Vanilla Dusk ✓

Loop Part 1

The door to the school rooftop was seldom locked, as if they trusted the students enough to venture into the open space without attempting anything stupid. Forsaken in one corner was a small, octagonal glass cabin with a wrecked window, smashed in the last hailstorm and left untended ever since. Shayne used to seek solace on one of those long wooden benches inside the greenhouse, where he could loll through the entire lunch while chewing a cold sandwich or relishing a light doze, ostracising himself from the boisterous gangs and the often-jammed canteen. He would bask in the soothing warmth of the filtering sunbeams and the lingering steam that almost concealed him from the rest of the world, engulfing his consciousness and dreams the same way a hot bath could do. He had planted some tomatoes once but they never lived to be harvested. Now shattered pots of withering plants and decaying buds lay scattered in the cabin, ravaged constantly by the brutal winter gale and occasional downpour after the Gardening Society dissolved not long ago. The benches, covered completely in glass shards and often damp with revolting sprawling mould, were kept out of reach. Sometimes, Shayne would stand outside the cabin for a long time simply staring at the miserable content inside, wondering how life and death was only a matter of a flash of lightning or a sudden gust of wind.

There were thick, black railings on all sides of the rooftop, reaching up to Shayne's waist. Some paints had faded, scraped off by delinquents when they were up there smoking cigarettes, beating another unfortunate boy to a pulp or simply striking secret drug deals during the breaktime. Some tiles were missing due to the lack of maintenance, cracks visible on the concrete floor.

He leant on, no, pressed himself against the railing, exerting as much pressure as he could to test if it might break and fall off by any chance, freeing him from the confinement of this schoolground. He peered down at the narrow alleyway below where cars were parked on one side in a straight line and a few pedestrians strolled by with their heads down. They walked into the alleyway or passed one another in the intersection, and were never seen again.

Shayne leapt over the railing and landed on the ledge, where there was still room for him to shift around and slumped against the railing. He sat down slowly, legs dangling in the air. A hunched old lady with two grocery bags hopped into her yellow compact car and drove off. A man in a trench coat scurried past with a suitcase. A mother pushed her baby cart while consoling her wailing four-year-old who kept tugging at her sleeve. Nobody ever looked above their heads.

It was a cold day in winter. The street was cold. Everyone was cold.

Fleeting, misty clouds escaped his quivering soft lips as he rubbed his pale, icy hands together. He was merely wearing his school shirt, well-ironed because his father demanded so, always white and straightened without a single loose thread. The wind tapped his face and he fought back a shiver. His black leather shoes gleamed in the light, always brand new and polished because his father demanded so. He dug into his right pocket and took out a black stud. He put it on his right ear which he normally wasn't allowed to, because his father demanded so.

There was a dream below, a dream he had been having repeatedly for a while. He had been on the rooftop numerous times in his dream. Every time, he was slouching against the railing, legs hanging perilously over the ledge, eyes blinking at the deserted street below, his heart thumping, waiting for someone to look up from their phone screens and spare a second or so to see him fly. And sometimes, there was this outlandish, uncannily familiar image of him with a pair of dark wings, sometimes outstretched, sometimes clipped, sometimes exploding into a mass of stunning feathers that tickled his skin. There were two birthmarks resembling faded scars that stretched vertically down his back to prove that and ever since he was a child, he had had this far-fetched theory that he might have been an angel and a spiritual incarnation of some sort, or at least this was what he had been told as a toddler by his mother when she was lulling him to sleep. His father was constantly asking him to snap out of his fancy and that imaginative world of woe because being melodramatic and depressed all the time wouldn't gain him a straight A's and it made no contributions to his intellectual growth at all.