falling

~chapter 1~

The first time she saw John B, she was 10 years old. She couldn't take her eyes off him. He was tall for his age, and far more muscular than the boys at her school. Probably from working more than any of those boys would in their lives.

He spat at her feet.

"That is some patriarchal bullshit!" Kiara yelled. "Spitting at a girl's feet for no reason. What are we in the 1950s?"

"I know right." Truth be told, Sarah had no idea what  'patriarchal bullshit' meant. She had learned a series of things from Kiara. For starters, she shared her with the Pogues, which happened to include said spitter, so Sarah learned a collection of swear words used only on the Cut. But, Kiara also belonged to Figure 8, and she was incredibly intelligent. If she said a long word like 'patriarchal bullshit,' Sarah figured she was right and that she should learn it.

"I'm gonna slap that boy across the head and take away his surfboard." Kiara grumbled from next to her. "John B will never spit at anyone's feet again."

"Thanks, Kie."

The next day a droopy adolescent John B came knocking on her door.

"I'm sorry about spitting yesterday," he started. Sarah stood at her doorway, amused by Kiara's power over  these boys. "I was having a bad day and I don't know why I did that. Patriarchal bullshit I guess." Sarah cracked a smile at that. She'd done her research after Kiara left.

"Yeah it was." His brown eyes waited for her to continue. "Well I'll see you around," she began to close the door.

"Wait!"

"Yes?"

"Am I forgiven?" His hair fell above his eyes.

"I'll think about it," she said as she closed the door on his awaiting face. She'd learn to make boys wait from Kiara. Now that she thought about it, what didn't she learn from Kiara?

x

For an unknown reason, John B made it his life's mission to have Sarah forgive him. She didn't mind. He followed her around after school, picked the weeds in her yard, taught her how to surf, took her to eat, and showed her music. Somewhere along the way, they had spent so much time together, that the line between enemies and friends became heavily blurred. To the point where boys at her school thought she was dating a Pogue. Which she was not. She thought about it. But she was not.

x

When she was 12, her mother died suddenly, leaving her and Rafe to fall into a spiral of confusion and loss. She'd thought that she would want to be alone because Rafe had closed his bedroom door in her face when she came crying in the middle of the night. Her father hadn't left his room, leaving their nanny to give them food since he decided to be absent. And when her entire family had betrayed her, left her to suffer alone and wallow in the sadness of her missing mother, John B was there. He was below her window at the crack of dawn, he was knocking at her door in the morning to eat, and he was in her room before she fell asleep, to hold her and tell her it would be okay.

"I miss her so much." Her face was drowned in her pillow, voice muffled by the cotton and her tears. But John B was there in an instant, ran over to her bed from where he had been standing at her doorway, and lifted her up into a sitting position, her head rested into his shoulder.

"I know," he had spoke only gently in the time that Sarah was grieving, not wanting to disrupt the vulnerable atmosphere. "I know."

His tiny child-like arms had wrapped themselves around her. For Sarah, who had not been comforted like this by anyone, not her own father or her brother, it felt like the largest form of protection. Like someone had wrapped a huge blanket around her that blocked out the rest of the world. Her sobs became louder into his shoulder.