Summers' Storm

•••One

     Curiosity grows strong at the sights of familiar storms

        For most of my life I had wondered, could it ever be possible for someone to take care of a broken soul? For someone to share the same taste in the saddest music that's ever been made and still would want to make an offline playlist of them all just to listen to later. For someone to take home someone getting soaked in the rain with tattered clothes on and maybe had a head full of unkept coils.

That's how I felt about the boy sitting three seats up and a row over from me.

A boy with enraged onyx skin that glowed with moisturized solitude as if it was cocoa-butter and spoken silence that is often mistook as terrorism. A boy who's smile was magic. If you caught a glimpse of it from across the room you'd feel your own top lip slightly curling upwards over your teeth without having to hear anything funny or sweet, but you knew exactly why you began to smile. A boy who loved trouble in the most subtle way. A boy who began his first day of his senior year in the middle of October. Or a boy who is better known as Jelani Long.

Jelani Long was officially back at Hansen High.

From his face down to his Jordan sneakers he appeared to be the same kid from last year who you'd notice was always under his older brother, either laughing at something with a pack of original flavored Sunflower seeds in his hands, or off alone somewhere tossing up a baseball. Although Jelani Long wasn't like the other guys he often hung around, he wasn't hard in the same sense as them, but his struggle piece that fit in with his older brother's crew was what I found so beautiful about them all. They knew he didn't belong with them, but yet they let him hang around because they all had faith that Jelani knew how to take care of himself to where they never had to worry about him. The magic he knew seeped from every pore in his blemish free face when he was with them. I think him alone made the whole group glow.

Although now, you can easily spot the change in his demeanor from miles away. He had no choice now but to be off alone somewhere seeing that his brothers crew had graduated. Jelani Long was now a boy of magic damned into exile, but someone who refused to go.

They feared him now because of his brother's demise. Although, no one really knows what happened exactly, but of course there were people to interpt the story of how it all went down as if they were there and made it seem so believable. But I wondered what would he say happened that night?

The terrible whispers that seeped through the vents of the lockers says that he was there. The bolder ones said that he was the reason why it happened. I never really trusted what most of them said about that night and never shared my thoughts on it, but who was I anyway? Jelani nor his brother knew who I was.

For I am just a girl who he still hasn't took to notice how much I was rooting for him.

"Stome!"

No.

Immediately I spotted her and her three month old malnourished Senegalese twists stumbling into homeroom. Her plaid bookbag overpowering her small body almost falling off her boney shoulder and Mr. Davis staring pathetically after her as she swayed side to side right by him carrying a McDonald's iced coffee. It's just like her to be oblivious to the things that were happening around her.

I quickly turned sideways and pretended to dig around in my bag for something— anything to avoid answering her. In all of the three months of knowing her I knew she would not stop her rousing and only in her true fashion did she continued to call to me as if I hadn't just turned my back to her in an attempt to be left alone. It's sad that I'm ashamed to know her at all, but it was my fault for being so welcoming for the first time to a girl who's a nervous wreck.