like me,” I said. “You’re seeing me all the way through. In fact, you could say that I’m your first real patient.”
“You’re not a patient.” His words came out in a strange tone. It felt like it was laced with something, I don’t know what. I didn’t think I was that good at conversations with undertones like this. I didn’t think I had the social skills for tone interpretation.
“What am I?” I asked.
“Well, I’d like to think we’ve become friends?”
I smiled to myself and looked at the road in front of us. “Friends. That sounds nice. I like that. I don’t have many friends.” “Many” was downplaying it. I didn’t have any friends. Although, in the last few days, I’d collected four phone numbers of people, and my phone was the fullest it had ever been. “Friends,” I repeated to myself, and then, as if the universe was punctuating that statement, a massive sound made us both jump.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, looking around as an explosion rocked us.
Noah and I leaned forward and looked up at the sky. Thick, rolling black clouds had almost swallowed it up. We’d been talking so much, we hadn’t noticed this blackness sweeping across the once-blue sky. I couldn’t believe it.
“Thunder,” Noah said. “Very close. But it’s still blue in front of us.” He pointed at the light sky on the horizon. “If we keep driving, we’ll probably miss it.”
I looked up again. “I think you’re right. It’s right above us. If we just keep moooo— what was that?” I asked, grabbing onto the dashboard as the car seemed to rock back and forth.
“Wind!”
“Wind that moves cars?” I let go of the dashboard when the car stopped rocking. “What kind of wind moves cars?”
“That kind!” Noah pointed to the sky ahead. The dark clouds above seemed to be rushing to fill the blue space there. They reached out with wild, black twisting arms, like those inflatable people with the arms that move around like crazy outside tire stores.
The wind raged and the entire sky soon turned black as the last of the sun disappeared. It reminded me of the storm that had raged outside Sheik Khalifa’s oasis which Amanda Stone had gotten caught in. She’d looked up to the sky to see the sun finally swallowed up by the red dust that twisted up from the dunes. A shadow fell across the once-illuminated landscape and Amanda knew that she was in serious trouble. Were we in serious trouble?
Noah pulled the car over on the side of the road as the clouds ripped open and rain poured out of them. It thumped down on us relentlessly; it sounded as if giants were jumping up and down on the roof, and we both looked up at it. I was petrified the whole thing might buckle and bend.
“Will it hold?” I shouted at Noah over the deafening sound.
“Yes,” Noah assured me. “I mean . . . I think so. It should . . . probably.” Okay, so now he wasn’t sounding as self-assured.
“Now what?” I shouted even louder.
“We’ll have to wait it out. I don’t want to drive in this.”
I looked at the window. The rain was pouring over it as if we were behind the curtain of a waterfall and I could no longer see the landscape outside.
CHAPTER 43
“So how much longer do you think we’ll have to wait?” The rain had not abated at all; in fact, it was coming down harder than it had been a while ago, if that was even possible. Huge pools of water were rippling across the surface of the road, and where the road was a little higher than the ground it was built on, waterfalls rushed off the edge, creating a river on the side of the road that raged down the slope.
“It looks like it’s really settled in. We might have to do the same,” Noah said, undoing his seatbelt and moving his chair back into a more comfortable position.
I looked around the car and wondered just how long we would need to settle in for. We’d left Johannesburg late, and it had already been getting darker when the storm hit. We sat in silence for a while. I too had pulled my chair back and stretched my legs out, my feet on the dashboard.
“I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘R,’ ” Noah said, and I laughed.
“Rain. Obvious!”
“I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘L.’ ”