Air after Rain – Chapter 11

One Summer

It was hard to look at Nadia sitting on the wall like that and not see her younger self.

In fact, it was impossible.

After the torrents of rain of the last weekend the sun had come out again. But its warmth was fading, the soft chill of fall slowly seeping into the days. The first leaves had started to turn red and golden. The air felt colder and the sun sank earlier. Summer was slowly dying, leaving behind a host of thoughts, smells and memories. Though Terrence's memories went back much further than this one summer, especially when he saw Nadia.

She was sitting on the low brick wall that separated the park's pathways from the small river bed, her hands curled around her notepad and a pen. Once she hadn't been able to reach the ground with her feet. She was now, today, but she had pulled them up and folded them underneath her. She looked small, sitting there, her red hair a halo against the slowly fading green of the background, and for a second he wondered. Standing up, Nadia almost was as tall as Reese, which meant she reached up to Cass's chin and Terrence's chest. But seeing her sitting there, she seemed… fragile. Young. Like a child sitting on a brick wall, legs dangling, waiting for her two best friends to join her.

"Hey."

She smiled up at him and the memories intensified. "Hey."

Terrence lowered himself into a sitting position on the wall, noting her bag on the ground before her feet, the pen in her hand and the note pad on her lap. She had been writing. Nadia never went anywhere without paper and a pen but now she closed the spiral-bound pad and tucked the pen into the bun that held her red-and-brown hair. Her hands caressed the cover unconsciously while she waited for him to settle into a comfortable position. For a while, they didn't speak, both lost in memories: three children, a girl and a boy who had never known another life than the one in town, and the new boy, so strange, so foreign, already an outcast because he wasn't like them. And here they were, Terrence thought and almost sighed, years later but still more or less the same.

Only Cassidy was missing.

"This will be our last year," Nadia finally said, looking out over the little park that stretched out in front of them. It was late afternoon on a Friday. The last children playing in the distance were slowly being collected by their mothers – or returned home on their own.

"You want to get away so badly?"

Without looking at him, she shrugged. "I want to see something more than this town."

Of course, he knew that. This wasn't by any means their first conversation. Terrence followed Nadia's gaze: behind the park was the main street, lined with shops and cafés. Then came the residential areas, the neat rows of houses, the school, the public swimming-pool, the tennis courts. Then: nothing. One hour to the next town, two to the next city. This was a world on its own, able to live by itself but by no means spectacular. It was enough for Terrence.

But Nadia wanted more.

Terrence leaned back and looked up into the blue sky. "Well, college is some distance away. Maybe after that you'd like to come back here."

Red locks had escaped her messy bun and danced as she shook her head, but she smiled. "I doubt it. But maybe."

"I like it here."

"You haven't spent your entire life here."

"But great parts of it."

"Apparently not enough."

They exchanged a smile at the well-used arguments. As they lapsed into another companionable silence, Terrence took the opportunity to look at Nadia more closely. The girl he had known had grown into a woman, that much was evident. But overall, she was still the person who had accepted him into her life without question, whom he had spent his childhood with, whom he and Cass had played with, argued with, laughed with and played pranks with. While he and Cass always had remained close, Nadia had drifted away from them during the last years, finding other, and, most importantly, girl friends. Of course they had attended the same school for almost their entire lives, but still there had been an odd sort of distance during the last years that had build up between the three people who once had been dubbed The Horrible Three. Actually, Terrence wasn't sure it would have changed until they left town hadn't Nadia explicitly invited them to her birthday party the weekend before. She had made them promise to come. And somehow it had turned out to be like it had been so many years before – the three of them against the rest of the world, a small island in the middle of a ruckus that refused to open up to foreigners. Terrence doubted anyone had noticed the three of them had spent almost the entire evening outside the house while inside, the party had been going on. They always had had the ability to push aside everyone who had tried to get close to them, who had tried to gain their friendship, and somehow they had reconnected as if time hadn't passed at all. Now, suddenly, remembering the laughter and the closeness, Terrence felt awkward. He dropped his gaze to the ground. Nadia had changed, and he had changed, and how could he ever have thought nothing would have?

Nadia, as if sensing his thoughts, sighed. "It's strange being here without Cass."

It was. They had spent hours here in their childhood. Terrence forced his thoughts away from the memories that were wandering through his head and they automatically settled on the topic he had been going over and over for the past week.

"I think my sister is in love."

One of the greatest character traits Nadia had always had been the fact that she was easy to talk to. She was a great listener, able to make one feel as if only the story one had to tell mattered, nothing more. Still, the second the words had left Terrence's lips, he regretted them.

As a response, he got a face wiped carefully clean of every emotion. The fact that his words didn't match their previous topic of conversation seemed entirely irrelevant.

"Is that good or bad?"

Another of her traits always had been that she never asked too many questions. Or she always asked the right ones, he wasn't quite sure which it was. Tired from the thinking, wondering, fearing and doubting he had done over the whole week, Terrence surrendered.

"Reese. I think she's fallen in love. Or, at least, she's slowly realizing she has." His hand went up to brush through his curly hair, a somewhat desperate motion. "Should I even talk about this?"

"Why are you so worried?"

"Because…" He took a deep breath and finally voiced what had been going through his head for the whole week. "It's Cass."

"Hmm." Nadia's dark eyes gazed at him as her mind pondered his greatest fear. "Are you sure?"

I see her face, he wanted to tell her. I see her face when she looks at him. Instead, he said nothing. Nadia read from his eyes and her brows knit together.

"When you say she's only realizing it now, has she had a crush on him for a long time?"

"Not a crush. Never a crush. Reese has no crushes." The thought almost made him smile. "But yes, I think she has felt for him like that for quite some time now."

"Then why does your concern pike only now?"

Terrence hung his head. "That's what I asked myself, too. The answer is shockingly simple."

"So?"

"Because," he said and turned to look at Nadia directly, "Cass sees her, now."

It was the truth. Terrence had watched his sister watch his best friend from afar for quite some time now and he always had feared the day when Cassidy would notice her. It wasn't as much that something in his best friend's character and habits assured him of his untrustworthiness. Rather the opposite: Cass had dated only few girls in high school, and those he had he had treated extraordinarily well. If he thought about it rationally, he even had to admit that there were only few guys he would accept as Reese's boyfriend, and Cass was one of them. His friend, despite his nasty habit of smoking and his jaw-breaking irony, was one of the few people Terrence trusted completely and would do so with everything he had. And yet, at the thought of Cass and his sister together, something twisted inside him.

Nadia nodded slowly, her gaze lost over the shimmering water of the small river.

Terrence waited for her to say something, and when she didn't, he turned to look at her, his shoulders slumping.

"You think I'm paranoid. Overprotective."

"Maybe the latter," Nadia conceded and grinned, but sobered quickly and repeated her earlier question. "Why are you worried?"

"She's two years younger than him."

"Two?" Nadia frowned, then her forehead straightened again. "I always forget she skipped a grade. But still, two years aren't much."

"Regarding the experience…" Terrence stopped. He didn't want to tell her too much, neither about her sister nor about his best friend. But Nadia gave him a look that told him she knew what he meant. That, he lamented silently, was the curse of a small town. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing. She surprised him by chuckling softly.

"I don't think your sister is as helpless as you think she might be."

Annoyed and subdued, for he knew she was right, he closed his mouth again. The protest, though, was still there, the nagging feeling that something was approaching that he had no control over and would end in tears.

"What are you really scared of, Ter?"

Her dark eyes watched him carefully as he tried to string together logical arguments.

"I don't know. Maybe it confuses me, maybe I'm getting paranoid. But the way he watches her unsettles me. I mean, Reese always looked at him like she knew she never stood a chance, and suddenly he cannot take his eyes off her. He's giving her hope and what if it's over in a few weeks? I don't know how she would take it, I…"

"Give her some credit." Nadia sounded faintly amused. "Teresa's stronger than you think she is."

"I know she is! But Cass… Nadia, you can't understand as long as you haven't seen her look at him. You haven't seen him look at her. It's like there's nothing else, like he barely can stand to stand there and not touch her, and not in the way you think but like he cannot stand the thought of her not being there. Until a week before, he barely acknowledged her existence. It's… strange."

"So now you're worried for Cass?" Nadia shook her head. Another few red curls escaped her bun and bounced up and down. "Or for Teresa?"

Terrence opened his mouth to answer and closed it again, only shaking his head. Nadia sighed softly and shifted her weight to lighten the burden on her folded legs.

"You've always had a sister complex."

There was no denying. Terrence smiled at the humor in her voice. "I guess so."

For a while, they both watched the sun dance on the water.

"Thanks," Terrence finally said. Nadia shrugged. "What for."

Silence, golden and warm. The air grew cooler around them as the sun settled over the tree tops.

"And despite everything," he stated silently. Nadia cocked her head at him. "…What?"

"Cass should be here right now."

Nadia smiled, a small, open smile that illuminated her entire face.

"He should. Text him."

"Hmmm…"

"It's not like he has anything to do today."

Terrence laughed, a silent rumble in his chest. Miraculously, it took away some of the weight that seemed to have been placed on his chest for the entire week. Nadia had this effect on him.

"Okay."

One summer, and the time never seemed to have passed so fast.