But Rex wasn’t that bad. He was different, on a separate channel, free from the commotion of the daylight crowd. His had been the first individual thoughts she’d ever filtered from among the hideous mass, and she could still read him better than anyone.

Melissa could feel his excitement clearly, his hunger to know. She could taste his impatience, sharp and insistent over his usual calm.

She decided to keep him waiting. “Nice storm last night.”

“Yeah. I went looking for lightning for a while.”

“Me too, kind of. Just got soggy, though.”

“Some night we’ll get one, Cowgirl.”

She snorted at the childhood nickname but muttered, “Sure. Some night.”

Back when they were little kids, when it was just the two of them, they had always tried to find a streak of lightning. A bolt that had struck at exactly the right moment and gone to ground close enough to reach before time ran out. Once, years ago, they’d spent the whole hour biking toward a bright, jagged spur on the horizon. But they hadn’t made it all the way, not even close. It’d been a lot farther away than it had looked. Riding back in the falling rain took much longer, of course, and by the time they’d made it home they were soaking.

Melissa had never been quite sure what they were supposed to do with a streak once they found one. Rex never said much about that. She could sense he wasn’t totally sure about it himself. But he’d read something somewhere on one of his trips.

School grew nearer, the early morning collision of struggle and apprehension building from taste to clamor, the bitterness on her tongue expanding to a cacophony that assaulted her entire mind. Melissa knew she’d have to put her headphones on soon just to make it until classes started. She slowed the old Ford. It was always hard to drive this close, especially at the beginning of the year. She hoped her usual spot was free, behind a Dumpster in the vacant lot across the street from Bixby High. Parking anywhere else would take thinking. The school parking lot itself was too close to the maelstrom for her to drive safely.

“I hate that place,” she managed.

Rex looked at her. His plain, focused thoughts made things better for a moment, and she was able to take a deep breath.

“There’s a reason for all this,” he said.

A reason for the way she was? For the agony she felt every day? “Yeah. To make my life suck.”

“No. Something really important.”

“Thanks.” The Ford’s suspension squealed beneath them as she took a turn too sharply. Rex’s mind flinched, but not because of her driving. He hated hurting her, she knew.

“I didn’t mean that your life wasn’t—”