This War Paint

Jane


It was my conscience, that was what I was telling myself. My conscience had led me to the upstairs boys’ bathroom. The one avoided like the plague by male teachers and students and creatures alike. It was my conscience’s fault that I stood in there with so many clothes on just moving my little finger would cause me to break out into a sweat, and it was to blame for the stupid look on my face when I saw Fraser darkening the doorway. My best caught-in-the act wide eyes and don’t-tell-anyone-please ajar mouth.

And then I had tried to make up for it with a false rush of confidence I had conjured up from the pits of my personality. God, he probably thought I was crazy. The way I had pretended to be so suave had me blushing as we worked side-by-side in silence, my cheeks cherry blotches of a thousand different reds as I caught sight of myself in the mirror I had just wiped down. I could see Fraser too, sleeves rolled up to reveal those tattoos, standing in one of the open stalls just staring down into a toilet.

“It’s not going to clean itself Fraser,” I forced out, feeling I owed something to the silence.

Fraser twisted himself around to watch me as our eyes met in the one clear mirror amid a collection of misty blurs. He was smiling with one corner of his mouth – I could tell even if it was the side he was hiding – because his charcoal eyes were grinning. I shook my head at him and reached for the next mirror, wanting to relocate the thoughts suddenly scattered all over the dirty bathroom.

“Why don’t you call me Butch like everyone else?” he asked softly once he’d shut the stall door, finally getting to work at the mess of a cubicle.

I paused once again mid clean, one hand still hovering at the top of the mirror while my breath misted up the glass. My blue eyes were looking at the haze of myself and asking the same question – why he’d never been that persona everybody else had bought into so many years ago. Why I hadn’t fallen into the rest of the crowd and believed as thoroughly as them that Butch was this big bad buy. That those masked men in our old cartoons, the ones who always dressed in black and tried to ruin the day, were embodied in this one teenage delinquent.

“Because I never believed what they said about you.”

“Not a bit of it? Not even those who talked about me smoking joints in my free time?”

He was joking but he wasn’t laughing, he was as serious as he had been with his first question. Something told me my answers were important. If not to him than to me, my answers were suddenly of vital importance to me. Because I could be asking him the same things – why he didn’t treat me with some great reverence like those around him did? Why he’d asked me if I was okay that day I had been crying outside of the councillor’s office? Why I was so special?

“I don’t believe rumours; I believe what I see, so I know you smoke joints in your free time. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve had sex with an underage girl or stabbed some drug dealer because he didn’t give you what you wanted, though. It doesn’t mean you’re this great villain who’ll break my heart and steal my virginity and run off into the sunset with my life savings. Butch would do that, sure, but you’re not Butch,” I said evenly before pulling myself back to life, wiping the rest of the mirror over and avoiding my own eagle eyed stare.

“Who am I then, if I’m not him?” He asked quietly, his voice barely carrying over the closed stall door.

I ignored him because I couldn’t answer that for him, that was a question only he could answer. I could, however, pose a question of my very own.

“Just why did you punch David at lunchtime? I mean I know he’s a huge asshole and everything but there must have been a catalyst today or something?”

There was a pause in which only my furious scrubbing could be heard, making me once again aware of the filth I was currently leaning into. I had swaddled up in clothes purely for this, grabbing all of my winter jackets from my locker and piling them on. Thinking about it now, all they did was weigh me down and cause me to feel over a hundred degrees, but for some reason they made me feel safe. Safer from the grime and dirt, safer from the burning eyes of boys like David who might not stop their bodies from taking over.

“I don’t want to creep you out but... well I guess I was looking over at you and saw the look you shot him. Like you were scared and he was the thing you were so afraid of, and I remembered that stupid announcement he made last week and how you’d been upset about it. It just overwhelmed me, my feet started over to him before I could listen to the rational side of my brain. God, he has been asking for it for years and today he just went too far. No way is he allowed to scare you like that.”

I smiled and had to bite my lip before a grin burst forth. I could hear in his voice how worked up he was getting, the adventure his brain was taking as he went over the events of earlier, how if David was anywhere close right now he would have met a similar fate. And it was me Fraser was getting so passionate about, not any of the other pretty girls around school or the hipster ones with black tattoos up their arms and piercings in their lips. It was me who he had punched a guy to protect.

“I totally see why people get into fights now,” I chuckled.

“Hm?” I could almost feel his deep voice vibrating through me. I shivered, wanted to open the stall just to see his young face so misplaced on an adult’s body. That was Fraser – an innocent thrown into a world of demons and hatred.

“Slapping David in the face was probably the best feeling in the world.”

He laughed and I marvelled at how happy it sounded. I had a feeling Fraser didn’t have a lot to laugh about most of the time.

“That was pretty bad ass,” he joked as it was his turn to make me laugh.

“It was,” I marvelled “I’ve never thought of myself as that in my life.”

“That’s because you’re a princess, princess.”

“I’m a con artist really,” I sighed, stepping away from the now clean set of mirrors and finding my reflection suddenly impossible to escape from.

“We’re all con artists Jane. You think everyone doesn’t play up to their image? Or play their image down? Nobody’s real in the town.”

“You’re real,” I said into a suddenly bottomless silence, watching as the stall door open and Fraser appeared once again in the oblong reflection.

“We have a habit of letting our conversations get a bit too deep, don’t we Jane?” he had that half smile on once again.

“I blame it on the shallow chatter I have with everyone else every day.”

We were smiling at each other like idiots, still as statues, before I realised what was happening. What I was feeling and what his look so clearly told me. I couldn’t do this; we couldn’t do this, not now and certainly not ever. This was Fraser, a boy, the one thing I had never dissolved into like every girl counterpart I knew. I was waiting on college or possibly I was just waiting for high school to end so I could be a permanent carer for my Mom while Dad could go back to work. No matter what, I was waiting for something and it was a lot bigger than whatever I was grinning like a fool at.

So I withdrew neatly.

I cocked my head at the next cubicle he had to do, telling him with my eyes instead of my words that we had work to be getting on with. I had come here because of my conscience and at some point that had crossed over into something a lot further away from my brain. I just wanted to make it up to this boy who had fought someone for me; I didn’t want to end up feeling anything sticky and confusing. It was dirty enough in here as it was.

“We should push on, if you want you can leave for work and come back to sign out about seven?”

It made sense – that way the task would be done, Fraser would owe the school less hours and everybody would be none the wiser. I was just being a Good Samaritan, I didn’t want anything in return. In fact, this was me repaying him, getting even after I was in his debt. Nobody had stood up for me as brashly as he had today, and no matter how much I wanted it to just be some kind of business deal I couldn’t stop my eyes from watching Fraser, cautious for his answer. I didn’t want him to leave. Not yet. I was enjoying this with him, even if it wasn’t the most romantic of settings.

“If you think I’m going to leave you here to clean up this nasty bathroom alone then you have another thing coming,” he cocked his head to a side and smirked at me.

No, I guess I never had thought that he would actually leave. If I knew anything about Fraser it was that he was a perfect gentleman, maybe not to everyone, but certainly to me.

Then there was the unspoken, unasked question between us. The elephant in the room. Why was I staying? What was I doing here? There was no plausible reason for me wanting to stay in this bathroom with him and clean, heck it was just plain insanity. And the only reason my feet hadn’t fled the place as soon as they got within one hundred metres of the hell hole was because of him. Because I owed him and I didn’t want to leave him at all.

Oh God, I was losing my mind.

Quickly, I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting to shut him out for a second or two. He was overwhelming me. The sight of him, how his eyes were set so levelly on me, leaving no room for questions or answers, was too much. I shouldn’t be there at all, I should be at home looking after Mom and doing my homework. Instead I was still at school with a boy who’d received ten hours detention for giving some guy a black eye. Giving the boy who had almost raped me a black eye.

“Are you alright?” came his smooth voice, cutting straight through whatever bubble I had wrapped myself up in.

“Yeah,” I snapped quickly back. I opened my eyes and took him in, just a few inches from me, the breath in my lungs getting stuck somewhere between my throat and my mouth. “I don’t want you to lose your job though.”

“I won’t,” he shrugged “my boss won’t fire me. I’m the only one who’ll do a good job and who’ll allow him to pay me peanuts for it.”

I grimaced because it was just like this town to take advantage of him. His employer probably knew that his chances of getting a job elsewhere were slim to none, after all who wanted to employ someone like Butch to work for them?

“Are you sure? Because I’m happy to stay here if you want to go?”

He smirked again, causing my heart to do something funny it had never done before. “You’re happy to stay here in this grubby boys’ toilet?”

“It’s fine.”

His smirk dropped away and from this close proximity I could see the change in his eyes. The way there was gold mixed in his dark eyes too, swirling around like some cauldron on Halloween.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t let me just walk all over you.”

I blinked at him, not understanding.

“I’m trying to be nice,” I said slowly.

“There’s a fine line between being nice and naive.”

I was beginning to get offended, here I was offering to stay in this place for him and he just called me naive. I wasn’t naive. I knew how the world worked; I just chose to rise above the bitching and manipulation. I chose to float along on my own web of lies as if I was any better than anybody else.

Fraser must have seen this because he raised both of his hands as if in a surrender. I would never attack him, I didn’t know how.

“I don’t mean any harm by it Jane; I just want you to... to protect yourself more. There are people out there who would take advantage of your kindness and I don’t...” he dropped his voice to nothing more than a whisper “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

There was something so vulnerable about him then, something I couldn’t understand but had me reaching out for him like a little child anyway. Nobody had wanted to protect me for a long time. My father had been too busy with my mother, my mother had been too busy with losing her memories, and David had been too busy being the person I should be protected from.

“You’re sweet,” I smiled softly “but I can look after myself just fine.”

I took his hand gently, his rough fingers feeling foreign as I brushed my fingertips over them. Without meeting his burning gaze, I brought the hand up between us and traced the lightning bolt around his wrist. It looped around like a bracelet, holding up the words ‘Baby Brianna’.

Instantly, I dropped him, feeling that very lightning bolt go piercing through my chest. Of course, I wasn’t the only girl Fraser wanted to protect. Of course, there was someone else who meant more to him. Who was I to him anyway? Just some silly girl who let the world tread all over her.

Fraser just laughed as if this, my pathetic reaction, was funny to him.

“I should go if you’re staying,” I murmured, bursting into flames as my neck and cheeks burned red. I didn’t want him to see what he could do to me, what only he had ever been able to do to me. No boy made me like this – into some bumbling jealous fool. I hated it. I needed to distance myself and gather together my facade all over again.

“Wait, Jane,” he caught my wrist gently with the hand I had only moments ago examined. Something about him was so fascinating to me, most likely the way his entire life was drawn on him, like a million different pictures all printed for forever onto his skin. “You want to know about this tattoo?”

I did but my pride couldn’t take hearing his answer.

“I really need to lea-.”

“-Baby Brianna is the name I gave my car when I got her. Don’t ask why because there’s really no story behind it, Max named her really but he was joking when he said it. He didn’t think I’d actually name her that, let alone get it tattooed around my wrist.”

I stopped before I just had to laugh at myself. I was ridiculous.

“Just how many tattoos do you have?”

“Fifty three,” he answered, smiling fondly.

“And they all mean something?”

“Every one.”

“Well...” I wanted to ask him, I wanted him to tell me about them, like a long story book opening up, spilling all of his secrets. But not here. Not now. Not in this boys’ toilet.

“We should try to get this place finished, huh?”

“Right,” I grinned shyly, breaking the intense eye contact to turn to the sinks.

In the mirrors I stole one last glance at Fraser as he turned with his back to me, the art running up both of his arms calling out to me, as enticing as a siren. I hadn’t realised up until that point how gorgeous Fraser was, and how the dirty things girls said about him made me unreasonably desire him more. Suddenly, I found the prospect of spending the next hour in the same room as him daunting for entirely new reasons.