Colored Rain

TheFittest Valentine's Day Contest

The park was empty. It was never empty, ever, on any day, but especially on today. It was always full of happy couples. Malibu Barbies with their Zac Efron boyfriends, laughing and kissing and laying on checkered blankets, counting clouds with heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and huge teddy bears. But today, there wasn't a person in sight. That was because today, everyone was inside with their dates, avoiding the whipping rain and crackling thunder.

Everyone but me. I stood at the edge of the ancient playground as the frigid cold rain spattered across my face. The new, metal swing-set was sitting just off of the slides and monkey bars, but I looked passed that. And there it was, just where it has been for my entire life, and his entire life.

Frayed, brown rope, once white, and the thick, sturdy wooden seats. The old swing-set, with only two swings, that never went high, that were hard to push. That swing-set meant the world to me, and I had thought it meant the world to him. Though I had meant the world to him.

Every Valentine's day, we had spent on those swings, since seventh grade when he finally got up the nerve to ask me out, and still, before that, when I met him. I was only three, and he punched the kid, Allen Wolfe, who stole my bag of chips. He got a spanking and wasn't allowed to come to the park for a week. We had been best friends ever since. And every day we would sit on these swings, every single day. Our names were carved on the bottoms of them, Tessa on mine and Faze on his.

And on our first Valentine's Day, we came and sat here on the swings and talked and laughed and ate the cheap chocolate candies, with caramel in the center. They weren't even shaped like hearts. Now, they are my favorite candy.

I slowly stumbled through the rain, the first tears blurring my vision, mixing with the icy storm. I ran my hands over my swing, and then ran my finger under his swing. There was his name, F-A-Z-E, worn and weathered but still there. My heart split.

I always asked him why he wanted to ever date me, every year, even when I was twenty and he was twenty-one, and we had been together for longer than anyone else we knew. I wasn't exceptionally pretty or smart or athletic. I was kind of chubby, totally flat, with plain, thin brown hair that always swirled messily at the ends. I was a C-Average and usually the last one done for laps in P.E. I was always in oversized shirts and hoodies, and long, torn jeans, ripped on dozens of bushes and rocks. He always smiled his thousand-watt smile, and I always melted at the way his warm brown eyes crinkled and glittered.

"Because you're the most amazing girl I've ever met." He said. He said it almost every day. Until he didn't. Until Lilia Matthews moved here, the year before we were supposed to go to college together, and suddenly, his thousand-watt smile didn't belong to just me anymore.

Lilia was perfect. Flawless hair, skin, nails, and figure. But I couldn't hate her. She was sweet and compassionate and dazzling, and she was everything I was not. And no matter how hard I tried to keep Faze, he wouldn't stay. And suddenly, I didn't matter, because the day came when I went to this park and sat on my swing, and I sat there for hours, long after the sun had set, long after he would be asleep, I sat on that swing, but he never came.

The next day I called. "Where were you yesterday?" I asked. Faze never missed hanging out with me, not unless there was a tornado or he was away. We always sat and talked and threw gravel at each other.

"God Tessa, just back off. I'm getting older, and I can't spend every day with you." A sob bubbled in my stomach.

"I get it." I whispered in a small voice.