“I love the rain!” he exclaims.

The band wails, telling us to let go of everything.

It’s coming down harder now, and small puddles form in the uneven grassy plain.

Jack turns to me and kicks water from a small puddle in my direction, drenching my legs. He rests his arm on top of my shoulder and says, “I love the rain.”

Without warming, he sprints through the grass, and it looks like he’s headed toward the sheltered pavilion where everybody else seems to have gone, but he’s really just running in circles, splashing through puddles and yelling, “Woooooo!”

Cool rainwater snakes into the collar of my shirt, sliding down my back, making me shiver. Let go of everything repeats over and over again in my mind.

I stretch my arms and feel every single drop of rain hit my body.

The grass squishes beneath me, and I sink into the mud.

I close my eyes and feel the world move around me.

When I open them, the floodlights on the stage streak across the crowd, and for a second, it looks like lightning; Jack’s face is lit up, like he’s holding a bolt of light in his hands. The strobe light moves, hitting me—and Jack, not missing a beat, “tosses” the lightning toward me. I pretend to grab it, hold it in my hands, feel its imaginary power flow through me.

I push it up toward the sky as the rain pours down on us.

On Jack and me.

Like we’re the only two people left on the entire slope.

In the world.

At least for the length of the song, I experience true magic.

7

I shut the door to my room after putting Benny to bed.

No joke, he’s like a toddler needing to be tucked in after being tuckered out by a concert in the rain. Granted, he drank whatever was in Rae’s flask, so by the time the show was over, he was gone.

The suite is pretty quiet. The rest of the guys must still be out at parties. The only person here is Jack, who lounges on one of the chairs in the common room.

“This is not a bad setup,” he says.

“It serves its purpose.” I teeter on my heels a bit, not really sure what happens now. Jack helped me get Benny back, and I figured once that was done, he’d leave.

But he’s still here.

And neither of us is saying anything.

“I want to do something. I’m not ready to go back to my dorm,” Jack says, finally cutting through the awkward silence.

I want to say, “I’ll do anything with you.” What I actually say is, “What do you have in mind?”

Looking out the window, he stands and says, “It’s stopped raining. Come on!”

He doesn’t tell me where we’re going, but I follow him as we make our way across the dark campus. A few streetlamps along the walkways shine little spotlights for us, and when he walks under one, I study the way the golden-blond hairs on the back of his head swirl into a cowlick. I live for it every time we emerge from the darkness.