Chapter Three A Little Fire

After Juliet called the Safewalk office, she stood in the foyer and waited for her escort. She wasn’t surprised when Seth showed up, but she was surprised by the girl he had with him. Why couldn’t he have come on his own? she wondered angrily.

“Hi. Are you Juliet?” Seth asked in deep, mellow tones, and then he gave her a heart-stopping smile. He almost had a dimple in his left cheek.

She managed to smile back, nod, and collect her backpack from off the floor.

The girl who was with him looked bored. She wore a Safewalk hoodie and she buried her hands in her pockets. Juliet despised the moments she had to spend evaluating Seth’s partner because those were precious seconds that should have been spent adoring him, but she suspected that the girl might be a form of competition since she and Seth obviously knew each other. The girl had dark eyes and the most attractive splatter of freckles across her nose, but she did not smile or speak. Juliet rejected the idea that hoodie-girl had a significant relationship with Seth and turned her attention completely toward him.

“I’m Seth,” he said, “and this is Nixie. Where are we taking you?”

“Lister,” Juliet answered cheerfully.

“Wonderful,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made it sound like it was exceptionally wonderful. It was quite a walk from the science buildings to Lister Hall. Was he really excited to be taking her all that way? It seemed too good to be true.

As they started walking, the wind picked up. Seth and Juliet walked side-by-side on the pavement while Nixie fell slightly behind them. It was getting cold and Juliet’s breath froze in the air.

She shivered and said out loud, “Wow, it’s cold. I wish I brought my gloves.”

“Seth,” Nixie called from behind. “Since it’s so cold, why don’t you link arms with Juliet? Maybe you could even hold her hand in your pocket as we walk. It’s a really long way to the dorms.”

Juliet felt distinctly uncomfortable since Nixie was clearly making fun of her, but all the same, she couldn’t resist seeing how Seth reacted.

His head was turned and he looked back at Nixie like he thought her suggestion was amusing rather than alarming.

“Let’s hurry,” he said, quickening his pace.

Juliet skipped a little to catch up with Seth, but when she turned around, she saw that Nixie had slowed her step in response to Seth’s request. Soon they were out of earshot, but Seth slowed down to give Nixie a chance to catch up.

“We don’t always get along, Nixie and I, but it’s Safewalk rules that all teams have to be made up of guy/girl partnerships. It’s because girls like you are afraid to walk with two guys. If a guy and a girl go with them then everyone’s supposed to be more comfortable.”

“What about the guys you walk? Are they more comfortable?”

“Ah, they don’t call. Actually, most of the time when I’ve escorted guys, it’s because they need help carrying their library books... either that or they got hammered at the Powerplant,” he laughed as he mentioned one of the campus bars.

“Are you serious?”

“Always,” he said, giving her another flirtatious smile.

Nixie caught up and passed them. “Come on,” she snorted. “I want to get back to the office and get a cocoa. Let’s move.”

Seth smiled and obeyed.

That was the end of Seth’s dialogue and in truth Juliet was glad. She found his presence slightly overpowering and in the back of her mind, there was a little voice that warned her that if she chatted him up too much he would ask about the rolled-up paper she carried just to make conversation. Her fear of being discovered as a pathetic groupie was enough to keep her tongue-tied. She would try to talk to him again without the poster.

They dropped her off in the lobby of the dorms and headed out again with little more than a wave. It looked like Seth would have taken her all the way to her room, but Nixie’s phone was buzzing which meant they had another job.

Juliet forced herself to turn around and walk with confidence up the stairs. She wanted to look a little cool, so she didn’t watch him leave.

Once she was back in her room, she was too wound up to sleep. Instead, she took off her winter gear and pinned up her poster. She decided the only safe place was on one of the sliding doors on her closet. That way, she could at least hide it if someone she didn’t want to see it happened to be in her room. That was wishful thinking. Seth probably had a girlfriend. Actually, he probably had a collection of girlfriends. She didn’t have a chance with him. He definitely wouldn’t be visiting her dorm room, so there was nothing to worry about.

After that, she put on her pajamas and got into bed, but she had no intention of sleeping, so she hooked up her laptop. Once she had it open, she went directly to her blog and wrote all about her first night with the Occult’s Addict. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to talk about calling Safewalk to have her vampire walk her home. In the end, she wrote it out but refrained from posting it on the internet.

She checked her email, wrote a few of her friends back home, and then surfed the web.

It was a while before she made her way to ReadyEyes808’s blog, but when she finally did, she discovered she was very interested in what he had to say. The title was ‘Step into the Confessional.’

He started out, “Forgive me for I have sinned. I’m always sinning, but tonight I found myself standing at the threshold of temptation. A few posts ago, I mentioned that I saw a goddess. Tonight, I met her. You should have seen her eyes. Before tonight’s fateful meeting, I thought she radiated goodness, but now that I’ve seen her more closely, I see that I was mistaken. It was innocence. Once I carefully examined her, it was clear she doesn’t have a boyfriend. She has never had a boyfriend. Like a child, she has never been consumed by the flavors of desire, jealousy, or fear; never felt hate, isolation, or obsession. She has never once left herself out to spoil.

“For someone like me, the stainless virgin is far more devastating than if she had been good—like my first impression.

“If she had been good, I would have been able to play my true role. I wouldn’t have had to hide any of myself from her. Women who are truly good are havens for men like me. When I throw myself on the mercy of a good woman it is a precious experience, because a woman like that knows exactly how to comfort me. I’ll spend an entire night from midnight to six telling a good woman what I am and she patiently listens and offers comfort at all the correct moments. It would be a perfect situation, except a woman like that always wants to reform me. An innocent girl somehow isn’t tipped off that there’s something unfathomably wrong just by looking at me. The innocence inspires me to hide what I really am. Why? Because she’s not the mind reader a good woman is. I can get away with anything.

“I throw lies into conversation seamlessly and act like everything is fine. I’m normal. She accepts me because she doesn’t know she should be afraid. She doesn’t have the experience to be warned by the smaller signals. It would be heaven to meet a woman who desires me for who I really am, and for me to have the confidence to be exactly that. To move like I naturally do speak the way I do, look the way I do. That’s all a dream to me because everything I do is a lie. I have to hide my eyes which reveal my unnaturalness. Unless I make a conscious effort to the contrary, my eyes look tragic—hopeless. Why? Because I am completely without hope. But tonight, around this innocent girl, my charade was worse than even I am liable to be. Even my best friend noticed and commented that I was acting like I was on the prowl.

“And why shouldn’t I be on the prowl? I’m young. I would like a girlfriend. I’m alone and it makes me restless.

“Because it is impossible for love to exist for me. Love is lifeless. Only heartbreak and ruin could follow my relationship with that girl if it should grow. In my mind, I can see what she would turn into if we got together. I’m not a fortune teller, but I can see it as easily as if the future has already become the past.

“She’s sitting in my armchair at six o’clock in the morning. She hasn’t slept all night because I wouldn’t let her and she’s smoking a cigarette. There are purple lines under her eyes. I can feel her exhaustion, but I don’t feel sorry for her, because she didn’t escape when she had the chance. Her wrist looks pathetically slender as she moves her hand to and from her mouth. She’s lost twenty or thirty pounds since I first saw her. The scent of apple blossoms is gone and what was once pure has turned a hideous gray. If she hadn’t gotten involved with me, who knows what bright future she would have, but once she falls under my shadow, she’s a little more than a corpse.

“Since that’s my guess for our future, I won’t pursue her, no matter how much I’m drawn to her. She’s like a beautiful blank piece of paper I have no business writing on. I have nothing to offer. Not friendship or love or devotion...

“There’s no love in this world and practically no life... not for me. This place becomes more and more of a wasteland in my eyes each day. And the worst part is there is no end. I can’t let up. I deserve it. And there is no way she deserves to be stripped of everything about her that was gentle and decent.

“I’ll never meet that girl again.”

As Juliet read his post, her heart was filled with such a deep sorrow she almost cried. She couldn’t believe anyone felt that desperate, that anyone despaired that much. She uploaded her comment as soon as possible. She had to be gentle and encouraging. She couldn’t allow anyone to feel that depressed. It was against her very nature.

“Dear ReadyEyes808,” she wrote, and as she typed she tried to envision a human being at the end of that name, even though it was an alias.

“I wish desperately that I was there beside you tonight. I wish that I could soothe you and comfort you. The voice you use in your writing makes me feel desolate. I wish I could shelter you from your self-loathing and show you a brighter way. I don’t know you very well, but I have felt your friendship across the circuits and wires of the internet. I only know you as the one who comes to comment on my blog. You have visited more consistently than any of my old friends from high school. And even though it probably hasn’t meant much to you, it has been one of the high points of my day. I wouldn’t even mind meeting you in real life. I’m sure we would make excellent friends. Goodnight, my sweet. Don’t forget, there are always people who care what happens to you.”

She signed her alias and wished that there was more that she could do.

***

Juliet woke up the next morning with her laptop stuck between her bed and the wall. She had barely managed to close it before she drifted off to sleep. She must have kicked it off the bed during the night. Now, she was pulling it out and apologizing to it like it was a person.

“I’m sorry, Lappy,” she mumbled. “I’ll always set you on the floor nicely before I zonk out from now on. I promise.”

Then she turned to see Seth’s glorious face and the three perfect bite marks down the side of his neck. “Good morning to you, too, Seth. Thanks for watching over me last night. Today has to be good because you were the last person I saw last night and the first thing I saw when I woke up,” she said with a playful shrug of her shoulders.

After that, Juliet went down to the cafeteria and had a bowl of Frosted Flakes in a cup. She didn’t even realize that she was alone until she happened to see Elise having breakfast with some people at a different table. She didn’t even have the sense to feel awkward when Elise’s eyes met hers. Instead, she merely gulped down the rest of her breakfast and went back to her room.

It was Saturday, so she had a few errands to run. They weren’t much, but she needed to get a load of laundry done in the laundromat, and then she needed to visit a supermarket. Her dorm room was pathetically empty of all snacks. Then she had a paper to write. Her day was so booked she didn’t even think her life as devoid of friends as she hauled a bag of dirty clothes to the elevator.

“Besides,” she reassured herself. “I am part of the Occult’s Addict and the rest... doesn’t really matter.” She had great plans to call for another Safewalk after the meeting next Friday. The thought of that was enough to carry her through her day.

Juliet read one of her textbooks while her laundry flopped around in the machines. She had been lucky to get a machine and happy that she only had one load to do.

Needless to say, it was a while before she checked her email. She scrolled through the university notices until she found one message marked differently. It was from ReadyEyes808.

“01Pearl_Moon,” it started out. “I suppose the number one at the beginning of your name must mean that you are the only pearl moon. Sorry, I’m cheesy early in the morning, but your comment on my blog really meant something to me. You sound like one of those ‘good girls’ I talked about in my entry. I know it’s probably way out there, but you said you wouldn’t mind meeting me. I know meeting people online is scary, but I’ll tell you what. If you’re ever at the University of Alberta, please let me know and I’ll tell you how to find me. I wouldn’t mind meeting you either.”

Then he signed it, “ReadyEyes808.”

“Whoa!” Juliet gasped.