Rainy Days

I've always been really fond of the rain. I'm not quite sure what it is, maybe it's just that I'm too fair-skinned to truly enjoy the sunshine, or that I don't have enough body fat to truly enjoy the snow, but rain has always been my favourite. I never knew anyone who liked walking in the rain as much as I did, at least not until I met Kaya.

Kaya and I knew each other in high school, though we did recognize each other from middle school. She and I were fast friends, we both loved a lot of the same things, hated a lot of the same things, and were both clever enough to make our intense apathy toward the world kind of funny.

Whenever the first rain after a period of clear skies occurred, you would be guaranteed that both Kaya and I would show up to school. There was an unspoken agreement between the two of us that, as soon as it started raining in the morning, the two of us would be spending the afternoon together. And, sure enough, we would always greet each other at the bus stop in the morning, our hoodies already soaking wet, and by the time we got back to the bus stop after school, we would be off.

We never once had a real destination on our rainy days, but there was always somewhere that we 'really needed to go to.' Of course, she and I never actually needed to go to any of these places, we just wanted an excuse to wander around town in the rain without umbrellas. It's not that we were against the idea of umbrellas, it's just that neither of us owned one.

On one of our trips, while being pelted with rain and an ungodly amount of wind, we came across a girl who offered us an umbrella. She had two umbrellas, which is why she offered us one of them, but she warned us that the umbrella she had replaced was broken. We were drenched and so cold that our eyebrows stung, so we took the umbrella from her, thanked her, and went on our way. At this point we were so wet that we couldn't tell if the umbrella was helping us from getting wetter, but we didn't really care.

It was one of the spokes in the umbrella that was broken, and we had to tilt our heads as we walked to keep ourselves from being hit in the face with that particular piece of metal, but otherwise the rain-deflecting device seemed to be working just fine. While it was certainly a nuisance to us, we didn't see it as being so inconvenient that we would have to buy a new umbrella and give the broken one away. At least, that's how we felt until we were in the middle of a crosswalk and the metal spoke wound it's way into Kaya's hair.

So, picture this: two drenched teenagers, standing in the middle of a busy (and flooding) intersection, stopped in their tracks and screaming at one another. Because that's exactly what happened; we almost got hit by a car and I fell flat on my face, in the middle of the street, trying to push Kaya back onto the sidewalk to avoid the car that was unable to stop on the slippery road.

Kaya's screaming "OW! OH GOD! IT'S IN MY HAIR" like she's being attacked by bats, and I'm screaming "GET OUT OF THE ROAD!" like I'm an old man trying to get kids off his lawn, and she's screaming "STOP SCREAMING AND HELP ME!" like I'm Ricky, she's Lucy, and I've just walked in on one of her crazy schemes gone horribly wrong. One of the things that I always really admired about Kaya is that, even though she was quick to panic, she was also quick to calm herself down if her company was speaking to her rationally. I took a breath, looked her in the eye, and said "I can help you on the sidewalk," to which she responded "...okay."

So we get to the sidewalk, and I'm trying my best to untangle the metal from her hair, and her heavy goth makeup is running down her face, and she's crying, a little from the pain, a little from embarrassment, asking me if I'm going to have to cut her hair out. Meanwhile, my thick hair gel is quickly being washed from my hair and draining slowly down my face, so all I can taste is an array of chemicals and alcohol, and I'm trying desperately to stop myself from gagging and choking while trying not to rip her hair out of her scalp.

Finally, I get her hair out, and she lowers the umbrella to her chest, takes a breath, and tosses it in the nearest trash bin. She then looks me up and down and tells me that "[I] look like a drowned rat," to which I respond with "I like your bald spot."

She laughed, kissed me, and we continued walking, soaked to the bone.