The Way Electricity Tastes

The first time that I met Adam, we were both sitting outside the principal's office. Both of us sported the beginnings of bruises on our knuckles and faces.

It wasn't us that fought, necessarily. Our friend groups had disagreed about something stupid, and instead of just, you know, talking it out like the responsible young adults that we were supposed to be, we had come to the hormone-fueled conclusion that fighting it out with fists was a significantly more conclusive alternative.

Anyways.

We had ended fighting each other, I guess, and while the rest of our friends had the sense to scramble away when they saw the administration coming, we were so caught up in each other that we didn't realize everyone else was gone.

Obviously, administration was not happy, and we ended up sitting next to each other, sporting matching bruises and holding bags of crushed ice against various scrapes. I don't think that there was ever any actual animosity between us. We'd fought, sure, but neither of us had ever actually done anything to provoke the other.

Naturally, it was the start of a brilliant friendship.

Well it was, and it stayed that way, but about a year after we had started being friends I found myself starting to realize that something was up. It was a honey-soaked summer day and we had just been hiking, and were now sitting on his back porch, glasses of lemonade sweating cold beads over the backs of our hands.

I looked at him and all I could see was the way that the setting sun was catching his eyelashes and how his throat moved when he went to swallow. That typical love story moment, you know: when the camera zooms in and the music starts playing all butter-like. It's that, but I don't realize it at the time and I just brush it off.

I don't tell him.

I don't even realize I need to.

Then it's the next year and that stage in between summer and fall, where the days are hot but the nights are cold enough that you always need a sweater but never bring one.

It's storming out.

It's storming out and it's the type of storm where you feel like something will go wrong at any second. It's the way that the weather seems sinister and the electricity collects between your teeth and on top of your tongue. Every so often lightning flashes, day-bright.

He's sitting in the church with me, all legs and limbs. He's climbed up into the stained glass window and every time lightning strikes he lights up in these reds and yellows, and it's almost comforting in some sort of sadistic way.

This is the house of the lord. This is the house where He is king. But He is also a teenage boy and the only thing godly about him is the way that he grins.

There's a key in his hands. Brass, maybe? I watch it twist and bend around his fingers. He flips his hand, offers it to me with an open palm.

"Want it?"

"Hell no. If your ass is insane enough to think of this, your ass gets to be the one to do it."

He smiles. Flips his palm back over. Smiles again, a flash of gold.

He pockets the key, standing up from his perch in the glass. As he does, lightning strikes the ground outside, and with his back turned to the window, it lights up like a painting.

Silhouette of a Boy.

Artist: Unknown

Asking Price: Not for Sale

I laugh.

"Are you actually doing this?"

"I mean, why the hell not?"

He jumps down to where I stand, the both of us wincing as his sneakers meet damp, rotting wood. The supports creak under the weight of the two of us, and exchanging a glace, we head back down to the solid ground of the church. Two teenage boys at the pulpit.

The audience?

The night.

The sermon?

Key versus storm. In that order.

The air feels heavy and I guess that he doesn't like that, because he grabs my hand and starts running towards the open door that's serving as a backdrop to the pews.

I run with him, let him hold my hand until we're outside, panting a little bit, completely soaked, sporting identical teeth-filled grins.

He lets go of my hand. Smiles. Wipes his hand on his jeans and pulls the key out of his back pocket.

"Are you seriously going to do this?"

"I mean, it seems kind of fitting. If God's watching me, then I guess he'll show it."

"By doing what, exactly? Saving you or killing you?"

"Who knows? I guess we'll find out."

"Christ. What the fuck?"

"Whatever man. I just think it'll be a fun story. No God needed."

He spits this last sentence out from in between his teeth, in the kind of motion that ends in a hybrid between a grimace and a smile, but is somehow neither.

He turns away, key in his hand. I watch him walk towards this open space in the field that borders our vacant church, squirming a little as he does, like he thinks that I might judge him by his walk. I don't.

Time stills.

I still.

There's a moment of weighted silence, like we both think that something's going to happen, like Jesus is going to walk out of the stained glass window and take away the key.

Spoiler alert: Jesus is made of glass, and does not in fact do anything but be glass, raindrops collecting along his fragile forehead and rolling down his temples like sweat.

I turn towards Adam, putting the glass at my back.

I miss it at first. I think that the lightening strikes behind him, once again rendering him a silhouette, albeit a harsher one than before.

But once my eyes have readjusted to the sudden, split-second reappearance of day, I see that the lightning is not in fact in from of him.

It's running through him.

We're all frozen.

Adam.

Me.

The Storm.

At this point it's more than just a summer storm. At this point it's a god who took our bait, a being tired of the taunts that only teenage boys are capable of making. It's a Storm, and it's mad at us.

Even as Adam is struck, the lightning reaches tendrils towards me, and when I open my mouth to scream, yell, do something, the electricity in the air creeps in, settling itself around my teeth, snapping fangs against my tongue.

But this is not a story about me.

It's about Adam.

It's about Adam, who isn't jerking like they do in the movies. Instead, he's stiff, muscles contracted, freezing him completely in place. His eyes are locked onto mine, and it seems like neither of us can look away. Adam has a valid reason. I don't. I keep looking anyways.

Suddenly, the world speeds up again.

Adam starts jerking now, muscles bunching and releasing, over and over, until his body looks twisted and I can't quite tell where his arms end and his legs begin.

The key flies out of his hand, as well, glowing red-hot against the bruised sky. It falls to the ground next to him, and the grass around it begins to smolder as the heat is stolen back into the earth and the glow begins to fade.

Adam lies completely still next to it, moving only as the last of the electricity leeches out. His eyes are closed.

The ground around the key is on fire.

I stamp it out.

I breathe in, tasting the mix of metal, ozone, flesh, and rain that permeates the air. I breathe out. I breathe back in, the taste settling around my teeth.

I breathe out.

Air hisses out from behind Adam's slack jaw.

I breathe in.

Adam doesn't.

The key is still smoking.