As The Rain Falls, Chapter 1

It had been raining when Will Johnson awoke from his light slumber to a steady buzzing noise, feeling a little bit warmer than usual.

Just like it had been raining the day before, when Will was walking home from school on that miserable September Tuesday. He lived a mile and a half away from school, but his parents never came to pick him up. Rain or shine, Will always walked home from school, more often than not lugging a heavy book bag filled with textbooks and binders. Will was fairly intelligent and was in a lot of honor classes, which meant a lot more homework than the rest of the Average Joes got. This homework load, and his home life always made him feel pretty miserable, but he was feeling especially miserable on this Tuesday, and even more puzzling was that he didn’t know why. It had been a normal day at school, the normal teasing and criticism, the normal exclusion from everyone, the normal homework load that had Will working for hours in his pathetic excuse for a room while his parents yelled at him. And once he got home, it would probably be the same old routine: do homework do housework, eat, and read, all the while getting yelled at. It was always the same, unless his little sister made him play with her. Beverly was more spoiled than curdled milk and was usually the reason Will became the target of his parent’s shouting. Will thought about how her on his walk, how she never did anything wrong, even though she caused half the trouble in Will’s broken-down household. Will sighed as he crossed the street, knowing how she’d probably cause a large amount of trouble when he got home and blame it on him.

During Will’s walks, he often thought, and today was no exception. He thought about his exclusion at school. He thought about his home life. Sometimes he just thought in general. On this drab September Tuesday he did just that. Except today all his thoughts all centered on a plan. A plan to get out of the hellhole that was his life. Of course one option was suicide, but he tried to push that notion out of his head. He valued life too much, just not the way he was living it. However, as he thought of a plan to maybe run away or something like that, suicide always seemed to creep into his head. He kept saying no, but like a homeless puppy the thought kept returning to him. He decided to think about something else after the seventh or eighth time he uncontrollably considered something as bad as suicide. So he gave up thinking. There wasn’t anything left to think about. Everything was, of course the same. Besides, his house was only a half-mile away.

Everything may have been the same when he walked out of the school building, everything may have been the same when he stepped in his pathetic excuse for a house, but not everything was the same on Wednesday at 3:28 in the morning. This was when the consistent beeping woke Will up from his dreams. At first he shook the obnoxious noise off and tried to go back to sleep. But then he heard the collapsing door of his bedroom. Will heard the crumbling wood and jerked up, frightened. He looked towards his falling door and saw the most horrible thing he had ever seen: tongues of red-orange flame lapping at the wooden walls. James tried not to scream as the flames entered his room, setting the walls, floor, and ceiling ablaze. Will felt excessively hot and knew he had to get out of his house but just sat there on his bed. The worst part was that Will didn’t know whether or not he was sitting on his bed because he was paralyzed with fear, or if it was because he was waiting for the red-orange tongues to lick him up and swallow him, putting an end to his misery.

Will’s trance was broken, however, by a blood-curdling screech of horror. Or was it pain? Either way, he recognized the frequency and tone of the scream as belonging to Beverly, his ungrateful little sister. Her scream meant the fire was spreading throughout the house. Which in turn meant he had to get the hell out of here.

Will jumped off his bed, finding him self a mere 5 feet or so away from the flames. It had spread more than his dazed brain had registered. Feeling the intense heat, Will stepped back, then unaware of his surroundings, tripped on his bed, falling over onto the scarcely covered mattress. Will was trapped. He knew this was the end. He was finally going to escape from it all….

That’s when Will remembered the window right beside his bed. Without missing a beat, Will reached over, opened his window as wide as possible, and jumped, his bedspread lighting ablaze right after he did so. As Will dropped onto the malnourished lawn and rolled away from the burning pile of wood he once called home, he thought he heard Beverly’s ear-splitting screech cut of as suddenly as a staccato music note.

Will found out then and there that there were few things more tragic and heartbreaking as watching the place you called home for the past fifteen years, no matter how lousy it was, burn slowly to the ground. Finally it was over. The house and everything in it was reduced to ashes and rubble. No firemen had come to try to put out the fire. No one had been able to call them, and the neighbors hadn’t bothered. The Johnsons were rather disliked on Acacia Avenue. Of course that was no excuse to let them burn to the ground, but you never knew in cities like these.

Now the question was what to do. Will had been the only survivor in the 22 Acacia Avenue house fire, and had no idea where to go. So Will Johnson, newly appointed fifteen-year-old hobo, began to walk. He walked away from what was once his life, everything that defined his existence. Of course, that was all gone now. What was next, Will would not know for a while. So for the time being, he just walked. Finally, the drowsiness overcame him, and Will fell asleep on the cold pavement until dawn awoke him.