Better Now

Stormy Weather

Kaiden's POV

As she snapped the twig off the branch of a cherry tree, Kaiden couldn't help but remember her. She loved these trees. The blossoms were her favorite flower.
They really were beautiful, weren't they?
     Kaiden smothers the petals, sneering, rubbing them between her thumb and forefinger as she saunters down the cracked sidewalk, just off the red brick road. Her neighbor wouldn't mind the vandalism.

Gazing up at the sky from her bedroom window, Kaiden tried to count the clouds, but they spread out above her like a wool blanket soaked in hard water. She picks at her stubbed fingernails as she sits on her bed, noting a small droplet that has struck the glass. She pries open the window.

The smell of rain fills her nose, dampens her thick sweatshirt, thickens the air. A storm is brewing, and Kaiden grins.
A storm means thunder, some lightning, and, most obviously, rain. It hadn't rained in what seemed like forever in Greensboro. In fact, it had been so long that the ugly bushes under her window had begun to turn brown a week ago.
When it rained in town, it really came down. When it rains, it pours, Kaiden thinks soberly to herself. The rain was beautiful. It could be loud or quiet, violent or calming, fatal or sobering. The soft pitter on her window always made her feel safe when alone. Hopefully this storm was just rain. It gets lonely during harsh ones.

The only problem with it raining was, Halloween was tomorrow. If the rain kept going into the next night then they'd be rained out, forced to stay in on one of Kaiden's favorite nights of the year.
Her plan was to dress in all black and hide in bushes or behind buildings, jumping out and scaring children. Was she supposed to trick-or-treat like the rest of her class?
Childish, she thought.
"What would I do with all that candy, anyways? Induce myself into a coma and fumble down the hallway at school tomorrow like the rest of 'em? Yeah, right," she mumbles quietly, staring out at the sky. She sits with her arms at full length holding her chest out the window, Ariel-on-Rock style.

Snapping her head around she closes the window briskly and flops back down on her bed with a sigh.
"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" She breathes out, chuckling at herself, raising her hand straight up and keeping it there and feeling it fall asleep slowly. Groaning, she rolls to face her door, tucking her hands under her cheek in a childlike display of tiredness. Kaiden closes her eyes for a while and thinks about anything that comes to mind, not caring how far or wide her thoughts jump. Not caring until a certain face comes to mind, at which she flicks her eyes open, then slowly lets them go half mast.
She doesn't want to think about him right now. But of course, she ends up doing it anyways. Kaiden rolls back and forth; facing left, then right two minutes later, then left again. She rolls and fluffs, tosses and turns, for just ten minutes before finally she sits up, defeated, and grabs her phone from under her pillow.
She lightly rubs her fingers over the volume buttons, clicks the ringer off and on again a few times, toys with the power button for a second or so, circling it.
She turns it on.
Kaiden goes into her photos and looks through them. All of them. She smiles and laughs at some, tears up at others, deletes a few where she thinks she looks strange or where the angles were unflattering. She hurriedly swipes over certain groups of pictures, not wanting to bring on some sort of mood she knows she'd get stuck in.

Somehow, she reminisces herself into a sort of dream state. She dreams of him, awakening later when everyone else is asleep, with tears burning her eyes and a soaking pillow.