“LOOKS LIKE RAIN,” she said.

He laughed. “You think?”

The rain fell in a deafening torrent all around them. A billion vertical broken lines of liquid Morse code repeating the same word into the earth: LIFE… LIFE… LIFE…

The repeated message was indefinable joy to their ears, the mad applause of every earthbound child. The riotous rushing sound of rainfall was disrupted only by the distant rumblings of an angry beast with a belly of white forked swords; a god who filled the sky, whose footprints were continents.

The gapped planks of the shed walls couldn’t hold out the chilled October gusts, but the corrugated tin roof kept the rain off their heads. They’d made a dash for it from Wilson Road, along which they’d been trekking on a return trip from a matinee that she’d loved and he’d squirmed through. An epic love story. When the sky broke they detoured through a patch of ripe pumpkins at a dead run and into the beaten shed, the doors too rotted to hold a lock, the contents too sparse to warrant one.

The minutes stacked as they waited for an abatement in the downpour, but the storm appeared strong and long for this world. Flashbulb lightning split the window-shade of infinite blue-green above the horizon. Carrie rubbed goosebumps off her bare arms while Eli knelt by the shed’s doorless entryway, stared at the growing puddles in the mud just outside their shelter.

“I suppose we should prepare some dinner,” she said, hoping for a smile or another laugh. But Eli seemed to have wandered again, away from her and toward the elements of the earth, his playthings, his special bond. “Perhaps a hot bath? If we had a basin I’m sure you could manage something.”

He stood smoothly, a long shadow tinted by the jade sky.

When did he get so goddam tall? she thought. They had both changed over the years, but even through life’s alterations they stayed close throughout high school (the mid-summer graduation already becoming a distant memory). Best friends forever, she supposed, and fought to define the swell of emotion she felt at the thought.

Despite his size, she still saw him as the little boy whose flannel back she’d followed on a ragged sprint through cornstalk fields; the pale, skinny brother-she-never-had who always let her climb one branch higher simply for the enjoyment of hearing her gloat, who lay at her side beneath a midnight sky shattered by stars, clumsily holding her hand before she’d finally pull it away, turning his tension to gloom.

Now this boy, this man, stared toward the heavens.

Studying the clouds, she guessed. Looking for his head, most likely.

“Hey! Eli!” she snapped playfully, tapping his broad back. “These jokes don’t write themselves, you know.”

He spun with a jerk and stared down at her, as if surprised at her presence.

She gave him a sardonic here I am look, turned her palms up. She never once thought of her sleeveless cotton dress – daffodils on sky blue – and the way it clung to her wet skin, how it might have been giving him x-ray vision. This was Eli, after all, and she just couldn’t relate to his perception of “them”, despite her best estimations of his feelings. Carrie refused to apologize or acknowledge something so shallow, especially when they were part of something so much deeper. And why doesn’t he see that?

“Funny as always,” he said, but his eyes slid off her, focused on a dark corner of the shed. He scratched his scruff of blond hair. “Getting cold.”

“Yeah, and I gotta get home. Promised Mom I’d help her decorate the house,” she said, using her hands to express her Halloween vision. “I’m thinking paper skeletons, a laughing jack-o-lantern, some serious cobwebs. The kids will eat it up, don’t you think?”

He nodded, his face a coal-black smudge against the backdrop of midday rain. “You figure it’s what… half a mile to your place?”

“I guess.” She shrugged. “I’m half frozen-to-death already, a little rain ain’t gonna kill me. Seems we got no choice, unless you wanna sleep here.”

He nodded again and turned toward the shed’s wide opening. His arms hung at his sides, thumb-pads resting against the hips of his overalls, fingers splayed. After a moment of thought, perhaps the making of a decision, or the solving of a particularly hard math problem, he raised his hands to chest-height and began to rub them together, as if rolling a ball of dough. Carrie felt the air stiffen, heard the sound of rain grow muffled. She flexed open her jaw at the sudden pressure on her eardrums.

Eli turned his palms upward, as if carrying two trays made from air, and stepped to the mouth of the shed. “Stay close, Carrie,” he said, and it sounded as if the words were spoken in a phone booth. Clear and intimate.

She pressed herself against him, pinched the back of his shirt. She clung to him lightly as they stepped onto the wet earth, and despite what she knew of his powers, she braced herself for the assault of ice-cold rain on her head and shoulders.

It never came.

He continued to walk, and after a few moments increased his pace. She clenched his shirt more tightly and stayed close as she could without tripping on his heels, as if he were holding an umbrella for them both.

After she fell into a rhythm with his steps, she let go of his shirt, slipped a hand onto his bare elbow to steady herself, then stared around her with amazement. She watched the spill of rain run off the surface of what she could only think of as a bubble; a protective shimmer of air he’d formed around them. Slowly she reached out, pushed her hand through the invisible liquid sheet of wind and rainwater. Rain splattered against her palm and she laughed with wonder. After a moment, she retracted her arm to the safety of the shelter, skipping to keep pace with his long strides over the soggy terrain.

They walked the half-mile wordlessly. She knew how much he needed to concentrate, having been privy to a thousand of his extraordinary enchantments over the years. When they finally reached her house, she stepped past him and onto the front step of the awning-covered porch. She danced up two more wooden steps and spun, wanting to embrace him and laugh at his miracle.

Her smile froze.

He was bent over at the bottom step, just under the lip of the porch roof. His breathing was hoarse and ragged, his face ghastly pale. He was shaking, as if burning with fever.

“Eli?”

He turned his face to her, and she stifled the scream that rose in her throat. His piercing blue eyes were gone, the sockets filled with muddy whites, as though he were a blind man. Dark blood ran from both nostrils, slid in dual lines down his face to embrace his upper lip.

“Jesus! Eli!” she yelled, and without thinking pulled his long body to hers, embraced his trembling form. “Let it go, sweetie,” she sobbed into his chest, almost shouting in her fear. “Please let it go!”

Against her cheek, she felt his chest rise, then deflate. The thumping of his heart steadied and grew faint. A heavy breath slipped from him. The sheltering pocket of air surrounding them evaporated. The harsh sounds of the world poured in unfiltered. Wind rushed into her ears, the biting air snatched greedily at her arms and legs, a bitter chill smeared across the back of her neck as if traced by a ghostly hand.

His weight fell into her and she was barely able to lower him to the porch floorboards. She rested his head his eyes, his ghastly white eyes on the porch and rubbed his cheeks, pushed back his sweat-slicked hair. His eyes fluttered closed, and she rested a hand on his forehead. His skin was hot as fire. She pulled a blue handkerchief from his hip pocket – the one he always kept tucked there – and wiped the blood from his nose and lips. Without thinking, she kissed his temple, his cheeks. She sat back and waited.

“Eli?” she said.

After a few moments, his face softened, the strain left his forehead. Some of his color returned. He opened his eyes and she was sick with relief to see bright blue eyes staring back, a twinkle brewing deep within them. A smile curled his blood-smeared lips.

“Are you all right?” she asked, still worried but growing angry at the same time.

He nodded, then slipped his fingers behind her head and drew her gently to him.

They kissed, and she knew she would never love him.

Carrie pulled away, a hand on his chest. “You scared the shit out of me. What happened?’

He sat up and shrugged. “That was a long walk,” he said, as if in explanation. She silently swore at herself for not paying him more mind along the way.

He sat up straighter, rested his back against the chipped white paint of a porch beam. For a while they sat together in silence, watching the rain, and that was enough.

“You should get going,” she said finally, watching the gutters sluice water into flowerbeds. She held his hand and squeezed. “Eli, you shouldn’t ever kiss me again. Not like that.” She watched him closely, searching for a response. A stiffness; or anger, perhaps.

But it was like he’d simply disappeared, and in the place in which he sat rested a void.

He pulled his hand from hers and stood. He stepped into the downpour, was immediately drenched. He studied the horizon.

“You think I don’t know how to love you,” he said, his voice soft and broken amidst the harsh rhythm of the rain. She said nothing, unsure if she’d even heard him correctly. He twisted around and studied her, a quizzical look on his face, that crooked smile. “Or maybe love isn’t what you’re looking for.” He turned his back on her once more. His face tilted to the sky and the spitting gray clouds, as if searching for something lost. “At least I kept you dry,” he said. “I suppose there’s that.”

Without another word, or another look, he started home.

She watched him as he walked away. Watched until he was a rain-smeared blur of blue and blonde standing out against a distant copse of dark green firs, then vanish inside.