THERE'S SOMETHING WARM ABOUT THE RAIN

   We met some goth girls at Church Street Station in downtown Orlando and Travis started dating Meg, the cute one. We were in 9th grade but these girls were a year older and had already dropped out of high school. We learned to take the city bus so we could hang out on their turf, ten neighborhoods away on another planet, and I found myself making an effort to hang out with Meg when Travis wasn't around. She was ultra smart and had dropped out so she could get a GED and then Associates Degree before any of the other chumps had graduated high school. I pitched this to my mom, who informed me that I had a chance to skip a grade but she said no because I was already getting beat up by kids my own age. 

   Meg somehow knew about weird records, avant garde art, and arthouse films even though she was 15 and from a low-income family. She taught me a lot. She had notably bizarre family situation, with divorced parents who still lived together, her dad in the master bedroom, which he kept locked, and Meg and her mom in the smaller kid-size bedrooms. Her mom seemed depressed and hung out in her room in her free time smoking cigarettes and watching a portable television, even though there was a big screen and couch steps away in the living room. It turned out that the reason her dad kept his door locked was because it was also his office. He designed firearms for Smith and Wesson and had weapons samples all over his room, and lived with two depressed women.

   Meg and I started getting familiar and bonding over art. I don't remember how it started, but I distinctly remember saying goodbye, leaving her house out the front door, walking around the side of the house as instructed, waiting for too long, Meg opening the window, climbing back in and spending the night. The common spaces of her house were eerily unoccupied, with the parents hiding in their rooms and us hiding for different reasons. We smoked so many cigarettes in her closed room that it made me sick, but I felt like I was in a French movie and she did too.  We would listen to Darklands by the Jesus and Mary Chain and make out.