The diamonds of ice shattered rhythmically on the roof, on the windows, on the drains. They froze the bushes, bruising their new-budding leaves, as hail came down in torrents. The quarter sized balls were sure to dent cars, nick windshields, and apparently wreak all sorts of havoc. So I stayed inside and did nothing, watching the little spheres of cold destruction fall angrily from the sky. My breath fogged against the glass. I felt the wet cold radiating from the window glass and stopping at the end of my nose. The weatherman was wrong, as he often was. No, it would not be sixty-five and sunny.

A flicker of lightning broke the sky, shattering the darkening heavens like a dish meeting the floor. A few seconds later, a thunderous boom shook the house. I shivered, feeling the blast shake me. It was like when music was too loud in a stadium, amplified and powerful. I heard someone enter the room and flick on the TV, but didn’t turn around, not wanting to miss a moment of the action.

“Kasey, will you get away from the window?” I saw my second oldest brother Bobby’s reflection looking annoyed in the glass. I huffed and got up, joining him in front of the TV as the metallic ping of hail-on-metal got faster. Bobby glanced skittishly out the window at the mounting black clouds. They looked like a mass of coal dust, billowing closer and refusing to disperse. I knew. I’d been watching them advance for the past hour. I liked storms, but Bobby didn’t. Not even one bit, which seemed to run in the family.

Suddenly, an annoying beep issued from the television, a poinsettia-red band feeding across the screen. Bobby’s face went white, because this warning wasn’t a routine test. “Tornado Warning,” Josh, my third oldest brother read from the kitchen. “For real? Should we call Mom?” Bobby turned quickly around, and coughed slightly, authoritatively.

“No, there’ll be no phone reception,” he said, rushing to a drawer and rummaging around. “Are Tate and Lidia upstairs?”

“Yeah,” I called, running for the stairs. “I’ll get them.” I scrambled up half of the stairs and stopped. Everything was suddenly bright, like the flash of a camera, a moment of light and then complete darkness. The power had gone out. I heard shouts of dismay from downstairs, a little yelp from down the hall, and the sound of Tate thudding into me in the dark.

“Hey, Kase, is that you?” Tate didn’t wait for an answer. “Get Lidia, and come downstairs. Way downstairs. To the basement. I have to look at the fuse box.”

“OK,” I nodded, doing as I was told. The hall was darker than I’d thought it’d be. I ran my fingers along the rough drywall as I flew down the hall. I stubbed my toe on the door jam, but contained myself enough to enter the room my little sister Lidia and I shared. Lidia wasn’t there.

“Liddi?” I yelled. No answer. “Liddi, when people call you, you’re supposed to answer.” Liddi forgot that sometimes, and I had to refresh her memory. A minute, shrill noise issued from under Lidia’s bed. I walked around blindly in the darkness, tripping over the backpack I’d left on the floor the night before. I snarled in frustration, and lay there for a few seconds, re-gathering my emotions. Then I picked myself up as a flash of lightning illuminated the room.

“Come out from under there. We’re going to the basement,” I stated to the empty space. A muffled “I’m too scared” came from Lidia’s hiding place. Another tooth-rattling crash of thunder with a shriek accompanying it.

“Hurry up, will you?” I snarled, giving up coming to her. That was when Bobby entered the room with a very welcome flashlight.

“One thing, Kasey. Tate asked you to do one thing,” Bobby sighed in exasperation. He dropped onto his knees and shined the beam of light under the bed, revealing a little girl with her black hair frizzy from the static.

“I’m sorry, okay?” I said as Bobby pulled Liddi out and picked her up. “She wouldn’t come out.” All three of us ran down the stairs. I stopped at the door, but Bobby kept going to the basement, Lidia in his arms. I looked through the window, just catching the x-ray like picture that lightning made when it lit the world and then plunged it back into the dark. The wind howled like a wolf under a full moon.

On impulse, I flung open the door, and stepped out, the wind slamming the door behind me. The strong, iron taste of electricity came into my mouth, joining the damp air that came with a heavy storm. The smell of wet earth and precipitation crushed grass met my nose as I inhaled deeply. Rain and hail were coming down in buckets, exploding on the pavement like watch-face-sized torpedoes. The sound was deafening. The roar of the wind, the grinding boom of the thunder, the clatter of hail and cold rain falling hard on the concrete blended together to form an earsplitting composition of sounds. It was a symphony. I watched in awe, not feeling afraid. All I felt were the raging elements that refused to cease.
My surroundings were pitch black, despite the fact that it was only six thirty in the spring. Then the scene lit up like a spark, revealing the trees bending like grass. I could see literal sheets of rain falling from the ebony sky and splashing on the soaked ground. The spray of water spattered on my arms and condensed in misty droplets. A jagged streak of lightning broke the sky in two, and I decided I should probably go inside. The wind was picking up. One gust almost knocked me over as I scrambled for the door. I tried the handle, but it didn’t budge. I tried again, jiggling it crazily, a mild case of panic setting in. How could it stick now?

Suddenly, the door flew open, and someone yanked me inside. In a flash of lightning, I could make out Bobby’s dark eyebrows knit together with anger or fear, I couldn’t tell which.
“There’s a tornado, and you’re standing on the porch? Do you have no sense?” Bobby’s hand was still securely around my arm as he hurriedly pulled me down the basement stairs.
“Did you see it, Bobby?” I whispered, still half in blissful shock from the sight of it all. “It’s all just clouds, but it seemed so alive.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I saw it,” Bobby replied, looking somewhat haunted in the luminance of the flashlight. The sight of our transformed basement made me think of a refugee camp in some Middle Eastern country. There were blankets on the ground; lanterns gave the spacious room a dim light. Josh was huddled in the corner, swaddled tightly in a blanket. I was pretty sure I saw him rocking back and forth, talking to himself. Tate was trying to console the inconsolable Lidia, holding a lamp for light as he hugged her close. As Bobby and me rushed into the hide-out Josh’s head snapped up.
“We should try to call Mom,” Josh pleaded. Bobby opened his mouth to deny, but Tate butted in.
“We better try. She might be in a ditch somewhere. We need to make sure she’s okay,” Tate fumbled with his phone.
Our mom had started out on a grocery shopping trip when only a harmless drizzle had been falling. How fast things could change. She’d only been gone an hour, but it took more than twenty minutes to get to town. I hoped she was safe in the grocery store instead of trying to drive home.
“No signal,” Tate bit his lip, the screen of his phone making strange shadows on his face.
“I told you guys. No signal,” Bobby wasn’t rubbing it in, just stating a fact. Thunder crashed and I heard the faint sound of something shattering upstairs. Huddled together, we waited and hoped for nothing more to happen.
“How about Dad? We should try to call him,” Josh whispered, sliding back against the wall as far as he could. Bobby was looking annoyed again, which I thought might be a good sign. Maybe this wasn’t as serious as I thought.
“He knows, Josh. He’s at a meeting. They’re probably all in the basement now,” Bobby snorted. “Pull yourself together. For crying out loud, you’re fifteen.”
“It doesn’t matter how old you are when the earth is turning on you,” Josh said above the cacophony outside. He had a habit of being dramatic, but I had to admit, that was a good point. We were quiet in the dark then, pondering what Josh had said. I pulled a quilt around me, tucking the edges underneath my feet and legs to create a barrier between my skin and the cold concrete. The smell of the musty room was sweet, and I was warm and comfortable and bored. And slowly, I felt my eyelids drooping. The light in the basement was dim, the storm’s sounds so methodical that I fell asleep on Bobby’s shoulder. Bobby would later pester me about this. I seemed to fall asleep during every major event. For example, I fell asleep last August during the Perseid meteor shower and missed everything, my mother not wanting to wake me. I also somehow dropped off during the Fourth of July fireworks on our visit to our cousins in Alabama two years ago. When I dozed off at Bobby’s graduation a year later, though, it was really the cherry on the sundae. I don’t think I’ll ever live that one down.
When my eyes fluttered open, daylight was streaming through the window. Lifting my cheek from the fleece blanket on the floor, I looked around and found that I was the only one left in the basement. I slowly sat up, finger combing my messy hair, and blinking owlishly at the warm morning light that streamed through the ground level windows. Everyone was gone. I bounced to my feet in a hurry, running up the stairs and slamming open the basement door. My mother looked up from the pancakes she was turning with a smile.
“I was wondering when you’d wake up, sleepy head,” she smiled as she carried a platter of pancakes to the table and flipped two onto my dad’s plate. My shoulders lowered as my worry flew away like a dove. “The window in the living room is out, but otherwise everything’s fine.” I flopped down in the chair next to Lidia, trying to reset my quickened breathing pattern. Pancakes helped. As I poured syrup liberally on them, I looked out of the sunroom window. The sun was now streaming in and, other than an uprooted tree in our backyard, everything seemed pretty much normal. The world looked warm.
“What’s the weather like?” I asked anyone who would answer.
“Sixty-five,” Bobby replied, holding a glass of orange juice and issuing a mischievous grin. A smile slowly spread across my face in realization. Sixty-five and sunny. The weatherman had been right. More or less.