Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Twenty Seven - Heavy Rain

It was raining. Pouring, actually, plummeting water splattering onto the glass shielding me in bursting drops. The rubber wipers clearing it shuddered to a stop as my music abruptly cut off, key clicking out of the ignition, droplets impact’s becoming louder in the absence of the radio.

I glared out at the parking lot, huffing and blinking tiredly as I carefully tugged my hood up and steeled myself to slump through the foul weather, pushing the door open with a sigh and swinging to my feet. Lowering my head and shoving my hands into my pockets, I trudged quickly to the dry corridors and out of the sharp downpour. My vision was reduced to a five foot expanse of pavement immediately before me, eyes straining upwards as far as my lids would allow to peek out from under the hood and ensure that I didn’t get knocked over by a careless car during my trek across the asphalt. That would be quite an unfortunate way to start my day.

The atmosphere was gray and biting, the stereotypical setting for the beginning of a cliché horror movie. Hanging clouds smothered the sun, muting everything with a flat shadow, partnering nicely with the chill infecting the air. Cold and wet; miserable climate.

Reaching the hallway, I flopped my hood off and rearranged my fringe, tucking it back and narrowing my eyes uselessly as it drooped right back over them. Focusing on the soaked spots patterning my arms instead of the fixed faces surroundings me, I contemplated whether being inside and protected from the heavy rain but subjected to critical peers and high school torment was really an improvement.

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Squinting out the window, I gazed past the glass, trying to focus my eyes clearly on the water streaming down and pooling into puddles. I was constantly mystified as to why rain was unnoticeable unless you were explicitly looking for it. Even though the drops coloring the sidewalks outside were substantial enough to  leave my hoodie damp nearly two hours after I’d tramped through them, they were too misty and weak to be defined enough for my vision to naturally catch them.                                                                                                      

Obviously, this had me twisted around in my stiff plastic chair, back turned uncomfortably and fingers gripping the edge of my seat as I ignored the work we’d been presented with. My history teacher had assigned us to read a chapter from the text book out loud and fill out a random sheet – busy work, it sounded like, leaving me to determine the activity useless and let my hearing discard my classmate’s voices and isolate the quiet sound of nature splashing the leaves beyond the window.

I was one of those contradictory and often irritating people who loved rain yet hated getting wet. Appropriately, I was also stuffed to the split seams with absolute shit.

While I had nothing inherently against letting the precipitation drip onto my skin and run streams over my cheeks, I was embarrassingly self conscious and spent obnoxious periods of time styling my hair to perfection every morning and attempting to convince myself that I looked decent enough to enter the judgmental public eye without attracting concealed ridicule and snickers . I adored the sensation of water flicking onto my lips and catching in my eyelashes, but never dared to venture openly into the rain because it also stuck bleached blond and contrasting black to my forehead, cold whitening my already paper pale skin and leaving my looking like a stupid wet ferret. Neither a view anyone wished to see or I wanted to become.

My ears picked up a snippet of information about George Washington, fact forgotten a quick second later as it was consumed by the curiosity that always plagued me, posing the question of why I actually cared about looking silly. I was a joke in every imaginable way; the words that left my mouth were only serious in the most desolate situations, I intentionally contorted my features into ridiculous expressions to intensify a punch line or cop an amused chuckle; I’d even made myself the subject of cutting jokes.