Free Lullaby for the Rain Girl by Christopher Conlon Page A

when I don’t see you?”
    She smiled, very slightly, glanced at me and then away. “Some people are observant,” she said.
    “When did you see me?”
    “At lunch. You came downstairs and got a Coke from the machine.”
    “Why didn’t you say hello then?”
    She shrugged. “I like just watching you.”
    I looked at her for a moment. “I—I have to go in now,” I said hesitantly. Once again I wondered if this girl was homeless or a runaway or what. The last class discussion came back to my mind: words like creepy and crazy. Yet in truth there was absolutely nothing creepy about this girl and she did not seem in any way crazy. She was just there, utterly plain, bland, quotidian.  I would never even have noticed her if she hadn’t shown up in my classroom after school the previous Thursday.
    “Okay,” she said, stepping out into the rain. “See you.”
    I turned to the building and was through the doors before I thought to check my optical illusion from last week: how she stood in the rain without apparently getting wet. But by the time I looked she was gone.
    Upstairs I saw the blinking light on my message machine and the flashing number 3. Ignoring it, I went to the bedroom and switched on my computer; I changed clothes and grabbed a soda from the refrigerator while I waited for it to boot up.
    Finally I was online. Ignoring the spams I went straight to [email protected]. The heading simply read, “No Subject.”
    I clicked on the message.
    I LOVE YOU, BENJA-ME-ME!
    xxooxoxoxxxoxoox
    Your Rain Girl.
    Something bloomed dark and sour in my heart. My breath came fast. The floor tilted; I nearly fell from the chair. It wasn’t the declaration of love or the x’s and o’s that did it. It was the name.
    Benja-me-me.
    A heavy black wing swooped over my mind, blotting out the world.
    I just made it to the wastebasket as my stomach seized up, and I vomited.
    5
    I almost called in sick the next morning, but realized that the worst course of action for me would be to sit around the apartment with nothing to do. The day floated by in a kind of phantasm—not threatening, but remote and something less than completely real. I felt as if I were on some odd kind of drug, one that didn’t make you high, exactly, but which removed you just a step from reality. Yet it wasn’t like a hallucinogen, either. I was able to teach my classes and interact with my colleagues but part of me wasn’t quite there.
    I knew I would see her again, of course. What I didn’t know is what I would say to her. My mind had run through a thousand possibilities, rational explanations, and yet: there were none. It wasn’t possible. She wasn’t possible.
    At the end of the day I sat at my desk in my empty classroom, staring out at the light rain streaking the windows. There were papers in front of me but I didn’t look at them. I had no thoughts in my head, just an overwhelming sense of disturbance, of the past as a quiet, still pool suddenly alive, tempest-tossed and thrashing. I had no specific memories, just distant disconnected sounds, pictures clear for an instant then splintered and blown in the air and kaleidoscoped apart again.
    “Hi, Ben.”
    She wasn’t at a desk in the back now. She was in a chair next to me, only inches away. She looked the same as she had every time I saw her. The eyes, the hair, the bland appearance—but it was something other than blandness, I realized. Something more. Unfinished, that was it. She looked somehow unfinished, like a statue the artist had left off from too early. There was something vague, unspecific about her. That’s why it was so difficult to remember what she looked like whenever she wasn’t with me. Her skin didn’t have the kind of lines or pores or smudges or pimples or anything one might expect a sixteen-year-old girl’s skin to have. Her eyes seemed to lack individuality, spark: they were animated enough, but they could have been anyone’s eyes—they didn’t seem to be hers,