A/N--Same thing with "I Am" goin' on here...I tried to get a bit deeper...and FYI, the italics are meant to show what happened in the past, :) END A/N

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It was vivid in Nora’s mind: the day she saw the poor boy, sprawled out on the corner of 25th and Verner, rain-soaked, every other person walking past simply ignoring him as though he was a homeless drug addict of sorts—

For all she knew, he could have been. He could have been a murderer, or a rapist, or plain-old criminal runaway. But that wasn’t the kind of person Nora was.

“You told me you weren’t a reporter,” Nora replies glumly at the woman, taking a small teacup embossed with pink roses from one of her kitchen cabinets.

The woman smirks with good nature. “Sometimes you have to lie in this business.”

Nora grips the cup, shaking. “Well what did you want to ask me? Go on and say it…”

The woman wonders how she could phrase her question delicately. Better not to ask personal questions in a situation like this. Even if it would make the issues sell like hotcakes. “How’d you meet him?”

“Are you okay?” Nora asked the boy, putting her hand on one of his shoulders. “Hello?”

He shifted in the most miniscule bit. “Huh?” he muttered.

Nora squatted next to him on the ground, holding her umbrella over him. “Are you okay?” she repeated.

The boy didn’t answer her, but merely turned his head to see her.

“A-Are you sick or something? Do you need to go to the hospital…?”

He shook his head. “But everybody seems to think so.”

He looked sad.

“D-Don’t you have somewhere to stay?”

“…Not really.”

The woman jots down every word Nora utters.

“And what paper did you say you’re from, again?”

The woman shakes her head. “I’m not from a paper. I’m from IQ BoX magazine.”

IQ BoX. Only magazine or newspaper even that lasted through the past eight years.

His face remained emotionless.

Nora’s concerned only increased. “I bet your parents miss you.”

He sat up, droplets from his jet black hair that clung to his head spraying everywhere. “My parents gave me up. I live—or lived, rather—in a foster home. And frankly I think they’re happier I’m not there.”

She tried to remain optimistic. “Why would you say that? You seem like a perfectly nice person.”

Amazed shock dripped onto his face like syrup. “What…?”

“I said you seem like a perfectly nice person…”

The rain suddenly worsened, pounding down on Nora’s umbrella, ultimately soaking her as well.

“No one’s ever told me that before….!” he said in an almost exaggerated mixture of sadness and joy.

What she thought was odd though, was that the rain had hardened only when he started crying.

“Was that when you realized it?” the woman asks, noticing Nora rummage through the same cabinet for the umpteenth time.

Nora gasps slightly, her hand fumbling over the familiar curved handle of another teacup, this one with only a plain gold rim around the edge.

“What is it?” the woman asks again.

“Erm…nothing. I just found what I was looking for. But ‘no’ to your first question. I didn’t realize it for a while then.”

Nora lived with her aunt. She didn’t have any parents, either. Her parents had died. She never knew what happened to Caleb’s parents, though. He didn’t even know, himself.

Caleb.

That was the boy’s name.

Last name unknown, to her at least.

There was a lot of things she didn’t know about him.

“Like what?” the reporter presses.

“Like what I said: who his parents were, where they went, his last name, where he went every day after school if he said he didn’t have a home...”

She didn’t know what happened with him, but a few days after she saw him first, he showed up at her school, nervous, fidgety, awkward, seemingly…lonely.

For his old clothes, shy personality…he was scoffed at, made fun of, shunned…

Nora chose to abandon her ritual of sitting with her friends at lunch as opposed to sitting with him instead.

“Why did you come here?” she asked him one day.

“Huh?” he looked up from his book, his eyes wide.

“Why did you just come here? To this school?”

He sighed. “The school I used to go to…I frankly didn’t see the point in going back there…”

The sky outside darkened, as though it was going to rain.

“Why not? Was it worse than here?” Nora asked, inching closer to him.

He nodded slowly. “But I’d rather not talk about it.”

She wanted to ask him how he actually got enrolled into the school if he didn’t live with his legal guardians. But that was a question for another day.

“You went to school with him?” the reporter asks incredulously.

Nora nods. “From sophomore year in high school to…” she chokes on her words. “Well…we only went to college for a few ears, and then it closed down…”

“What one?”

“Macrobat University.”

“Ah, okay…now was college when you figured everything out?”

Nora can’t bring herself to turn around and face this woman, this woman who wants to prod into her life, not out of concern, but to make a good story for her magazine. Still she can’t help but answer her questions.

She gulps nervously. “Gradually…”

Caleb was an odd boy. He was very sweet, very tender-hearted…but he was odd. Or rather, the circumstances surrounding him were odd.

The weather seemed to know him.

Anyone would feel extremely grateful to get a scholarship, right? Caleb especially. For even being flat-out homeless for a long time, he was actually quite smart. And he somehow managed to get a scholarship to the same college Nora applied to.

It was the day (a beautifully sunny day) they were moving into their college dorm rooms. She had several boxes, but he only had one. Anything of his was kept at her house, for he obviously did not have one.

He was going through his box. Nora was trying to figure out what she could do to “brighten the room up” as he luckily had no roommate.

In the box was mostly clothes, plain t-shirts and dirty jeans…but at the bottom was a snow globe. It was of a girl, decked out in white, standing on a bridge, with blue flakes (painted that colour to look like water he guessed) sputtering around her.

Nora immediately stopped and eyed the snow globe. “What’s that? You never showed it to me before…”

She reached out to grab it, but he quickly jerked away. It accidentally slipped from his hands and dropped to the floor, cracking into near-indiscernible pieces, the water spilling all over the oaken floors.

She clamped both hands over her mouth in horror. “Oh my God, Caleb I’m so sorry…I didn’t mean to make you drop it…”

He was silent for a moment, staring at the pieces in shock.

“C-Caleb…?”

He went and got the broom in the corner of the room, and started sweeping up the snow globe remnants meticulously. He took the pieces of the globe itself and put them on his bed. Then he somehow managed to get a handful of the blue flakes off of the floor and put them into a Ziploc bag.

Nora noticed the sky outside had gotten dark like it had three years ago in high school, when she asked him about his old school.

“Caleb I’m really sorry…”

He didn’t reply, only holding the base of the snow globe up to her face.

She took it carefully, trying not to prick her fingers on the broken glass. It read, engraved on the bottom: ‘To my sweet little boy, Caleb, we’re sorry we couldn’t take care of you. We hope you have a long and happy life. We love you always.’

“His parents left him snow globe, of all things?”

Nora is surprised at the woman’s lack of compassion. She chooses to ignore her last question.

Taking the hint, the woman asks something else: “So was that the night the city got flooded?”

Nora nods. “From all of the rain…”

It happened more frequently, after that. Whenever Caleb was sad, it tended to rain. Nora joked that the sky was empathetic with him.

But it when the second year of college rolled around, it got…serious…

He seemed to be more susceptible to bouts of sadness than ever before…and every time it would rain, it would hail, it would flood…

When he was particularly happy, the outside temperature would rise significantly, to the point that everybody had to stay in their dorms with the air conditioning on full blast…

On a Saturday night…he got mad. Infuriated.

Funny thing—Nora couldn’t remember exactly what happened.

Most likely she blocked it out.

All she did remember was Caleb getting mad at something.

And the ground shaking violently.

Things falling off of tables and walls, everyone crowding in doorways…

And hearing on the news day after day that it had been the worst earthquake the north American continent had encountered.

Nora remains silent for several minutes. “But they didn’t come to find him until a couple months later, after the second and third floods…”

“And what did you do then?” the woman presses, her eyes glowing with interest.

There is a loud, almost happy-sounding shriek. Startled, Nora drops the gold-rimmed teacup, and it smashes on the linoleum floor, just like the snow globe…

“I-If you’ll excuse me for one moment…” Nora says to the woman, rushing into the hallway, staring in dismay at the open backdoor, and rushing out through it.

“Carrie? C-Carrie…?” she calls out.

A small figures waves at Nora from down the alley, sitting on an equally small beach that bordered the backyards of the houses on that particular street.

“Mommy I made something for you!” she calls out.

Slightly relieved nothing ill had become of her child, only six years old, Nora walks over to the small girl, who’s indeed sitting in the sand…finishing up a sand castle.

Shaped oddly like a snow globe.

“Hon, the phones ain’t workin’,” spat the middle-aged, rather cruel woman who worked at the station.

Nora sighed and glanced at Caleb.

He had his hood pulled up over his head, though not to keep out the ever-pounding rain, but to keep anyone from noticing him. He stared down at his feet, and a look of contemplation rested upon his face.

Trying to work payphones to try and call your aging Aunt to come pick you up at a train station during an intense thunderstorm while on the run from the CIA wasn’t the best place for that, but—

She fumbled for his rain-slicked hand and squeezed it reassuringly.

“Carrie, what’s this?” she squats down, finding herself somewhat disturbed by the girl’s creation.

“It’s daddy’s snow globe. The one you made him break.”

Nora knew Caleb was an emotionally disturbed boy from the beginning, but she had to tell him she was expecting a baby it went haywire…

“Honey, I never told you anything about a snow globe,” Nora says, more to herself than to Carrie.

“I know. Daddy told me. When you guys were in college he had a snow globe his mama gave him, and you accidentally made him drop it and it broke.”

It is also rather disturbing at the level of detail Carrie has put into the sand castle. The base, for one—her model has the same shape and carving as the original did.

“But Daddy put it back together again. And he gave it to me. It’s in my room, in my top dresser. Wanna see it, Mama? It doesn’t look as nice as the snow globes in the stores, ‘cause you can see all of the glue from when Daddy super-glued the pieces back together, but…Mama, what’s wrong, why are you crying?”

“You know Humpty-Dumpty?” Caleb asked her one day.

“You mean the nursery rhyme?” Nora asked back, resting her hands on top of her rather large midsection.

He nodded.

“Yeah. Why?”

“What kind of person makes up a rhyme for babies and little kids about a guy who falls off a wall and breaks into pieces so small he can’t be put back together?”

She shrugged and laughed. “I dunno. A lot of nursery rhymes are like that.”

She noticed a strange look in his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“That can really happen. People can shatter to the point they can’t be healed.”

“Oh, I’m fine, sweetie. And your sand snow globe is very pretty. Looks just like the original,” Nora says half-heartedly. She takes Carrie’s hand and begins to lead her off the beach. But Carrie stumbles in getting up, and her foot snags over the stick she was using to make the sand castle’s details…and knocks over the sand castle by mistake…

“Caleb?” Nora said softly, shaking his shoulder, trying to wake up the sleeping young man.

“I’m not feeling well,” he’d said the night before, and went and slept out on the couch. But there hadn’t been a word out of him all day. She was getting worried.

“Caleb sweetie are you okay?”

No response.

“C-Caleb…?”

No response.

“Caleb?! Caleb?! Answer me! Caleb, wake up! Caleb!”

Another broken object.

A snow globe.

A sand castle.

A family…

It was disturbing how little Carrie cried.

No, in fact, she didn’t cry at all.

But maybe…

Maybe that’s because…

After Nora takes Carrie back inside, she comes back into her kitchen to find the woman doodling on her notepad.

“I’m sorry about that…” Nora says.

The woman shrugs. “It’s fine.”

“But…have you ever heard of comparing people to snow globes?”

The woman raises an eyebrow. “Heard it? No, but…I guess if you think about it…it could mean that people are fragile, and if too much damage is done, they can’t be healed, or put back together again…” she said with sincere sympathy.

People can shatter to the point they can’t be healed.

“I think sand castles are more accurate.”

The other eyebrow goes up. “How so?”

“Because sand castles…no matter how much damage is done to them, they can always be put back together…with the utmost effort and care and love, a person can be healed, even if it’s just a little bit.”