City Lanes

Prologue

Prologue

And when it rained the skies cried tears of love for their dreams had come true--the storm was ended.

I know that a lot of people think rain is “beautiful” and “lovely” and all that, but I honestly for the life of me can’t understand why.

Maybe they live in a sunny city where it rains 1/365 days a year. Or maybe they have the nice kind of rain that’s always only a little drizzle, and doesn’t make it impossible for them to sleep because of how hard it’s pounding on the roof.

In any case, I disagree with them. Rain is not beautiful, or lovely, or magical or anything like that. It’s a weather phenomenon that has been explained by science at least a billion times in schools all over the world, but for some reason people insist on believing there’s something more to it – that it’s the skies crying (bull) because the world is sad (bull).

In my city, it rains 340/365 (or 366…) days a year and the remaining makes up our summer. They say that we only have two seasons: twenty days of summer and the rest is just fall. That’s correct. We don’t even get snow in winter, which is possibly the biggest disappointment of my life; when my parents first told me we were moving – and I remember this part clearly even though I must’ve only been four or five or something – I explicitly asked if it was in the north, and if I would see snow. They said yes, and I did see snow that first year – I remember that moment clearly, too; my mother stopped me in the middle of my piano practice and said, “Tarieva, it’s snowing outside” (she refuses to call me Tari); and boy did I ever run that fast in my life! – but after that it’s been rain, rain, stupid unceasing rain every single year.

And today is no different.

Thursday. How I hate Thursdays. I’ve got fun classes, yes, but it’s with the most stupid people in our grade (seriously, how can you not know what “tolérant” means when it was basically the one word we’d been repeatedly learning for two damn months? When it’s the exact same thing in English?) and they just slow everybody down. It’s quite annoying. But I guess you always have to give and take a little bit.

And when I was going on the sky-train, this way overdressed lady carrying the most humongous and ridiculously gaudy handbag I’d ever seen in my entire life refused to walk just a little bit quicker and I had to run to avoid being a human sandwich since the doors were already halfway closed when I stepped through. And then she decided to take up two whole fucking seats for her and her handbag so I had to stand for who-knows-how-long before some biker dude got off and I had to fight another biker dude for that seat (well, I just glared at him, but whatever).

The scenery calmed me down, though. Sure, I’d probably seen all of this a thousand times – and it would’ve been so much prettier if the windows weren’t dripping with water and everything wasn’t fogged up so bad – but I always felt something when I stared through the glass at my city passing by quickly like that. The buildings became a blur of colored shadows, yellow lights flicking on one by one as the sky darkened more and more. And the sky – I hate the rain it always brought, but I fucking love the sky. It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful.

Sometimes I wish I’m as beautiful as the sky, but let’s face it: that’s just another shallow teenage-girl-daydream that I should probably rid myself of as soon as I can before it turns me into a Barbie. That sounds absurd, doesn’t it?

Trust me, I’ve seen it happen one too many times.

There’s a flash of blue at the corner of my vision, and I turn my head somewhat gleefully, thinking that it was the lady bumbling along to find a new seat because she and her handbag had been kicked out of that old one. But no – it’s a boy.