Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings Read Free Book Online Page A

either.
    Despite glimpses, the magnitude of her trauma and the force of her ghosts were still clothed in vagaries. I could fathom the abstractions of “abuse” and “addiction”; I could even guess at how rough it must have been for her to wrestle with the fallout of those things in the context of a traditional Indian family. If I’d known then the depth of her pain, I might not have allowed the libations of hope to swoon my head that summer.
    I learned it all much later—the broad brushstrokes, anyway, something about the events that had gotten her shipped to Montana years before. And I took those brushstrokes and I filled in the rest for myself, inevitably and probably wrongly:
    She’s sixteen, doing the suburban teen summer thing in Connecticut—serving sandwiches to sunburned mall goers. She has been bound in the loose standards of Grateful Dead music, sundresses, overalls and the East Coast’s bad weed. But the angst that defaces most adolescents has erupted in her. She’s turned toward the darker allure of Nirvana, the nihilism, the world-damning cynicism—toward this mini-culture of my own home, Seattle, where at that age I am happily oblivious with my hip-hop, classic rock, and cheap beer. There’s an older girl that she works with, a tall, severe beauty who slaps bread and cold cuts together and squeezes mustard bottles with a dull violence. This girl plays with her nose ring and stares into the distance, or sneaks out for cigarettes when the manager goes on break. She makes Serala nervous; Serala admires her. When the older girl speaks to her, Serala does her best to sound worldly, caustic, and older. When this young woman watches Serala change into her banana yellow apron out of a Nirvana T-shirt one day, she nonchalantly invites her to a party. Serala keeps her cool, shrugs, and tosses her hair, casually agrees. But secretly she’s overjoyed and hoping that she’ll get a stronger taste of this glimpsed world. She’s already admitted to a couple of friends that she wants to try heroin, that she imagines herself adult enough to dabble and suck the pleasure carefully from the experience.
    At the party there is the wailing and bleats of some grunge band or another ripping the speakers, people lounging with half-lidded eyes or chopping powder, loosing those maniacal cocaine laughs. Serala sits in a corner, smokes, and tries to look unconcerned. When the man sidles up and offers her a taste, she’s suddenly scared, her theatrics are faltering. A metallic taste climbs her throat as she looks at the coolly disguised urgency in his face, the distance in his glassy eyes. But she glimpses her coworker studying her from across the room. Plus, the allure of the forbidden tugs in her belly and she says,
yeah, sure, why not,
and allows him to lead her into a bedroom lit by a bulb with towels nailed over the windows.
    Her pulse is racing as he cooks up a spoonful, talking nonstop to her, quiet and kindly, promising that
she will love it, that she’ll never be the same
, that it is, for him,
the best part of life
. When he turns her skinny arm under the bulb and pinches at a vein, perhaps she tries to pull away, perhaps she’s flooded with flight juice, perhaps she begins to argue or plead, a child suddenly frightened by a bully’s tricky game. Or perhaps not.
    I imagine that first time, when the spike that will bind her bites and the rush comes through her like a transfusion from an angel, that her head falls back into the pillow that the empty space in the room has suddenly become. I imagine that it’s so good that even as he pulls her clothes from her, she enjoys the sensation of air moving over her skin, that she’s unaware that he’s no longer cool, no longer slow and careful but fast, somewhat angry, and that his hands are closed around her arms. I imagine—perhaps because I want to—that she is absent and free. I imagine that the