Daffodils and Skull Skateboards (**One-Shot** - Comp Entry)

Daffodils and Skull Skateboards

Dedicated to ProjectiGotCancer and BadassReads!

I glanced up quickly from reading the book I was holding as someone shouted from down the street.

I'd come into town to go the library, resulting in the heavy backpack of books I was now carrying, and I hadn't even been aware of the Cancer Council Daffodil Day. It had been a surprise, then, to see the main street lined with vibrant stalls selling butter-golden daffodils, gleaming pins, and buckets of containers of sunscreen.

Brochures had been thrown over the ground, along with piles of yellow flowers. Banners, hung from awnings and streetlamps, swayed in the breeze coming off the nearby harbour. Car horns had become a constant background noise as cars struggled to drive through the masses of people that kept crossing the cobbled road, irritating yells out of the pedestrians who thought they had right of way.

I hefted the book in my arms, at the same time shrugging to keep my bag strap settled on my shoulder. I shoved my glasses further up my nose as they started to slip, as they usually did when I bent my head. I still needed to get the screws in the hinges tightened.

I looked around where I was standing, carefully tilting my head so that my glasses stayed in the right position. I was leaning against a stretch of graffiti-spattered wall, which I'd managed to claim, near the bus stop, which seemed to be the only place in the street that wasn't dressed up in yellow decorations.

I felt very out of place, I think, at the stop, amongst three businessmen in crisp suits, a young couple glued to each other, and a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt who had dreadlocks and a beard that went to his waist.

Another yell echoed down the street, and I turned my head to track the noise to a man trying to cross the street by squeezing through a gap between a car and a bus. A bus. Happily, I snapped my book shut and took the two minutes that it took for the bus to stop near me to wrestle my book into my bag with the others.

The bus huffed, letting out a wisp of steam, and then the doors slid open. I waited patiently as five people got out and went past me, too busy with their own things to notice anyone else.

I was just about to get on the bus, thinking that everyone had come off, when a girl stepped out. I went rigid, astonished, as she stepped off the bus with cat-like superiority.

Her hair was out, coloured a dark blonde, and was slipping in waves past her shoulders in the un-brushed, striking way that some girls could manage. Black eyes, steely and almost frightening, narrowed beneath long eyelashes.

One arm was bent up, wrist flicked back to balance the axle of a black skateboard, adorned with a staring skull, on her curled fingers. Her hands were cased in thin leather MMA gloves.

She slunk past the people gathered at the stop, her Doc Martens clicking on the sidewalk. She was short and lean, though she was at least sixteen. She didn't acknowledge anyone, just looked ahead with no needless sense of purpose, untouchable in her carelessness. One of her lips was the slightest bit uplifted, showing a flash of teeth and radiating something similar to disgust at everything and everyone around her.

Tattoos spiralled down her bare arms, bared by her dark grey singlet, carving images of skulls and ravens and dark purple flowers. Her tight black leggings went to just below her knees, her pale skin, showing beneath the hems and through the frays, in stark contrast to her dark clothes. Skateboard gear hardened her elbows and knees.

For just a moment as I stared after her, I wondered what it would be like to look and feel that confident. That indifferent. That unfathomable.

The boy who had been standing wrapped around his girlfriend stared after the girl, mouth open, just as amazed as I was. His girlfriend saw, hit him hard across the chest, and started squawking at him angrily, startling me.

My head whipped to them, and then back to the girl. I noticed, almost enviously, that the back of her singlet was printed with a tiger head roaring. The cloth hugged her small frame, which wasn't particularly womanly, though her waist was slim. And yet she was still the most badass person I'd ever seen.

"Hey, Love?"

"What?" I turned around. The man with the Hawaiian shirt looked at me with a puzzled expression from where he was waiting just inside the bus doors. Behind him, the bus driver was blinking at me with a similarly confused look.

"You getting on?" the man in the Hawaiian shirt asked. I glanced around, realising with surprise that everyone who had been standing at the stop had boarded the bus.

"Yeah. Yes. Sorry." I shifted my shoulders back, standing a little straighter. I hopped onto the bus, thanked the man and the bus driver for waiting, and then slumped into a seat, throwing my bag down beside me.

I was pushed back into my seat as the bus jolted forwards. I leaned towards the window, watching as the street blurred past: rotting buildings, curling graffiti, dark side-alleys, golden banners, laughing people, daffodils, flashes of bright yellow. And then the image of the girl whipped past, and I was pressing myself to the window to look back at her.

The girl was frowning as she dropped her skull skateboard to the ground and readied her foot on it as she swung her bag onto her shoulders. A breath of wind seemed to sweep through the street again, sending the banners swaying again and lifting the girl's hair from her shoulders. I blinked as I saw the only bright colour on her, a bright yellow pin, livening the grey of her singlet.

And then the bus went past her, and she was gone, and I slowly twisted in my seat to face the front of the bus once again.