“Hi, checking in for Sam Kim.”

“Hello, welcome in. Yes, I see your name here. Two nights?”

“Yes.”

“And you requested a room with two queen beds on the first floor, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What brings you to Lombard?” 

“We’re storm chasers,” Sam said, glancing over at Dean, standing next to him. “There’s about twenty more of us coming in shortly.”

Not looking up from the computer in front of him, the hotel clerk was silent for a couple seconds as he clicked away. 

“That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever met a storm chaser before. So, you’re gonna drive out and try to see a tornado tomorrow?” he asked, his gaze shifting from the computer screen to Sam, ignoring Dean’s presence. 

“Truthfully, storm chasing is only a part of what we do. It’s just more exciting to say that. We’re part of a research group that's installing a mesonet network across Illinois. It’s a collection of permanent weather stations that we’ll use to get more accurate meteorological data. After we install the mesonet station in Lombard tomorrow morning, we’re gonna head out to go storm chasing,” Sam explained.

“Got it. Good luck and stay safe tomorrow. You’re in room 108,” the hotel clerk said smiling, as he slid the key card across the front desk, his gaze still lingering on Sam.

“Can I get a key card for my partner, too? I mean he’s not my partner. He’s my storm chasing partner, not my partner partner. We’re colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.”

“Sure, no problem.”

Extra key card in hand, Dean and Sam left the hotel lobby and headed down the hall toward their room. Dean looked back to confirm the distance from the hotel clerk was sufficient and finally felt comfortable speaking. 

“Well, that was awkward.”

“Oh come on, Dean. I didn’t mean to make it weird,” Sam said, poking Dean playfully. 

Sam placed his key card against the magnetic strip on the exterior of their hotel room door, and a small green light appeared. Sam pushed down on the handle and entered the room with Dean who immediately claimed the bed closer to the window, climbed into it, and lay on his back to rest after the long drive up from southern Illinois. Sam, still energized, turned to Dean.

“Hey, it’s only 10:00. Want to get a drink at the hotel bar? We can hang out there for a couple hours and still get enough sleep before tomorrow.”

“Nah, I’m good. I don’t want to be hungover during the mesonet installation tomorrow.”

“Suit yourself.”

Sam changed into a fresh outfit and strolled to the hotel bar where the lone bartender was quietly putting away wine glasses. 

“One whiskey sour, please,” Sam said, grabbing the bartender’s attention, as he pulled out a barstool.

“Coming right up.”

Sipping his drink, Sam poured over weather data on his phone, trying to gauge the right location for storm chasing the following day. He had a rough initial idea, but after nearly two hours of research, he was satisfied with a potential location, and ready to close out his bar tab. Sam looked up from his phone for the first time since he had arrived at the bar, and a banner was scrolling across the bottom of each TV screen hanging above the bar countertop.

*****The Storm Prediction Center has issued a tornado watch for Northern Illinois, including Lombard, until 5 am CDT.*****

Sam wasn’t worried. A tornado watch was normal for Illinois in May, and the storm potential didn’t look truly impressive until tomorrow evening. Plus, it was only a tornado watch, not a tornado warning.

Buzzed and feeling like the night was missing something, Sam opened the Grindr app on his phone to check if there were any cute guys around. As he expected for suburban Chicago, it was mostly average looking middle aged white men, a few couples looking for a third, and a smattering of faceless profiles, one of which was 100 feet away. While there wasn’t a picture for this particular profile, there was an age, height, and race listed: 41, 5’7”, Latino. He had seen that same profile nearby when he worked at the Atmospheric Sciences building on campus at the University of Illinois. Sam knew that was Dean. Scrolling down to profiles a bit farther away, he came across a particularly handsome 27 year old white guy who was online now. Sam decided to message him.

Sam (visiting): “Hey, what’s up?” 

G: “Hey not much. How about you?” 

Sam (visiting): “Same here. Just visiting for a couple nights. Nice pics btw.” 

G: “Thanks you too. Looking to hookup?” 

Sam (visiting): Yeah, I’m down. Here’s the address for my hotel. I’m in room 108.

G: I’ll be there in 20 minutes 

Sam stumbled back to his room to take a quick shower. Upon opening the hotel room door, Sam saw the lights were on.

“Oh good, you’re still up,” Sam said to Dean calmly.

Dean squinted at Sam from his bed and closed the book he was reading. 

“I was about to go to sleep. What’s up?” 

“I invited a guy over. Would you mind leaving the room for 45 minutes?”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, he’s on his way here, and I need to get ready. Is it that big of a deal?” Sam said as he took his shirt off. 

“I can’t believe you. This is so unprofessional, and you’re wasted!”

“I think I can say the same thing about you!” Sam scoffed, pointing at a nearly finished bottle of white wine on the desk. “What happened to not drinking tonight?”

Dean stayed quiet, energy and anger building up inside him. He got out of bed and stood to face Sam. 

“You have it so easy, Sam. People think your research is great. They think you’re charming. They think you’re nice. People are attracted to you. You have no idea how much harder it is for me.”

“You know what, you’re just jealous, Dean. You don’t have the courage to come out, your research sucks, and you can’t decide what you want! It’s pathetic.”

Their faces were now only an inch apart, and Sam’s smooth, muscular chest pressed against Dean. Uninhibited from the lingering effects of the bottle of chardonnay Dean had consumed, and ignoring Sam’s criticism, he finally admitted what he had been wanting to say for years. 

“I want you!”

Dean closed his eyes and leaned in to kiss Sam, but Sam backed away, both of them almost falling over in the process. Stunned by the rejection, Dean’s face flushed with embarrassment as he stuttered, looking for the right words to say. Just then, three thunderous, solid knocks on the hotel room door rang through the air. Sam looked at the door and back at Dean, tears welling up in his eyes.

“You know what, Sam? Fuck this. I’m on the edge of a breakthrough. People are about to finally appreciate me.”

Dean grabbed his phone, backpack, and precious blue journal, covered in a mesmerizing geometric pattern of various sized squares. Dean never went anywhere without that journal, and Sam often wondered what he wrote about.

“I’m going for a drive, and don’t worry. I finished that bottle of wine two hours ago.”

Dean violently opened the hotel room door, startling Sam’s hookup in the hallway. Pushing past him, Dean stormed toward the hotel parking lot. 

“Oh! Please come in! Have a nice fuck!” Dean screamed, tears streaming down his face. 

Sam, still inside the hotel room, sighed and walked to the hotel door to meet his hookup, awkwardly waiting. 

“Hi. I’m Sam.”

“Nice to meet you, Sam. I’m Gregory. Is everything okay?”

Sam’s voice quivered. 

“Actually, no it isn’t. I know you just drove over here, and I’m really sorry to send you home, but maybe we can meet up tomorrow night.”

Sam closed the door, leaned back against it, and slumped down to the floor, exhausted. Deciding there was nothing he could do about Dean, he collapsed in his bed and fell asleep. Not long after this, the universe had decided Sam did not deserve peace that night, and a shrill alert screeched from his phone at full volume, jolting him awake. 

*****TORNADO EMERGENCY for Southern DuPage County until 3:00 AM CDT*****

At 2:23 AM CDT, a confirmed large and destructive tornado was observed near Aurora moving northeast at 45 mph. This tornado will be near Naperville at 2:30, Lombard at 2:40, and Elmhurst at 2:50.

This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. TAKE COVER NOW!

Sam rolled over on his side and looked at the empty queen bed beside him, wondering if Dean was chasing this storm. With a tremendous amount of effort, he sat up. A bit more alertness and clarity came to him as he realized the seriousness of the moment. Tornado emergencies were extremely rare, only reserved for the most life-threatening situations. He got dressed and ran to the front desk, arriving as the panicked hotel clerk, different from the one he had met earlier in the night, was picking up the phone to send an alert to all the rooms.

“Attention all hotel guests, there is a tornado emerg-” 

The sound of systems powering down echoed throughout the lobby. Everything was now dark. Sam strained his eyes and saw the other storm chasers through the glass entryway of the hotel, standing outside pointing at something. He walked toward them, forcing open the now powerless automatic doors, making eye contact with a massive black wedge of rotating air, only identifiable through flashes of lightning and exploding transformers. He noticed his former colleague Greta, now working at the University of Michigan, among the group of storm chasers staring at the tornado, and she was gathering people’s attention to make an announcement.

“Okay everyone! We need to get inside now! Anyone who is staying in a first floor room, please volunteer to shelter at least four other people for the next 30 minutes.” 

“I’m staying in a first floor room!” Sam yelled over the commotion. 

With several others volunteering their first floor rooms as safe havens, everyone now had adequate shelter, and five of the storm chasers, including Greta and Sam, ran to room 108. With the flashlights on their phones, they situated themselves in the room’s small bathroom and covered their heads. The continuous low rumble in the background was now a roaring waterfall.

“Where’s Dean?” Greta screamed over the roar of the wind, as she sat on the tile floor.

“I don’t know. We got into a fight a couple hours ago, and he drove off. I thought he’d be back by now.”

Greta responded, but her words were inaudible. Her mouth repeated the same movements, but Sam shook his head and closed his eyes, unable to understand the words that were torn out of her throat and disintegrated in the wind. Seconds were hours, and the pressure became unbearable and suffocating. Sam’s ears popped as the windows in the room blew in, the curtains audibly whipping around. A buzzing sound filled the air as the roof of the hotel lifted off, pulling wood beams, nails, insulation, and brackets away from the building. The top story walls collapsed inward and were swept away. The tornado worked its way to the floor below, effortlessly sweeping those walls away. In a turn of luck for the five storm chasers huddled in the bathroom of room 108, the tornado had now decided to move on to other targets, sparing most of the walls of the first floor. The roar gradually subsided. 

Slowly opening the bathroom door, the five horrified storm chasers cautiously walked out into the main part of the hotel room. The hallway, blocked with debris, forced them to exit through the window. One by one, they climbed out into the lightless hotel parking lot, trying to avoid getting scratched by remnant pieces of glass and mangled bushes below the window. They made their way farther into the parking lot, unable to believe what they saw when they turned around. The top two floors of the three story hotel were completely gone, tossed into a pile of twisted metal, next to several collapsed steel light poles. The first floor was a mess of removed cladding, partial walls, and broken windows. 

Sam, looking at his phone for the first time in almost 20 minutes, noticed three missed calls from Dean. 

“Shit! Dean called me, and I wasn’t looking at my phone.”

Sam, forgetting in the fervor of the tornado that he and Dean shared locations with each other, frantically pulled up the location app on his phone and saw a blue dot for Dean, located a mile southwest of the hotel. Sam showed Greta.

“Sam, we can’t get to him right now. Look at the debris.”

“I don’t care! I need to make sure he’s okay. He’s not that far away. We can walk there.”

“Okay. I’ll go with you,” Greta said, agreeing reluctantly.

After what seemed like a full night of dodging overturned cars, downed power lines, and tree branches they finally arrived at Dean’s blue dot.

“That’s Dean’s truck!”

Dean’s white Ford F-150, or what was left of it, was wrapped around a debarked tree with no remaining branches. There was no one inside. Dean’s treasured blue journal lay open in the passenger seat, the pages fluttering in the breeze mimicking the torment they had just experienced.

“No, no, no. God, please no.”

“Sam, I…”

“Can you…can you give me some space, please? I just need to process this.”

“Of course.”

Greta walked a couple hundred feet away, fixating on a home that didn’t have much to fixate on except a bare foundation with a few bolts that weren’t sucked away. Sam walked to the crushed truck, looking back to see if Greta was observing. Noting that she was occupied, Sam carefully reached into the truck and grabbed the journal. He opened it to the first page: 

If found, please return to Dean Contreras

An insidious plan came to Sam as he flipped through pages of detailed meteorological notes. What Sam had not revealed to Dean is that his own research had faltered recently, and his grant money was running out. The mesonet installation was a temporary project through the university, and he was eager for new opportunities. He surreptitiously tucked the journal away in his jacket, and turned to walk toward Greta, making sure to wipe a tear away when she noticed him. 

“His phone must be around here somewhere, but I didn’t see any of his stuff in his truck.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“Thank you. Let’s get back to the hotel. There’s nothing else we can do here.”

In the summer following the tornado, Sam successfully oversaw the rest of the mesonet network installation in Illinois, using Dean’s meteorological secrets to make improvements to the network’s capabilities. Dean’s theories were profoundly insightful, full frameworks for reimagining weather forecasting that Sam had never considered. With the resounding success of the network and additional research possibilities in hand, he was hired as a professor at the University of Michigan a few months later. The cold had now settled in for the winter, and Sam, in his spacious campus office, flipped to the last entry in the journal, one which Sam believed referenced the breakthrough Dean had alluded to in their final argument. 

05-21-37

If we can incorporate the data from each mesonet station independently into a machine learning model to predict storm dynamics, we can create more accurate warnings with pressure readings, wind speed, dew point, and other real-time data.

There was one other note at the bottom of the page:

Sam Kim cannot be trusted.

Sam’s thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice. 

“Hey, Sam! We’re getting ready to head over. Are you ready?” asked Greta. 

“Yes! Let’s go.”

That year, the American Meteorological Society was hosting its annual conference in Detroit, and today was the final day, concluding with a formal awards ceremony. The University of Michigan colleagues packed into two cars and made their way over to the convention center in downtown Detroit, entering the conference hall together as the ceremony began. Sam sat down and patiently waited for his category. 

“Here we go!” Greta said excitedly, grabbing onto Sam’s arm, as the time had finally come for the category of best individual research contribution.

“The award for best individual research contribution goes to… Sam Kim for his innovative work with the Illinois Mesonet Project! This is the highest award for an individual in meteorology, and the AMS is elated to give this award to such a collaborative and hardworking individual, especially given the circumstances he has had to face in the last year.”

Sam made his way to the stage to make a quick speech.

“Thank you, everyone. I’m honored my work has been recognized. We’re now able to make better forecasts and change lives in ways we never before imagined.”

Sam stepped away from the podium, and walked back to his seat next to Greta, who congratulated him thoroughly on his achievement. After a few more awards, the ceremony wrapped up, and everyone was ready to head home. Sam offered to drive a couple people back to Ann Arbor.

A few casual goodbyes later, Sam had dropped off his final passenger, and his car found a new destination. Tires crunched over gravel, slowly coming to a halt, and lightning arced across the dark sky, producing a distant rumble of thunder. Sam opened the trunk to retrieve a blue journal with a geometric pattern on its cover, and gently placed it on top a smooth placard at Oak Grove cemetery, knowing it would rain heavily all night. Sam bent down and kissed the placard marking the final resting place of his friend who had died alone and unaccomplished. A smile slowly crept across his face.

“Thank you, Dean.”