even if not everything was quite right.

David lost track of time.

He still hadn't untangled himself from Alice but he felt like he was on the verge of falling asleep himself and let the heavy, steady thumping calm him down as well.

The thunder rumbled with renewed anger but David could not even remember in detail how he'd arrived at that overwhelming physical terror which had overtaken him moments before the lightning had struck them.

Perhaps he was more difficult to impress now - he had become acclimated to surprises. The thunder rumbled again, long and loud, but David was busy studying the contours of Alice's face, the curvature of her nose, her proud chin, the strands of hair which had escaped from her ponytail and the ones that had not been caught to begin with.

Alice's eyelashes fluttered.

Before David could let go of her and pull himself away, her eyes snapped open to find his own. Their noses were nearly touching.

David didn't usually feel the need to explain himself to anyone, but he could already feel a particularly potent strain of embarrassment and chagrin coloring his face.

He opened his mouth to tell her that he was leaning across the table with his arms around her because they were being struck by lightning, as if that could possibly make any sense at all, but everything about it was so ridiculous and inconsistent even in his thoughts he couldn't think of anything.

"Don't," Alice warned.

There was a slight rasp to her voice as though she hadn't spoken for days. The slight smile was gone, replaced by an expression too neutral to represent her thoughts, especially in this sort of situation.

To his surprise, she leaned forwards, just short of standing, and her arms slipped over his own and her wrists found his shoulders. Her fingers, just past him, clasped themselves just under the back of his neck.

"Don't let go." Her lips had become a grim, determined line. Her eyes were also determined, and worried.

"It's not over yet." She stood fully and then pulled herself up, surprising him.

He let go of her to steady himself, palms flat on the table as she lifted herself up over. Alice had managed to begin in her chair across from him and end on the edge of the table, her legs dangling before him, still taking care to keep ahold of him.

She looked at him expectantly, then sighed and pulled his arms around her again in a surprisingly intimate manner. Her knees rested against his stomach casually and their faces were a few inches apart again.

"The first one was so much worse. I thought we were already dead when it hit us," said David.

Alice looked a little disturbed at the thought.

“I felt it,” she said.

David would have believed otherwise. He thought she must have been the only person who wasn’t affected by the first lightning strike in the library. David quietly explained his thoughts on the library and the blast, about the air itself going off like a bomb, gesturing at the windows, the pool left behind by the burst water pipe, Mr. Watterson and the lighting tubes above them.

He jerked upright in surprise.

"What's wrong?" Alice asked, alarmed at the sudden movement.

"The lights are gone and it's gotten dark outside." David frowned. "It's nothing important, I guess my eyes have adjusted to the low light. At least the storm's died down."

It was true, the rain had stopped, at least for the moment.

Alice gave a heavy sigh. "I don't think it'll be over yet. It's too quiet."

It was strange, now that she mentioned it. David looked through the windows over Alice's shoulder. The trees, planted at regular distances from the building in regulation intervals along every city block, shook from the memory of the howling wind but were more or less still.

"I think this could be considered the eye of the storm. It's too angry to be finished with us."

It was a little too much to hear her vocalize those thoughts which gave a voice to the storm, which had found them with lightning. David opened his mouth again but couldn't quite gather his thoughts into anything coherent, so he chose to appear a shade dismissive, if not derisive.

Alice narrowed her eyes and pulled back from him slightly, clearly angry. "You can lie to yourself all you want but don't push it onto me."

Her words hit him like a splash of cold water. He closed his eyes and exhaled heavily. "What is it, even?" he finally asked.

Her gaze softened from something accusatory to a rather annoyed thoughtfulness but she drew him in closer. He could feel her hands, which had been peacefully relaxed against his back tap out a tense rhythm between his neck and his spine.