Perfect Timing | ongoing

jasper scott

  JASPER SCOTT IS the quintessence of first love.

   This is something that Charlotte Everhart thinks, even after nearly two decades of knowing him. The first time she laid eyes on him, he was standing over her after she had fallen off her bike, hand extended out to her like a knight in shining armor.

    Streaks of his copper-red hair glistened in the golden glow of the setting sun, and as he pulled her up, she caught sight of his toothless grin.

   "Hey, are you okay?"

   Charlotte nods quietly, feeling heat rising up her cheeks.

   "I'm Jasper Scott. I just moved here. What's your name?"

   "Charlotte Everhart," she says shyly. She had never been friends with a boy before, much less talked to one.

   "Nice meeting you Charlotte."

   She doesn't speak; all she could think was that Jasper, deep dimples adorning his smile, was the cutest boy she'd ever seen. His chocolate brown eyes reminded her of the Hershey's syrup her grandmother would pour into her milk — warm and sweet, melting into her heart as he gazed at her curiously.

   Jasper points to her hair, "I like your hair. You look like Goldilocks. You know, from Goldilocks and the Three Bears."

    Charlotte smiles softly at the comment, it was the first time someone had pointed that out to her.

    "Thanks. I like your hair too. You look like Archie, from the Archie comics," she says, nodding towards his hair.

    Jasper beams at the remark, patting his hair self-consciously — and Charlotte notices his cheeks turning rosy pink.

    For a moment, they just stood there, an awkward yet comfortable silence hanging between them, the gentle breeze stirring the leaves nearby.
Charlotte's knees stung from the fall, but she barely noticed now.

    His eyes dart downwards for a moment, and that's when he notices the scrape on her knee.

    "Hey, your knee's bleeding !"

    Charlotte glances at her knees, and true enough, there, on her right knee, was a deep red gash, blood trickling down her leg. As if snapping out from her daze, she started feeling a prickling sensation spread through the affected area. It burned.

    She waves a hand to dismiss it, not wanting to look uncool in front of him. "That's okay, I've fallen off my bike a lot of times. I'll be okay."

    Jasper doesn't listen to her and tells her to wait there, running inside his house and coming out two minutes later with a first aid box in his hand. He guides her to sit on the step outside her home, and without hesitation, takes out a disinfecting wet wipe and a plaster.

    "This might hurt a little, okay?" he tells her, slowly pulling her knee closer to him.

    He wipes the blood that has trickled down her leg at first, then gently presses on the gash itself. Charlotte flinches when he does this, the stinging sensation from earlier intensifying, and Jasper looks at her sheepishly.

    "Sorry," he whispers.

    His hand remains there for about a minute, steady, confident, like he had done this countless times. After the bleeding had stopped, he takes out a cotton bud and a small bottle of antibiotic, swiping some of the solution onto Charlotte's kneecap with the cotton bud carefully before putting a plaster over the injury.

    "There, now you're all better," he says, chest puffed a little, looking proud of himself.

    Charlotte looked down at his work, impressed. "Woah. How did you learn how to do all that?"

    "My dad taught me. He's an army doctor. I kept falling off my skateboard so many times that he said I should learn how to do this myself in case nobody's around to help," Jasper explains, zipping the first aid kit up before looking at her.

    "Good thing your dad taught you. Thanks for helping me," Charlotte grins, watching as he crumples the piece of protective film from the plaster he had used. He returns her grin with one of his own.

    "Oh right! I forgot something. Wait here."

     Jasper stands up once more, running back into his house and coming back out five minutes later.

    This time, there was a plate of chocolate chip cookies in his hand, and a bottle of apple juice in his other. He extends the plate of cookies to Charlotte, sitting down beside her and passing her the bottled drink.

    "Here, you should eat something. Eating always make me feel better after I fall."

    "Cookies!" Charlotte exclaims, taking a cookie from him.

    They sit side-by-side on the curb, shoulders slightly touching as they both take a bite. It's chewy and sweet, the chocolate chips melting in her mouth.

    "This is sho good," Charlotte says, mouth full with cookies.

    Jasper smirks at her, a mischievous look in his eyes, "I stole some of these from my mom's cookie jar.

    Charlotte's eyes widen, "Really? What if your mom finds out?"

He shrugs, "That's okay, I'll just tell her a squirrel came in and ate it."

She giggles at this, "Imagine a squirrel climbing over the cookie jar and opening it."

"It'd be a really strong squirrel, with muscles like this!" Jasper starts flexing his arms and makes a funny face as he pretends to open an imaginary cookie jar, and that's enough for Charlotte to burst into laughter.

He smiles at her, evidently pleased with her reaction; a boyish, lopsided grin that makes Charlotte's stomach flip.

She didn't know it then, but this moment, this golden afternoon when Jasper had come to her rescue, would be etched in her memory forever.

    The thing about first love is that it often creeps up on you slowly, and quietly, catching you off guard that you don't even realize it until you're in deep. For Charlotte, it happened when she was seven years old. Jasper had breezed into her life unexpectedly one day — kind, charming, handsome.

And he stayed for a long time, sealing his name into her heart.

Throughout the years, Jasper pieced her heart together over and over again, through every breakup and heartache, family disputes, and the weight of unspoken fears.

    Charlotte imagines that if her heart were a piece of glass and her life depended on it, Jasper was the one person she would willingly give it to.
He mended every crack seamlessly every time, an anchor of comfort she could lean on no matter what happened in life.

But the boy who patched her up that day would be the very same one to shatter the piece of glass nineteen years later — and this time Charlotte was going to have to pick the pieces up herself.