Watchers

Lightning Boy

I didn't get it. I mean, seriously. I wasn't comprehending it. Adam was standing there telling me that he'd just opened that massive locked trunk in the treehouse to find stacks of old papers there. And they looked real old. They were off-color and torn at the edges; the paper was practically rotting in front of us.

"Didn't that really happen to you?" Adam asked me.

I'd been reawakened to the world. "Huh? What?"

"Didn't you run off in a storm one time? I remember you telling me something like that. You got lost when you were real little and they found you in a field."

"Well, yeah," I said, still kind of wandering through my murky mind. "But I don't really remember it. And I'm pretty sure I didn't get struck by lightning or anything."

"But if you can't remember, how could you know?"

"What are you talking about? I think I'd remember getting hit by lightning. I mean, that doesn't just happen without a person noticing. Besides, what are you trying to get at—that somebody decided to write a story about me? No way, Adam. No stupid way." I was picking up on it now. He was shooting me these looks, and I could tell what they meant. It was so weird. I'd never been struck by lightning, anyway. At least, not that I could remember.

Adam dropped his stack of papers on the rug. With the strangest expression I'd ever seen on him, he said, "It's weirder than ever, I admit it. But you have to look at these, Cole. I didn't read it all, but I skimmed through them. Every one of these papers has stories on it about a kid named Lightning Cole. Who knows if it's about you or not, but we should read and figure this out. There are a ton more papers in that trunk. These were just right on top; the rest were tied in bundles. I don't have any idea what the rest of it all was . . . maybe it's nothing. But I grabbed this bunch and it just happened to sound familiar."

"Familiar?" I said quietly, wonderingly.

He hesitated, didn't talk.

I knew he wouldn't. He was waiting for me to say something, so I did. "You can probably stay. My mom won't care. Let's read this junk." I said it with a great big sigh, but Adam knew I wanted him there. I wasn't going to read all of the papers by myself, especially since the thought of what might be written on them sort of creeped me out.

So Adam made himself comfortable on the floor of my bedroom. He plopped down onto the carpet, his pants spreading out like a garbage bag across the floor. At least he was wearing a T-shirt. It said Punks R' Us in silvery metallic letters. He'd changed since school for some reason. Adam was more picky about his clothes than anyone I knew, but when he was just coming over to my house, he didn't get so dressed up.

With me reading aloud (because reading was Adam's worst subject), the two of us started off on what would be the first step in our believing the unbelievable. We shouldn't have read those papers. I sometimes wish I'd never sat there with Adam and read aloud that pack of stories that very oddly seemed to fit a lot of things about myself. Like Adam had said, it was a weird coincidence: the similarities between what was in those pages and the boring old things about my own life. Real connections were there. Like the time the kid in the stories saved his brother when he fell through ice. (I'd once pulled Corey out of Buck Creek Pond when he was six and trying to skate on it.) And when Lightning Cole climbed to the top of a monument and jumped off of it. (One time I'd been dared to climb the Goldenrock City Hall steeple, and I'd done it. Of course, my jump was more of a fall, but nobody ever knew that because I executed it so well.) Most coincidental of all, though, was the story that told of Lightning Cole escaping from a vast galloping pig by running like the speed of light. (Hadn't Adam and I just gotten away from the Abominable Ham a day earlier?)