I’m a thirty-four-year-old researcher with a PhD, not some hormonal teenager developing a crush on the woman from a weather video. I don’t even have crushes anymore. I have peer reviews and grant deadlines. I have an alarming caffeine dependency and lower back pain from sleeping on my office sofa three to four nights a week. So the fact that I am sitting here staring at her face frozen on my screen is deeply concerning.
This is such a bad idea, but again, Lucas is right. I need her data, and well, her.
I check my watch. Five-thirty. If Lucas is picking me up at six-thirty, I should at least make an effort to look...what? Approachable? I have no idea what impression I'm trying to make on a woman who drives into tornadoes for a living.
LILA
I hatecrowds almost as much as I hate PowerPoint presentations. Yet here I stand, staring down a sea of eager faces in this overheated lecture hall, feeling like I'm wearing someone else's skin.
“And as we can see from the data collected during the Woodward County event…” I gesture to the slide behind me, trying not to wince at the sound of my own words echoing through the speakers. The projector hums like an angry bee, casting my carefully compiled graphs in washed-out blues that don’t do justice to the elegant violence they represent.
This is the part of storm chasing nobody warns you about—the afterward, when you have to put on business casual clothes and explain yourself to rooms full of people who've never felt a barometric pressure drop in their bones.
I click to the next slide, a time-lapse of the supercell formation that I risked my neck to capture. The audience makes appreciative noises, but they don't really get it. They can't. They weren't there, feeling the earth and sky having a conversation in a language only a few of us understand.
Dad never enjoyed this part either. “Talking about storms is like dancing about architecture,” he used to say. But he did it because it was necessary, just like I'm doing it now.
Another click, another slide. I spot a man in the third row furiously taking notes.
“There were smaller spinning funnels twisting inside the main tornado, something scientists say may happen more often as the climate gets warmer,” I say, the explanation sounding practiced and automatic even to me.
God, I hate this. Standing here like some trained monkey in slacks and a blouse that feels too tight around my collar. But this is the game I have to play. The necessary evil that keeps my research alive. If I want to keep chasing on my own terms, I need funding that doesn't come with corporate logos plastered across my equipment or my findings buried in proprietary databases.
I could get a corporate sponsorship tomorrow. The Weather Channel, AccuWeather, even those energy drink companies that love to slap their logos on anything “extreme.” They'd pay me well to drive their branded trucks into storms, wearing their jackets, spouting their simplified explanations.
But then the data wouldn't be mine anymore. It would belong to shareholders and marketing departments. So instead, I stand here sweating under these fluorescent lights, explaining tornado dynamics to meteorology enthusiasts and academics who'venever had to calculate wind speed by how hard it's trying to peel the skin off their faces.
“Questions?” I ask, clicking to my final slide—a simple black screen with my contact information.
A forest of hands shoots up. Of course. There are always questions, usually from people who want to hear war stories rather than discuss pressure differentials. I point to a woman near the front.
“Have you ever feared for your life?” she asks, eyes wide with the kind of fascination people have for natural disasters, as if I'm a storm-riding cowgirl rather than a scientist who happens to work in dangerous environments.
“Absolutely. Tornadoes are unpredictable, and data has to be collected. Fear is a part of it,” I answer, giving the same response I've given a hundred times.
I can practically hear Dad's voice in my head. Give them enough to satisfy their curiosity without feeding the sensationalism. He'd mastered the art of redirecting these conversations back to the science. I'm working on it.
A boy who can't be older than fifteen leans forward from the edge of the crowd. “What does EF-3 mean?”
“It’s basically a tornado rating system,” I explain. “EF-0 is the weakest—mostly broken branches and shingles. EF-1 can damage roofs and push cars around. EF-2 tears roofs off houses and snaps big trees.”
“And EF-3?” he asks.
“Bad,” I say simply. “Whole walls ripped off houses. Trains overturned. Serious destruction.”
His eyes widen.
“EF-4 and EF-5 are the nightmare ones,” I continue. “Homes flattened. Cars thrown. Entire neighborhoods erased.”
The woman beside him looks horrified.
I shrug lightly. “Most tornadoes never get that strong, but they happen.”
I point to another raised hand, this one belonging to an older man with a university lanyard.
“Have you published any papers on your observations?”
The question hits a nerve. “I’ve submitted my findings to several journals,” I reply, trying to keep the edge out of my tone. “The peer review process tends to move slowly for independent researchers without university affiliations.”
