Why Won't You Fall Into My Arms?

Chapter Four

I had known Jack for years and years, since we were small children. Long before we had a broad enough vocabulary to hurl proper insults at each other or even understand the ones we would later throw.

We weren’t childhood sweethearts but just friends who shared two childhood necessities: toys and advice. When his hair used to grow in pointy tufts and my clothes consisted of hideous dresses, we were virtually inseparable. I wasn’t afraid to get into mud fights or go exploring around the woods or play pranks on the other boys who teased me for being so tall and different. Jack never used to tease me about those things; in fact he had never touched on them. 

There isn’t a time in my life I can remember not being abnormal from everyone else. All the other girls stood at average height, flipping average hair and smiling average smiles. I was tall, the tallest, peaking 6, 0 ft when everyone else seemed to stay 5, 5. My hair was a pale orange flicked with gold, blonde to some and strawberry blonde to others. When I was young it hardly mattered but as soon as age crept up on me it seemed so vital.

I distinctly remember a day just after my 10th birthday when the boy I’d thought I was in love with hurled mud at me. We were now too old to play with the stuff; we girls stared at it with narrowed eyes of disgust while boys eyed it in a jealous kind of pleasure, as if they knew it would only end in their reprimand but desired it even still. If you threw mud at 10 then there was no promise of a fight but instead the contempt with which you held that person at.

I came back into the classroom, crying weak tears with dirty brown overalls and sticky mud stuck in my mass of hair. 

“Freak.”

The word wouldn’t leave me alone for the rest of the pitiful day after it had left his lips. In fact, it still rang in my ears sometimes when I passed muttering girls or laughing boys, insecurity isn’t as easily rubbed away even if the mud was.

Jack Adams had patted me as I had cried and made no sign of disgust when the mud transferred onto his hand. He waited with me as my grandfather came to pick me up and didn’t fully let me go until I was safely in my car.

The next day the boy who I now hated had apologised profusely to me, a nasty black bruise already forming along the rim of his eye. Jack stood watching the scene with his arms crossed and shot the boy a nasty look when he hesitated on his lengthy apology.

It was a naïve kind of friendship, one easily forgotten, but I had depended on him once to heal the bullets which had sometimes pierced my body armour. To help the bruises that didn’t always fade.

It’s almost impossible to be nostalgic and look back on my childhood without wanting to laugh. Jack had been such a goofy kid who couldn’t have cared less about girls unless they wore ponytails that could be tugged out teasingly. I was the only girl permitted to touch him and I only did that when punching him for being an idiot. He’d never managed to shake off that particular trait.

But he’d also been a reserved boy. I’d never entered his house until now, only seen his parents from a distance and known he was shy about family. Something had happened at some point, something must have done. I didn’t speak about my family because my parents had died when I was young - my story was straightforward, my secret understandable. I couldn’t imagine for a second what Jack’s could be.