whirlwind | tyler owens

i. sixth sense

Alice Tatum Finch always had an eye for chaos, more specifically, the beauty that can be found in the center of the destruction. It wasn't an odd trait that the girl had, no, it practically ran in her bloodline.

Growing up on a lonesome farm in Oklahoma, Alice idolized her older sister, Addy Finch. The eldest blonde, being only three years older than Alice, had been majoring in meteorology at Muskogee State University. Addy was always calling her younger sister from her dorm room late at night to talk about the cool graduate assistants and Ph.D. students she was friends with and new projects they were working on. Conversing back on forth through the early hours of the morning for almost two years now, the younger sister began to take an interest in weather, researching all the patterns and storm types, especially having a huge hyper-fixation of tornadoes, just like her older sister.

Alice Finch was just a little different though, more so, her brain was different. When she processed information, it was like it stored in her brain forever, never letting her forget one single detail. Sure, this helped a lot when she would do research about the storm topics her sister would be studying at college, just wanting to understand more about the huge wind funnels she had become so obsessed with, but it didn't help when every bad memory remained engraved in her mind like a tattooed burn.

Both Finch girls did have something else in common though, besides both being blonde and having an odd liking to weather. In fact, both of their favorite time of year was when the late spring and early summer finally began to approach on the year's horizon, only because it meant that warmer weather was approaching, and that Addy was coming back home for the summer.

The sixteen-year-old practically tackled her nineteen-year-old sister as soon as she stepped foot right back into their childhood home on their farm, eager to hear about the cool projects she had done while she was away during her sophomore year, only to take a step back and freeze when she realized Addy had not returned alone.

"Alice, these are my friends I was telling you about. They all live around the area and we're working on Kate's cool project," the glasses-wearing blonde smiled at the sixteen-year-old, introducing each person one by one.

"Hey, it's all of our project, not just Kate's," one of the boys, Praveen, complained causing everyone to laugh quietly.

"Is it about tornadoes?" Alice asked, wide-eyed as she looked around the room of older adults who had all been working in the field that the teen could only dream of.

"Yeah, it's Kate's favorite part of the weather," Jeb, who Alice could easily tell was Kate's boyfriend by the way he smiled at her, nodded over towards another blonde woman.

"I'm trying to get a grant to help me on my research for taming tornadoes. We're just trying to see if we can even weaken one right now," Kate laughed, southern accent thick like Addy's as she smiled at the young teen.

"Weaken tornadoes? How do you do that?" Alice asked, moving closer to see if she could take a peek at Kate's notebook that she had laid on the table, wanting to be included in the discussion surrounding her favorite topic.

"You don't need to worry about it, kid," Javi, the data collector of the group, tried to brush off, not really wanting a kid to bother them while they were at Addy's house for a quick bite to eat, before they had to leave again to go camping out in a field where Kate sensed strong weather formations.

"I just want to hear some of Kate's ideas. Addy told me she was working on her Ph.D right?" Alice stuttered back, cheeks burning after the older man blatantly tried to get her to exit the conversation.

Everyone looked at the youngest blonde in their group, Addy shrugging as she went through the fridge in the kitchen, around where they all remained huddled, "What? We have like daily phone calls for gossip. Plus, she is actually really interested in tornadoes, has this weird sixth sense for when tornadoes are gonna happen, kinda like Kate."