The Flames of Love
Caitlan Hobbins (University of New England)
It had been years since I’d seen The Curly-Haired Boy. We’d both gotten older: I had smile lines and the errant grey hair; he’d lost some of his youthful muscle and instead gained a mouthful of silver fillings I could see when he offered a polite smile. But those eyes had stayed the same deep blue they had been on that last day. And I couldn’t lie to myself and say I wasn’t slightly entranced by them, even now. How had so many other things changed, but his eyes were still the same? There was still a part of me, it seemed, a small, quiet part, that could remember what I had felt for The Curly-Haired Boy. And the secret we held between us had wrapped up that childish, fluttering love inside of it. He had never spoken about it, not in years, and I only mentioned it to people who were completely unconnected to us both. It had become an anecdote, a hapless, comedic one at that, and not the life-altering incident I once feared it would become.
It was the end of my six-year, one-sided love affair. The so-called culmination of pining, longing, light stalking, and years of consecutive disappointments. This entanglement between myself and the middling heighted, somewhat athletic, Curly-Haired Boy had been brewing in between the crusts of my body, like a volcano in the folds of the earth. Despite seeming dormant on the outside, I knew that, within, I would broil at the thought of being in the same room as him, let alone stand in his orbit. I had seen his face endlessly in my dreams and rehearsed so many conversations that it was difficult to pick my favourite. None of these had ever converted into anything tangible, but I was content to leave things be—nothing ventured, nothing gained, but nothing lost either. It seemed set to remain that way, even as I entered my final year of high school.
So, like all miracles, this one began with a prayer. A silent one, uttered by a girl who was about as visible to the male species as their reflection was to a bat.
We sat in a grade-wide circle, each person touching knees with the next. With an elbow here, and a lunge there, I had managed to sit directly across from The Curly-Haired Boy. Through the 47 pairs of knees that lay between us, I could feel a buzzing in my legs. Two by two, we students were made to silently stand, take one of the markers from the table and sketch our names, along with a short prayer. It was the last in a series of torturous exercises designed to bring us closer to God, which for some reason involved a lot of sharing our feelings and feel-good documentaries. There was a conga line at some point, but this had been frowned upon. How were we meant to know that the disciples didn’t choose to travel that way?
I watched the monotonous, rhythmic movement of my peers: stand up, walk to the sacred white tablecloth, scrawl something meaningless then return to the cocoon of your similarly aloof peers. It was easier to pretend it meant nothing; you could happily stand in a line at the back as the more religious kids openly impressed. Still, there was something inherently farcical about writing on a tablecloth as an almost-adult, even more so when it is done in the name of some deity. All those warnings in junior years not to doodle what you liked on whatever surface you liked seemed foolish now. Perhaps it was an enaction of Moses, carving the commandments, or taking a page from whoever wrote the Bible, but with something teenagers could realistically handle. No matter how addled by hormones they were, they could all still spell their names, right?
The gulf of space in the prayer circle was sliced by a table, with two candles and a crisp white tablecloth atop it. A woman, Mrs Lynn dressed in the vestal garments of all educators coerced into spending more time with their charges than they had ever bargained for, swished forth to protect two tall candles from the sticky breeze. I wish I could say I was mesmerised by how the flames ate at the wick, scattering black dust onto the clean white fabric, but I was doing what I had always done. How could I help it? It was criminal how the lines of The Curly-Haired Boy’s face were almost lyrical, like a poem of the face, and far too much for a boy of only 17. Blissfully occupied, I awaited my turn to add “John 14:9” to my signature as children were whittled down, tattooing the tablecloth with some other banal quotation. As the invisible force calling each student rise ticked around, a realisation dawned:
If I timed this correctly, I would be able to stand at the altar in the same moment as The Curly-Haired Boy. I could stand across from him and everyone would be watching.
Counting on the fingers buried in my lap, I watched as the imaginary queue shortened in front of him. His side of the circle was moving faster than mine. To my despair, I had sat with the girls who were certain that this quote would be photographed to accompany their deeply inspirational TED Talk in the near future. Sweat formed on my brow, as my heel tapped rapidly against the dirt, shuffling my chair forward until a rut had formed in the dirt. When I bounced from that point on, the chair leaned haphazardly backward each time. It was a wonder that a plastic chair could put up with so much violence.
But, as it turns out, the chair was not capable of withstanding my nervous exertions, and a loud snap broke the religious bubble that had been forced upon us. With all the tension of an overstretched rubber band, each teacher looked to the other, feigning moving forward to help me. None were brave enough to cross the gulf, however, and I wound up kicking the shards of plastic which had jumped ship swiftly behind me. They skittered toward the brush, a suitable home for a lizard, but I did not notice as my world began to blur. I turned back to the makeshift altar. The other half of the circle had moved through 4 more people during my sideshow. My stomach was tied in knots.
I had to walk up when he did. This would be everything, the final bittersweet goodbye, or even the beginning of something new. What if he looked into my eyes and realised he had loved me all along? What if I caught him writing a secret confession in his message? What if he leaned over and wrote his name close to mine?
The heat of the day was building to a fever pitch which seemed to be centred entirely in my gut. Something was coming to a boil, and it was more than just the water in Ms. Hunt’s “army-grade”, metal drink bottle. Without waiting a moment longer for movement beside me, I leapt to my feet. There was an appreciative murmur from Mrs Lynn, a proud smile painted with a flourish across her face. Finally, so many years of opening our ears to the call of Jesus and one student had heard it. Only this time it was something that rhymed with “holy” that was calling my name.
Striding forward with my chest out, chin high, and a self-satisfied smirk on my face, all the swagger of a girl who might be proposed to on the spot, I approached the altar. Just as planned, The Curly-Haired Boy met me there, the table now pressed up between our two bodies. All at once, it was both too large and too small; a vicious cage holding me back and an oasis in this burning world. My heart had miraculously travelled from my chest into my throat, and the world seemed to turn on its every beat. My fingers flexed, reaching for the sharpie and curled around it one by one. I had to stop my hand from shaking. At the same time, The Curly-Haired Boy took his sharpie, removing the cap in his mouth, and began to write.
What should I write? I prayed: if I could only summon all of my wit and force it into these scant movements of the pen, then perhaps my unrequited love did not have to be over! Searching for inspiration, my eyes roamed over the tablecloth; would a Bible quote suffice? New or Old Testament? Which was the gospel that makes no sense? Would people think I was a stoner if I quoted that one? Which one was just the “facts”? Or would that make me come off as some sort of Bible fanatic? The quotes about love were too broad; which are the ones they use at weddings?
In the past, I had fancied myself a decent writer, but I was even better at stealing. I could reel off quotes from movie and books interchangeably with my own words like lies and a politician. But now, with pen in hand, I was no better than the early man, a shaking hand hovering over a blank canvas with no concept of how to form any recognisable letters. What I wrote here could reflect on me for years, far beyond whatever time I had left standing across from The Curly-Haired Boy. After this, I could be more than the girl who had been rejected by the same guy for six years. Think, think, think!
“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”- Mark, 11:24-25.
There! I had done it! Leaning down to examine my work, I let a wide smile bloom on my face, full of teeth and crinkled eyes. I looked up to where The Curly-Haired Boy had finished his message. The sharpie cap fell from his mouth and a breath caught in my throat. Had he read what I wrote? Was he blown away by it? Was this truly the beginning of the greatest romance of our time? I was so caught up in his eyes that a vague noise almost escaped my notice.
Hiss. Hiss. Something brushed my hand, as light as an eyelash, but I paid it no mind. The Curly-Haired Boy was looking at me! His eyes, deep and blue like the sky, were locked on mine. They grew wide, probably so I could admire them more, and for a moment they flitted down to my hand. Was it like in the movies? Had he reached over to move my hand and felt the same spark that I had? Demurely, I moved my hand toward his, eager to return his gesture when I saw something in the corner of my eye. My hand brushed it. It was stringy, and the strands separated underneath my fingers.
Hair. A burnt lock of human hair. It lay in a pathetic clump next to my perfectly constructed message, and The Curly-Haired Boy was staring at it, then back at me, then the hair again, in a repeating loop. In my rush to get to the altar, as proud and puffed up as I was, I hadn’t noticed how close the candle had been burning. My hair, which was loosed for maximum waifish effect, had fallen elegantly over my shoulder and directly into the flame. Now, where a perfectly curled, Romantic bang had hung loose, there was a jagged, injured tuft of hair. The other side was untouched, swinging loosely from the sudden movement of my arm as I scrawled the message. Great, it wasn’t enough that my hair had been so callously ripped from my head, but now it was uneven too.
Had anyone else heard that? Had anyone seen me be so horrendously assaulted by the forces of nature?
As if it weren’t already fast enough, my heart pounded rapidly in my chest. I needed to do something about the hair. Maybe, if I moved quickly enough, I could convince even myself that the whole thing had been a brief mass delusion. Picking it up felt too obvious, leaving it behind and blaming someone else was somewhat viable, except that The Curly-Haired Boy had seen it. It would probably kill me that the first and only time we had spoken would be for him to tell everyone I was clumsy enough to burn my hair off on a pascal candle. Mrs Lynn looked over innocently tilting her head, but in my mind, she might have been Satan himself. With a wicked kindness in her eyes, she moved to inspect the commotion, and instinct forged by years of dealing with nervy, scatter-brained students like me.
Think. Think. Think. I put the cap back on the Sharpie and placed it back on the table. Just as Mrs Lynn approached, I tossed the hair from the tablecloth with a flick of my wrist. It flew toward her, falling onto the ground and was promptly crushed beneath her feet. Only I could hear the crunch of ash as she walked over. On the white tablecloth, there was a trail of black dust, the same dust which was now spreading to each of my fingers. It was disgustingly close to my beautiful message, enough to make me seem guilty by association. I tried to rub it out with the heel of my hand, but that only succeeded in making it larger. In my panic, I looked up again; The Curly-Haired Boy was still staring at me, his mouth pressed closed. I didn’t know whether to smile or cry or try some horrific combination of the two. He kept watching me with that same horrified look. My face morphed into some sort of expression, one of flexing muscles, bared teeth and squinting eyes. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to make the same face ever again.
And then he walked away. Without a word, a sound, or even a look over his shoulder, The Curly-Haired Boy had turned and taken a seat with his friends. Conspiratorially, they whispered in his ear, but he did not capitulate. Sitting with his hands in his lap, The Curly-Haired Boy kept his eyes on the ground, and his mouth stitched shut.
And for the next ten years, we kept the secret between the two of us. It was our own, private connection. It had bonded us all this time; the memories welled up inside me, enough to make me chuckle under my breath. Perhaps this was the start of the greatest love story of our time.
I approached the buffet table of our old school hall, butting up against it the way I once had at the prayer table. It was not as humid now, but an electricity still lingered in the air. The Curly-Haired Boy reached over to retrieve something, revealing the beginnings of a beer belly and his keys on a metal ring, attached to a denim belt loop. We couldn’t all keep up with the rapidly changing times, I had thought, but it still hurt a little to see a dream die. His curls, which had once dominated my thoughts, so much that I practiced flexing my fingers through them on a throw rug, were pulled back. Some of them had fallen out, others were mangled in a hairstyle which I could tell was meant to be trendy, but really only aged him another five years.
Now on the same side, The Curly-Haired Boy was inches away from my shoulder.
‘Hi’, I cooed, ‘How’s it going?’. My voice was meek, barely rising above the unremarkable club music. In the dark, I could only see The Curly-Haired Boy’s eyes as the slowly came to settle on me. He studied my face for some time, a cup of cheap, warm beer in his hand, before he smiled and turned to me fully. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, another man crashed into his side. Clearly drunk, he stumbled from foot to foot, roaring in a hiccupping voice,
‘Hey! Aren’t you that girl who burnt her hair off?’
I am a second year Masters student at the University of New England, majoring in Writing, and a high school teacher in my spare time. Flames of Love is my first ever short story submission and was inspired by the works of Kristen Roupenian and David Sedaris. Unfortunately (for me), Flames of Love is based on a true story, but I only had to cover up my new uneven haircut for a couple of weeks thankfully. I always tie my hair up around my candles and my crushes now, just to be safe!
