She had always been an underdog. She was the kind of person who got up in the morning and the first thing she did was trip over her own feet. Then, the toothpaste tube would only be half-full, and the emptiness of the milk carton would only be discovered after the pouring of the cornflakes. Getting dressed would be an uneventful procedure, by the end of which it would already be raining outside. She would take a look at the clock, realize how late she really was, and stuff things, hurried and haphazard, into her backpack. There would be things she needed in there, and things that she could leave home that particular day, and the ratio of the latter to the former that actually ended up in the backpack would vary from morning to morning, but rarely did she get it exactly right. And then she would kiss her mother goodbye and tear around the corner, through the front door, into the rain.

All of this she did with a smile on her face, especially the last part. She loved the rain, and she loved running in it.

Pretty much inevitably, she would slip in a puddle, and would end up on her back, staring up into the extraordinary gray disaster of the sky, the streaks and shards of cloud, and the raindrops thundering down to meet the earth. She would think about the miles of ground underneath her back, and how the water seeping into it would find roots, and the trees would be thankful for it. She thought about how that water would find its way to rivers one day, twining back to the ocean, where the storm would suck them into the atmosphere again and rain them back down, just like it had done since the first rainfall billions of years before, and how in the many, many rainfalls that had followed it, no single sky could be perfectly matched to look like another. 

When she got up, the back of her sweater and hair and jeans would be soaked and damp for the rest of the day, but for now, she only looked into the storm-wracked white infinity above her and stuck out her tongue to catch the drops.