Rainy Day

I don’t see what the big deal is with beautiful girls. I see beautiful girls every day, all over the place. It’s overwhelming. At the store, on the street, in other cars, near my house, sometimes in it, and it’s too much, really entirely too much.

I remember we saw one girl in high school. She was sitting at her desk crying and she was so beautiful, just so beautiful, that I fell down. We all fell down. We didn’t want her to stop so we all tried to lie very still there on the ground, peeking sometimes to see her. We tried not to let her notice because then she might have stopped and it would have been all our fault. If I had been more bold, I would have collected some of her tears. I would use them now to make tea, so that I could feel beautiful sometimes too.

At the time, though, she was so silent and we were all so silent and eventually she slid out of her desk and joined us on the floor. I’m not sure if she noticed we were there, we were trying very hard not to let her. After hours and hours, somebody got up to pee. The teacher coughed and said he had to go get coffee, and it was all ruined, nothing like this would ever happen again. The girl started to make sounds, not very loud ones, but she used her whole body. Our reverence seemed so grotesque then that it made me feel sick, like I was going to vomit. I started to cry too.

Everyone rushed to comfort me, and that is how I learned that I was not beautiful, and probably would never be so. That was the same year I learned to crochet but I don’t remember how to do that anymore.