“Perfect.”
“Mr. Hawking,” I said, desperate to stop the momentum.
“Shut up, Devereaux. Your idea is brilliant. I might even decide to like you before this day ends.”
“But that wasn’t—”
Vern pulled me into my seat. “You and your big mouth.”
“What’s happening?” I whispered.
My best friend didn’t have an answer. No one did.
6
Gale
“Idon’t want to be part of this.”
My sister ignored me. Roe, Jazz, and Maggie, occupying the couch and lounge chair respectively, said nothing. Everyone was too caught up in themselves to care about my feelings. Why shouldn’t they be? Nothing had gone as planned the previous day.
Besides, my protest was twenty-four hours too late.
After an hour-long negotiation over terms, it was a done deal. Returning home from the city yesterday afternoon, we’d gone our separate ways, agreeing to meet in Dad’s basement—mybasement—the following day to discuss a plan moving forward. I suspected Olivia had organized it this way, so I couldn’t back down or miss it on purpose.
I’d needed her last night, but she’d abandoned me, making excuses that she had to go home and put in a few hours of work. She worked remotely as a data entry clerk for a major construction company out of Dallas. I begged her to call whenshe had a free minute. When I didn’t hear from her by midnight, I figured she was avoiding a confrontation.
Olivia was my best friend and strongest advocate, but she was also pushy and demanding when it suited her. This show opportunity trumped my feelings.
I didn’t sleep and wound up in the field behind the house, taking pictures of a starlit sky, a colony of bats racing across the moon, and the haunting silhouettes of trees on the horizon. The crickets and owls kept me company, and I longed to get in the Jeep and drive.
My pant legs were soaked through in minutes, but I marched on. When the sun broke, I photographed the rising dawn, mesmerized by a thick blanket of radiation fog that covered the field before it quickly burned off as the day warmed.
Instead of the usual peace I found in isolation and photography, I jittered with restless energy. I had walked miles beyond our property line, winding up on a remote country road in the middle of nowhere, and no less anxious.
Peace and calm had never been mine.
The whole CineVision Entertainment deal was a living, breathing nightmare. One I had literally signed up for, albeit against my will. Pen in hand and with a dozen eyes on me, I’d scrawled my name on the contract with no objection, same as everyone else, even as screaming protests battered the inside of my brain.
I was the lemming, willingly following his fellow compatriots off the cliff to his death. Jonah, compelled to preach in Nineveh despite wishing I could run clear in the opposite direction, get eaten by a whale, and never look back.
What was the alternative? Abandon Olivia and her team, and risk disqualifying them? Let CineVision’s CEO build a team that somehow involved me and practical strangers, including Ozrik,the guy who made my stomach twist in a not-so-unpleasant way?
No. Absolutely not.
I didn’t want to chase tornadoes, and I certainly didn’t want to be on a show where my life would be dissected by strangers. Where I’d have to spend time in the presence of Elk City’s bad boy heartthrob.
I had gone to Oklahoma City for Olivia. For moral support. Nothing more. I wanted to take pictures of landscapes and flora, meditate, journal, and continue my quest to rediscover God in nature. I wanted to be alone. Was that too much to ask? Maybe one day I would find a suitable career, something that called to me like the priesthood had once done before everything fell apart.
Caving to peer pressure when the alternative was voicing my opinion to a restless, potentially judgmental crowd was easier. Safer. It was what I’d been doing for years. Keeping peace to my own detriment. Crying on the inside while smiling to the world and acting like everything was okay.
It was not and never would be okay.
I didn’t want to be an outlier, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to fit in.
As a result, I was now an official contestant on a reality television show, fighting to earn a spot as a tornado chaser.A competitionof all things. Me, the kid who had actively avoided organized sports and clubs and cliques at all costs growing up. The guy who went out of his way to go unnoticed. Who hid in the library and under the bleachers.
I was not cut out for this.
