Clearly Now, the Rain Read Free

long time, beginning with the ugliness of my parents’ divorce, which was knotted up in my father’s abuse of drugs, alcohol and other affairs, the revelations of which turned my childhood into a kind of false floor in my memory. But in recent years the casual way that violence and betrayals and sorrow cropped up had increased in velocity: the mental illness of my best friend, the suicide of Hugh’s popular brother, the betrayal by a girl that I’d loved wildly. From beneath a baseball cap with a keg cup in my hand, devoid of wisdom or perspective, I flailed. The best I could achieve was catharsis by risking my ass writing graffiti on rain-soaked billboards or dropping acid and playing chicken with freight trains. I wanted to deal with life’s pain better and I thought that college and all its attendant lessons would instruct me in how to face storms like a man instead of a boy.
    Likewise I can say now that Serala was the human manifestation of that. I knew that she had endured rougher trials than me. I saw in her a stoic and mature model, a contrast to my adolescent hunt for catharsis and circular ranting in Louis’s ear. I wanted to grow up intentionally as opposed to being costumed in adulthood by events and feeling absurd in the cut of those clothes. I wanted to be perceived like Serala and, like Serala, respected.
    I had no idea what the toll was for that kind of a journey.

Two
    Minutes after our arrival at Sage Hill College, this time as students, Louis and I sit on “the mounds”—little hills with fake grass—and listen to the president’s welcome speech. She is a large woman who smiles too much to be believed. She is wearing a sweat suit. It is one hundred and fourteen degrees.
    I’m dressed comfortably because this is a free-flowing community,
she explains, making grandiose gestures with flabby arms.
    Louis and I scoot into the shade of a transplanted tree and talk genuinely about fleeing—back to any of the places we found ourselves the season before. But when I glance at my friend—my road partner—his big, sunburned face tilted to the side, trying to make sense of the nonsense they’re feeding us from the podium, and I see everything I feel reflected in him, I am equally ready to continue forward. So when the poisoned sunset spreads, when we start to smell weed and hear music, we haul boxes from the van and build high school shrines with tape and curling photos on the cinderblock walls of our dorm rooms.
    Although Louis and I are not roommates, he’s just down the hall. A gangly, pale kid who will be my roommate wears a look as if he’s been blindsided by this relative adulthood. When I drop my jeans and cut the quarter pound of Seattle green off my thigh, I think he might faint. But he recovers.
    As the party gears up on our hallway that night, the same hallway on which I met Serala months ago, I hear snippets of chatter:
Hey, dude, do you skate? / No, bro, I don’t know what it means, I just thought it would be a cool tattoo / I’m totally gonna take the easiest classes, man
. My anxiety about higher learning begins to drain away but disappointment laces through me, too—it sounds like high school out there. And I have a hard time imagining Serala in this bastion of image and ease, even as I witness her here.
    Trying to balance love and concern, Jay betrayed her for the second time that fall by reading her journal. I might have done the same. The ferocity with which she said it to him:
It’s my fucking business, don’t—just don’t.
A mark that might sneak from beneath a sleeve or a bra strap, the acid that would run through his veins as he tried not to ask, tried to believe the half-truths and denials.
    So the second time Jay reads her journal, she puts an end to their relationship.
    He calls me in desperation one afternoon and I go to him. I find him in his room, the drapes drawn tight, Miles Davis’s
Kind