When Lightning Strikes

When Lightning Strikes: Chapter 3

“You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream …”

“The way you turn me on, I can’t sleep …”

“Let’s runaway and don’t ever look back …”

“Don’t ever look back!”

A ritual for Ruby and I was to spend our Sunday afternoons doing something together. The activities usually ranged from finishing assignments for hours, to visiting thrift stores in search of unique bohemian clothes and sipping on a delicious macchiato at Starbucks. Sometimes we painted our nails and toes, experimented with make-up and belted out to tunes from our iPod docks, like we were doing right now.

Once ‘Teenage Dream’ ended, Ruby started to blow carefully on her painted polka dotted nails. I was really proud of my handiwork. After years of practice on my best friend, I considered myself as a professional manicurist. She was good at pedicures, so we were like scones and jam.

We had started our Sunday sessions or ‘Sunday Sesh’, as Ruby liked to call it, ever since we met in junior year.

I had been walking – scratch that – running in the local mall, trying to reach Sephora before it closed down for the day, because I had been in need of a new eyeliner pencil for the party Aubrey had been holding that night. Of course, I hadn’t been really paying attention to where I was going and I ended up bumping into someone. Before you knew it, we were both on the ground. I had been completely mortified of myself and was about to profusely apologise, but the sight of Ruby on her back with her red hair sprawled everywhere with potato and gravy all over her white tea dress proved to be too funny, and I ended up giggling instead.

Cheeks flushed, Ruby had wiped a small tear away from her soft eyes and asked, “Is this what you wanted?”

You know that feeling when you laugh at other people’s misfortunes, and they end up crying? It’s a horrible, sinking feeling of regret and shame. Well, that was how I had felt. I had stood there in the middle of the mall and watched as the redheaded girl rushed off to the women’s bathrooms to wash the food off her clothes, and debated whether or not to follow her, or to head to Sephora to buy my much needed eyeliner.

It’s pretty obvious what happened. I had gone to apologise to Ruby, and we ended up talking.

As for my eyeliner? Well let’s just say that my puppy-dog face had worked like magic on Aubrey.

“I can’t wait to go back to college,” I thoughtfully said, out of the blue. “I know it’s unusual, but I miss the routine.”

Ruby suddenly sat up on her queen-sized bed, making her hair fly dramatically. “Talking about routine, I forgot to tell you something.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“I scored a volunteer job at a teaching centre for disadvantaged students,” She paused for a second to let it sink in, and then continued as she looked out the window. “It feels ... satisfying for me. I feel like I’m doing something you know? I’m helping people.”

I nodded because I understood what she meant. “How many kids do you teach?”

We connected because we had so many common interests. For example, one of them is that Ruby and I both studied in the same field – education. I still remember ‘career day’ in senior year, and we had started talking about what we wanted to be. We both had known that we wanted to help people in some way. She had been set on teaching art and maybe history. On the other hand, I had still been unsure and was looking up information about nursing.

The day when I realised I wanted to be a teacher was when I tried some nurse training in a children’s hospital. It had been a tiring day, until they had asked me to read a story book so some young children, and keep a teenager company while she was writing short stories as a hobby.