Weatherby

We didn't notice until the fifth grade that each time Leonard was upset, it would start to rain. For years we'd just berated him in kickball games, then found ourselves running headlong for the covered walkway when another fierce Texas thunderstorm would strip the trees of their leaves and drill deep holes in the muddy ground. When we put it together, Leonard suddenly became cool. We started gathering around him on the playground, saying, "C'mon, Leonard. Make it rain. Come on!"

And he would say he couldn't do it unless he was mad, he was sorry. So somebody would ask him if his parents knew he was gay -- that classic unanswerable question -- and Leonard, who wasn't too bright, would blurt, "No!" And everyone would collapse in fits of giggles, and before you could say 'tsunami', violent sheets of water were slapping against our backs.

The weird thing was that Leonard wasn't immune to his own weather. He made it hail once when someone smacked him in the face with a red rubber ball, and then he just stood there crying while the rest of us ran. He was covered in bruises when the teachers finally darted out into the storm to haul him inside.

Leonard was transferred to a special school during our sophomore year. By then the rain was nothing -- when someone pissed Leonard off, we got lightning splitting telephone poles in two and massive heat waves that left millions of earthworms and frogs frying on the blacktop. I always suspected he was the cause of the heavy fog that swallowed our outdoor graduation ceremony; it was so thick, so syrupy, that our whole class nearly asphyxiated.

To this day I swear I can't help wondering where Leonard is when I read about things like that cyclone that just tore through the Solomon Islands or about how an electrical storm wiped out an entire water polo team. He's got to be out there somewhere. I wish he'd been the type of kid who was interested in, you know, Dungeons & Dragons or something. Or even Garbage Pail Kids. I could've handled knowing that a kid like that was still out there.