Sweater Paws

chapter one

It was Christmas eve and I felt lost. The kind of lost that a teenage girl feels after her boyfriend of 18 months breaks up with her with kind of lost. The kind of lost in the middle of a shopping centre on Christmas Eve, not knowing anyone kind of lost. The kind of lot that makes a wave of anxiety come over you as you try to search above the heads of people you do not know to find an exit, but to no avail. Yeah, that kind of lost. I wanted to call Chase, my boyfriend, well ex boyfriend now. He was always the person I would call in this kind of situation and he would come to my rescue like a knight in shining armour, I guess he got tired of saving me after a while. And that is why I am here. Alone. On Christmas eve. Searching for the perfect gift for my brother.

Jason was in a band you see, and a fairly successful one at that. They often toured for months at a time with only a few phone calls home. Over the past two years, the more he tours the more I feel like I don't know him anymore. Do you know how embarrassing it is when one of his fans asks you his favourite colour or his favourite band, or his favourite anything really and you have to tell them that you don't know, that you wish you could help but as it turns out you don't know your own brother as much as his fans do. And that is why his gift needs to be perfect.

I searched through shirts, pants, shoes, hair products (I guess if you're expected to look good all the time you get obsessed with this kind of stuff), but I couldn't find anything that was right, and this needed to be perfect. I wouldn't, I couldn't let his fans one-up me this time, I just couldn't. I know they loved him but they didn't even know him, not like me. They didn't know about the time we were playing hide and seek and he hit his head on a tree branch and had to get stitches, he still has the scar. Or they didn't know the time when we tried to reenact 'The Lion King' but he dropped me and got grounded for a month even though I told mum I was fine. And they especially didn't know about the time I was sick on my fifth birthday so he dressed up as a fairy princess just to make me feel better and he stole me some lollies from mums secret stash because he said that lollies were the best medicine and could fix anything. He told me the same thing when I broke my arm on a camping trip when I was eight. Or maybe they do know about those moments. I doubt it, but some of those fans are pretty fanatical so i wouldn't put it past them. But never the less, I have to get Jason the perfect gift, I don't want to lose him to the fans, I can't.