Stormy Mood

The weather outside was turning quickly.

My girlfriend approached the table across from me. She carried two cups. One hot cappuccino for herself, and an iced matcha latte for me. We usually switched off who would pay for things like this. This round was on her. Outside, I heard thunder in the distance, and through the open cafe windows, smelled the coming rain. She looked visibly uncomfortable.

"Hey, are you alright?"

"I'm fine. Don't worry about me," she replied.

I reached for the latte. Once she gave it to me, I saw her hand was trembling. Bad weather always made her nervous, and she was stiff even on good days. The sky was growing darker by the minute outside. She sat down, but her eyes continued to glance toward the window every few seconds.

"You don't have to pretend around me, Lorelei. We're all scared of different things."

"No! Katie, it's not- I'm not-" She glanced outside again. The barista and her manager were closing the windows. I could hear the first few drops of rain hitting the hot pavement outside. She sighed. "Can we go to the car? I need to tell you something." She was turning red, and her eyes were welling up.

I grabbed both of our drinks as I stood, and offered my left elbow. "Let's go."

She lifted her glasses to wipe the corners of her eyes dry, then stood and took my arm. Outside, I could see even darker clouds rolling in from the west, and felt the wind whip my long hair around.

"Can you-"

"-take the drinks? Of course," Lorelei said as she grabbed both cups. Her short pixie cut didn't bug her, even in wind this strong. But the incoming storm seemed to be making her tense. I took the key fob for my mom's car and quickly unlocked the blue hatchback, parked a short distance from the cafe door. We scurried over, and got into the front seats.

As soon as the car doors shut, before I even had a chance to turn the car on, the rain started coming down in full force. Dense, insistent waves of raindrops slammed the windshield. And in the noise of the storm, it took me far too long to realize that Lorelei was crying. She let out a choked sound as she exhaled, and I turned to see she had taken her glasses off. Tears were streaming down, and she had both palms over her face.

I reached over to console her. She flinched.

"I'm so sorry! I just can't help it!"

Lorelei and I had been official for only around three months, but I'd known her for years. We had met in middle school when her family first moved to the area. In a tiny suburb on the edge of what could barely be called a city, Pine Bluff didn't have much to offer. And most people were far from supportive when Lorelei came out as a lesbian in the ninth grade. Her dad, an adjunct professor who taught at the university downtown, certainly didn't grow any less cold. But when I figured out I liked girls too, it wasn't in the same nebulous way she seemed to come to that realization. I found out I liked girls, because I realized I liked her.

Her intelligence. Her passion for her interests. The brightness in her voice when she talked to her friends. The way her hands held the pen when she wrote down notes in class. The way she laughed, the way she smiled, the way she whispered when she was telling you a secret. The way her breath felt against my ear when she got that close.

So by now, I thought I knew all her secrets. But this was new.

I had never seen her cry before.

Her glasses, big black frames, now rested upside down on the dashboard. Pine Bluff got its fair share of summer storms, given we were in the middle of the Midwest. The weather didn't pull its punches, but it sure telegraphed them. And Lorelei's mood always got worse, predictably so, when the weather got bad. She seemed to think she hid it well, but I could read her even when she was bottling up whatever was on her mind. She shut down, went flat like a soda that'd been left out for too long. But I'd never seen her implode like this.

But then again, I'd never seen rain coming down this hard, either.

"Lor?" I asked. I didn't dare touch her again. "It's ok. I know you don't like bad weather. We can't help what scares us."

"But it's not… I'm not… It's…"

She couldn't get her words out. The silence between us was filled with the rush of water against metal and glass. A distant light flashed through the window behind her, and thunder rumbled the car moments later. She shivered.

"It's all my fault," she murmured. She took a shaky inhale. "I know you won't believe me, you'll say it's just coincidence. But this is my fault."

"What is? Lor, you've done nothing wrong. It's fine to be scared, it's fine to cry. We can't control our emotions."

"I HAVE TO!"

Lightning struck a tree not 30 feet from the car. The flash of white illuminated the parking lot for a fraction of a second, then red fire and black smoke erupted from where the tree had just stood.

My heart was beating a mile a minute. Lorelei hadn't even turned to look. Something was wrong.

"Listen to me." She grabbed my shoulders. "Listen. I'm telling you it's my fault, because I can't control it. When I can't control my emotions, they come out in other ways." Her eyes were red and puffy, but she was speaking clearly now. "Most of the time, the energy works its way into the atmosphere, and if it's bad enough, the consequences are… meteorological."

I blinked. My breath was coming in shallow. But I knew Lorelei would never hurt me. Her hands were still on my shoulders, trembling.

The red fire of the blown up tree behind her was now smothered by the rain. The air inside the car was humid, and warm, and getting hotter by the minute.

"Are you… Are you saying you control the weather?"

"If I could, this wouldn't be an issue. Control really isn't the right word for it. At best, I impact the weather."

I said nothing. Lorelei began to cry again, and shrunk back into her seat. The rain continued to pour.

I took a deep breath. I realized I was far too hot, so I turned the car on, and turned the AC on full blast. I picked up her drink from the cup holder, and offered it to her. She hesitated, but took it, and took a sip.

"That actually makes a lot of sense." The rain on the windows subsided just the slightest bit. "Why did you never tell me?"

She sniffled. "My father told me never to tell anyone. It runs in the family. He had worked out how to manage his powers by 16, and my grandma had hers on lock by 13. But I turn 18 next October, and I still have no idea how to stop causing these problems for other people."

"So your whole family has to… bottle up your emotions? Or else you cause thunderstorms?"

"Heat waves, cold snaps, thunderstorms, blizzards. If you can name it, we've got a story of someone in the family causing it. We're on a federal watch list. Dad moved us here from Arizona because I kept causing dust storms too close to some of their military testing stations."

It was harder to hear the patter of the rain now. Part of it must have been the air conditioner, and part the fact that she wasn't crying anymore. I reached my hand over to take hers, and gave her a reassuring squeeze.

"Well I think that's rad as hell, Lor."

She giggled. "Really?"

"Seriously! It's epic as shit! You're saying if you get mad enough you can rain thunder and lightning on your foes? Freeze their crops and destroy their airplanes? And you're just allowed to hang out in Pine Bluff, Wisconsin?"

She smiled, wiping the remainder of the tears from her eyes.

"It's not all it's cracked up to be. I'd be conscripted into the military if there were a serious enough threat to the country."

"Damn."

The rain had slowed to a drizzle now. Puddles had filled the dips in the asphalt, and a few people from the cafe braved the elements to check out the tree, or newly created lack thereof, off to our right. No one was paying attention to the interior of the blue hatchback.

"The way I see it," I said, "you don't need to get better at controlling your feelings, you need to get better at expressing them. You said they- what was it? Come out in other ways?"

She nodded.

"Have you tried, like, kickboxing? Starting a screamo band? Really angry… painting? Whatever it would take to find a healthy outlet for things so they don't have meteo- metorical- uh, weather-type effects?"

The rain had petered out completely at this point. A hint of a sunbeam began to peak through the clouds.

Lorelei leaned forward to kiss me.