Ignite (4 page)

             
“Why do you even care?” I inquired curiously. “You don’t even know me.”

             
“Don’t gotta know you to know you, birdy. Just gotta be there to make sure you ain’t in shit you don’t ever wanna be in.”

What a strange answer.
Was he high? He looked in control of himself. His eyes weren’t dilated either. Huh.

             
“How will you know if I’m in shit I don’t ever wanna be in?”

             
I felt his leather jacket against my cotton pyjama top and watched him angle his head so that it was mere inches from mine. I smelled the cigarette smoke as he breathed out, and a musky kind of cologne that was surprisingly pleasant. I had to shut my mouth so I didn’t stare at awe at his rough beauty. No one would have found this man beautiful. Why the hell did I?

             
“You’d be surprised,” he softly answered. “One day I might just pop outta the blue and you won’t ever know it. Might pull a few strings, dangle an opportunity in front of you. All the while you’ll be living life unaware of my intrusion.”

             
I was so fucking lost, it wasn’t even funny. Yet I was so mesmerized by his voice and face, I didn’t stop to swallow the words until long after. He didn’t know me, yet he acted as if he did. But that wasn’t possible because this was our first meeting, and, most likely, our last.

             
“How ‘bout headin’ home now, Sara?”

             
I shook my head, defiantly. “I’m waiting for my friend.”

             
His lips curved upwards into a smirk. “Alright, then, stubborn one. You can wait on your guy. Be careful, though. I don’t wanna see you lurkin’ around here on your own again.” Without expecting it, he ruffled my hair at the top and stood up.

             
My body screamed
No!
and my mind kicked back in relief at his departure.

             
“See you around, birdy.” And just like that, he was gone. Never learned his name. Damn shame. I sat in the stillness of the night a while longer, mulling his words over. 

             
It was right then I wondered how he knew I was waiting on a guy.

Two

I hated high school with a passion. Jaxon promised me that he would look out for me and that it wouldn’t be as agonizing as people made it out to be. Lucinda loomed over my shoulder throughout the summer leading up to my first year. She was itching to have me looking the part of a high school teenage girl.

             
She sat me down the night before my first day and did my nails for me. I’d never had my nails done by her before – and not from her lack of trying!

             
“You need to stop biting these off, Sara,” she whined.

             
“You’re going to cut them off anyway,” I replied stubbornly.

             
“That’s not the point. You’re in the habit of biting them off, and I don’t want to dare see your new nails bitten off tomorrow. I’m doing these free of charge, young lady. Be grateful.”

             
I attempted to feel grateful, but her talking about nails was already making me want to chew them off again. She’d been extra attentive to me lately. She insisted I remove the hairs from my face, whining that my moustache was a sin to female humanity -- and don’t even get me started on what she said about my eyebrows…

             
She gave me my first make up kit and taught me how to apply it. It was a long process that I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to commit to, but she pushed and pushed until I relented and made her a promise that I would. She took me to the hair dressers and had my hair cut in layers. After my father had left, I had the freedom to let it grow. I never knew how thick hair could be, or how time consuming it was to wash it every night with Lucinda’s “rinse and repeat” method and shampoos she’d given me.

             
“We can put colour in it,” she’d said, combing her fingers into my dark brown wavy mess.

             
“Please don’t,” I begged. Her paying for the cut was already too generous.

             
She spoiled me rotten, and took me to some second hand shops for clothes. With the price on some of the items I wondered why on earth I’d grown up with barely anything in my closet. There was no excuse for my parents not to spend so little on me. How fucking petty of them.

             
“You see, Sara,” she started, going through the racks of the clothing store, “you find a second hand shop near the wealthy area. Rich people love to throw their clothes away, and you don’t want to miss out on that. Are you listening to everything I’m saying?”

             
She’d noticed I’d wandered off in thought. “Hmm?” I said, looking at her.

             
“Sara,” she sighed, “be appreciative of me. I have a lot of wisdom to share, but only if you’re listening. You’re like the daughter I never had.”
A daughter you’re trying to vicariously live through
, I thought with amusement.

             
“You need to impress the boys. After I’m done with you, I’m sure you’ll have your first date the same week you start.”

             
That didn’t give me pleasant feelings. I liked boys, don’t get me wrong, but I was just too timid around them. It was hard enough talking to girls my age; imagine my stumbling ass in front of a cute boy!

             
When I envisioned myself talking to a boy, I had all the wittiest lines picked out in my head. I imagined myself twirling my long hair with my impeccable make up on, wearing the best outfit I had, and flirting graciously without flaw to a smiling and enamoured muscular boy… And then I brought myself back to reality and remembered just how impossible that reality was. Imagination and reality were two entirely different dimensions. While I was a flawless rock-star babe in one, I was a complete shy scatterbrained mess in the other.

             
It also didn’t help I was in a phase that included men in leather jackets, buzzed haircuts and light beards! Or the fact that this phase had me intentionally walking past bikie owned shops in the hopes of finding that mystery swing man I’d met. Oh, how pathetic I was!

             
“You’re turning into such a pretty girl,” Lucinda said as she set my nails under the nail dryer. The heat soaked in pleasantly around the tips of my fingers.

             
I wasn’t the most confident or most beautiful girl around, but I looked at myself in the mirror enough to know I wasn’t ugly either. I liked what I saw. Ugly Sara was a shadow of what I’d become. I was no longer bones. I was healthy and athletic, of average height, with chestnut coloured eyes and very long eyelashes. My skin was a light tan, and my body was developing speedily at fourteen. My breasts had come in, and I immediately wished they’d stop growing, but Lucinda advised me that they would be my most useful body part.

             
“You’ll have boys eating from your hand if you strut that stuff.” She emphasized her own by jutting her chest out.

             
Ugh. I didn’t want to jut mine out at all. I promised her I would, but knew I most definitely would not. Lucinda’s advice was always a hit or miss.

             
“Make sure you stay away from them bikie kids, by the way,” she’d advised with the kind of seriousness that meant no funny business. “You don’t want to be involved with that kind of trash.”

             
That was a hit. Unless it was mystery man, the last thing I wanted was to be anywhere near anyone that associated with the Black-Backed Jackals. That MC was untouchable.

             
I’d been wracked with nerves on my first day, and although I had a few friends with me, they weren’t in any of my classes for the first semester. The first day was lonely and hard up until lunch time when Jaxon spotted me eating alone. If there was one thing about Jaxon I can say I loved the most, it was that he was caring and protective of me. He invited me to his table, introduced me to his friends, and was attentive to me. He wasn’t at all afraid of letting the world know that I was his best friend, and it made the experience a lot easier on me.

             
I knew many people, but only had a couple friends. Every year those friends would be replaced by others for many reasons: sometimes they weren’t in my class, other times they moved away, and sometimes we just meshed into different crowds. I maintained my personal distance to them, never letting them in, but allowing them to trust in me. I liked when they told me their problems or their stories, it kept the attention off of me.

             
And yes, there were boys. I had an awkward and shy boy ask me out on a date the first week I was there, like Lucinda had surmised. I agreed only because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Unfortunately, the date was even more awkward and unmemorable, and Garrett Abbott was crossed off my Potential Boyfriend list. I didn’t think that guy could grow a beard or had it in him to shave that lanky hair of his, which were deal breakers at the time.

             
My second boyfriend was Jordan. He was in Jaxon’s grade and good friends with him. Jaxon was very unimpressed by this and scowled at me for potentially making it awkward between him and his friend. “You know, he asked me if it was okay to ask you out! Why the hell would I have anything to do with it? Now if you guys go down the shitter, he’ll probably stop hanging out with me, Tiny.”
Tiny.
He’d been calling me that since I was twelve, when he’d doubled in size and I was physically tiny next to him.

             
Although I thought he was overreacting, I didn’t mean to intrude on his friendship, but I certainly didn’t think it was that big of a deal. In fact, Jordan and I were a solid couple for a year and a half. He was my first kiss, my first dance with a boy, and, well, my first ever boyfriend. He was cute, tall, and sometimes funny. Also sported short dark hair,
check
! He was good at sports and talking to him was easy. I was sad to see him go, but my interest in him died very shortly after he vacationed with his parents the entire summer. Being apart made me realize just how much I didn’t really miss him, and not missing him made me realize that the feelings I’d harboured for him were not very deep. It wasn’t love, and it wasn’t real either. It was just… two teenagers who liked each other.

             
Jaxon was very amused by my break up, and wasn’t afraid to show it. Actually, to put it more accurately, his reaction was overly joyous than what I would have expected from my supposed best friend. But even at the time, I suppressed the tiny suspicion of why that was.

             
I stepped back from boys after Jordan and focused on my school work. I also got a part time job as a convenience store cashier. I never let Lucinda know the store was owned by a Jackal, but it was the only place that took my resume and gave me the job. I never had any problems working there, and the Jackal owner was hardly ever around, so it worked out well. I was technically not associating with that gang. Just an employee.

Working and studying kept me occupied and dist
racted me from futile pastimes like partying and gossiping. I was only making minimum wage, and my hours were quite short, so I wasn’t pocketing a whole lot. Yet I felt good at every cent I earned knowing it was done the right way, unlike some people…

             
Jaxon, by some grand miracle, graduated from high school along with the others I’d been friends with. It was hard to adjust to not seeing him there – whenever he
had
been there, anyway. In my eleventh grade year of high school, I’d been bombarded day dot by girls. I didn’t try to fall under some pretence they wanted to actually get to know me; I was sure they could care less. No, now that Jaxon was not sticking out gloriously among the crowd of students in school, they wanted to know all about his whereabouts, and our friendship – very evident by our inseparability throughout the two years I’d been there – was the gateway for them.

             
I didn’t understand the attraction like them, but that was because I really knew Jaxon. I’d grown up thinking of him as my friend and even so far as to say he was like my family. I knew he was drop dead gorgeous, but our friendship was the forefront of my mind. I needed that kind of stability; he was my rock I could always count on.

             
But what the girls saw was superficial. On the outside, he had that bad boy image; you know, the mysterious, dangerous boy who doesn’t care about authority, doesn’t care about school and rules, and people… I wished I could understand that naivety, wished I could find my own bad boy to drool over, but having a father who bashed my mom and me around, didn’t have a job, and didn’t care about a damn thing either except for himself, had turned that notion of bad boy into a harsh reality.

             
There was nothing sexy about a real life bad boy, and that was the awful truth chicks didn’t want to accept. Girls enjoyed the two dimensional man, and Jaxon was
not
one of those.  But would he ever pretend to be for their amusement? He was capable of that. If he sat there in brooding silence for a long enough time, then sure, you could take him as someone who lacked depth or care. He was too much like me in a lot of ways, one way standing out more than others: he never let people in.