I didn't get it. I mean, seriously. I wasn't comprehending it. Adam was standing there telling me that he'd just opened that massive locked trunk in the treehouse to find stacks of old papers there. And they looked real old. They were off-color and torn at the edges; the paper was practically rotting in front of us.

"Didn't that really happen to you?" Adam asked me.

I'd been reawakened to the world. "Huh? What?"

"Didn't you run off in a storm one time? I remember you telling me something like that. You got lost when you were real little and they found you in a field."

"Well, yeah," I said, still kind of wandering through my murky mind. "But I don't really remember it. And I'm pretty sure I didn't get struck by lightning or anything."

"But if you can't remember, how could you know?"

"What are you talking about? I think I'd remember getting hit by lightning. I mean, that doesn't just happen without a person noticing. Besides, what are you trying to get at—that somebody decided to write a story about me? No way, Adam. No stupid way." I was picking up on it now. He was shooting me these looks, and I could tell what they meant. It was so weird. I'd never been struck by lightning, anyway. At least, not that I could remember.

Adam dropped his stack of papers on the rug. With the strangest expression I'd ever seen on him, he said, "It's weirder than ever, I admit it. But you have to look at these, Cole. I didn't read it all, but I skimmed through them. Every one of these papers has stories on it about a kid named Lightning Cole. Who knows if it's about you or not, but we should read and figure this out. There are a ton more papers in that trunk. These were just right on top; the rest were tied in bundles. I don't have any idea what the rest of it all was . . . maybe it's nothing. But I grabbed this bunch and it just happened to sound familiar."

"Familiar?" I said quietly, wonderingly.

He hesitated, didn't talk.

I knew he wouldn't. He was waiting for me to say something, so I did. "You can probably stay. My mom won't care. Let's read this junk." I said it with a great big sigh, but Adam knew I wanted him there. I wasn't going to read all of the papers by myself, especially since the thought of what might be written on them sort of creeped me out.

So Adam made himself comfortable on the floor of my bedroom. He plopped down onto the carpet, his pants spreading out like a garbage bag across the floor. At least he was wearing a T-shirt. It said Punks R' Us in silvery metallic letters. He'd changed since school for some reason. Adam was more picky about his clothes than anyone I knew, but when he was just coming over to my house, he didn't get so dressed up.

With me reading aloud (because reading was Adam's worst subject), the two of us started off on what would be the first step in our believing the unbelievable. We shouldn't have read those papers. I sometimes wish I'd never sat there with Adam and read aloud that pack of stories that very oddly seemed to fit a lot of things about myself. Like Adam had said, it was a weird coincidence: the similarities between what was in those pages and the boring old things about my own life. Real connections were there. Like the time the kid in the stories saved his brother when he fell through ice. (I'd once pulled Corey out of Buck Creek Pond when he was six and trying to skate on it.) And when Lightning Cole climbed to the top of a monument and jumped off of it. (One time I'd been dared to climb the Goldenrock City Hall steeple, and I'd done it. Of course, my jump was more of a fall, but nobody ever knew that because I executed it so well.) Most coincidental of all, though, was the story that told of Lightning Cole escaping from a vast galloping pig by running like the speed of light. (Hadn't Adam and I just gotten away from the Abominable Ham a day earlier?)

Yeah, it was weird all right. The thing was, none of the stories were dated, so we really had no way of knowing when they'd been written. Was it just that someone had written some tales a long time ago and for some reason they resembled my life? Or was there somebody following me and Adam around, watching our moves? I couldn't really think too hard about it or it hurt. And maybe it was all just a strange mix-up. The stories weren't exactly the way things happened to me. They were written more like fairytales or folktales or something. Like, all fancy with big words.

Whatever the reason for those stories being there, the two of us were definitely feeling weirded out by the time we'd finished reading. The last paper was the most peculiar of all. It said something about Lightning Cole not even knowing of his own powers yet. "Because he'd been struck by lightning," it said, "the boy had abilities beyond his own imagining. He just didn't know how to use them, which was why he had yet to do so."

And that was where it left off.

I looked at Adam. He looked at me. We both raised eyebrows. Neither one of us had moved since I'd started reading the two-inch stack of papers. I knew what he was thinking, though. I knew he was about to tell me that those stories had totally been written about me. But I didn't even want to hear him say it.

I was about to plug my ears, but he started talking first. "Listen, Cole. You were lost like that kid. You have a brother like him. You saved Corey from the ice. It's all the same! The guy's even got your name and the same hair color as you. I mean, seriously. How else could this all be here? It's all about you."

"No. No way Adam."

"Isn't that cool? Somebody's writing about your life!"

"No, it isn't cool." I was on my feet, ready to kick over the pile of papers. Something was chewing me from the inside and I didn't like the feel of it. "It's totally freaky. You didn't write all that, did you?"

"What?!" Now Adam was standing too. He was really offended.

"Well you're the only one who'd know me so well! Nobody else would." Even when I said it, I felt bad. It wasn't right to accuse him of something so weird. Plus, I was pretty certain he hadn't done that writing. He was an awful reader. No way could he have come up with that stuff. "For real, Adam," I said more quietly. "This is the weirdest thing that's ever happened. How did someone write all that and just happen to make it like what goes on with me? That's just scary." Then a thought struck me. "I wonder what the other papers in the box say. You didn't look through those, but they can't be anything about me. Everything interesting I've ever done is pretty much here. The rest of it has to be other stories."

"We can go back tomorrow," Adam offered. He was just as shocked as I was about the whole thing.

"Yeah, ok. Even if I'm grounded, this is too weird not to go check it out. Maybe it's all some random chance. Who knows. None of it might be about me at all, right?"

I glanced over at Adam. He shrugged, but I knew what he thought. There was no doubt in his mind that the stories were, somehow, written about me.

"Cole! Adam! Dinner!" came my mother's voice from downstairs. She was real used to having Adam eat with us. Some weeks, he was like her third son. My second brother. Or my only brother, as I didn't always believe Corey could actually be related to me. Anyway, mom hadn't even asked if Adam wanted to eat with us. She just assumed it. That's what I liked about her. She treated Adam like he belonged there, and I sometimes thought he needed that. Lots of times his own mother wasn't home to cook. She had to work a lot. So Adam made his own meals about every other night. Hot dogs and macaroni—that was what he usually "cooked" for himself. That was better than what I could do, though. Everything I made myself came prepackaged: potato chips, oreos, fruit snacks . . . you get the idea.

Adam and I lumbered down the stairs. Neither one of us said a word to each other as we sat down. There was so much stuffed in our heads at the moment. Corey screeched his chair across the tile as he squeezed into his seat. "Hey no fair!" he whined when he caught sight of Adam. "Mom! You said Jeremy couldn't eat over. How come he gets to?"

Mom didn't answer.

Adam did. "Because I'm not a fifth-grade wart, Corey."

"Uh! Neither is Jeremy, stupid."

"Boys!" Now that mom was putting food on our plates, she wanted to try to install a no-arguing program into our heads. Dad just sat at the end of the table and listened. He never talked much during dinner because he was busy all day yelling at the construction people to follow his plans. He was a carpenter. He also did blueprints for houses in the area. Mondays he'd have a full voice, but by Friday he'd always be hoarse from all the shouting. Being Thursday, he was trying to save his voice for important matters only.

"Yo Adam," Corey snarled. "My teacher says you're going to get yourself landed in summer school again."

"What?" Adam scowled. Corey's fifth-grade teacher, the nasty Mrs. Roula, taught some of the summer school classes. Last summer, Adam had been stuck with her for six weeks for flunking out of the sixth grade.

"Yeah. She's got the digs on who's probably going to be there again this year. Teachers can just tell. They have their secret communication systems, you know. A kindergarten teacher could fart and they'd hear it at the high school."

"Corey!" That was mom, sitting down, genuine annoyance on her face.

All defensive, Corey blurted, "Well it's true, you know! Seriously, how else could they all know everything about each other and all of us so fast?"

"It's called telepathy," I said quietly, starting to slurp some spaghetti noodles into my mouth.

Corey glared at me with his ugly little lips half open. "Tele-what?" He said it real rude. Ha. Like I was going to answer back to that. He saw that I wasn't going to talk and got angry. "Mom, tell him to tell me what it means! That's no fair."

Mom motioned toward his fork. "Pick it up. Start eating."

I smirked. "Yeah, monkey boy. We know you're primitive and all, but even butt-picking apes can learn to use a fork."

"What?" Corey gasped in disgust.

"Now that's enough, Cole," said Dad. That's when I knew I had to stop. "We're trying to eat, here. Let's leave the rear ends alone and start talking like a normal pack of humans."

I felt bad for making him use his precious vocal chords. Instead of apologizing, though, I turned to look at Adam. He'd gotten all sulky, suddenly. I really hoped Corey wasn't right about Mrs. Roula expecting to see Adam back in summer school. Last June and July I'd been super bored every day waiting for him to get out of classes. This summer wasn't supposed to be like that. I was mad at Adam though, because I knew that if he was in summer school, it was his own fault. He was smart enough to pass; he just tried so hard to be liked that he kept his grades low on purpose. Only nerds got good grades, I remembered him telling me one time. If that's what he really thought, then maybe he did need to be in some serious summer school. Still, I was upset about the news just as much as he was.

Mom talked to Corey about school. She asked me and Adam about our finals. We talked about the weather. Blah, blah, blah. The usual family dinner conversation. Then Corey had to bring up dead cats, because he'd seen one lying on the road half-picked by birds when he'd been walking home from school. After the description of that dead thing (which he detailed down to the ant-infested eye sockets), my dinner didn't really look edible.

Then Adam did something I wished he didn't. Looking all serious, he asked my parents, "Did Cole ever get struck by lightning?"

Dad froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. Mom gasped. Well, she didn't gasp, really. It was more like a short breath or something. They both looked at Adam weird, with their eyebrows raised in little arches.

I wanted to crawl under the table. Sure, it was just my own family members, but Adam just did random stuff sometimes. The reason I wanted to crawl under the table was not to hide; it was because I wanted to kick Adam real hard but couldn't reach him from where I was sitting. I mean, this was my family, not his. Where did he get off asking questions to my parents that I should've been asking?

Eventually, my mom broke the silence by tapping her fingers on the table.

Dad said, "Well, we don't think so."

Suddenly this whole ocean of something rushed into me. It was like a floodgate had opened. "What do you mean, you don't think so?" I asked real calm and quiet, totally opposite of how I was starting to feel.

Then Dad sighed. He put his fork down against his plate. "It's nothing, Cole. Just a long while back when you were a baby, you got lost out in that storm, remember? Probably not. You were small. Well, nobody saw lightning striking the field, so there's no proof of anything. The doctor tried to convince us that you'd been hit by lightning, and that was why your hair went so blond."

"Hang on a second," I demanded, putting up a hand to stop his comments. "Just wait. I don't get why you didn't tell me that."

"The doctor was wrong, honey," said Mom. She smiled. "Your hair was darker when you were first born, but it was getting lighter as it grew longer. If you'd been struck by lightning at the age of three, you'd probably not have lived. There were no signs of burns or electrical currents or . . . you know. Things that would happen if lightning struck you."

Corey was goggling at me across the table like a dead fish. "No wonder you're a freak!" he said. And he was being serious. "Lightning frazzled your brain wires!"

"Corey," said Mom in her I-dare-you-to-keep-talking sort of tone.

"For real, mom! How come nobody ever tells me anything? I never knew anything about it! That's not fair!"

"Shut up, Corey!" I cried. For some reason I was really angry. I'd never felt so upset in my whole life (or at least, not that I could remember at the time). I didn't even know why I was so mad, but I was. If fury was measured in people, I'd be as full of it as China. I stood up so hard from my chair that it fell over onto the floor, making noise against the wall. My parents just looked at me weird. It made me more mad. "Who cares if you never knew about it. I'm the one it happened to, and I never even knew!" Sarcasm bleeding out of my mouth I added, "Thanks for being such great parents." Not as biting as it could've been, but I was too upset to think of much more to say. Totally forgetting that Adam was in the kitchen, I left the table and stormed up to my room, slamming doors on the way.

Whether I'd been struck by lightning or not, I bet it was streaking out of my eyes with how mad I was.