I walked down the street, kicking a stone in front of me. The delicatessen next to the ARCO station was empty. I could see Big Betsy, the only waitress who worked there, wiping the counters and arranging the laminated menus. The ARCO station was quiet, too. A mechanic sat on a chair outside and considered the sky. “Looks like rain,” he called over to us.

“Sure does,” Sage shouted back in a wide drawl. Sometimes she spoke like she was from the deepest part of the South. “Can’t help it,” she’d say if I teased her. “The Charlotte and Grady effect.”

From the west, I could see the King of Prussia 102 lumbering toward us up Route 23. The big silver bus had a rounded front and reminded me of films from the 1950s and ’60s. I couldn’t see anything through the tinted windows except single silhouettes of other passengers. The bus made a hiss as it came to a full stop, and the doors unfolded.

“Well, someone has to pour coffee for the blue-haired brigade.”

“And someone has to get rained on,” I said. We both looked at the sky.

“Damn, it’s dark,” Sage said. A high-stacked dirty cloud with a purple-black underbelly hung above us. Sage climbed the steps of the bus, raised her shoes in a half-wave as the doors folded shut and she disappeared.

I set off back up the hill, walking fast. I didn’t mind rain, but lightning terrified me. I entered the woods. It wasn’t a safe place for lightning storms, but neither were open fields; I couldn’t remember which was safer. I started to run. This time of year the trail got overgrown in parts, and I pushed through, turning my face away from stray branches and thorns. I heard a rumble and wasn’t sure if it was distant thunder or a tractor trailer down on the highway. The air smelled like electricity, metallic and acrid; the temperature was falling and the wind had started. Bundles of treetops swayed high in the canopy. I saw a flash and a few seconds later heard a roll of thunder. I kept running. On the next flash I counted the seconds between it and the thunder. Five seconds equaled one mile. It was close.