Pool ─ Twisters

1. Girl, Almighty

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chapter one.
girl, almighty

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     FRANKIE knew a thing or two about storms.

In the three years since founding HazardTrack, she had chased seven hurricanes, two wildfires, been snowed in during three blizzards, been caught in four earthquakes, and even rode a helicopter over a volcanic eruption in Hawaii. But tornados were something she never chased.

A hurricane, you can predict ahead of time. You can see the doppler and more or less pinpoint where it'll go, when it's going to let up. The categories are tracked by speed. A category five is a category five, even if it barely hits the coastline. A blizzard, you can tell by the temperatures drop and the cloud density on how much snow you're looking at.

But a tornado? You never really know when one will pop up. You don't really know what it'll do when it does, how strong it'll be. And an EF5 is only an EF5 if it does damage, because that's how you measure tornados. How much destruction they leave in their wake.

That was a fact that always unsettled Frankie; she was fifteen and still in New Orleans when the Joplin EF5 killed 158 people and left an absolutely decimated path in its way. She remembered watching the footage on TV after school of cars being crushed, houses flattened.

You can't really run from a tornado.

But here she is in the middle of Tornado Alley, chewing her lip in between her teeth as the van barrels down a straight and narrow highway. There's a country song on the radio that Lily, who's driving, taps along to on the steering wheel. Dani is in the passenger seat with a book in their hand, Frankie taking the seat behind her.

Boone keeps looking over at her, so she tries to stay zeroed in on the plains and imagining all the history of weather that they've seen. What tornados have carved out the hills, which trees have stood tall through it all.

"You're not a big talker, huh?"

Frankie turns to meet his eyes, playing with the buckle on her belt. She could feel the anxiety bubbling up in her stomach the more she stared out the window. "Just nervous, never chased a tornado before."

Boone shakes his head, "Tyler said you were a storm chaser, I thought."

"Hurricanes, yeah," Frankie smiles at him lightly, pulling out her phone. She's goes into her favorites to a video of her setting up a doppler during the onslaught of Hurricane Zeta a few years back. Turning the phone to him, he watches it intently. "Seen seven hurricanes since grad school. Mainly what I chase — people back home need the data the most."

"You live there? During..."

"Yeah, I was there for Katrina."

For Frankie, it feels like all the warmth is sucked out of the air. For a storm chaser, she sure does hate talking about Katrina, though it's usually the first hurricane people remember. And she can't help but think of her momma, still down in Louisiana in the clinic, still drowning in the gulf water from twenty years ago.

BOONE knows he ain't really got a way with words.

He doesn't know why he kept trying to talk to Frankie on the ride home, other than she was pretty and he wanted to know about her. The tidbits she let fly were like crumbs of a whole plate that he wanted to eat so damn bad. It was like licking a lollipop once and then throwing it away.