Drink the Rain

By Cynthia Davis

Fans of Sarah Dessen will love this story of travel, adventure, and drama, Cynthia Davis's follow up to her debut novel, The Chrysalis.

Two starry nights--one in New York, the other on a desolate African plain...

Under the falling stars of a cold November sky, Christina Brannigan's life seems deceptively clear.

Until the dark clouds of an approaching storm bring trouble that doesn't dissolve with the snow.

A sting operation, a lost letter, and a roadside breakdown bring her toward a cross roads under the winding path of the Milky Way.

What happens next depends on the answer to a question asked in a tin shack church by a barefoot guy with an easy smile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cynthia Davis
• Release date: Dec 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465990587

Cynthia Davis

Cynthia Davis teaches freshman composition at Christopher Newport University, which also happens to be her alma mater. Her patchy resume includes stints as a travel agent, burger flipper, youth worker, reporter, and a particularly long run as an elementary art teacher. She enjoys photography, good coffee, and making mosaic seahorses. She lives in an old house near the Chesapeake Bay with her husband, children, pets, and a cast of regular extras.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Camp Global Training Headquarters, east Texas

Monday

Christina Brannigan wiped the back of one hand across her forehead while reaching for her water bottle with the other. Her hand shook as she lifted the warm water to her cracked lips. Pressing a trembling arm against her filthy shirt, she glanced at her wrist. The face of her watch was coated in a layer of the red Texas soil that stained her clothes and clung heavily to the sweat and sunscreen that caked her skin.

Dinner should have begun ten minutes ago. She looked hopefully toward Paige, the sassy, auburn-haired drama instructor for signs of dismissal, but saw only a hardened frown of determination in her gaze.

Come on, places, people, look alive! Paige’s voice had an edge of urgency and insistence as she clapped her hands and pointed stragglers to appropriate places on the dusty field. She punched a button on her portable CD player. Christina cringed. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and one….the even tempo of the eight count resumed its merciless control.

Not that it had ever really relinquished its iron-fisted grip. For the past three days, every movement in Christina’s life had become choreographed to the numbers that steadily vibrated the dry, brittle field with their cadence. When she walked, she fell into step with it. When she actually had time to eat, she chewed her food to it. Earlier that morning, she had even caught herself folding her towel to the same rhythm that lulled her to sleep and invaded her dreams.

Even as she mindlessly executed the dips and pivots required by the droning eight count, Christina looked longingly toward the big top tent about 500 yards to her left. Students from Team Brazil were filing into the tent, each grabbing a dull pink cafeteria tray from a tall stack at the end of the row of serving tables. Smiling volunteers were filling the geometric indentations of each tray with what would, based on past experience, undoubtedly prove to be some sort of hot goop.

It wasn’t the hot goop or a lukewarm water refill that made Christina so eager for a break. The fact was that she just wanted a chance to sit down. If her coordination hadn’t improved in the past three and a half hours of practice, missing the dinner break wasn’t likely to do the trick either. Christina had already learned that missed breaks were not made up, but simply sacrificed to the never ending demands of a schedule tighter than the canvas sneakers she’d been issued at orientation.

Exasperated, Paige thumped a finger on the CD player and killed the eight count. Listen, people, this is it. Her voice carried such authority that it was impossible not to feel as though she were giving orders in a life or death military campaign. We’re going through this one more time with the help of the numbers. If you don’t have the rhythm by now, we’re doomed. You have to be able to count these steps out in your head. Paige began clapping out the rhythm. Christina could feel her own palms begin to sweat. It was impossible for her to step on the right number even with the help of the soundtrack.

…the last time you’ll hear the numbers, Paige continued, tucking a damp curl behind her ear and placing her hands on her hips. After dinner, we’re running through the entire block of skits and we’ll keep at it until we nail them. She paused, meaningfully. No matter how long it takes. She turned around and thumped her index finger on the play button. The speakers came back to life, belting out marching orders.

Squat on four, pivot on five, step on six, turn on seven, rest on eight. How hard could it be? If Christina’s sore muscles and flushed face were any indication, it was about as hard as climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with both hands tied behind her back. Most of the other team members seemed to be catching on, but for Christina, it seemed the harder she worked, the more complicated the movements became.

There was no way anyone could have prepared her for the intensity of Texas heat in mid-June. When she’d pushed through the glass doors of the airport last Friday, she’d been practically bowled over by the heavy, humid air. It reminded her of the time her face got too close to the industrial ovens during a Home Ec. baking exercise. The blast in the face sounded an alarm—go back, you’re too close to danger!

Later events proved the heat to be the least of her worries, although she now knew she should have heeded its warning. Each passing moment at Camp Global Headquarters continued to assure her just how woefully misguided she’d been about what she had gotten herself into. Three days ago, Christina had been expecting to spend several days in air-conditioned classrooms rehearsing the lines of humorous scripts and learning useful phrases in some exotic tribal dialect before boarding a plane for a summer of adventure in South Africa.

What she didn’t know was that the drama they’d be taking to Africa was a tightly choreographed routine. Of course, last fall’s Riverside High School production of Guys and Dolls had already spotlighted Christina’s talent deficit in the choreography department. She also hadn’t realized that Camp Global performed only street drama. Enter the fact that they didn’t even have air-conditioned classrooms, and that pretty much summed up the surprises Christina discovered on page one of the inch-thick binder she’d been tossed as she climbed aboard the camo-splattered Camp Global bus outside the airport.

If the heat and the drama weren’t shocking enough, even worse was the realization about the assignment itself. The way she had understood things, she had signed up to travel with a team of college students to perform and teach drama at a brand new South African camp. What she had not fully grasped was that they were being sent to actually build the camp. Hammer and nails type stuff. The drama would only be part of a schedule that she now suspected would be full of twists she couldn’t begin to anticipate while fumbling through the tricky footwork of the squat/pivot combination.

The accumulation of these unexpected surprises left her feeling as though she were in a bad episode of reality TV—without the huge cash payoff, and no chance of being voted out.

She could feel her pulse hammering at her temples as she took her place on the field. Even her headache seemed in sync with the eight count. What would they say back at Riverside High if she dropped dead from synchronized heat stroke?

Back turned to an imaginary audience of small, black faces, she blinked back tears as she acknowledged the truth: she simply did not posses the coordination necessary to pull off her part in either the Soap Stomp or the Mighty Mouth March.

Conceptually, she had to admit that the idea behind the drama was pretty cool. It was a set of choreographed scenes depicting basic health and hygiene information, set to a musical soundtrack narrated in the native language of whatever region—in this case the Kwa Zulu Natal province of South Africa—that Camp Global was headed.

It had never occurred to her that there were children anywhere in the world who didn’t know how to shower, brush, or floss, but apparently whether or not some children did was at least partially dependent on Christina’s ability to pivot smoothly and step on count.

Christina heard the music swell and took her cue to begin counting. Her lips moved slightly and her eyes closed as she turned on one, two, three step, step. So far so good, four, squat (crunch, a painless but annoying reminder of last summer’s knee injury), and stand (ouch—sore quadriceps) five, pivot (regain balance), step on six and—open eyes.

Bam! The eight count abruptly stopped halfway through seven. All eyes stared in one direction—at Christina. She looked around. Sadly, she had not spun out with the other white-capped members of the parade of pearly whites. Horrified, she realized she had whirled into the clutches of the tooth decay squad hugging their knees awaiting their cue to spin into their march of mass destruction.

She swallowed hard. She’d turned out on the wrong cue, a fact that Paige did not seem to be handling well. She gave an exasperated wave in the direction of the big top tent. Go, get some dinner. Be back at 6:30 sharp. Christina, get some food and fluid, please. You look like you’re about to collapse. I want you back here at 6:25.

Christina shoved slimy bits through the slippery sauce on her dinner tray. She was relatively certain she must be hungry, but borderline heat exhaustion had a way of masking the body’s normal sensations.

Why had Paige asked her to come back before everyone else? She suspected it had something to do with her dismal drama performance or the confusion about her funding. Neither were pleasant subjects, but right now it was hard to say which was worse. Technically, either could be cause for dismissal.

She walked over to the flatbed trailer where the water drum was propped. She refilled the bottle and downed half of it before she made it back to her table. The water sloshed as her shaking hand deposited the container on the rough, wooden surface. She felt dizzy, queasy, and suffocated by the hot, heavy air.

Although this wasn’t the first time she chose a summer of adventure over burger flipping and mall crawling, she wished she had a clue just how much of an adventure she had gotten herself into.

Christina had spent the previous summer working for her Aunt Meg and Uncle Michael at the camp they ran for disadvantaged children. So much had happened there that it seemed as though she could describe her life in terms of before camp and after camp.

Before camp, it seemed to her that her life was one long wish list. Outside of academics, there was little she could really claim in life. She wanted a part in the school play; what she got was a bloody nose at auditions. She wanted to be thin—and noticed by popular guys like Kevin Witherspoon; what she got was fifteen pounds heavier working with the Home Ec. teacher on a disaster that came to be known as The Donut Project. She wanted a date for the prom, but not with chess team captain Bernard Flood—the only guy who asked.

The facts seemed to speak for themselves. She simply was not meant to have the life she wanted. She was destined to live behind the scenes, in the shadows of others fortunate enough to actually live out the dreams she wanted for herself.

The dismal events of her junior year had left her unprepared for the adventures that Camp Edson brought into her life. She found herself responsible for more than she could have ever bargained for—in fact, there was a twelve-year-old girl in New York right now who owed her life, in more ways than one, to Christina’s good judgment and quick thinking.

As incredible as her experiences as a counselor had been, the biggest surprise of last summer had been Mark. If anything disqualified Mark from being the most perfect guy alive, she didn’t know about it. Not only was he good looking, sensitive, and intelligent, he was thoroughly in love with her. At least, she thought he had been.

Where things had stood between her and Mark last fall seemed unclear. Ask most people who had any knowledge of the previous summer’s events—Stacey, Suzy, and as later events so vividly proved, even Mark himself, and the facts clearly seemed to indicate that Christina had abruptly and inexplicably ended things with him.

In reality, her feelings for Mark had only intensified when she left Camp Edson last August. Had it really been almost a year? The truth was hidden within a secret that none of her friends, especially Mark, could ever know.

The summer had ended with a decision. It was a decision that had altered the course of both their lives, and, unavoidably, their relationship. Going to Africa was a big part of that decision, and it impacted both of their futures in ways that Mark would never know and even she couldn’t predict. It had cost her—not to mention her aunt and uncle—a fortune that none of them could really afford; it had mystified Stacey and bewildered Kevin, and even if the sun shriveled her into a raisin and her muscles and bones collapsed from exertion, it was preferable to quitting now. Besides, what could she really say? It was hot, and the drama was difficult hardly seemed like an option.

She would go back to the dusty field and conquer the drama. She would endure the heat of mid-summer Texas. Wednesday morning at 3 A.M. she would board the plane and head for Africa. She would pound nails and saw lumber. Most of all, she would squat on four, pivot on five, and step on six.

Sitting here on the edge of a splintered bench, she was 48 hours from realizing a dream that had taken every second of her time and every ounce of her determination. Her senior year had been the most difficult of her entire life, and she suddenly found herself reliving it all in a mental power-point slide show. The memories of what it had taken to bring her here, now, on the brink of living the dream made her certain that there was no other choice.

Unless, of course, there was any truth to this morning’s report that her account was $330 short.

Chapter 2

New York, last school year

September

Stacey cranked the CD player up another notch as she closed her eyes, visualizing the movements that Elle, the choreographer, had demonstrated earlier that evening. Her attempts at duplicating the routine were disgustingly successful, Christina noticed with a smile. Casting Stacey as a Hot Box girl in the Riverside High Production of Guys and Dolls was a natural choice. Her movements were smooth, and she picked up even the most complicated steps almost instantly—a fact that may have made Christina jealous in the past, but didn’t matter in the least as she sifted through the boxes of photos and books that were strewn across center stage.

Here we go, Kevin said with a triumphant smile as he held a dog-eared photo toward the strip of overhead stage lights, giving it a final examination. This one’s mine.

Christina gave a non-committal shrug, her default response to all things Kevin Witherspoon.

Kevin began sorting through the pre-cut strips of plywood propped up on stage left, searching for the perfect piece to recreate whatever street sign had caught his eye in the fifties-era photos of New York City they’d been sifting through for the past hour. Mr. Earle, the history teacher, and Ms. White, the librarian, as well as several interested grandmothers had loaned snapshots, books, and memorabilia to the stage crew to help with set design.

Christina had spent every one of the previous three years she’d been in drama club on the stage crew. Even though she’d landed a leading role in Guys and Dolls after last week’s audition –a fact she’d confirmed by repeated readings of the cast list still posted on the auditorium door—she found that she still felt the need to be a part of the stage crew. Designing the bits and pieces that miraculously combined to create a new, onstage world in a drama all their own had somehow become part of her. She found it impossible to separate herself from the process.

Christina glanced toward Kevin out of the corner of her eye. He was prying the lids off several cans of paint and had already penciled in the block lettering for the single word TONITE surrounded by a series of circles that Christina assumed would materialize into neon lights under Kevin’s highly skilled brush strokes. Christina suppressed a sigh. Kevin’s sudden interest in the dramatic arts was irritating. Like any other football player, he’d passed through the auditorium doors for the sole purpose of school assemblies—until late last week when he’d become a permanent fixture in every aspect of the upcoming production.

Looking back, Kevin’s sudden decision to join the stage crew was almost predictable. In recent weeks, he’d proven quite capable of worming his way into Christina’s life in more ways than she ever would have dreamed possible. Besides, any Riverside High student who was able to hold a paintbrush and was willing to show up was not only eligible, but encouraged to join stage crew.

How Kevin had managed to land a leading role, however, was nothing short of school politics in action. It was a simple fact: put popular Kevin Witherspoon on stage doing anything, and ticket sales would follow. Put Kevin Witherspoon on stage as a 1950s gangster in a sizzling story line, and plan on a full house. If not entirely fair, it certainly made perfect sense to Mr. Lopez, the new drama instructor who was under pressure to deliver a successful show lest the Riverside High drama club fall victim to the next round of school board budget cuts.

What do you mean, you’re tired? Stacey’s voice had a whiney edge. Come on, Christina, it’ll be fun. Slowly examining the sequined dance costumes on the long rack in the dressing room, she pulled out a shiny green and gold leotard and held it in front of her as she stared into a full-length oval mirror.

Stacey’s party girl personality had been a turn-off to Christina when the girls first met at Camp Edson the previous summer. The fact that they eventually became friends was nearly as surprising as the job transfer that brought Stacey’s family to Riverside that fall. Christina was finding that Stacey’s immediate slide into Riverside High’s popular crowd, which now somehow included a remake of the former chess club captain Bernard—now known as Dave or Flash—Flood, combined with Kevin’s sudden interest, often left her confused and uncertain where she fit in.

You’re just nervous about rehearsing ‘the scene’ tomorrow, Stacey teased.

Christina sat down at a vanity across the room. No, I’m a professional, I can handle it, she said jokingly, in the cool tones of an afflicted celebrity.

Don’t you realize that you’re the envy of every girl in this school? Stacey continued. I heard Debbie Dennison and Angie Farringer talking about it this afternoon. ‘Does she really get to kiss him?’ Debbie asked, and then Angie said that she heard it from Kevin himself. I mean the fact that he’s talking about it… Stacey’s voice trailed as she hung the costume back on the rack and perched on top of the vanity.

She crossed her legs and picked up a compact and make up brush, and, flipping the top of the compact she carefully examined her face before dipping the brush into one of the several dozen jars scattered across the top of the vanity. She lifted the brush and blew the excess powder away from Christina before sweeping it across her cheeks. I just don’t get it, Christina. Kevin has been so sweet. Without the least bit of encouragement, he’s followed you around like a puppy dog since the first day of school. He sat in detention for you, Christina, an entire week of detention, and shall we address why?

No, no, let’s not.

Detention, Christina, was Kevin’s reward for his loyal service.

Christina groaned. I never asked him to carry my books.

Which makes his sacrifice all the more noble, Stacey continued matter-of-factly, ignoring the pain in Christina’s voice. Seventeen tardy slips and a month of carrying your backpack to every one of your classes—

All right, all right, I’ll go! Enough! Christina really did feel awful about Kevin’s detention. It was the one thing that actually made her have second thoughts about the possibility of ever dating him. It had only been three days since Christina had abandoned the knee brace and crutches that had been slowing her down since an accident at Camp Edson. Kevin had miraculously appeared at Christina’s side at the end of each of her classes. He’d swing her backpack over his shoulder and match her ridiculously slow place, telling