Page 27 of Praying for Rain

“The system?” Rain’s dark eyebrows bunch together. “Like foster care?”

“Uh, yeah. Anyway”—I kick myself for letting that slip. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about it. I just don’t particularly want to talk about the worst nine years of my life right now. Or ever—“Rome is fucking incredible. It’s ancient and modern, busy and lazy, beautiful and tragic, all at the same time. I had no idea what I was gonna do once I got there, but as soon as I stepped off the plane, I knew I was gonna be all right.”

“How?” Rain is so engrossed in my story that she steps on a muffler lying in the street and almost busts her ass.

I try not to laugh. “Almost everybody was speaking English. There were signs in English, menus in English, the street musicians were even playing pop songs in English. So … I cashed in my dollars for euros, bought a spare guitar off one of the street performers, and spent the next few years strumming classic rock songs in front of the Pantheon for tips.”

I glance over, and Rain is staring at me like I’m the fucking Pantheon. Eyes huge, lips parted. I have to reach out and pull her toward the bike so that she doesn’t hit her head on the tire of the flipped Honda minivan we’re walking next to.

“Did you have to sleep on the street?” she asks, unblinking.

“Nah, I always found somebody to crash with.”

That makes her blink. “Somebody, huh? You mean, some girl.” When I don’t correct her, she rolls her eyes so hard, I half-expect them to fall out of their sockets. “Did you point guns at their heads and make them pay for your groceries, too?”

I raise an eyebrow at her and smirk. “Only the ones who talked back.”

Rain scrunches up her nose like she wants to stick her tongue out at me. “So, why’d you leave if you had it so good with your classic rock and your Italian women?” she sasses.

My smile fades. “It was after the nightmares started. Hey, watch out.”

I point to a shard of glass sticking up at a weird angle in Rain’s path. She glances at it just long enough to avoid it and then returns her rapt attention to me.

“Tourism totally dried up. I couldn’t make shit playing on the street anymore, and I couldn’t get a real job without a visa. I didn’t really have a choice, as usual. My roommate was an American whose parents offered to pay for our plane tickets back to the States, so … that’s how I ended up in South Carolina.”

“Did you love her?”

Rain’s question catches me completely by surprise.

“Who?”

“Your ‘roommate.’” Her big eyes narrow to slits as she makes sarcastic finger quotes around the word roommate.

I hate how much I like it.

“No,” I say honestly. “Did you love him?”

“Who?”

I drop my eyes to the yellow letters emblazoned across her perky tits. “The guy you stole that hoodie from.”

Rain’s eyes drop to her sweatshirt, and she stops dead in her tracks.

I guess that’s a yes.

Crossing her arms over the band logo, Rain lifts her head and stares at something off in the distance behind me. It reminds me of the way she looked when she was watching that family at the park yesterday.

Right before she flipped the fuck out.

Shit.

“Hey … look. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …”

“That’s his house.”

Huh?

I follow the direction of her gaze until I’m turned around, staring at a yellow farmhouse with white trim, set back about a hundred feet from the road. It’s nicer than her parents’ place, bigger, too, but the yard is just as overgrown.

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