A Girl Like Lilac Read online

  I’d turned to Lilac, pushing up the heavy black frames of my glasses before I blinked and combed back my dark, floppy hair with my fingers.

  “Toby Hunter.”

  “Are you?” she whispered.

  “Am I what?”

  “A hunter?” Lilac’s eyes went wide, and her lips parted as she stared at me in wonder.

  I had to swallow again. She was wearing denim dungarees that day with a frilly, short-sleeved blouse underneath that was already covered in mud stains, and I had to wonder why her parents let her wear so much white when she obviously liked to roll around in blacks and browns.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever tried to be?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” She scowled.

  “What would I hunt?”

  “Magic.” Her eyes went impossibly wide, and all the lights in the little classroom made them sparkle like the illuminations my mum had once taken me to see at Christmas.

  “Lilac?” the teacher called from the front of the room.

  Lilac didn’t take her eyes off me as she answered, but her smile grew bigger and bigger, showing me her teeth and the blue lick of food colouring that had stained her tongue. “Yes, Miss?”

  “Face forward, please. And leave Toby alone.”

  “Yes, Miss,” she answered with mischief in her voice.

  My own smile grew to match hers, and I couldn’t take my eyes from the blue in her mouth. What could she have eaten so early in a morning that would leave that kind of mark? A lollipop? A fizzy drink? All the things my parents wouldn’t let me have unless it was my birthday, no doubt.

  “Everything okay, Toby?” the teacher asked, pulling my attention away from Lilac.

  The whole class turned on their bottoms to face me, and the heat of my embarrassment made my cheeks turn red.

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “Don’t let Lilac distract you. She’ll take you up in the clouds in no time.”

  “I won’t, Miss.”

  The teacher’s warm smile made me relax a little bit, but it was the way Lilac’s hand slid over mine on the carpet, without anyone knowing, that really made all my nerves disappear. With one squeeze of her fingers, it all began.

  From that moment on, I’d spent half of my life obsessing over the wonder that was Lilac Clarke. I did become a hunter that day, but it turned out that I found my prey straight away. Somehow, I knew that no matter where in the world I went after that, I’d never find anything as magical as her.

  At age eight she drew me out into her back garden, and we hid in her shed, making sure our parents couldn’t hear us or see us as we watched the sun go down in the autumn skies. I barely said a word, but that didn’t seem to bother Lilac one bit. She told me a hundred different stories about ghosts and pirates and princesses and brave knights who were secretly ninjas but had witches for parents. Her imagination was a universe of ideas and pictures I’d never before heard of. There were no rules in her world, only possibilities. The unimaginable was as real to her as the skin on my back was to me. She made my stomach twist up, my belly ache from laughing, and my smile show off more teeth than I knew I had.

  I treasured that one late afternoon with her for months afterwards.

  That was the thing, you see. We never spent a lot of time together. Just the odd day of perfection here and there, scattered among the years like leaves that had drifted off the trees, soared high in the skies, only to land in completely different fields, too far apart from each other but still beautiful—still where they were meant to be.

  That winter we had snowball fights on the driveway, our feet becoming soaked and our clothes dripping with water. We waited for it to turn to ice so we would freeze in time like statues, neither one of us wanting to grow any older or leave that fun day behind.

  The following summer she turned nine and invited me to her birthday party with my younger brothers, Charlie and Harry. Lilac’s Aunt Coral put a gigantic bouncy castle up in the back garden, and my mum and dad took quiche around, as well as some horrible, dry sausage rolls that no one had the guts to tell my mum were awful. I was grateful she made an effort, though, even if it was just for that one day.

  I got to spend time with Lilac in her world.

  None of her friends paid me any attention. They were swarming around Lilac, wishing they could be her, but a bit annoyed that she didn’t need their approval, too. I spent most of the time with my school friend, Christopher, both of us in sitting in the corner on the grass looking at bugs until Lilac came over and ran in circles around us, her pretty purple party dress flapping in the air and her long, strawberry-blonde hair bouncing everywhere before she landed on her knees in front of us with a thud, her legs immediately becoming covered in dirt and grass stains.

  “What you doing?” she asked, out of breath.

  “Chris is trying to decide what a wormbee would look like.” I nodded in his direction, hoping she would look at my ginger freckle-faced friend so I could stare at her flushed cheeks.

  “A wormbee?” she wheezed, keeping her eyes on me.

  “If a worm and a bee made babies... they’d be wormbees,” Chris told her.

  “I like that.” Her bright eyes grew wider. “You’re so clever, Toby.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was me who came up with it,” Chris grunted beside us.

  “But it was Toby who made me fall in love with the word wormbee. Must have been the way he said it.” She giggled before she jumped up and ran off to find her other friends. My eyes lingered, watching her run around without a care in the world, never afraid of getting dirty or making a fool of herself.

  “Do you love her?” Chris asked me quietly. I turned to look at him, and I pushed up the glasses on the bridge of my nose.

  “Shut up.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not even nine yet.”

  “How old do you have to be?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged.

  “Do you love her even though you’re only nearly nine?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Pft,” Chris scoffed, curling his lip and wrinkling his nose.

  “Do you?”

  “I am nine.”

  “What does love feel like anyway?”

  “I don’t know.” He rubbed his nose along his sleeve, and he looked down at the grass. “The same feelings you have for your mum and dad, I guess.”

  I glanced across the garden to see my mum bouncing my baby brother Harry on her hip, while my dad stared down at his feet, looking awkward. That was until Lilac’s Aunt Coral went over to him with a plate of sandwiches, and his smile grew ten-miles wide. Dad loved his food. I didn’t know where my two-year-old brother, Charlie was. But I knew that when I looked at my family, I did love them all… but they made me feel different to the way Lilac made me feel. She fascinated me. Them, I loved because I had to.

  “What if it’s more?” I asked Chris quietly.

  He leaned forward and began to pluck at some blades of grass, shrugging once more before he started to talk about the construction of a wormbee house and how we’d need to have a roof for the wormbees to escape out of in case they inherited wings through their bee gene.

  I switched off from him and spent the rest of the party memorising the glimpses I had of Lilac in that purple party dress that didn’t quite go with the colour of her hair.

  By the age of ten, we were in our final year of junior school, and something had changed in her. Her clothes began to get a little bit more coordinated, but the change wasn’t so drastic that anyone else would notice. Only a stalker boy like me.

  Maybe she hadn’t even realised she was changing herself.

  Her bright coloured socks were the first things to go. They were slowly phased out to be replaced by white, grey, or black socks. The shoes stayed the same, but the dresses soon began to be replaced by jeans, leggings or shorts. Whenever she wore tight tops, I
could see two little mounds growing beneath them that she would try to cover up by folding her arms or pressing her backpack close to them as she walked through the playground.

  When we moved on to high school, she played out less in her back garden. The times I got to see her carefree became few and far between, but whenever she stepped outside her door, pressed her bare feet into the cold grass, Lilac would look up at the sky, close her eyes and inhale a deep breath.

  Those mounds of hers had turned into small breasts by then. Lilac’s waist started to become more defined. Her hair a deeper red and much longer, and her shoulders broader. Her face and arms thinner.

  I always struggled to look away.

  A mutual friend had a twelfth birthday party at a bowling alley one year. The moment I saw Lilac bent over, tying her bowling shoelaces, my breath caught in my throat, and I came to a screeching halt, almost knocking Chris off his feet as he slammed into the back of me with a grunt.

  “Jeez, Tobe.”

  “Sorry,” I mouthed, my gaze locked on Lilac’s hair that had fallen forward, and the bare legs she had on display. She was in a dress again. A white dress with yellow daisies, just like her old one, only this time she had a pale blue cardigan hugging her shoulders. A thrill ran through me. I’d hoped she would go back to her old style. I’d missed it.

  When she looked up, her head turned in my direction as if she could feel my stare, and her eyes landed on mine. It took her three full seconds to smile, but when she did, a stirring came to life in the very pit of my stomach. Something I’d never felt before. Something that made my head spin and my feet feel unsteady.

  “Move,” Chris ordered with a shove at my back, and I did. I somehow made my way over to where she was, sitting down beside her as I pulled the zip of my hoodie right up under my chin before I brushed my hands across the thighs of my jeans.

  “Toby Hunter,” she sang, my name sounding like a nice name when she said it.

  “Hey.”

  “Long time no see, stranger.”

  “We live next door to each other, Lilac. We see each other all the time.”

  “Only in passing.”

  “How have you been?” I asked, ignoring the way I wanted to ask her how much more she wanted to see of me.

  “Good.” She nodded as her smile grew. Her eyes were searching every part of my face.

  “That’s… good.”

  “You’ve cut your hair.”

  I nodded, running a hand through my buzz cut sides before dragging it back over the longer lengths at the top. “Mum said I needed it.”

  “I like it. Makes you look… mature. And no glasses?” she asked me, pointing out the obvious that I wasn’t wearing them that day.

  “I don’t need them all the time.”

  “Then why do you always wear them?”

  I looked down at the floor and cleared my throat before I looked back up at her. “They give me something to hide behind.”

  My answer didn’t just surprise her. It surprised me, too. Her eyes widened in that way they used to do before she tilted her head to one side and searched for something I wasn’t sure she would find. “Why do you want to hide?”

  “I kind of prefer to see instead of being seen.”

  “A true hunter.” She smiled brightly. “You really do have beautiful blue eyes,” she said, as though she was satisfied with something.

  “Thanks.”

  Our brief conversation was over then as her friends came to surround her, pushing me farther and farther away with every second, forcing me to slide over the bench towards the boys. I spent all afternoon watching her trying to bowl. She was useless but carefree. One go, she would throw the ball straight down the drains, the next, she would knock down three pins and act like she’d scored a strike, throwing her arms in the air while everyone else looked on in confusion.

  I wanted to be just like her.

  I wanted to steal her optimism and push it into my veins.

  I wanted to look at the world through her eyes and see the magic that she once told me to go out and hunt down, but I knew in my heart that I could never do things or see things the same way as her. We were two different people with two different lives, occasionally drifting off course into each other’s paths until the world dragged us both back in line and made us smile at each other from afar.

  It wasn’t a bad thing.

  Just confusing.

  I missed her, even though I didn’t really know her.

  It was confusing for a boy of twelve. It didn’t get any better when I was thirteen, either.

  By fourteen, I was taking our little moments and storing them in a memory box in my mind. The more she grew, the more I grew. The more the distance grew, too. The more she changed, the more I did. Childhood doesn’t last forever. That’s what no one ever tells you. It’s only really there in those early years when you think you have a million days to figure out what you’re going to be and how you’re going to grow. You don’t expect to wake up one day and find hair growing in places it had never grown before. You don’t expect your voice to start breaking, turning you from a sweet-sounding seven-year-old into someone who isn’t quite a man, but no longer a boy, either. You don’t expect your responsibilities to grow. You don’t prepare yourself for the weight on your shoulders.

  Everything changes.

  Sometimes we see the differences. Sometimes we don’t.

  I’d never really noticed many things about myself… but her? I always noticed them on her.

  I should have known then, at fourteen, what Lilac meant to me. She was on a pedestal I could never reach. She was always far away, in the distance, with an admirer keeping his eyes on her without her knowing he was there to protect her. I was a hunter by name, sure. But for Lilac Clarke, without even realising it, I’d become a protector at heart.

  And we were fifteen before I had to test just how far I’d go to keep her and her innocence safe.

  TWO

  Lilac

  I’d never wanted to change.

  It was a strange feeling to look in the mirror and be uncertain of things you’d never had to be uncertain about before. I’d had a stable, sweet life. I had a wonderful family. Doubt and insecurities had never been an issue for me. Not until my body started turning me into something I wasn’t sure I wanted to be: a young woman.

  Now I spent most days before school checking to make sure my breasts weren’t peeping out of my vest top or that nobody could see my nipples through my bra. I missed the carefree days of not caring if a boy saw my underwear when I did a cartwheel. I missed the way the other girls used to look at me like a friend, rather than an unknown ally or enemy as some did now. That had nothing to do with who I was as a person. I knew that. Modern-day teenage girls were turning out to be vicious. It made me sad the way they all spoke about one another, smiling one minute and declaring eternal love, only to whisper in another person’s ear the moment the girl’s back was turned. I saw it every single day. Girls were tearing other girls down in order to build themselves up.

  It was hard to stay out of all that at fifteen without missing out on the fun at the same time.

  I kept my head down for the most part. It was rare that I’d get involved in someone else’s feud, but when I did, I saw the surprise on their faces when I asked them all to stop… just stop with the bitterness that made the world cold instead of warm.

  I loved my friends. I just didn’t always like the way they let their souls get dirty sometimes.

  Saturday night arrived, and we were all heading out to a party at a boy’s house for his sixteenth birthday. Joel Atkins was the oldest boy in our year, and the first one to celebrate that sweet, milestone age. Everyone was excited. We were becoming adults. We were leaving our youth behind. Things were going to get interesting from here on.

  Or so they all said.

  I liked my childhood. I loved the adventures. I already missed rolling around in the grass. I kept those thoughts to myself, though. I didn’t mind my pri
vate thoughts keeping me company. It was a me-on-me secret. Not everything has to be on show for the world to judge.

  Joel’s house party roared to life at around 8:00 p.m. that night. The music was so loud, I bet it could be heard from two streets away—something that was quite an issue for the sleepy old fishing town of Southwold, Suffolk, England. Lucky for Joel, his father was a high-ranking police officer who the people loved, so he’d no doubt be given special privileges the rest of us weren’t afforded. He lived close to the ocean. I only hoped the sea breeze would carry some of the noise away from the rest of the village. Not everyone should have to suffer that night.

  My skinny, light-blue jeans felt claustrophobic, but my floaty white cotton vest top allowed the September winds to creep up and caress my belly as I stood in the garden of Joel’s huge five-bedroom detached property and watched everyone partying like small adults. Underage drinking was a big thing. Not even Joel’s cop dad could stop it. He had no idea that the lemonade was spiked with vodka, or that there were kegs of beer hidden in the bushes at the far end of their sprawling lawn. Joel knew what his father would be looking for and what he could get away with. I had to give him points for bravery. If my father were a policeman, I’d have been sipping hot chocolate with a bunch of girls in a tent in the back garden as we studied the stars.

  Cheryl came to a standstill beside me, her hand pushing away the wispy bits of my hair that were floating across my face before she unleashed her bright green eyes on me. She was the closest thing I had to a best friend. Her short, black, pixie-style haircut wouldn’t look right on anyone else, nor would the grunge rock T-shirts and the heavy denim jacket she had on that was roughly four sizes too big, but Cheryl pulled the look off. She was made to be a misfit. It was what I loved most about her.

  “Someone’s looking very bohemian tonight,” she said with a sly smile, her eyes falling to my feet where she paused to study the battered white pumps I was wearing. “Damn, we need to get you some new footwear.”