Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Every time it rains
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out
I just know that something good is gonna happen
—“Cloudbusting,” Kate Bush
For anyone searching for light in the dark, you deserve every good thing
Dear Reader,
The idea for Weather Girl lived in my head for a couple years before I started writing it, and it’s been a romantic comedy ever since my first lightning strike of inspiration—one with no shortage of climate-related puns. In the middle of the drafting process, it also became a romantic comedy with a depressed protagonist.
On paper, it sounds like those two things shouldn’t mix. Rom-coms are escapist and exciting and often full of hijinks. And yet what I’ve loved the most about them as we’ve seen this category evolve is their capacity to balance those wild, escapist plots with the kind of realism I used to avoid in my storytelling. For a while, I’ve written about Jewish characters whose backgrounds are similar to mine, but it’s rarer for me to explore mental health in a way that comes close to my own experience.
In Weather Girl, Ari’s depression is mostly manageable, and it’s taken nearly a decade for her to get to that point. There are also complications with her family and relationship history she works to untangle over the course of the book. I tried to write her depression with care and sensitivity, with the understanding that this illness doesn’t have a magic cure. That said, Ari’s experience is not every experience, and each mental health journey looks different. Very few, including mine, are a straight line.
More than anything, I wanted this book to highlight a neurodiverse heroine who happens to be on medication and in therapy falling in love and thriving. I wanted to show the messy, heavy parts of her life alongside the moments that sweep her off her feet. And I wanted a hero who’d love her through her dark days, not despite them—because to me, that is the most romantic thing of all.
With so much love,
Rachel
If any of this subject matter is triggering to you, please be gentle with yourself while reading. The following resources are available 24/7.
Crisis Text Line: https://www.crisistextline.org, or text HOME to 741741
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
Samaritans Helpline: 1-877-870-4673 （call or text）
1
FORECAST:
Cloudy with a chance of public humiliation
THERE’S SOMETHING ESPECIALLY lovely about an overcast day. Clouds dipped in ink, the sky ready to crack open. The air turning crisp and sweet. It’s magic, the way the world seems to pause for a few moments right before a downpour, and I can never get enough of that heady anticipation—this sense that something extraordinary is about to happen.
Sometimes I think I could live in those moments forever.
“What was that?” my brother asks from the driver’s seat. It’s possible I’ve just let out a contented sigh. “Are you getting emotional about rain again?”
I’ve been staring—well, gazing—out the window as the early morning sky surrenders to a drizzle. “No. That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.”
Because it’s not just that I’m emotional about rain. It’s that rain means the thrill of tracking a cold front as it moves in from the Pacific. It means knee-high boots and cable-knit sweaters, and it’s simply a fact that those are the best clothes. I don’t make the rules.
For so many people, weather is small talk, the thing you discuss when you’ve run out of conversation topics at a party or you’re on a first date with a guy who lives in his parents’ basement and thinks you two could be really happy down there together. Can you believe the weather we’re having? It’s a source of joy or frustration, but rarely anything in the middle.
It’s never been small talk for me. Even if we’re due for six more months of gloom, I always miss it when summer comes.
“You’re lucky I love you so much.” Alex rakes a hand through the sleep-mussed red hair we almost share, only his is auburn and mine is a bright shock of ginger. “We’d just gotten past Orion’s fear of the dark, but now Cassie’s up at five if we’re lucky, four-thirty if we’re not. No one’s getting any sleep in the Abrams-Delgado house.”
“I told you she’s a little meteorologist in training.” I adore my brother’s five-year-old twins, and not just because they’re named after constellations. “Don’t tell her we have to do our own hair and makeup. Ruins the illusion.”
“She has to watch you every morning before preschool. Dinosaur-shaped pancakes and Aunt Ari on the TV.”
“The way God intended.”
“I must not have been paying attention that day in Hebrew school.” Alex stifles a yawn as we jigsaw around Green Lake. He lives on the Eastside and works in South Seattle, so he picked me up in my tree-lined Ravenna neighborhood and will drop me off at the station when we’re done.
His clock is always six minutes fast because Alex loves the extra motivation in the mornings. Right now it reads 6:08—usually late for me, but thanks to one of Torrance’s last-minute schedule changes, I won’t be on camera until the afternoon. I might end up staying awake for a full twenty hours, but my body’s gotten used to me messing with its internal clock. Mostly.
Still, imagining my tiny perfect niece transfixed by a weather report warms the very center of my heart.
Once upon a time, I did the exact same thing.
“Relax. It’s going to be great,” Alex says as I fidget with the zipper on my waterproof jacket, and then with the necklace buried in the fuzz of my sweater. I only roped him into this because I didn’t want to do it alone, but there’s always been a whisper-thin line between excitement and anxiety for me.
Even if my tells weren’t so obvious, he’d be able to sense my emotions with his eyes closed. At thirty, Alex is three years older than I am, but people used to think we were fraternal twins because we were inseparable as kids. That morphed into a friendly rivalry as teens, especially since we were in the habit of crushing on the same boys—most notably, this Adonis of a track star named Kellen who had no idea we existed, despite our appearance at every one of his meets to cheer him on. This was made clear on the day of the state championships, when I showed up with flowers and Alex with balloons, and Kellen blinked his gorgeous tide pool eyes at us and said, “Hey, do we go to the same school?”
Reluctantly, I allow the swish of the windshield wipers to lull me into a false sense of calm. We head north up Aurora, past billboards for the Pacific Science Center, for gutter cleaners, for a guy who could be either a personal injury lawyer or a pro wrestler, given the way his face is twisted in a scowl. A cluster of car dealerships, and then—
“Oh my god, there it is. Stop the car. Stop the car!”
“You’re not allowed to yell like that when I’m driving,” Alex says, even as he stomps the brake, his Prius tossing me against the door. “Christ, I thought I’d hit something.”
“Yes. My ego. It’s shattered.”
He swerves into the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour donut shop, sliding into a spot that gives us an unobstructed view of my very first billboard.