Young Writers Society

I always feel it in my bones first. My right arm and my left leg, muscles tensing up, bone grinding against bone in my joints. Soon, it radiates outward, warming my whole body, a joyous yet terrifying feeling at the same time. The very instant this feeling reaches my heart is when I always see the first flash of lightning.

Then, all the pain disappears, and I feel only a glowing warmth. When the storm finally ends, the feeling ceases, and instead I’m left with only a dull stinging ache on both of my palms and the heel of my left foot.

Point of entry, point of exit. It came in through one of my hands, then split and one half went out through the other hand while the other went out through my foot. From the wound it left where it exited, you’d think it’d really truly be gone. But it’s not. It has stayed with me, scars on the outside, scars on the inside, scars on my mind, still circulating in my body, as much a part of me as my own blood.

The most terrifying thing in the world is white light. At least once a week, I still wake up screaming, and when everyone asks me why, I tell them I felt it again, saw it jigsaw-slice open the sky. “That’s ridiculous,” they say. “You know lightning never strikes twice.”

But that doesn’t explain why after that dream, I can feel the charge circulating through my veins, as fresh as it was ten years ago.



There are fifty voicemails on my phone. I know for a fact they’ve called me more times than this, but my phone will only hold the most recent fifty. Eighteen from Nick, thirty-two from Cole. He must be frantic.

Several times, I looked at my phone buzzing beside me and saw the name Cole on the screen, and almost answered. No, I told myself. This is what’s best for the both of us.

Now, on the bench seat beside me at some random Wendy’s, my phone buzzes again. New messages! it says. I pick it up and turn it off, then toss it onto the tabletop. It bumps against the ketchup jar.

I’ll be getting rid of the phone soon anyway. It’s not so much that I don’t want them to contact me, but that I don’t want to tempt myself to contact them. He’s too good of a person to be bothered with this.

This is what is happening, now that they have realized I am gone. Right away, he and Nick will call my mom and the police. But what they don’t know is that twenty-four hours have to go by before someone is considered a missing person, and by then I will be long gone. No one will find me because I’m used to blending in.

A few months will pass, and I will be eighteen then, a legal adult and able to live on my own. I will not come back, and Cole will grieve when they realize I’m gone for good, and then he will move on with his life. He will go to MIT with that scholarship, and he’ll play basketball there, and then he will graduate and become an awesome person with a high-paying job, a beautiful wife who is nothing like me, a big brick house, and a dog.

He’ll be pained, of course.

But if I stay, because he is such a good person he will sacrifice himself for me, and he won’t have a future.

As it is, I don’t have one either, but to be honest I couldn’t care less about myself. I’m doing this for everyone else.

I take another bite of the juicy burger sitting on its paper wrapper in front of me. It’s positively disgusting, but I force it down anyway because, let’s face it, the money I have isn’t going to last forever and who knows how long it’s going to be before I have another real meal?

I’m the only customer here at Wendy’s. A tired looking old woman walks around cleaning all the tables. She keeps shooting me glances; I’m starting to wonder if I’ve stayed past closing time or something.

Cole and I were supposed to have a double date tonight with Nick and Chelsea. Olive Garden, and then a movie. Instead, I’m here at Wendy’s all by myself. I wonder what ended up happening with the would-have-been date. And what Chelsea knows. They’re keeping her in the dark, no doubt. She’s pretty easy to fool.

The sick yellowish lighting here is giving me a headache. Not surprising, really, everything gives me a headache nowadays, especially since I’m not taking my medication anymore. I can deal. It’ll be alright. Besides, it’s not for long anyways. What, six months from now? When all of this will have blown over and I’ll be eighteen. Easy. Simple. I just have to stay away until then.

I’m not taking my seizure meds either. That’s a bigger deal than the migraines I suppose, but I really can’t take them anymore. I haven’t had a seizure since I was thirteen anyways. Didn’t the doctor say I could grow out of them?

I take a final bite out of my burger - I really can’t eat any more of it - then wrap it up in the greasy paper and dump it into the trash bin behind. The cleaning woman is staring at me again - I think she needs to wipe off my table - so I grab all of my stuff and head out the door.

The car - I’ll have to ditch the car soon after I ditch the phone. People will be searching for my license plate. But I can’t get rid of them both in the same area; I will need to spread it out.

I amaze myself at the kind of detailed planning I’m putting into this. I think maybe it’s a subconscious defense mechanism; I need to get as far as I can, as much permanent done as I can, before reality sits in and I miss Cole and my family. That’s when I will want to turn back, to forget this all happened, but if I do everything serious now, I won’t be able to.

I settle into the car seat and take a deep breath. This - this leaving home - is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

But I have to. There is no other choice.

I grit my teeth and pull my phone out of my pocket; I’ll get rid of it now and find some way to get rid of the car later. First, I break the screen off the keyboard, then pull out the battery and throw them all out the window onto the road I am parked parallel to, where they will be run over loads of times and with any luck unsearchable before anyone thinks of tracking my phone.

I pull out of the lot and purposefully swerve to make sure I hit every last piece of my contact to my former life.