In the sky, there are no stars.

Well, not where I was walking anyway. It was raining, and all I had to keep me dry was a thin waterproof jacket, which was no match for the violent downpour that consumed everything it touched.

It's like the universe was mirroring my mood.

I was the only one on the street. Though my hood was up, my hair was irredeemably wet and hung around my head in clumps, little droplets of water drip dripping onto my nose and face. I couldn't feel it at that second, but I was sure that the rain had soaked through my trainers down to my socks. I would be squelching with every step at any given moment.

I'm sure I looked like something out of a music video.

A few more steps and I would be there. I could already see her, sitting on a soaked bench and wearing an outfit equal to my own in deficiency. She didn't notice the rain, though. She was staring into space.

I attempted in wringing out my clumps of dark hair and advanced towards the bench. After about 5 seconds of silent  standing in front of her, I sat down at on the opposite side of it, as far away from her as possible.

I spoke first, after about two minutes, "Kenny told me you were here. I'll be honest and say that I have no idea what to say to you right now."

She turned to me slowly. Her face was naked and innocent, brown eyes red and puffy. Her bright pink hood shielded most of her hair but was a shade darker and weighed down with rain. Little droplets of water fell from the end of her thin nose. She managed to look beautiful even when crying and soaking wet. But it was different now.

"I don't know what you want from me, Cassy." I started, "but I'm not a pr*ck. I wont leave you, not tonight."

She suddenly leapt into my arms and sobbed quietly. I gave her my warmth in return, acknowledging the fact that in this moment, I wasn't her awkward ex who avoided her at all costs. I was just someone, and boy, did she need just someone at that moment.

I had no idea what would happen tomorrow, but I didn't let it bother me. I just held her in my arms because she needed it, and because sometimes a soft pat on the back and an, "it's going to be okay" just won't suffice.

~~~

"You'll never believe what I just heard," Kenny exclaimed, bounding excitedly onto the couch in the living room. He'd entered from the kitchen with a facial expression of exclamation and confusion.

"Is Leona looking for a date to prom?" I asked sarcastically, my eyes averting back to the TV.

"Low blow, man," Kenny began, "I would have talked about this with Dante beforehand, but he isn't here, so I guess we'll have to cut out the middle man."

This caught my attention. Dante and Kenny only held secret meetings when it was a code green (reference the best friend handbook for code colour key), which wasn't code red, but still a bit iffy. I turned round to Kenny with expectant eyes.

"Talk."

"Well, I heard from Dana-"

"The one that has a crush on you?" I interrupted, chuckling. Dana also lived in the home, and had a giant crush on Kenny. It's just a pity that she was 10 years old and Kenny wasn't a cradle robber. He'd done all he could so far to deflect her feelings from him, to no avail. At least the personal chocolate deliveries had stopped. Maybe she ran out of money.

Kenny gritted his teeth, "maybe."

I grinned.

"Anyway, I saw Maggie moving around a few things upstairs. She took the top bunk off of Dante's bed and moved it into the shed. She was still shuffling stuff around, and I asked Dana what she was doing and she told me that someone was coming back. Today."

I waited for him to continue. At times, Kenny could almost be as dramatic as me. "And..?" I prompted.

"Ugh, I really wish Dante was here right now." He whispered, annoyed at Dante's inconveniently timed absence. Not that he could do much about it.

Dante was visiting his brother Tyrell and his foster parents. "An introductory dinner", he called it.

Of the three of us, Dante was probably the most affected by his past. He was always the joker, the guy that had a permanent smile on his face despite the situation. To the naked eye, he'd seem like he had few cares, which was all true.

But when Dante cared, he cared deeply.

Dante's sob story can be seen as perhaps the most tragic. As the oldest of three, he'd witnessed the deterioration of his family first hand. He'd been born with no walking difficulties, but as he grew he developed some sort of condition that made walking very hard and painful for him. Some kind of muscular thing, he doesn't talk about it much, that proved superbly inconvenient to his financially struggling family. With the death of his father when he was 9, Dante's mum was left with 3 kids and virtually no money. She started to get aggressive, and at first Dante wrote it off as stress, but when the aggression became less provoked and more... Uncontrollable , he knew his mum wasn't the same person anymore.

I remember him describing the day that he and his little brother Tyrell were brought into Bramble Tree once. It was unexpected, in this youth counselling thing in school that all of us care kids were required to go to, and he just started spouting all this stuff that I'd never heard him talk about before.

"Right," he began. "So my mum was, uh, not right... mentally. After dad died the stress got to her, I suppose. She went a bit off the rails.

"When the money first got tight, she'd always be a little snappy. Telling us that we were greedy if we wanted seconds, always forgetting to feed the baby.

"Then, she'd come home and the first thing she'd do is complain about how she'd rather be anywhere else. It's funny, because I always felt like she was talking to me specifically, my condition was expensive. Maybe she was, but, what bugs me is that I'll never know-"

He took a deep breath.

"Right, so on the day we got admitted into care, I didn't actually go with lil' T straight there. I was in the hospital for about a week afterwards.

"See, when I think about it now, I feel like there was some sort of trigger to what happened. Maybe a comment one of us made, or a thought that popped into her head. But, on that day, at breakfast, she got this bright idea that the government would give more money if I was more disabled. That we'd get pity benefits or something, and maybe qualify for some sort of special treatment. So she took away my pills, even though they were specially prescribed, and stopped buying them completely, up until the point where," - his voice started to break at this point - "I couldn't walk. It was a neighbour that heard my screams of pain when mum wasn't home that rescued me, in hindsight. There was nothing they could do by the time I got to the hospital. Then after losing her kids, mum, uh, couldn't take it anymore.

"The thing is that I don't blame her for anything. She was still my mum, you know? I would've tried to help."

Then he'd been the only one laughing amidst the stunned silence.

"I guess a children's home is the best way to meet the most damaged kids," he finished lightheartedly, though what he'd said would resonate in the listeners' hearts for years to come.

Let's just say that Dante was pretty damn inspirational when he chose to be.

"Reece? You there?" Kenny questioned, bringing me back to trivial reality.

"Uh, yeah," I responded distantly. "About Dante- You can always wait til he gets back.." I offered. Dante deserved quality family time with what little family he had left. It was more than what Kenny and I had. His baby sister was the first to get adopted. Babies always are.

"Nope. I need to say this now," pronounced Kenny dismissively.

He then wore an apologetic expression, and sympathetically rubbed my shoulder. It did nothing but make me worry about what he was going to say.

He took a deep breath, "Cassy's back from Tunisia," he said, quickly ripping off the band-aid. "And apparently, she was crying. "

He paused for a moment until it sank in. "Now," he said, "what are you going to do about that?"

~~~

I had no idea how much time passed, but it was enough time for the rain to subside and for her sobs to get less frequent. A few times I thought she'd stopped, and she'd get up and wipe her eyes. But then she'd remember and whisper, "why?" and fall back into my arms in agony.

It wasn't raining anymore when she'd cried away all the liquids inside of her. The evidence of the rain was still very abundant - with puddles taking up more of the ground than ground - and it was the same with her tears (the evidence of them were very much there). Her eyes were red and puffy and she was sniffing. I decided to wait until she spoke before anything more was said.

"Why'd you come?" she whispered. Her voice had a lack of emotion that would have insulted me if I didn't know her so well. She'd cried out all her emotion, I knew. There wasn't much I could say to get anything else out of her.

"Well, partly because I have nothing better to do at 1am." I began, before I let my tone become softer, "-also, because I was told you may have needed a friendly face."

"Not that I left things friendly, exactly." she said sheepishly, after a beat.

"Pssch, are you kidding? We've been on such good terms as of late." I said sarcastically. I had no other way of distracting her than to make her laugh.

I got a mild chuckle, which was good enough. "God, I'm sorry, Reece-"

"We are not doing this now," I interrupted. "Not like this. Not when we're both so vulnerable."

She sniffed, "I think its the perfect time to talk because of that," she insisted.

"Oh?"

"Well, as good a time as any. We're both too tired to lie to each other in hopes of looking less needy or weird or whatever. Oh, I know-" she tapped the bench with what I would say was as much enthusiasm as she could muster. "Let's make a pact, that what gets said tonight never leaves this bench. I've just had a good ol' cry. Now it's your turn to open up."

I smiled slightly, "Deal. Whaddya wanna know?"

She was quick to answer, "How much did I hurt you?"

I looked down on the floor, ignoring the uncomfortable feeling of damp that always emerges after the rain. "You didn't." I said. "Well, okay you did for a while. But then you made me realise that I knew nothing about anything."

She furrowed her eyebrows in confusion, "how'd you mean?".

"It's like... you made me yearn for more than this sleepy town. You made me realise that maybe the life I'm living isn't enough. It took a while to get over you, but once I did, I realised that there's so much more to life than what I held dear. It was all you."

"Well," she stated in bewilderment. "That's certainly not what I was expecting to hear. I braced myself for the 'how could you do that to me?' speech. Figured I deserved it, too."

"Well, you do." I said matter-of-factly. "But I'm not going to give it to you."

"I appreciate that."

There was a short pause as we both gathered our thoughts.

"I met someone, in Tunisia." she said factually.

"Great. Who is he?" I asked just as robotically. Maybe the cold of the rain had left me numb.

"She." Cassy corrected. "It seems I've discovered more about myself in those few months than I have my own life. Anyway, you wouldn't know her. I don't even think I do ."

"Ah," I acknowledged, not expressing emotion to tell her that it didn't bother me. "I think we've all had one of those. The ones we like even though we know nothing about them."

"Yeah, but," she started, "with her it was different. We hardly even know each other's last names. With her, there was like an instant spark, passion, everything. More than I've ever had with-"

"With me?" I finished.

She sighed, "I'm so not making this any better for myself."

I shrugged, " I get it. The heart wants what it wants."

"Isn't that a Selena Gomez song?"

I laughed at that, "I wouldn't put it past myself to be quoting Selena Gomez at 1am."

She chuckled too. "You know, I've really missed this. Talking to you. Remember when we used to sneak out of Bramble Tree and go to our special place in the dark and just look at the sky and tell each other our hopes and dreams?"

"Uh, I remember it more as us sneaking out to the back garden because we were bored." I said, "but I do recall a little bit of dream sharing."

She leant back against the bench and ditched her cross-legged position to get more comfortable. "You still don't know what you want to do?"

"I'm thinking about being an Engineer." I said, thinking back to Career day the day before. "Oh, and you missed Career Day by the way.It was a barrel of fun."

She scoffed, "I'm sure it was. Even though everyone is either stressing about this one big unattainable dream or don't have the faintest idea of what they are doing. I think you can put me in that second category. I'm glad I didn't go."

"Maybe we should make a club," I agreed, grinning ironically. "Good for university applications. Strictly for those who have no idea what they're doing. I think people would come."

There was a comfortable silence.

"So, have you met anyone?" She queried.

"I wouldn't say that," I answered uncertainly. "It's a - Uh - a slow process."

"Well I'm sure whoever she is would be very lucky to have you."

I sighed. I wanted to tell her that I still knew nothing about anything and that I didn't like all the norms that revolved around love and how big gestures were overrated and how I didn't think there's only one person for everyone (and how I know that love in fact isn't everything but somehow it feels like it is ) and that all I wanted was to find some meaning in it all. But then I figured that she'd already cried once and 1am conversations on a soaked bench can only go so deep before you're pouring out your soul and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

So, instead, I said, "let's hope I can prove that to her".

And then I looked up, trying to place stars in a vacant sky.