Chapter ten — brat summer is real

"I'm not nervous."

Tyler peered over at her from beneath the rim of his tan hide cowboy hat, an expression of utter disbelief on his face. He took the toothpick out from between his teeth and flicked it out the open window of the car.

"Yeah, you are," he told her, a slow smile spreading across his face. "Why you nervous, Line? You've met these people before."

"I'm not nervous," she said again, glaring out the window where Tyler's discarded toothpick had gone. It took everything in her not to unbuckle and walk around the truck to pick it up and do away with it correctly, but she abstained, surprisingly. It was wood, anyway. Wood with Tyler's spit on it—but just plain earth.

She shook her head to clear it, clocking Tyler's grin as a downhill slope in another small bickering spat cresting between them. "Don't say I'm nervous, 'cause I'm not. I just... have no idea how to interact with your friends."

Tyler let out a little chuckle. "Alright, well, let me give you a little breakdown. Boone's gonna be loud and obnoxious at first—"

"At first?" Caroline said, raising her eyebrows. "He gets better?"

"Oh, no," said Tyler with an amused shake of his head. "Nah, you just learn to live with it. He's a good guy beneath all that hootin' and hollerin'. And Lily—ah, she's a sweetheart. Got a bit of a sour mouth, but who doesn't, right?"

"Kate," Caroline suggested, eyes trailing over to where she was bidding her mother goodbye.

Tyler shrugged off the answer to his rhetorical question. "And Ben, he's just in for the week, I don't really know him all too well, but he's got a damn good attitude for a guy in his mid-fifties being dragged along into the middles of tornadoes."

"I liked Ben," Caroline recalled in a wondrous tone, tilting her head to the side to remember. "Yeah. He's got the British accent. All posh-like."

"That's Ben," Tyler confirmed enthusiastically. "Big fan of the guy."

Kate opened the back door of the truck and tossed her bag in before herself. "You two lovebirds ready to hit the road? Got a long day ahead of us, if Caroline wants to keep this pace of hers up."

"What pace?" said Caroline in a feigned tone of innocent. "Oh, just the fact that we've already test-run this twice today and now we got some good-lookin' cells up over in the west that we need to catch if we wanna run it again, for real this time? Yeah, that's all."

Tyler shook his head vigilantly and let out a short whoop. "Let's do this!"

He floored it. The truck ripped out of the Carter's driveway at breakneck speeds, and Caroline and Kate flew back against their headrests with gasps of the air leaving their lungs.

"Tyler," Caroline said, "you know we got, like, three hours and a good chunk of distance between us and the storm, right?"

Slowly he eased up on the gas pedal, unclenching his fingers from the wheel and straightening up his posture. He cleared his throat. "Yeah, I.. I know."

Historic Stillwater had picked themselves back up in the wake of their EF-5 just a couple days ago. The obvious threats—downed electrical power lines, broken tree limbs that splintered menacingly, shattered glass—were all picked up and discarded of. The streets had been swept clean. All around the town, people were out helping pick up, but there was only so much they could do with just their hands.

Caroline's eyes caught on a pair of young, soon-to-be parents picking up splinters of a pink bassinet. The mother's lips pressed together in sadness. The father wrapped an arm around her, then tossed the old pink wood into a pile of trash. As Tyler's truck passed them, Caroline let her gaze stay stuck on the couple, her head turning back as far as she could before they were out of sight completely.

Only then did she turn back toward the front, chewing her bottom lip.

Tyler glanced over to her. "You're plannin' somethin'," he accused. "What is it?"

"I'm not plannin' anything," she argued, looking affronted. "Why would you think that?"

"You have that look in your eye," he said with a smile. Then he shook his head. "Well, whatever it is, I sure hope the world knows what's comin' to it."

Caroline couldn't hold back a smile, but luckily Tyler was facing the road.

When they reached the field where the rest of Tyler's crew had already set up a good portion of their gadgets, the gaggle of hillbillies erupted in cheers and laughter at the sight of their red truck. Tyler even pulled a little donut in the grass to appease them—which he warned nothing about to Caroline or Kate, so they let out screams of protest along with the tires.

The car whipped to a stop next to the beat-up old trailer, and the doors opened to spill out the trio that had formed over the last twenty-four hours. Tyler welcomed his crew with a mighty fine sense of hospitality, as if he weren't the one that had left them for a day and a half; but his friends let out all sorts of loud noises (that Caroline could only assume were out of glee) and they fell into a messy little group hug. Caroline and Kate stood to the side, watching, their uncomfortableness practically radiating off of them. And Ben—he offered the two women an awkward little wave.

"Alright, alright," said Tyler, a head taller than anyone else in his huddle. "Great to see y'all again, but I got some friends I'd like to officially introduce you to."

He swept an arm out toward Kate and Caroline, grinning. "Kate Carter and Caroline Sullivan. These two," he promised his group in a coy sort of voice, "are the smartest people I've ever met. They're like some evil geniuses."

"I'll pretend like that doesn't hurt my feelings," said the old man of Tyler's group—but he spared Kate and Caroline a good-natured grin and introduced himself as Dexter.

"So what's this big idea about?" Boone said, suspicious. He crossed his arms—his stance reminded Caroline of someone trying to seem a lot bigger than they were. "Tyler said it's gotta do with... eh, aeroplanes?"

Caroline wet her lips. Boone's asking the question to her stole the attention of the rest of the crew, and they all turned to face Caroline, just as curious as Boone. Usually, such attention from people she'd only ever met on one occasion would have unnerved her; but she met Tyler's eyes, and, smiling, he gave her a reassuring nod.

She smiled, then turned back to Boone. "Aeroplanes, Boone, are the things that fly in the sky and take you from place to place. You never heard of 'em?"

Lily let out a loud cackle, and the rest of her friends laughed right along with her, some calling out short whoops to elicit their surprise. Even Tyler's shoulders shook. Kate glanced between Caroline and Boone, a surprised sort of amusement on her face.

Boone raised his eyebrows challengingly, an affronted grin widening on his face. "Alright, alright," he said over his friends' amusement. "Settle down now, y'all. I know you know what I meant, princess."

Caroline lifted her shoulders. "Well, y'know. Not an airplane, exactly, but we're lookin' for the height of one. Aerospacial dynamics, Boone. That's what you were lookin' for."

Still smiling, Boone gave a listless shrug to brush it off. "Yeah, I almost had it."

"Almost," Lily agreed with a laugh.

"So what do you need from us?" Dexter asked, raising a hand slightly as if he were in class. He glanced around. "I mean, Tyler asked us all to be here—"

"You're all a team, ain't you?" Caroline smiled, putting her hands on her hips. "We weren't gonna split Tyler from his tornado cowboys. Wouldn't dream of it."

Tyler grinned at her from within his circle of tornado wranglers. "Well, I do hope y'all don't mind we got some extra baggage today."

"Extra baggage?" Kate rolled her eyes. "How about the only reason your YouTube channel's gonna get any attention today when you upload a livestream titled 'Stopping Tornadoes From Touching Down'?"

Boone looked to Caroline with wide eyes. "That's what we doin'? Well, shit, princess, if I'd'a known that—"

"Alright, alright," said Tyler, waving his hands dismissively. He walked over to his own truck and smacked his hand on the door to the bed. "If we wanna catch that cell formin' in the west, we need to get to work."

And so they did. Tyler cranked up the stereo on his truck, blaring music out the open windows and all around so him and his friends could sing along in tones screeching to reach the high notes. Everyone took their jobs and got to work—Boone took up camerawork, as always, shoving his recording screen and boom mic into everyone's faces to get perspective.

"Dexter," he said, swerving the camera to get all sorts of angles, "talk to me. Tell me what's goin' on."

"Testing the Goldilocks principle of the tornado," Dexter said, eyeing a random amount of nitrogen beads and pouring them into one of the silver tubes that usually were used to shoot fireworks up out of Tyler's truck. "Disrupting a tornado by modifying the variables. Isn't that right, Caroline?"

He handed off the silver tube of solid nitrogen to the front runner of the experiment, and she took it gladly, perched on the roof of Tyler's truck. "That's right. See, originally, Kate wanted to use polymer beads to suck up all the water in a tornado and dry it out. Since those are all specifically made to absorb water, it'd take them a while before they broke down in the earth after the storm. They'd just lie there for a long time. But these," she said, shoving a lid on the silver tube of iodine pellets and sending them down into the rocket launcher, "break down in about twenty-four hours. We can send 'em up into a tornado and they'll hopefully disrupt it enough to get the winds all angry, shootin' it higher and higher into the atmosphere—and it can only go so high until it dissipates."

Boone stood in silence for a moment. Then he moved the camera to Kate. "What's that mean, Kate?"

"We're tamin' a storm," she said, a smile spreading on her lips.

"T," said Boone, spinning around to give the livestream a view of the man they do it for, "tell us what's goin' on."

Tyler leaned against the bed of his truck, the sunglasses covering his eyes tilted up toward Caroline. "Alright. We're gonna shoot the clouds with rockets of nitrogen beads to make the winds angry—force is what we need in the updraft. Might sound backward, but that's what it is; higher winds mean higher storm."

"A–and that does what to the tornado?" Ben asked.

Tyler took off his sunglasses. "Forces the storm to choke itself, Ben."

While the camera was off her, Caroline took her chance to hop down from the roof of Tyler's truck. She plucked her film camera out of the passenger's seat, then hopped down through the tall grass to get to a lower point on the hill, closer to the storm forming deep in the west.

The clouds rolled menacingly in the distance. Even though the storm hadn't fully formed yet, lightning struck through the sky, illuminating the lands it loomed above. Even the wide berth between Caroline and the swirling winds of the tornado wasn't enough to stop the electricity from tingling her skin and raising the hairs on her arms.

Caroline bit her lip. She lifted her camera to her eye and snapped what she hoped was a decent shot of the thing—she never could tell. All she knew was that gray clouds were bad news, no matter how you caught them on film.

A little ways behind her, up the hill, Ben crouched over himself and raised his own camera. He snapped a shot of Caroline's back profile, facing the brooding black clouds above her, staring down her future with feet planted solidly on the ground.

"She's your story," came Tyler's voice, and Ben glanced over his shoulder to see he hadn't been the only one watching Caroline. Tyler turned his head to give Ben a small smile. "Give me a copy of that. Who's ready to go!?"

Going to stay in my delusional little grandeur that Kate's last name is interchangeable between Carter and Cooper because even Daisy got it wrong so that means I have an excuse 😊 thus ends the chronicles of Kate Twisters last name. Now we need Scott Twisters last name immediately so it can become mine