Great Ball of Light

Picture This . . .

It’s just past midnight, and my brother, Fenton, and I are pushing a wheelbarrow holding our undead grandfather, who we dug up at a cemetery a mile from our farm. There’s one of us on each handle—pushing a sort-of-dead guy is a two-kid job.

We are on a tar and gravel road, so pebbles crunch under the wheelbarrow’s wheel—maybe this will help you see it inside your head. We pass by houses and farms, some with unattended cows. Cows at night, with their dark eyes and splotchy designs, look like creatures from another planet.

Fenton and I stop pushing Grandpa Wade so we can rest.

You’re such a girl, my brother says to me. I could have gone much farther before resting. But he’s shaking blood into his arms just like I’m doing.

And you’re such a donkey butt, I say. I try to make a donkey sound but blow it. Mr. Ed with a bad head cold, let’s call it.

Anyway.

It had been cloudy all day, but when I check the sky I see stars glittering above us. We live in a small farm town, so nothing blocks our view of the sky. That night, the night Fenton and I commit grave robbery for the sake of our family, it seems like the stars are packed ten deep per square foot of sky.

Awe-mazing.

Stars, my grandfather says, pointing at the sky with a crooked finger. He died three years ago in a car wreck, and by all rights he had given up his star-seeing privileges. But a miracle happened, and now he’s seeing stars again.

Watching Grandpa watch the stars, it hits me that I should never take anything for granted, like seeing stars fill up the sky on a warm night in May—and a hundred other things and people I love. Because one day it could all be gone, and if I’m waiting on a miracle to bring it back, I might be waiting for a very long time.

Introductions

My name is Fiona North and I’m nearly thirteen years old. My brother, Fenton, is the same age. We are twins, the fraternal kind, so we don’t much look like each other, except for blue eyes of the exact same shade and earlobes that look a little pulled on.

According to our mom and dad, Fenton was born eleven minutes before I was. I’m still mad at myself for not showing more ambition and being the first one born: What was I waiting for, an invitation? Or, knowing my brother, maybe he pushed me aside so he could be the first one out.

We live on a farm in Deerwood, Montana, that I named Bluebird Acres after we moved there from Great Falls. If you look at a map—a magnifying glass might be helpful—you will find Deerwood down at the bottom, in the center of the state and just east of the Gallatin National Forest.

Deerwood is so small we go to school and shop for groceries in a neighboring town called Red Lodge, which is also small, but big enough to have schools and stores and a gas station and doctors and a place where they hold rodeos during the summer. Sometimes we see a moose roaming around. It’s a cool town.

Our dad is named William, but everyone calls him Will, not Bill. He works on our farm and takes handyman jobs to earn extra cash: it’s hard to make lots of money selling corn, eggs, and goat milk. Sometimes Fenton and I barely see him except at breakfast, especially if he’s going to be on the other side of the county, repairing a fence or patching a roof, or visiting his girlfriend. My brother and I call her the Ice Queen. I’ll tell you more about her later on.

Fenton’s and my mom is named Amanda Carson, and she lives 2,149.41 miles away in New York City, so we only see her for two weeks each summer and hardly ever talk to her on the phone because she is always busy, busy, busy. If you flip through ladies’ magazines at the drugstore with the hope of seeing pictures of women in their underwear—like Fenton does—you might know my mom’s name since she writes articles for those magazines about fashion and makeup and what celebrities do when they aren’t making movies or starring in TV shows.

I think it’s strange that my mother, who carried me in her crowded belly for nine months and fed me and taught me some cool stuff before she left Montana, like how to attract hummingbirds to our property (planting trumpet creepers and bee balm did the trick), and who pretty much lived in jeans and T-shirts, would want to have a job writing about dopey stuff like lipstick and fashion labels, but maybe her parents did not raise her right, or something else went wrong along the way.

There are things Mom and I do have in common. We both love books and writing. I have read all the Harry Potter books, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Lemony Snicket series, the Hunger Games trilogy, and many more: my bedroom is like a miniature library. And now I’m writing my own book, sorta. Hopefully, I won’t totally screw it up, but you can be the judge.

Now, without further delay, I’d like to tell you an incredible story that you might find hard to believe, even though it’s true. It begins on the next page. So why are you still on this one?

Stormy Weather

Like most great stories this one starts with a storm, the kind that will curl your hair due to fright and electricity, and make you wish you were living underground with moles as your neighbors, since that’s the only safe place when nasty storms strike.

Unless of course they are psycho murderer moles. . . .

Anyway.

This particular storm hit at about four thirty that afternoon, a warm day in May. Fenton and I had been home from school for an hour and were watching TV when there was a beep . . . beep . . . beep, and then words scrolled across the screen saying that the National Weather Service in Cheyenne had issued a thunderstorm warning for the following counties, and our county, Carbon County, was one of them. We had nine minutes of peace to enjoy before the thunderstorm attacked our farm, said the scroll.

This storm is capable of producing heavy rain, hail, damaging winds, and possible tornadoes. Those within the path of the storm should take cover immediately.

And kiss your stinky butts good-bye, said Fenton, adding words that were not on the screen. I tried to smile, but it wasn’t working. Ever since I was a baby I’ve been terrified of storms. Back then, according to my mother, I would cry and shake whenever thunder boomed and lightning flashed.

I’m over the crying part, but I’m still frightened of storms. My fear is not something I would admit to Fenton, however. He is brave and often reckless, and I want to be brave too, and slightly less reckless.

Before we could look outside and check on the storm, the phone in the kitchen rang. Fenton was closest, so it was his job to answer it. He stood up and I did too. I followed him into the kitchen, and then huddled close so I could hear our father say over the phone that a bad thunderstorm was coming, so we should go into the storm cellar until it cleared. He also said that he was doing some indoor electrical work and it was going slower than he had planned, so we should have dinner without him.

Love you guys, he said. Fenton and I told our father we loved him, too, then Fenton hung up. I wished I had told Dad that he should take a break from working and hide from the storm. Sometimes parents issue advice to their kids that they do not heed themselves, such as to not stay up too late or you’ll be grumpy the next morning and your hair will be weird and you will hiss at singing birds and tell them to shut their tiny traps if they know what’s good for them.

Fenton turned off the TV, then we went outside, stood on the porch, and looked west, to see what the storm was doing. It seemed like we were looking at every kind of cloud God had ever invented. There were tall clouds and flat ones and thick ones and wispy ones. Some were smooth, others had ruffles and layers. Cirrus clouds and stratus clouds and other kinds of clouds with names I couldn’t remember. There were white clouds and gray ones and purple ones and blue ones, and some black clouds were scooting lower than the other clouds like they didn’t want to be seen with them.

Do you think we’ll see a twister today? I asked Fenton, the self-proclaimed expert on all matters of the world—surely he would have an opinion.

I sure hope so. He looked at the clouds like he was trying to will them into forming a funnel cloud, that twisting finger of doom.

Me too, I agreed, trying to sound tough as nails, though I didn’t really want to see a tornado, not that day, not ever. Anything that kills people and animals and wrecks their homes is no friend of mine, no matter how cool they look on TV.

We heard a goat bleating out back and remembered our father’s other instruction, to make sure the animals were in the barn or their coop. Our animal inventory that day included three goats, eleven chickens, two ducks, and two cats. One thing I’ve learned about farm animals is that they have a better sense that a storm is coming than most people. So we didn’t have much work to do. Daisy the one-eared goat needed to be pushed and spooked and encouraged to go inside the barn, but all the other animals, except the cats, were sheltered. We figured that Piedmont (orange) and Screech (black) had enough sense to find their own shelter when the rain started. Sure enough, when thunder boomed far off, Piedmont scrambled down from the highest branch of the old dead maple tree out front, his favorite perch, and tore off for safer quarters.

Fenton and I peered again at the sky. Storm clouds, all of them looking darker and meaner than they had three minutes ago, seemed to be racing to see which one could get to us first. There was a flash of lightning in the distance, and thunder growled and tried to scare us. We could see sheets of rain falling three farms over, though our property was still dry. But the wind was crazy, coming from every direction and tugging at our clothes like it was rudely trying to turn us into naked people.

Time to go in the storm cellar, I said, grabbing Fenton’s arm.

He jerked away. We have another minute or two. Don’t be such a big baby.

Another streak of lightning cut through the sky. I glared at Fenton. Everyone with a working brain knows that just because lightning from an approaching storm isn’t directly above you, that does not mean you are safe.

Before I could spit out any choice words, Mother Nature put on a demonstration as to why Fenton’s assumption of safety was dead wrong. A third lightning bolt shot out of the sky. This one blasted into the lawn about twenty feet in front of us, not far from the dead maple tree, briefly setting a patch of grass on fire and causing every hair I owned to shoot straight out.

Immediately thunder sonic-boomed, knocking us on our butts. I had never heard of lightning striking the ground, or thunder knocking down kids. Things were not adding up right in my head. Two plus two equals frog.

Did you see the lightning strike the lawn? Fenton cried out as we clambered to our feet and slapped our ears. Mine were pounding but seemed to hear okay.

I saw it, heard it, and felt it, I said. We could have been killed. Storm cellar. Now!

Even though I’m eleven minutes younger than Fenton, on the rare occasions when I use my I’m-in-charge-and-I-know-what’s-best voice he’ll normally go along with my wishes. And so he did that day, briefly.

We were scooting to the storm cellar, wind cutting at us and electricity charging up the air, when my brother looked back at where the lightning bolt had struck the grass and said, Hey, Fiona, look at what the lightning did!

That was when I split myself in two, amoeba style. (A process called binary fission, in case you haven’t been paying attention in science class.)

Part of me, including some of my best elements like smartness and common sense and the will toward self-preservation, urged me to keep going to the storm cellar, to not even look back for a quick second to see what Fenton was talking about.

But I’m also made up of elements such as curiosity, and I have learned that curiosity owns a big roll of duct tape and likes to tape over the mouths of those other, more sensible voices, leaving it the loudest.

So I stopped and looked back, and saw something bizarre: the lightning had cut a crater into the yard, about a foot wide. Steam rose out of it. It was creepy looking, like the earth had been gashed and was leaking steam.

My first thought was that I had seen this movie before. The movie where lightning or a space ray blasts a hole in the ground, and then two kids of questionable brain wattage step closer to the hole to investigate, and as soon as they stick their heads above the crater—slurp!—an alien monster pulls them into its huge mouth and gobbles them up in three bites.

Fenton! Storm cellar! I cried. Besides the threat of being eaten by an alien monster, the storm was nearly on top of us. Pinging drops of rain from the nearing sheets were hurling themselves at us, a warning that zillions of their friends were on the way.

Hang on a sec, Fi, he said. I have to see what’s down there. Sometimes Fenton gets a look on his face that is part sinister, part curiosity, and part thrill from doing something dangerous. That triple combo was in play at that moment, and I knew, as I always did in those situations, that nothing I said or did would stop him from looking into the hole in our lawn, alien monsters be darned.

Fenton inched closer to the steaming crater, ignoring the thickening rain and thunder booms.

My brain was screaming: run to the cellar, open the doors, and hide; save yourself from the thunderstorm and whatever was inside the crater (my logical self had sent the alien monster packing). But the non-screaming-brain part of me didn’t want to leave Fenton alone outside to face hazards from the storm. He was my brother and my twin, and in the end I couldn’t talk myself into saving my skin and abandoning him.

So I caught up to Fenton. By then the storm was at full power; rain plastered my clothes to my body and fogged up my eyes.

As we approached the crater I heard a hissing sound and scientifically guessed that it was caused by hot steam rising from the hole in the ground running into cooler raindrops, an unhappy chemical collision, and so the hissing.

Let’s go to the storm cellar like Dad told us to do, I said, a waste of words since there would be no corralling Fenton before he had a chance to see into the crater. I imagined how our father would react when he got the news that his kids had been killed by a lightning storm. It would ruin him. He loved us a lot.

One thing I’ve learned from my many escapades with Fenton is