You've Become the Rain

I didn’t see him for another week. Part of me expected him to be outside my school the next day, just watching me with those dark eyes of his. Part of me almost wanted him to be there, but he wasn’t. It was almost as if he had disappeared; no matter where I looked or where I went he wasn’t there.

In the end I just assumed that he was like everything else in my life. Just passing through, never staying. Leaving his mark before disappearing. And I didn’t know why it was that he had left a mark on me, or why I felt disappointed at his absence. I didn’t know why my eyes always seemed to drift over to that piece of paper, just wondering if he was on the other side. He intrigued me, both in his own mysteriousness and in his sudden knowledge of who I was and who I wanted to be. And as sad as it was, I almost wondered whether he could teach me all the things about myself I had been searching for fruitlessly for years.

Jeremy brought him up at every chance he got. He seemed to assume that I knew more about him than I actually did, and although I told him multiple times that I had never met him before, he didn’t seem to believe me. Scum, he called him. You shouldn’t be around scum like that.

At times I thought that Jeremy was too close-minded compared to me. Because I didn’t believe with any part of me that Kennedy was scum, or that he was a waste of space. I saw him; I looked into those dark eyes and I found someone who was like me. Broken, in every sense of the word. But instead of trying to cover it up with fake smiles and faux laughter as I did, he had simply cut his emotions off from the outside world. By looking at him, it was almost as if I knew everything and nothing about him all at once. But he seemed to see simply everything about me.

I couldn’t count the amount of times I’d been asked about him by my peers. And when I answered; when I responded that I didn’t know him their answer would be the same. I thought so. You don’t seem like the type that would hang around with him.

That was when it occurred to me that people made assumptions. And it seemed as though they’d made the wrong assumptions about me.



I saw him standing on the side of the road two weeks later when I was on my way back from picking up the groceries. He was with another man – an older, more muscular one, and they were fighting. Kennedy’s hands were clenched in tight fists by his side, but his head was down and he seemed to be apologizing. Words left his lips that were lost in the abyss that was reality. But there was a name, over and over. Alaina… for her… please… I need… Alaina… but… another chance. One more. One more. Just one more. The man was shaking his head. Brown eyes swarming with foreign emotions darted around, lowered, closed. Fists unclenched. Emptiness was forgotten through the strangling grasps of despair.

The man shook his head once more before patting the younger man on the shoulder, and turned to walk back inside the grubby complex. Haunted eyes lifted and met mine. They widened and darkened; turned away and disappeared.

And then the engine was roaring and he was gone, leaving me staring after him and sure of nothing but the knowledge that I really didn’t know him at all.