Clearly Now, the Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

back on her.
    What the fuck?
    Get away from me,
I say, as severely as I can. She holds her ground. Samar is not a girl to surrender any ground. Samar spent much of her early life being mistreated by males. From her abusive, corrupt father in Beirut to the string of New England lovers who welcomed her with manipulation and deception into the game of love, American-style. She has every reason to expect this kind of shit from me, but she hasn’t.
    I saw you with that fucker
—I shrug in his direction and spill beer over my hand—
so why don’t you go back to him, huh?
    You’re trippin’,
she tells me calmly and flatly, leaning forward into my face to say it. Then she walks away.
    Mercifully, I don’t recall how it all turned out. I know I went as far as to call her a slut, to insult her clothing as trashy, to leave her at that party out of spite and drive home. I was a mess, I was a child, and I was taking out more on her than could be justified by the most liberal rationalizations. I acted as Serala’s inverse, flailing to her calm, vindictive to her forgiving. Meanwhile, she’d tell me of Monty’s philandering with a near-whisper, as if it was something
she
was ashamed of.
    Two memories rendered in the infrequent sunshine of that season:
    Samar is idling in a friend’s dorm room at Messert Hall when through the window she sees Serala approaching. She mistrusts Serala as much as Serala does her and she lifts her chin and looks away. She expects a glare at worst, so when Serala lights a Pall Mall and knocks on the glass to call her outside, I imagine Samar is taken aback. When Samar gets there and Serala says,
I don’t give a shit what you think about me or if you like me or not,
I imagine Samar recovers her composure, and sees an opening. Serala says,
You hurt my friend and I hope you don’t do it again.
I imagine that the gravelly roll of skateboard wheels from the quad devours the brief silence. I imagine that Samar says something back, like
yes, okay, you’ve got every reason to dislike me. I won’t hurt him again,
uncrossing her strong arms. And I imagine Serala says,
good,
and blows smoke past her and then says,
I guess what I mean is I’m giving you a chance, I don’t want to hate you, I just want him safe.
And she drops her butt and crushes it and forces a smile and then puts her gaze on her feet—in that way she has—and walks away.
    The second:
    It is a weekday and Serala and I escape for a meal, both of us fed up with our unhealthy love affairs. This time we do better than Denny’s—St. Charles, a café with high booths and a Cajun theme. We drink beers at midday; I remember sitting outside, the sun a welcome sensation after long, wet days.
    We are doing writing exercises, something that our odd, beloved creative writing professor has pushed on us like a flu shot. The scritch-scratch of her blue pen gets urgent. Her brow is furrowed and locks of hair are hanging down over it, escaping the big sunglasses that hold most of the bangs to the top of her head. She bites her lip once, hard, I can tell, because a ridge of caramel flesh is white from the dent of her teeth. Then she pauses and curses in a way that is supposed to be sardonic but I know is actually somewhere nearer to happy.
    Fuckin’ A.
She holds up the leaf of notebook paper by the corner and lets the breeze rattle it.
This is what we got, Eli. This is it.
She shakes the paper.
Painters have these big heavy canvases, texture, and color. Musicians have pounds of material hanging from them and they beat their art right out into the world with it and watch how it affects people, right there! Right fucking in front of them.
She wags her head and slaps the paper down, reaches for a smoke.
All we’ve got are these flimsy fuckin’ pieces of paper, weightless. They’ll fly away quiet, fast, and easy. We got it rough.
    We climb back into Desert Storm. We light cigarettes