Happy Australia Day to any fellow Aussies!
Jeff stood by the window, watching the rain fall down into the courtyard below.
The sky was an ominous shade of grey and there was no hint of the sun anywhere. The water pooled into the gardens, soaking the soil, and collected in puddles on the brick flooring.
Jeff watched as it pattered on the window, unrelenting. It blurred the view from the window and he had to squint his eyes to see outside.
He loved every second of it.
There was something so comforting, so reassuring about the steady beating of rain on the window. With his and Nick's room being only on the second floor they couldn't hear it on the roof, but the steady thrum of the rain into the side of the building more than made up for it.
An impatient sigh sounded from across the room.
"When is this rain going to end? I'm going out of my mind here."
Jeff looked down at his watch. It had only been raining for – he raised an eyebrow - forty three minutes.
He turned to his best friend, smirking. "Patience is a virtue, Nick."
Nick hated rain almost as much as Jeff loved it. How he could ever be friends with such a pessimist Jeff didn't know. Hating rain seemed to fall into the same category as hating fluffy little kittens.
Nick just sighed again from where he was laying sideways across his bed.
Jeff stepped away from the window, walking over to collapse onto his own mattress. It was a Sunday afternoon, the slowest part of the week at Dalton. Usually there would be groups of students filtering out into the courtyard or heading down to the athletics track, having finished homework for the weekend. Nick and Jeff would usually get a leave pass and head into town to go and see a movie or grab a coffee (or in Nick's case a milkshake).
Technically they could still do that, but the four hundred metre walk to the bus stop in the rain had Nick protesting.
"Well what would you like to do then?" Jeff looked across at Nick.
"I don't know."
"There's this thing called studying. You could always give it a go. You never know, you might be surprised."
"I've already done all of my homework."
Jeff laughed. "Studying and homework don't always mean the same thing."
"Eh. Close enough."
There was silence for a few moments as the rain sounded on the window before Jeff spoke up.
"Rain doesn't have to be boring, Nick. My sister and I used to have so much fun on rainy days."
This caught his attention. Nick rolled on his side, facing Jeff. "Like what?"
"We used to make a sheet fortress and then turn off the lights and watch movies in the dark while eating all the junk food we could get our hands on."
So they did.
Later, both would adamantly deny it that Trent had walked into their room to borrow Jeff's chemistry homework to copy only to find them in a sheet fortress giggling like a couple of schoolgirls.