Interval: Windowpanes

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The rain pattered against the windowpanes with ferocity, the drops connecting together in apt streams to form a river of tides across the smooth glass, and they watched, forlorn, their eyes sad and their mouths smiling, wilting like five month-old tortilla chips.

They'd cleaned them last week, stripping the house bare until they found the proper lemony scented one, and had spent the day spritzing the stuff at the windows until they got bored and shot at each other. By the middle of the day they'd gotten five new bottles of the stuff and, convinced it would be the greatest thing that had happened to the town since ever, took the jeep downtown and sprayed it all over the stairs, trees, busses, bushes, people, and windows. By the end of the day they'd had five tickets each and grins permanently stamped on their faces, with their ears ringing from the multiple sirens blasting through their heads.

It had been Todd's idea, of course. He was stupid that way.

But she had known the rain would come. It smelled like it -- she could always tell when rain was coming, she didn't exactly know why -- but she didn't tell them about it, just stayed silent, not wanting them to find that she knew something they didn't know she knew. The tension was strong and clear and indifferent, even with the changes and the feeling that clung to the back of their minds and prickled like a pin that settled at the base of their spines. And she didn't want to break it once again, like she always managed to do, like she knew she would even if she managed to break away from this one.

So they sat, and watched the rain, and she made them peanut butter and McNugget chicken-nugget sandwiches with M and M's sprinkled through like Freddy liked, and which the others ate because they had to. Fred just sat and watched soap operas while Todd snacked on bugs on the ceiling, and Lance worked late into the night. And the three just sat it out and watched the rain turn into rivers on the windows, all seeing the same thing while she watched the clock.

It was five years, two months, and five days since they'd left the slums of New York, and she still cried.

Not while the others were watching, of course. Just spaciously, after a while, into pillows and woolen blankets or while her forehead leaned against a wooden door, as she listened to the low tones of the voices floating up the stairs. She wasn't the kind of person who just broke down every time infiltrated her well-blocked barriers. How could she? There were people who fucking slept in their lawn trying to kill them, and they couldn't even walk out the front door without having organic tomatoes thrown at them (Freddy had noticed the particular label), and she was just like the rest and they knew it. And that wasn't something that bothered her as much as it should have. It didn't seem… real -- not real enough -- and now it was all shattered and she didn't know anything at all. He hadn't remembered it all, so she had counted time by the foster homes that they had rotated through before her father had found them again.

But he didn't remember that, even. And she hadn't known why.

But she still had cried, and for what she didn't know. Maybe it was because they'd all been letting her live in a dream -- a perfect dream -- one that could never happen in a million years, but then did, and she was told later that she was lucky. And she knew that dream worlds were for people who were crazy, even having not seen as much TV as Todd or Freddy. Days afterwards, watching TV, she'd just broken out sobbing while watching Carla be taken away half way across the world while Jake could do nothing about it. Hearing screams in her head and not being able to stop it, watching widows break and water-pipes burst around her head while the plastic table from the kitchen stuck itself to her bedroom ceiling, she'd blacked out screaming.

Lance had come home from work to find the house in smoking ruins, and the sister of the boy he'd once called his best friend sobbing on the floor with her hands to her ears and the radio blasting the Star Spangled Banner.

They'd told her anyway. He was gone, they'd explained, as she sobbed, while Todd had brought her tea and cakes that he made himself that weren't all that bad and she let him hold her, and Lance said that he had just given up and called every police station in the area. And that he wasn't coming back, probably, ever.

"But it said," she'd whispered into Todd's collar. "…It said…"

'Lance --

Going out for a run. Don't eat all the food, I don't have any money left to pay for more. Be back by tomorrow morning at latest.

P.'

And now, when he was gone, it was worse. Because her stomach was churning and Todd was grinning too brightly and her head was pounding as she watched the rings of light that her eyes created on the churned scarlet sheets that he'd slept in. That she'd come to in the middle of the night, sometimes just watching him sleep in the same way she slept, with his arm over his eyes and his mouth firmly closed, his legs spread far apart towards the edges of the bed and his blankets spewn over his body.

He hadn't slept in that bed for weeks, and she didn't remember him sleeping that way.

But then, she didn't know which memories were right and which ones weren't, anymore. They were just jumbled, absorbing the information that she'd lived in a dream for too long and that the memories of her father…? Oh, yeah, those are fake too, babe, now let's go find your brother before he kills himself out there.

But she knew that it wasn't like that. He was already gone.

And she didn't know where to look for him.

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