Weather Powers

Once upon a time, on a bright Tuesday morning, Professor Charles Xavier asked Storm if she would do something a little unusual.

"The new students have questions about your powers," he said. "Would you show them?"

Storm smiled. She reached for her shoes — then changed her mind, tucked them under her arm, and walked outside barefoot.

"I think better when I can feel the earth," she explained to the students trailing after her across the lawn.

They settled on the grass rolling gently down toward the Hudson River, which caught the morning light and turned it into a million small diamonds. Storm stood barefoot in the cool grass with her white hair loose around her shoulders and looked perfectly at home.

"Ask me anything," she said.

A boy with red hair went first. "What does it feel like?"

Storm considered carefully, the same way she worked the weather: with full attention.

"It doesn't feel like using a switch," she said. "The atmosphere — all the air around the earth — is like a great living thing. Changing all the time. Breathing, almost. And I am fluent in its language. I don't tell the weather what to do. I feel what it wants to do, and I work with it."

She paused. "I can feel a thunderstorm building three hundred miles away the way you might feel the mood change in a room before anyone has said a word. Not with my eyes. With something underneath that."

"Let me show you," Storm said.

She turned to three students and raised her hand — and beneath their feet an invisible warmth gathered, and all three lifted slowly, two feet off the ground. They looked at each other. They started laughing. Storm held them there for five seconds and set them back down like teacups on a shelf.

Then she reached into the air — gathering, coaxing — and a small white cloud appeared above the lawn. She turned her left hand palm-down. Rain fell on one square yard of grass. Just that patch. The students sitting there yelped, and everyone else laughed. The dry sunshine three inches away didn't feel a drop.

Storm smiled. "Now the harder part," she said.

She sat down cross-legged in the grass. They hadn't expected that — they'd thought she would stand for the serious things. But she sat, and she was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke her voice was very thoughtful.

"My power listens to my feelings," she said. "When I am angry, the sky wants to answer that anger. When I am frightened, the wind goes uncertain. If I am not careful, I can call a storm I didn't mean to call." She looked at her hands, resting open on her knees. "Professor Xavier taught me that the most important lessons were about myself — breathing, steadiness, how to feel something strongly without being swept away by it. The most dangerous storm I have ever caused was one I did not intend. I was fourteen and I was grieving something, and the sky went dark for forty miles. I did not mean it. I did not want it. But I had not yet learned to hold my feelings and my power in the same hands at the same time."

The students were very quiet.

"But you learned," said a girl with a notebook.

"I learned," Storm agreed.

Then someone asked about flying, and everyone brightened. Storm described it in a way that made them all want very much to try: she generated a column of air beneath her feet and balanced on it, reading the wind like a surfer reads a wave. On a clear day, sixty miles per hour. With a good tailwind, ninety — the wind singing past her ears, the sky immense around her.

"Like surfing," said the boy with red hair.

"Yes," Storm said. "Exactly like that."

At the end, the girl who hadn't spoken all morning raised her hand.

"Do you ever get tired of it? Of the sky?"

Storm looked up for a long, quiet moment, and everyone else looked up too — at the same blue sky, vast and patient and full of things that were always changing.

"Never," Storm said. "Every sky is different."

She called one last playful gust, and it swept across the lawn and sent every single notebook skittering across the grass, pages fluttering like happy wings.

Laughter. Scrambling. The Hudson River catching the light.

Storm smiled, put her shoes back on, and walked inside.

Above the lawn, the little cloud drifted, and drifted, and disappeared into the wide blue morning.