Back in the Rain

by Elen Chase

  BACK IN THE RAIN

  ELEN CHASE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.

  BACK IN THE RAIN

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2018 by Elen Chase

  Edited by Emily Dux

  Cover art by Noemi Ruffolo

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of Italy. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  Introduction

  When I was a kid, I loved reading and immersing myself in the epic novels we had at home. In every single page, I could feel the bravery of the heroes, the courage of the knights, the fear of people waiting to be saved and the joy of victory. I longed to be a hero myself someday. I remember telling that to my father once, and he replied that we don't have swords, dragons or magic in our world, so I wouldn't be able to fight the same battles of my books. Nevertheless, if I really wanted to be a hero, there were other ways. Every day different heroes fight different kinds of modern battles, he said. I was somewhat disappointed by his answer. What kind of battle can you fight without a sword or magic? This modern world sucks.

  "I think I know what your dad is talking about." I turned toward my friend Dan, even if I knew he wouldn't be really looking back at me. He would never look at me when he was busy doing something else, but this time his voice sounded sort of amused, and I wondered what kind of expression was on his face. With his big eyes, of a rare shade of blue, almost closed thin lips, and wavy black hair falling on his forehead, he was concentrated on his drawing.

  "So, what do you mean?" I asked. I didn’t like the idea of him understanding something I couldn't, even though, to be honest, it happened all the time.

  "I mean that to me a doctor like your dad is a better hero than an idiot who can only swing a sword and kill dragons."

  "ONLY kill dragons?" I raised my voice. I must have had the dumbest face in the world, and I have no idea how, but he noticed even without looking at me.

  "Yes, but close your mouth or you’ll catch flies," he said, and this time he had something really similar to a smile on his face.

  "But dragons are like THIS size and breathe fire!" I opened my arms as wide as I could.

  "Still doesn't seem very threatening to me." Alright, now he really was smiling. "Also, if by killing a dragon you could save, let’s say two hundred villagers, that would be good. But then you wouldn't be needed anymore. You’d be useless in other cases of emergency, like when a very bad disease spreads. However, if you were a doctor like your dad, you could heal the people hurt by the dragon until it went away on its own. Then, when the epidemic came, you would be able to save people again without killing any of that world's creatures." He had stopped drawing now and was looking straight at me. I really wanted to say something back, but nothing came to my mind. As always, his arguments sounded perfectly logical to me.

  "I hate you when you're smart," I admitted. He turned his face back to his sketchbook without saying anything, and I moved closer to him and took a look at the page. I had been sure he was drawing the landscape in front of us; I thought we came to the park because he wanted to draw that. But then, on the paper, the most beautiful dragon I had ever seen had come alive. "You… " I was speechless.

  "I don't want to think of dragons as evil creatures. In books, all they do is destroy villages, but if you think about it, people never tried to befriend them in those tales. Maybe dragons have too many ‘heroes’ to protect themselves from."

  "I don't know, I never thought about that."

  "Well, they don't exist anyway, so I guess you can think what you want," he said. I needed to be reassured like that. I somehow felt guilty for wanting to kill dragons all that time. I looked again at the dragon. As if I could ever kill you, I thought.

  "Annie, Dan!" screamed my twin sister, Ange, from the road next to the park entrance, stealing our attention. She rushed toward us, a very angry look on her face, the long, light brown hair waving in the air, red cheeks under the green beady eyes. She was wearing her favorite pair of jeans and a sleeveless blouse all creased from sleeping in it in the afternoon. When she was close enough to have us boys listen to her without hurting her throat she said, "How could you leave without me?! Annie, that's horrible!"

  "Shut up An, you’re the one who fell asleep on the sofa and wouldn't wake up no matter what," I frowned, "and don't call me Annie, it's a girl's name!"

  "Shutting people up is rude, Annie," said Dan, mocking me. I said nothing, but glared at him. Now ignoring me, he told her, "I was wondering when you'd catch up with us, An."

  "So, what were you doing here without me?" asked Ange.

  "Dan was drawing and I—"

  "Yes, alright, I really don't care. Today I had just the best idea and I can't wait to tell you," she said, interrupting me.

  "What? Don't ask then," I muttered. Her acid attitude never failed to upset me. Ange touched her watchpad and displayed in the air, over her arm, the hologram of a logo. This attracted my attention and I crawled closer to them.

  "Guys, from now on we're gonna be a team," said Ange. The hologram was showing a symbol, which I later recognized as three hands one on top of the others, and in the center, a heart. So girly, I thought. In the middle of the heart, in her favorite font, she had written, “3AN.”

  "An, it's really cute," said Dan. We immediately understood that a “but” was following, and I couldn't agree more.

  "Dan's right. Are these hands? Looks more like a diaper to me," I said. Ange flushed bright red, and even Dan was about to laugh hearing that. "Also, the heart. Just, please, no," I added.

  "So, what do you suggest?" said Ange, displeased but also clearly embarrassed by our reaction.

  "I think we could delete the hands and the heart, and try to make the text more original instead," said Dan. He began to edit the image by touching the hologram; he deleted the hands and the heart and made the text bigger. Then he moved the letters diagonally with the three at the top, and slightly overlapped them. Finally, he manually edited the font, drawing on it with his finger, creating a completely new style. "Something is still missing, but this could be the sketch," he said when he had finished.

  "Well, I'll probably leave the artwork to Dan from now on," commented Ange.

  "I see," I said, "3AN. Because ‘An’ is inside our names, ‘Andrew,’ ‘Ange’ and ‘Dan,’ and there's three of us. Not so cool but it's easy to remember. Anyway, now that we’re a team, what do we have to do?"

  "I thought of an oath we can make. Let’s promise we will always help each other, no matter what happens. This means to never give up on the others, and be together for the rest of our lives. Also, if you agree to be part of the team, it will be forever. Got it? No retirements allowed here.”

  We looked into each other’s eyes. Suddenly we were all dead serious about it, at least for how serious some ten year old kids could be.

  "I'm sure we're gonna have a lot of fun!" added Ange in the end.

  “I like it,” said Dan.

  "I guess it's not so bad," I said.

  We put our hands on the hologram, one on top of the others, and she whispered, "Forever!"

  "Forever," we said again together.

  Chapter 1

  It was a cold April night, the coldest I could remember in my twenty-one years. I had been home all day, half-asleep on the sofa with the TV turned on. To keep my mind occupied, I was trying my best to pay attention to the airing programs. The channel I was tuned on was History One, my favorite from when I was a kid. A documentary was show
ing the great reform that changed the social system of the entire world a hundred years before: the birth of the Universal Cities and the First Government. In other words, this was the very beginning of the New Era. When my great-grandmother was still alive, I used to ask her a lot of questions about that period. I couldn't even imagine a world divided into Continents and States, each with its own political system, often strictly connected to religion or culture. Of course in each City there was freedom of belief and anyone could keep the customs of their former land, but for those ideas to influence the government was just absurd. I remember how I was astonished thinking they had no internet, no cameras, no watchpads. We basically have owned watchpads since we were six. They give them to us during the first year of elementary school, when we start earning credits. Since credits are a perfectly valid currency and can be converted into money, it would be almost impossible to live without watchpads ever since. In the Uptowns of the Cities almost everything can be bought by credits, and money is usually used only in the Downtowns, the slums, which have the reputation of hosting drug markets, brothels and being the most squalid places of the city.

  “People can't just live in a world too perfect, son,” my great-grandmother used to tell me. “You do your best to try to have everyone get along, but there will always be someone who is not happy about it. They can't compromise, or can’t just give up on transgression, that's it. But who knows? Maybe it's better this way.” She was a clever woman, a surgeon who worked in the first global medical team of the First Government. She really earned her place in the Uptown of Rosedeer.

  There are always new people coming and going from Downtown. They teach us in school, “Anyone can become anything,” so it's utterly normal for a person born in Downtown to gain a fairly important position in Uptown companies, exactly like it’s pretty common to see Uptown people waste all their family's credits and move to Downtown afterward. But my family has always lived here, to the point that we are known in the neighborhood for that. Not that I ever even cared about that, especially in those days, when every time I went out I felt everyone's eyes on me. I knew they talked about the great “misfortune” that fell on our family, and that they were “sure that boy won't meet the expectations of anybody at this point.” They heard I had dropped out of the police academy right after passing the entrance test, apparently. Even being in my own house was becoming suffocating for me. I had told my parents I wanted to go away for a while, but they wouldn't let me. I could understand their worry; they were afraid I would do something stupid. I appreciated it, but still, it wasn't enough.

  That night I had lost track of time. I turned the TV off and went to my room. I sat on the bed and kept staring at the wall in front of me, without really looking at it. I could hear the wind howling, crashing against my window, but I wasn't able to listen to any sound. I wasn't sad, I wasn't angry, and I wasn't scared either. I was nothing.

  Shallie Lindsay, my girlfriend, had been found dead under the oak near her house two months before, after being missing for another month. When she was found by a guy taking his dog for a walk, apparently he thought she was sleeping. She didn't have any injuries, no signs of violence on her body, not even a scratch. So what was it that had taken her life? The police suspected a suicide. “She might have taken some sort of drug,” they said. But no traces of that were found either. No suffocation, no heart attack, no aneurysm. Nothing. Apparently, what killed my girlfriend was nothing. How could that even be possible? And where had she been for that month? There were so many mysteries about her death that at a certain point I had even stopped asking myself any questions, falling into the deepest apathy.

  I was home alone. My parents wanted to take me somewhere with them, but I refused without even asking where, and I insisted for them to go on their own. They were trying their best to cheer me up, I really knew that, and so were my best friend Sean, other friends, old schoolmates and whoever came to talk to me in the previous two months, but it was asking too much of me. Finally, a growing frustration urged me to get up, so I left my room and started wandering around the house. That was no good; soon the memories of my childhood passed before my eyes, reminding me that, after all, I was alone. I picked up the framed picture of An, Dan and me placed on the dresser in the corridor, and found myself talking to it. "How could you leave me? Both of you." Hurt and lonely, I ended up thinking of Shallie’s words, of the trust she had in everyone, of that strength in her voice that would always make everything alright. “I think your relationship with them is wonderful and unique,” she used to tell me. “Life sometimes can be unfair, it bends you to the breaking point, and often your efforts don't bring any result. But things can change, and you can change them! Look at you, after seven years, with sparkling eyes every time you mention them. I think they never really left you, Drew.”

  "But where are they now, Shallie?” I said, replying to her words in my head, “I don't even have you anymore."

  Suddenly I grew angry, and the weight of loneliness fell on my shoulders. These were first emotions I had felt in a while. I suddenly couldn't stay in that house anymore. I put some things in my backpack, wore my watchpad, grabbed my keys and left home. I didn't know where I was going, but I walked down the street breathing the cold night air and letting the rain fall on me. I arrived at the park where I used to play when I was younger, and I looked around to every detail: the position of the trees, the benches, the grass, the view. And finally I cried all the tears I had held back in the previous three months. I threw my backpack in the air and screamed, then cried again. When I finally ran out of tears, I was lying on the grass, exhausted, but at the same time I was coming back to life. I felt that, at last, I was able to think clearly again. I slowly got up and sat on a bench, remembering all that happened in the six years that Shallie and I spent together. The first time we met, how she hit me with a fastball during the girls' baseball practice match. The way she laughed with her friends in class. The first time we held hands. And then the breathtaking kisses, the love she gave me, her understanding, the complete trust, a shoulder to cry on, and her smile... how she smiled. I wanted to see her smile for the rest of my life. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted to treasure her the most.

  But she is gone, said a voice inside my head. Why? Suicide? What are they talking about? It's impossible. Absolutely. Even if it makes no sense now, there must be a reason. Something happened, in that month she was missing. There must be a reason she was missing in the first place. Someone had to do this to her.

  I wondered how I could have just ignored all of that for two months. What had gotten into me? Shallie wouldn't have wanted it, and she didn’t deserve it either. Whatever happened to her, it was something terrible and shady. And I would find out. I stood up and ran as fast as I could, all the way to the graveyard. It was two districts away from the park, but even when I was about to fall from fatigue, I forced myself to keep running. I was sweating and panting, but I didn't even stop to catch my breath. When I got there the gate was open, as always. I searched for her, and found her grave. I knelt in front of it, and as soon as I stopped moving, my chest tightened and a burning pain spread throughout my muscles.

  Ignoring my physical distress, I looked at that cold stone, and said, "Shallie, I know you. And you know me. I will never give up on you. I’ll find out what happened to you. I'm leaving home, I’ll do anything, and I swear, I won't let anybody think that Shallie Lindsay has taken her own life. Forgive me, Shallie, for taking so long."

  I caressed the picture on her grave, looking at her smile. I was alone, but I had found a reason to live again. I was ready to do anything. I smiled at her, with tears in my eyes, as the world around me was gaining back its colors and its sounds. It was just me and the noise of the rain hitting the ground, but it wasn’t lonely at all.

  "Drew?" a familiar voice called my name. I was startled by it, as I thought I'd be alone there, at night. I didn't turn around for a couple of seconds. Maybe I had imagined it. Soon I heard steps coming
closer. My heartbeat increased, as nervousness grew into me. "Drew." This time it was almost a whisper, but I heard it clearly. I guardedly turned my head to him.

  "Dan." Pronouncing his name was like a throwback to a distant past. After seven years without seeing each other, we met again just like that.

  "What happened to you?" he asked me. I couldn't see him well in the dark, but he was soaked in rain as much as I was. I didn't answer. I must have had an awful look, after the crying, the rain and the mud I had all over me. His presence there was unexpected, and also quite disturbing. I was finally enjoying my time alone, I had just found what I really wanted to do next, and that person, with the same selfishness he showed when he left seven years before, had just shown up in my life again. He offered me his hand to help me stand up. I hesitated, but finally I took it. I wished he would just go away soon.

  "Are you alright?"

  "I am," I told him. "What are you doing here?"

  "I came for An, I've just come back from the countryside."

  "At this time of night?" I wasn't sure what time it was, but I guessed pretty late.

  "You're one to talk." He had a point there, as usual. I hated how he talked as if nothing had happened between us. "What were you doing?" he asked me.

  I looked at Shallie's grave, then back at him. "She is my girlfriend," I said. I hoped I made him understand he was getting in the way.

  "I'm sorry," he lowered his eyes and looked away. We walked toward the exit of the graveyard, without a word. The rain had now stopped. I was freezing, and I had a strong headache. Standing in front of the gate, I looked at him again at the light of the lamps. He had grown a lot and was almost as tall as I was now. He was thin, or rather skinny, and his face was pale. His hair was longer than before, tied in a short ponytail, falling on his neck. I tried not to meet his eyes. He was wearing a jean jacket on top of a winter sweatshirt. His gaze was on me too, and the sad look he had on his face irritated me even more. You have no right to feel sorry for me. I don't need your pity.