Rain

• Elena Lukina, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2012

I sat with her and drank my coffee with caramel and smoked slowly and thoughtfully. I talked to her as if she could understand. Maybe she could. I just pretended I was sitting next to an especially good listener. That made it easy to talk all I wanted. I blew a billowy cloud of smoke and looked at Rain, her head tilted to the side, her blonde hair disarrayed and her eyes wider than hell’s gate.
“I wish I could sympathize with you, Rain. But if I told you I know how you feel, I’d be lying. I don’t know one damn thing about being you.” I blew another cloud into the air and she just stared through me as usual. Then she had a weird spasm and blinked fifty times before resuming the staring.
“It’s such a painfully unglamorous way to be disempowered, isn’t it?” I sighed. “Being disabled, I mean. People won’t even go near you unless they have a friend of family-member with the same problem. It’s true. People say they don’t care about appearances and that they tolerate differences and all, but they don’t really mean it. They’ll tolerate sexuality and religion and race, because you can say anything you want about someone, you might think you hate them, but when you hear their side of the story, you realize that they’re just humans and you decide you can’t dislike them anymore,” I took a long drag on my cigarette and blew a misshapen smoke ring before continuing, “but then you get someone that drools in public and can’t form sentences; someone who can’t explain themselves. There’s none of that charm, that humanness. It’s like they’re freaks; gross or funny or sometimes creepy… It makes me want to cry because they don’t admit it, but they all think it and stay away. They secretly wish that the freaks were gone.”
“Caaghj!” Rain burst out unexpectedly, waving one hand about and blinking madly again.
I exhaled and picked up my coffee cup. “I wish you were back. I wish you could understand me and that your mum wouldn’t cry every time I came over. But I’ll be making wishes ‘till I die and I guarantee you none of them will come true. Why you, Rain? Why us? I can’t help you, but I can’t leave, either. I hate myself already, but if I left you now I’d just have to kill myself right away. I don’t know how the others left you. Cowards. I don’t care if I won’t get a date ever again, or if I have to put up with no sleep and derogatory jokes and whispering and sympathetic looks for the rest of my life. I can’t ignore you. I won’t leave you.”
With that I got up, paid for the coffee, wheeled Rain out of the shop and set off into the city with her. The sympathetic looks were everywhere. But c’est la vie and what can you do?