"It's been a while," he greeted me. That was the way he always greeted me. Rain or shine, light or dark, that was how he said hello.
"Yes, it has," I grumbled in annoyance, shoving my hands in my pockets and kicking a tin can down the street. It made a foreign sound in this night full of crickets' song and the scent of flowers, oddly chaotic in the middle of the calming chatter.
"How is she?" I asked, looking up at him through my eyelashes.
"You're worried about her?" he asked me, chuckling lightly. A silence stretched on between us, while I went over my next words carefully in my mind.
"The misfortune that must have plagued me the day the introduction was made is unfathomable," I hissed. I was almost seeing red as I said these words. I was so angry with everything that had happened. He gave me a questioning look, but kept his mouth shut as I continued. "For the love of heaven, why did you ever think that I'd enjoy that? Selfish, spiteful, egotistical little... I couldn't even breathe again until the drive home!" I finished in a rush, grinding out the last words grudgingly. He stared at me, looking shocked. I took a breath to compose myself. "But you were with her, and you wanted me to accept her. We've been friends a long time, Caleb – heck, we’re practically family! - and I'm glad that you value my opinion, but it isn't my choice what you do with your love life."
"Do you even care?" he asked me slowly.
"Of course," I said, wandering away. I sat down on one of the many benches that were in the park and crossed my legs. My closest friend soon joined me.
"She wasn't like that around me," he explained. "She was kind and gentle. I thought you were just judging her. I didn’t know she was keeping a secret."
I laughed mirthlessly. "She made it very clear that she wanted you all to herself and if I got near, it would be my blood that she would shed."
"She'd never." I gave him a look, the one that he knew very well. It was the one that seemed to say "Are you really that stupid?"
"I give up," he sighed, leaning back. "Yes, she's got anger issues."
I rolled back my sleeve, revealing clean white bandages all the way up. "Issues?" I asked. He looked sadly at my arm, then looked away. Tears rolled down his face. I turned my back on him, giving him his privacy.
"There was nothing you could do," I told him. "Insanity isn't something you can fix for someone else. Usually you can't even fix it for yourself."
"She wasn't insane, though. Just angry." I tried to ignore the sob I heard.
"You have to forgive yourself," I murmured gently. I focused on a black cat that sauntered by, mewling at my contentedly before trotting away in search of food.
"I can't," he replied quietly, reaching down to hold my hand. I gave his a reassuring squeeze, still turned away. I pulled my feet up on the bench and leaned against his shoulder, like I always used to when we were kids. I couldn't separate from my memory the time when I first did this during our childhood, but he'd told me once that my trust in him comforted him, so now I always did it when he was sad or angry.
"So is she okay?" I asked finally.
"Oh, yes, all settled into the mental institute. She won’t talk to me. Says it’s something to do with ‘seeking solace in the comfort given to her by the kind doctors’. Her obsession with you and pictures is being handled. I can't believe I didn't see it before!"
"Calm yourself," I murmured, leaning my head back and looking at the stars.
"How can I? I can't forget what she did."
Neither could I. He'd found her in her room with a pair of scissors, cutting my face out of old pictures of me and him. There were hundreds; enough to fill five photo albums, and they dated back to when we were in preschool. When she'd been caught, she ran out and drove to my house. She'd burst in and started breaking things, and then she'd attacked me with the broken pieces of a mirror. When Caleb got there, she'd been laughing like a lunatic, and when he asked her what she'd done, she'd just turned around and said "Mischief managed," like it was all some sort of joke. I was out cold on the floor, and Caleb had dragged the giggling Claudia back to the car. He'd gotten the neighbor to guard me while he drove to the police station.
I'd woken up in a white room with a beeping machine and stinging arms and Caleb asking again and again, "Can you hear me?"
When I'd gotten the strength to reply, I'd told him to "Stop yelling, or you’ll get a swift kick in the head." He'd then asked me if I was dying.
"I remember," I chuckled, "me lying on the bed and you standing there, and you were all scared for me, and I was telling you that you were being a royal pain and that it was in your best interests to stop talking about it.” I glanced over my shoulder and caught a small smile on his lips.
“Now that’s a precious treasure,” I told him, smiling back. He laughed a little.
“Look at it this way,” I suggested. “There’s no time for sorrow. You’re standing still in the middle of two roads. One will lead to happiness, but you won’t know which until you start walking.”
“Kind of like ‘you’ll suffer from thirst until you drink and suffer from starvation until you eat’ things?” he asked.
“Yes. Think of this as a test of life,” I added.
“I think this might take a little teamwork,” he told me.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“I don’t think you trust me.”
"Are you challenging me?" I asked. I turned to him, looked deep into his eyes, and said “I trust you.”
“And so I walk the road of solitude,” he said dramatically, shifting. I turned back so that I was facing forward, but still held his hand. He lifted my arm. “How’s the pain?”
“Not too bad. It’ll heal.” I looked at him, and he seemed to be deep in thought. There was trouble lurking in the depths of his blue eyes.
“Let’s go to the abandoned mall,” he suddenly suggested, standing up. He pulled me up with him.
“Did your brain take a vacation?” I asked dryly.
He looked at me, his face holding the perfect illusion of innocence.“No, I’m happy, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, and I know that you’ve forgiven me. I want to do something.”
“You always did enjoy breaking the rules. For you it’s almost like a sport. You’ve exceeded my expectations of bounce back time,” I informed him, referring to his emotions.
“Why stay sad?” He asked with a laugh.
He led me to a chain link fence with a broken old lock. It sported a sign with diagonal yellow and black stripes, a red triangle and the words “danger ahead”. There was no way out except for here, a fact made obvious by the scuff marks of shoes and litter from the security that used to be here when the town still thought that they’d rebuild the mall after the fire. They hadn’t, and had just left the place to rot.
The building itself was a horror to behold, a huge plain square with a tower for the penthouse suite of the hotel. It had been built with fortitude in mind, and not practicality, so when the fire hit the bottom floor the whole place went up, and most of the greedy shoppers ran through the fire to grab the merchandise. There were some things to salvage, and the candy store was perfectly unharmed, which was the reason for so many kids trying to break in. It looked like a bad guy’s fortress from a fairytale, like someone had stolen all the good magic and joy from the place. It had been a secret hideout for a gang at one point, but now it was just an empty place with candy on the second floor. Its creation had been followed by one month of use, but then a big mall opened up downtown, and everyone went there instead. In the end, it was the saddest place I’d ever seen.
When we stepped in, the floor was drowning in weeds and wild flowers as if Mother Earth were reaching out to claim her land back from the progress of humans. Field mice skirted the traps that had long ago been laid out. The far wall was crumbling, the small stones breaking away and rolling down the hill into the street on the other side.
There was an open door leading down a staff hallway into an office. Caleb held me back when I tried to step in. “Safety first,” he told me, and waved his hand around inside the room. I listened for alarms, but there weren’t any, so I stepped inside.
The usual office supplies cluttered the room. A pen and paper, the words scrawled in royal blue ink in a fancy script long ago faded by the weather; a ruined leather swivel chair; a file cabinet with rusted corners and a keys hanging out of one of the locks. A “do not disturb” sign hung from the door knob. Quickly bored with the place, I walked out.
Caleb followed me as I wandered over to inspect an advertisement in front of a games store, which boasted the hardest puzzle anyone had ever seen. I laughed at it, considering I’d completed that puzzle in minutes, and had immediately rated the toy for ages three and up.
I wasn’t even seeing the building in front of me anymore. I’d forgotten my conversation with Caleb. I was seeing what this building had been, how beautiful the inside was in the past compared to the outside. I was thinking of how the old stores and charred walls emanated rejection, as no one had realized that we could still salvage the old fortress.
I led Caleb to the hotel, and stood waiting at the bottom of the spiral staircase. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I could see lightning flash across the sky where a wall should have been blocking my view. I started climbing the stairs quickly, Caleb barely catching up to me in time before I reached the penthouse suite.
The sky was gray with storm clouds. The rain, so far, was light, and the wind had yet to pick up. I let the rain soak my clothes, loving the feeling of it, while it was still warm. Thunder cracked from miles away, and lightning lit the world on fire. It was ugly and boring, and so, so beautiful.
"Have you been thinking about our little talk," Caleb asked from behind me, "or have you only been thinking about the rain?" I stared out at the world over the broken walls.
"Um... I've been multitasking," I lied. I turned to him. He looked troubled.
"I haven't told you the whole story," he admitted, walking towards me. He stopped a step or two away. "You should always be the hero of your own dreams, right?" he asked, like I would know.
"Yeah, I think so," I said.
"Well, for a long time, I've been in my dreams, but there's been someone else. With all that's happened, I realized that this person is my last hope. I've loved them for a long time, and I just haven't admitted it to myself. The truth is..." He broke off, and bit his lip. "The truth is, I'd give all that I have to be with this person now. I'd sacrifice everything just for them to konw how I feel, and for them to feel the same way."
I raised my eyebrows at him in surprise, and looked out over the horizon. The moon was out by now, just visible in the east, and a faint rainbow was showing just underneath. The rain seemed to be playing the melody of relaxation, and I didn't want to think about serious things. I didn't want Caleb to think about serious things. I just wanted him to be happy, for once. After all the girlfriends he'd gone through, all the horrid breakups and grudges, I just wanted him to happy.
I looked back at him, and realized that even in the storm, he could do something cheesy like kiss me. I knew this, because that's exactly what he did.
When he pulled away, I asked him softly, "now who taught you to kiss a girl under the rain?" In that moment, I knew another thing: somehow, everything was going to be alright.
"It was you, Jen," he said with a smile, and he kissed me again.
********
OMG! Horrible cliche, falling in love with the best friend! Sorry it took so long, but writing a story around words is a new experience for me. Wow... I just noticed that I didn't put whether the narrator was a boy or a girl until the last couple of lines. Did that confuse you? Ha ha! Hope you enjoyed it!
~Mocha
