summer skin.

I was sharing a wet towel with Brandon William [Padre Pio] Closson.

He insisted that if I tried hard enough, and if I just kept sitting, I would realize what it was to love the rain.

We sat, facing the library, and occasionally laughed as his paint melted off of the shiny, varnished guitar he held in his hands, strumming and trying and occasionally humming to himself as people passed by, tests looming in every building and nobody missing a step as rain misted onto all of us. My hair started curling and falling into my face, and I kept staring at the library.

We sat in her living room and she asked us what we wanted to do. Or, in fact, what we were doing this summer, or next year, or next semester. They went around the room and told everyone about their capstones, about their parents, about their home states. For some reason she knew where everyone lived, and as we sat with plastic plates perched on our laps in a room she had no more than sat in (and I know this, for even the alcohol cabinet was full of empty bottles, clearly not finished off by my PhD professor) and tried to fake interest in other people's futures. Her assistant was going to grad school, and a bunch of the others were going to work for firms they couldn't even name. She rewarded them with smiles, and promises that they were "going where the money was."

"I'm working for a nonprofit that focuses on substance abuse this summer."

She was a senior, a tall senior with little shoes on and capris falling to mid-calf underneath her red plate, the plastic sitting in her lap. The reply?

"That's noble."

We circled again and we fell on me. I lost my work study. Fuck financial aid. And what am I doing this summer? Films. Films about women, and about violence against women, and yes, I can tell you don't understand why or how but it's how I'll spend every summer afternoon. She started talking about the packages and someone made the usual claim that us honors students are more diverse in socioeconomic terms. I kept my mouth shut and then someone started talking about how they manipulated, or thought of manipulating, financial aid by pretending their parents were divorced.

I stood up.

This may have been before or after she told us about the contractors and the missed details around her house, "and this is four stories," and I looked around and the paint started looking more matted and I realized it was just paint on a wall nobody had ever loved.

I put on my raincoat.

"She's getting her PhD."

I wish I was getting a house for graduation.

I picked up the phone and I stretched out my lungs and I took in the dry, wet, summer, spring, frizzy-hair, shut the fuck up it's dark outside and the apartment is kind of far air and pressed the buttons and called up the people I knew would trust that I had honestly gone crazy.

We were sitting on the couch sharing stories and my sobriety was beginning to mean less and less as everyone started peeling layers off of their skin.

"Carmen has a point to make, everyone."

And the room fell silent and I whispered it out. "I hate money."

The library was across from us and he kept strumming his guitar. He looked at me. "I don't think I ever took the time to like the rain before."

"Isn't it awesome? I love my life."

He was right, and the moisture was even free.