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It’s 5:30am and pouring rain.
What do they call that again – pathetic fallacy? It seems apt to Michael.
Pathetic, as in pitiful. Heartbreaking. Forlorn. Lost, in a way.
Fallacy as in shitty, fucked up reasoning. Something pretending to be better than it actually is.
Both, as in the rain only started coming down a moment ago and my clothes are already sticking to my skin, I’m cold and feel like crap and the clouds look unforgiving and everything seems right in a maelstrom.
Both, as in I’m unreasonably empathizing with the way the sheets of water fall angled over the river and unhesitatingly meld into the current, washing away into nothing.
Both, as in there’s nothing anyone can really do about anything.
He’s standing at the precipice of this rusted over, creaking bridge that nobody really dares drive over anymore on the edge of town and his curls flatten on his forehead from the cold shower in 0.5 seconds.
The wind picks up and he rocks forward.
He rocks back, the soles of his shoes leaving the sharp edge, but the metal is cold and dicey and he suddenly thinks about how ridiculous this entire thing is.
He knows what everyone will say.
He knows how unwarranted this is.
After all, there’s really nothing to be unsatisfied about.
He has a good thing going in school. His teachers say he’s got a good chance of getting into all three of his top choices for college for the fall, and money definitely won’t be a problem with the scholarships he’ll be getting.
His parents love him. A good support system. They never had qualms with whatever he wanted to do. Not that he gave them any reason to.
He dated a girl up until the end of spring, nothing dramatic. Nothing earth-shattering, world-ending. They’re still friends.
And he has a fucking excellent group of friends.
He’s social and popular. Popular enough.
He’s decent looking.
He’s good at sports.
He’s great at video games.
And he’s out of excuses.
He’s three quarters of the way through thinking about how icy water will feel running through his lungs and choking the oxygen out of his blood cells and halfway through thinking about what it’ll feel like being a little closer to god – or maybe exponentially further, who knows - when he shows up.
Out of the blue.
Or rather, out of the grey-blue. Matte gunmetal, with a hint of abysmally dark sky.
At first he thinks it’s a broken, dim motorcycle light in the fog coming ever closer but then he sees the purple paint job that isn’t actually a paint job but a dark hoodie with frayed white drawstrings. The light is a 3DS illuminating a lowered face and jeez, who the fuck walks around playing Pokémon at five in the morning through a thunderstorm?
Michael’s quiet and hopes he doesn’t see him standing there.
Somehow, he’s quieter. And he does.
Michael doesn’t even remember if they make eye contact but the other boy hops ungracefully onto the railing and perches there with his drenched skinny jeans and water-splattered glasses, eyes glued to the screen and 3DS buttons clicking without pause near silently in the haze between them.
It all seems somewhat lackluster.
For one brief moment, Michael forgets why he’s here to begin with.
“Do you have a charger?”
The voice snaps him back to reality. It barely makes it above a normal pitch, the rain still relentlessly bearing down and drowning out everything else.
It’s soft. Without edges. But the question is bizarre, bizarre like the boy himself.
Michael stares.
He wants to say that he doesn’t, not on him at least, that there’s nowhere to plug it in to begin with, that it won’t matter anyways since the console in the boy’s slim hands is so water-logged it’s a wonder it’s still working and hasn’t electrocuted him by now, but he doesn’t say anything.
Somehow, that feels more satisfying, leaving him hanging. After all, Michael feels cheated.
His suicide was interrupted.
There aren’t any stars across the sky left over by the suppressive, rolling black clouds, but he feels like if they were there to watch they would be laughing.
The boy continues clicking away at whatever version of Pokémon he’s playing, not perturbed in the slightest. After a while, Michael makes out the faintest blipping of arcade music.
Watery. Suspiciously garbled.
He considers giving the boy a ten so he can screw off and buy himself a charger.
He considers it, but the boy shouldn’t be out fucking playing in this downpour to begin with.
He considers it a bit more than he would have liked to. Stupid, really, to be empathizing with the suffering of an inanimate electronic device, but the truth is the truth. And the truth is that it’s probably around 6am right now, and GameStop doesn’t open until 10am.
Michael opens his mouth to speak, but the other boy beats him to it.
“There’s easier ways to die, you know.”
A jolt of electricity runs through Michael and he had to check to make sure they still have a foot of space between them because he could have sworn the boy’s 3DS finally kicked the bucket and its battery discharged whatever current it had left of its measly lifespan.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He chokes on the words and blames it on the rain dripping down his face – his mouth is just another crevice for it to collect in and that has to be why the words all come out jumbled up.
Has to be.
The boy’s eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly but he doesn’t turn. He doesn’t move a single other muscle, doesn’t give any other indication that he heard Michael, much less heard him fuck up so spectacularly.
Not that the sneakers on Michael’s feet kissing the edge of the bridge less than an inch away from dropping off is any indication of anything.
The game abruptly beeps out loud battle music and Michael jumps –
No, not like that.
Upright. Vertically. Strictly perpendicular to the beam he’s standing on, unfortunately.
His hand curls and his heart beats erratically in his chest and only then does he notice a slight curve to the boy’s mouth. A minute tilt of his hooded head in his direction. Maybe even a snicker.
“Don’t you fucking have somewhere to be?”
Michael doesn’t mean to snap, but he does. He fights a tremor as the rain slows to a drizzle and the boy turns back to his console.
“It’s six-thirty in the morning. Where should I be?”
Somewhere that isn’t here, for starters.
Home, maybe.
“I don’t fucking know. It’s raining.”
“So?”
“You shouldn’t stand in the rain, you’ll catch a cold? Haven’t your parents told you that?”
He swears he catches the boy mutter something under his breath but the boy retorts faster than the speed of light and whatever it was, it’s lost in the noise.
“Then why are you here?”
Michael looks at the boy’s dimly illuminated face disbelievingly.
“In any case, I need to charge my 3DS. It’s going to die and I really want to get to the next town. Also, have you played the new Fallout yet?”
“If I help get you a charger, will you fuck off?”
Immediately after Michael plasters a sodden bill on the top screen of his console, the boy announces he doesn’t know his way to GameStop. And that he’s also hungry.
By the time Michael relents and decides he’ll walk him to the store if only to make sure he doesn’t wind up back at this bridge again, it’s 7am.
The boy doesn’t make it a meter after shutting his dying 3DS with a snap and water droplets flying.
He gets stuck on a peeling patch of metal trying to slide back over the railing to the other side. His skinny jeans rip and he falls flat on his face, limbs flying with a shout.
In comparison, Michael makes it over with little difficulty and gloats at the sopping mess of a boy lying on the sidewalk, but he doesn’t say anything.
When the boy gets up, affronted, and faces him completely, Michael can’t tell if he’s getting lightheaded from the cold or something because all the blood rushes up to his head, putting him in immediate danger of toppling over into a puddle himself.
Thing is, Michael already loves him. He just doesn’t realize it yet.
But he doesn’t end up taking him to the store.
GameStop opens at 10am, and the boy with the rain-drenched purple hoodie isn’t sitting on the sidewalk, waiting. In fact, he never showed up to start.
Neither did Michael.
The truth is that GameStop isn’t far from the bridge. It’s close. But Michael’s place is closer.
The two wind up hopping the fence to his backyard and climbing through his bedroom window.
But as the smell of breakfast cooking and the sound of mild conversation drifted through his closed door, Michael surprises himself again that early morning.
Taking the other boy’s hand, he tugs him through the door and they both drip rain down the hall to the kitchen like star trails marking the approach to an endpoint on collision paths that probably started when the downpour did.
Michael doesn’t know if he believes in fate, but he does know he doesn’t own a 3DS charger.
He also knows that the boy, Ray, didn’t need one.
To be fair, he really didn’t need one by 11am that day, because his 3DS dies from water damage despite brightly displaying two out of three bars of battery until it fizzed out for good.
As retribution, he takes over Michael’s Xbox and they play Fallout 4 for the rest of the day.
Or rather, Ray plays. Michael watches.
A year later, they’re still doing the same, albeit in the residence on the campus of the local college.
Ray has a shiny new, pink DS, but he still shows up to play Xbox with Michael.
Most importantly, Michael’s still there to let him in.
And the year after that, too.
And the year after that.