Dead Drop Gorgeous

1. Evan

The rain beat down from the dark sky above. A few minutes earlier, the sun was splitting the trees and birds were singing happily from their perches, but with a rumble of thunder and a gust of wind, it was all turned upside down. People were running to their homes for cover and the streets quickly became deserted, except for one or two people who had decided to battle the elements. The rain fell heavier and heavier, without mercy, and soon Evan's shoes were so filled with water that they squelched and sloshed when he walked.

Today had been another boring school day, the same old thing. Drowsy and uninterested, he daydreamed through every single class. These weren't the things he wanted to learn about and more and more of this useless rubbish was being thrown at him in every lesson. He knew how to add and subtract, how to write sentences and all the rest of it, why did he need to know the ins and outs? It's hardly like he was ever going to use most of it when he left school.

The rain continued as he turned into his street, his schoolbag was dragging him down as it was now soaking up water, too. Thunder roared somewhere in the distance. Splish-splash-splish, Evan had walked right through a puddle, unaware of how deep it really was, and now his trousers were taking up water as well. I can't bloody wait to get home, he thought. Nearly there. Someone passed him on the other side of the street. Man or woman, he couldn't tell, they had a long trenchcoat on and were holding a hat onto their head, probably to stop it getting blown away. He muttered enviously under his breath, "I wish I had a trenchcoat and a hat". He opened the door and stepped onto dry carpet. The house was so welcoming after the storm outside; the magenta carpet, the clean wood, it was so warm and inviting.

"Mum? Lyndsay?" he called out. No answer. He was home alone, and that gave him time to do whatever he wanted to. It was his birthday recently, and his mother had bought him a book on the Cold War (History was the subject he found himself least drifting off in), and he was taken in by it. The wars, betrayal, mystery, they were his daydreams now, rather than stupid fractions. He was near the end of that book, might as well go and finish it now, before anything else.

While he was upstairs, hunting out the book from the swamp on his desk, he heard a noise from next door. He put his ear up to the wall and listened:

"...00134 88197 63941 85375 ENDE."

Was that the lottery? There were an awful lot of numbers, and a tinkly little closing tune. Maybe it was some news report about Germans? Perhaps it was telephone numbers. Strange, anyway, he'd never heard something like that before on the radio.

By the time that he'd dug out the book and finished it off, night had fallen and his mother and sister were finally back home. Tomorrow is Saturday, the end of his working week, and all was good. Well, apart from the weather.