Reese is the smartest boy in the eighth grade, also very good-looking. “Reese Clanahan said he’d love to date a girl who knows the weather.” She wrinkles her nose and swats my hand to the side, discharging the errant crumb herself. A cornbread crumb lingers in the corner of her mouth, so I lean forward to wipe it away. “Maybe you should do your paper just like everybody else in the class.” It’s the only one for miles - here all that breaks the stretch of vast, golden land are the cornstalks and dry wheat reeds. I scattered our mother’s ashes out there, under a Japanese magnolia tree. The sliding glass doors leading to the backyard are open and my smoke dances out with the breeze. Greene’ll give me a pass on that final paper? I hate to hell to read Shakespeare.” “The teachers at school are talking about the soybean farm,” she says. and many of the baked goods I give her are made from the wheat her predictions have saved from drought. Bread products are some of the only things she’ll eat after three p.m. When Hallie gets home from school, I always have a plate of cornbread waiting for her. The storm came closer to the evening but the crops got decently watered and that’s all anyone really talks about. Recently I drove her all the way out to the soybean farm outside of Central City and predicted a massive storm cell would appear on Sunday in the afternoon, even though no weather stations reported precipitation. So far, all the days she forecasted rain, it came. Hallie’s been in the news a dozen times in the six months since she started predicting. They wear colorful dress shirts that appear out of place in the sea of gold and brown, ready to trek acres deep into the Nebraska crop farms, cameras and notepads at the ready. Local reporters flock to her weather readings. She just likes the routine of it and happens to predict right most times. But she’s told me, hours after standing in the wheat fields with arms outstretched, face tilted to the sky, that she has no idea what she’s doing. Everyone thinks my thirteen-year-old sister can predict the weather.
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