Storm Boi 🌩️ (ON HOLD)

Part 5

The rain started again as I biked home from Eleanor's house - not the same furiously aggressive downpour as before, but a sad, cold mist that seemed to bleed the warmth from my bones. I was shivering by the time I got back to the trailer; the puffy vest and hoodie had done their best, but my waxen fingers looked like a dead man's.

In some ways I was grateful, though. At least I didn't have to explain to Mom how I'd cut my hand, and risk another can't-we-all-just-get-along sermon.

It was unseasonable, the weather turning cold like this. I could actually hear the point in the night when the rain turned over into something harsher, dancing off the windows like the pinging of a hundred thousand fingernails on a wine glass.

I pulled the quilt up over my head, leaving only a narrow tunnel to admit the cool air. Somewhere, out there in the darkness, the magma-red digital clock was ticking down the hours of my freedom. It was this way every Sunday night - every weeknight, really.

Should've listened to Mom when she wanted to leave Boothby. Even as the thought hit me I knew it was wrong; moving from one town to another wouldn't have solved anything. There was no escaping your personal demons in the digital age, not when you were haunted by their faces on social media more than you saw them in real life. Virtual shadows knew no horizon.

Danny... I flexed my right hand, letting the laceration sting me afresh beneath the taped gauze. Stopping and zoning out like that had been stupid - the pain was a reminder of that much.

I groaned and rolled over, trying not to count the minutes until dawn.

The wind sighed plaintively through the park, and eventually anxiety released its talons and I fell away into oblivion. My dreams were only snatches of colors, blurs of violent emotion, and then I was awake again, the alarm clock blatting at me until I slapped the snooze button.

Even though I had to wake up at 5:30 a.m. for school each day, I didn't really wake up until I was halfway there, shaking off my sleepwalker daze as the equally misty-eyed buildings of West Street were rolling past. The high school was in the opposite direction from Dr. Andrews' office, but Mom gave me a ride every day, so at least I had that last bit of safe haven before my daily nightmare began.

I winced as the grey sedan's front brakes wailing like a banshee, the way they always did after a big storm. It was only now as we stopped that I saw the ghostly, fractalline frost patterns stenciled across the passenger windows.

Mom smiled tightly at me, clenching her jaw so her teeth wouldn't chatter. "Make it a good one, kid."

As if I really have any control over that. I kept the thought to myself, only nodding to my mother as I climbed out of the car and grabbed one strap of my backpack, sling it over my shoulders crossways like a messenger bag. She fretted about how anything but a backpack would mess up my posture; this was my form of silent protest. "Seeya at home."

"Love you," she called after me as I slammed the door.

The sprays of dying grass guarding the front of the school had been dusted with the same frozen microcrystals as the sedan's windows. The irony defied belief; just a few days ago the earth itself had been fissuring, dying of thirst, and now the thing the plants most needed enclosed them like diamondine prisons.

I stared down at the dull greenery, collecting myself as Mom and her battered chariot chundered away behind me. It was minutes to seven o'clock, and though some of the buses had started to arrive the main crush of students was still fifteen minutes away, rattling down patchworked back roads on a course to converge at the front loop.

Arriving this early was no mistake. Mainly it was so Mom could get to work on time, but it also helped me avoid the tsunami of other teenagers.

I wrinkled my nose as I shouldered open the chipped chrome-and-glass front door. Smells like death and jock straps. The hallways were narrow as clogged arteries, and they held the stench of decades-old fear like a smoker's walls. Atomic orange metal lockers made the passageways even more impassable - and once the torrent of students arrived in a few minutes, the effect would be akin to Thera or Vesuvius.

My feet automatically carried me past the front office in all its 1970s-themed glory, down to a fork where I should've turned right, to the library. Instead I found myself stopping, and I tossed my bangs off my brow, stealing a surreptitious glance down the corridor that led to the left.

I could only see a sliver of the cafeteria from this crossroad, but I could hear the raucous din well enough. The nape of my neck prickled. It wouldn't have surprised me if I'd walked in there to find an actual rancor's pit rather than a cesspit of teenage cliques, all vying for a hierarchy of booths and circular tables that conveyed appropriate social status. It's heckn loud enough, for one thing.

I'd walked this way a hundred times - no, more - and never once had I stopped, or even questioned where I was going. Morgan and Jimmi were no doubt waiting in the library, and there was no earthly business that could take me to the cafeteria when it was in full-on before-school chaos mode...yet still I couldn't bring myself to keep going.

An unpleasant suspicion gathered with the same invisible whip-strike as yesterday's storm: What if she's in there?

It was easy enough to picture after the way I'd seen the girl yesterday, completely out of place in this half-a-horse town with her Wednesday Addams dress and her hidden smile. The cafeteria was the first place most kids went in the mornings, all save for the weirdos like me and the self-proclaimed gruesome twosome, who chose to hide well off the beaten path. And it wasn't like Mr. Keller was going to homeschool her. She'd probably get smashed up and spit out like water through a wheel if she got thrown into that - the way the school receptionist was bound to do.

She won't know where else to go. I glanced at the cafeteria again, lingering now, as though my squinting gaze could somehow pick her out among the anonymous blobs.

Someone smacked into me bodily, and my chin snapped around in time to see Kip Gravese's back as he sauntered away from me. An angry flush burned upward from my collarbone as I clumsily regained my footing. Not even a pretend apology...classy.

It didn't take long for my rage to seep inward, burning my lungs like acid as I tried to remember how to breathe normally. Dude, what are you thinking?! I had no reason to suspect that - like most of the students at Ulysses S. Grant High - she'd be anything but a mindless social climber who'd suck up to Danny and Vanessa and the rest of them just to seem a tiny bit cooler. Not that I'd be one to know it, but there hadn't been even the whisper of a new kid; her appearance would throw all the different cliques into a frenzy, until one or another of them had snapped her up.

I hitched my shoulder strap higher on my shoulder, and let out my breath in a shaky sigh. I hadn't even realized I'd still been holding it. With any luck, she'll go to a private school. Boarding school, even - or maybe she's just visiting Keller and won't stick around. The suitcase had been remarkably compact, definitely not big enough to accommodate a proper round of school clothes; I was probably panicking in thinking I'd run into her here.

Sunlight flashed off the front door in my peripheral vision, and my heart stopped as I saw the hallucination, clear as a prism. She was wearing the same black dress as yesterday, the white collar ruffling as she stepped inside the school from the front loop, rubbing her arms against the chill.

My heart slammed home against my ribs as Mr. Davies emerged from the front office to greet the girl, and she rewarded him with a shy smile.

Not a hallucination, then - she was really here.

"Heck," I grunted under my breath and spun on my heel, heading for the library and escape.

🌩️

Thanks for reading!!

Don't forget to follow me on YouTube to catch me writing
STORM BOI for NaNoWriMo! New chapters (more or less) daily :)

🌩️