Winter's Shadow (10 page)

‘No, I’m not. It’s a foolproof way for you to go on a date with him without having to ask him on a date.’

Despite Jasmine’s cool explanation, this plan did not sit well with Winter. In fact, it made her feel a little sick. ‘Jas, I don’t even like the Urban Ninjas! Plus I can’t afford the tickets.’ She pushed them back across to Jasmine, who promptly returned them to her.

‘I
can
. It’s a gift.’

Flustered, Winter shook her head. ‘I can’t!’

Jasmine threw her hands up in exasperation. ‘Win —’

‘Look, what do you want me to say? I appreciate the thought, but . . .’ Winter knew Jasmine’s heart was in the right place, but there was no way she was going to ride out to the Velasco place and ask Blake to the concert.

Jasmine abruptly pushed her lunch aside and stood up.

Winter frowned at her. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Inspiring you.’ Jasmine looked beyond Winter’s shoulder and adopted a determined expression. Winter followed her eyeline and saw Sam sitting by himself eating a hamburger.

As Winter watched in astonishment, Jasmine crossed the cafeteria to him. He didn’t seem too bothered that his lunch was being interrupted. After a minute or two of conversation, Jasmine waved goodbye to Sam and marched back to Winter. With a satisfied expression, she sat down and picked up her fork.

‘Done.’

Winter gawped at her friend. ‘What’s done?’

‘You and Blake are doubledating with Sam and me at the concert Thursday night.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘But Jas —’

‘No buts. This is happening. If you don’t go through with this, you’ll not only be letting me down but Sam as well.’

‘Jas!’

‘End of conversation. You’re gonna have a life whether you want one or not!’

Jasmine started eating her lunch again, smiling smugly between mouthfuls. Winter pushed her lunch tray to the side. She’d lost her appetite.

For the rest of the day the concert tickets remained crammed beneath Blake’s jacket at the bottom of Winter’s bag. Out of sight but definitely not out of mind. By the time the final bell rang, she still hadn’t come to a decision about what she was going to do with them. Usually it was easy for her to reject Jasmine’s attempts to set her up, but this time her pushy friend’s plan had stuck with her. Romantically speaking, being shy hadn’t got Winter very far. This was her last year of high school and the sad fact was most of the boys in her class probably didn’t know her name. At best they saw her as Jasmine’s shadow; at worst they didn’t see her at all. What did she have to lose if she asked Blake to the concert? Only her pride, but if there was a chance Blake would say yes, wouldn’t it be worth risking a little humiliation?
Brooding on this question, Winter made her way to the school parking lot.

Jessie gave no sign of yesterday’s mechanical hiccup, and soon Winter was weaving her way towards Maple Boulevard and Fletch’s Photographics.

Humming along the leafy streets, Winter’s confusion and stress began to ebb. She stopped worrying about the tickets and whether or not she had the guts to ask Blake out. She even allowed herself a small spark of hope that her camera might be salvageable. Riding Jessie was good like that – whenever Winter was on the scooter her outlook brightened. Something about the wind in her hair, the sense of speed and motion, just made her feel happier.

Her mother had never wanted Winter to get Jessie. Working as a nurse at the hospital near the highway, she spent most of her time tending to patients injured in vehicle accidents. She called motorcyclists – and by extension scooterists – ‘temporary people’. Despite her mother’s concerns, it had been love at first sight when Winter saw the dirty cream scooter in a used car yard. She didn’t care that it was rusty and had the horsepower of a ride-on lawnmower – buying Jessie had just felt right. Even after she’d taken a course at traffic school in defensive driving her mother still hadn’t been happy about the purchase but Winter had never once regretted it. She’d had no cause to as she’d never come remotely close to getting into an accident.

As Winter turned into Maple Boulevard, she checked her side mirror as she always did, then glanced over her
shoulder just to make sure the way was clear. There was no car coming up immediately beside her; further back, though, Winter saw something that made her pause. A white pick-up truck was coming up through the middling traffic. Blake’s truck. She was sure of it.

She returned her attention to the road, and it was just as well she did, because at that moment a black shape streaked in front of her. Winter reacted instinctively to avoid it, swerving across the lane into the path of oncoming traffic. She had only a second to register that the black shape was a charcoal Labrador puppy before something else demanded her attention. A red station wagon was careening towards her.

At the last instant, the middle-aged woman behind the wheel wrenched the station wagon to the right, dodging Winter and running one wheel up onto the footpath in the process. The car came so close to grazing the scooter that Winter was able to note in frightening detail the yellow mustard stain on the driver’s blouse, along with the half-eaten sandwich lying on the passenger seat.

Winter straightened back onto the correct side of the road, heart hammering in her chest. She pulled over and switched off the scooter, giving her nerves a chance to settle. It was the first near-accident she’d had in the entire time she’d been riding Jessie. The fact that this was also the second time she’d nearly died in as many days was not lost on her. It occurred to Winter, somewhat ominously, that her bad luck in Pilgrim’s Lament seemed to have followed her. As her heartbeat began to
slow, she noticed something strange in her side mirror. Three dark figures were standing on the road behind her. She whipped around, but all she saw was the dog’s owner rushing to retrieve the wayward pet. There was no sign of the three figures and when she checked her mirror again, there was no evidence of them in the reflection. It had to be just her mind, buzzing with adrenaline, playing tricks on her.

There was no sign of Blake’s truck, either. If it even had been Blake. There was every chance it was someone else’s rusty old pick-up truck. Surely after seeing Winter nearly crash, Blake would have stopped to see if she was all right. Steering back onto the road, she drove very slowly and carefully the rest of the way to the shopping strip, much to the annoyance of the cars behind her.

By the time Winter pulled into the parking lot in front of Fletch’s Photographics her nerves had steadied somewhat, but she was still feeling shaky. She quickly glanced at her reflection in the adjacent shop’s front window, to make sure she didn’t look too frazzled before entering. As she approached the service counter at the back of the store, Mitch, the store manager, frowned at her dishevelled appearance.

‘You okay, Winter?’

During the past two years, as she’d become a regular customer, she and Mitch had struck up something that if not a friendship, then was a warmer-than-usual retailer–customer relationship. Warm enough to call each other by their first name. He was about ten years older, and a
reminder of the sort of career and life she might enjoy if she didn’t graduate and get out of town. A life that consisted of working in retail, getting drunk down at the surf club on Friday nights and getting married and having kids before she hit her mid-twenties because there wasn’t much else to do.

Winter forced a smile. ‘I’m fine, Mitch. How’s my baby?’

The way he sighed suggested her baby was not in very good shape at all. Mitch bent down and rummaged beneath the counter. He was balding at the back of his head, pink scalp showing through his blond mullet cut. When he straightened back up again, something about his demeanour made Winter think of a doctor about to deliver bad news to a patient.

‘I tried my best, but the body was completely destroyed and the lens, well . . .’ He brought up what was left of her Nikon, and placed it in front of her. ‘See for yourself. What did you do? Drive a car over it?’

Close, Mitch – I dropped a church on it, actually
. Winter turned the camera over in her hands, flashing upon the moment her father had given it to her. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon. She’d just returned from the lighthouse on Whistler’s Peak where she’d taken some pictures using the camera function on her phone. While she was uploading them to her computer, her dad had poked his nose over her shoulder and exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm, ‘Wow! Those look pretty good, kiddo!’ Winter had shrugged modestly but was secretly
thrilled by the praise. He’d never really taken much of an interest in anything she’d done before. After reviewing all the pictures, he’d told her, ‘I’ve got something in the attic that might interest you.’

This mysterious object turned out to be the Nikon, purchased for a photography elective he’d enrolled in during his college years. Apparently her dad had no problem with the technical aspect of taking pictures, just lacked the creative flair necessary to take great ones. Ever the perfectionist, he’d dropped out of the course earlier rather than waste his time on a skill he’d never master and the camera had sat neglected, gathering dust ever since.

Winter was fascinated by the archaic piece of technology – the only cameras she’d ever used were digital – and was eager to start using it straight away. Her father was more than happy to impart his technical knowledge on the subjects of exposure, focal length, and so on but unfortunately they didn’t have any film. This precipitated the first of many father–daughter outings to Fletch’s.

She vividly remembered meeting Mitch that first day – his blond mullet and matching moustache, the white T-shirt he was wearing which said ‘Honk if you think I’m sexy’. She especially remembered the comical expression of incredulity when they asked if he stocked any 35 mm film.

‘Been a while since anybody wanted some of that,’ he’d confessed, making her even more excited about getting her hands on some film – she felt like a bootlegger dealing in illegal contraband.

After searching in the back of the store for a few minutes, Mitch managed to scrounge up a few rolls (‘Right behind some dinosaur bones,’ he’d joked) and promised to order more. He then proceeded to spend a generous amount of time walking them through the various lens kits that were available to a budding amateur – so generous, in fact, that Winter’s dad had kidded that he was more interested in
her
than selling anything to them. This grossed Winter out, because Mitch had to have been at least twenty-five, which to her fifteen-year-old eyes was
way
old.

They’d spent the next few weekends on the internet going through photography articles and running film tests together in a makeshift darkroom her dad erected in the laundry (much to her mother’s irritation). It wasn’t easy to obtain the necessary developer and fixer fluids, so he’d instead mixed up the solutions himself, using materials from the pharmacy.

Those busy Saturday afternoons had been some of the best times Winter could remember having. Now, holding the Nikon in her hands, she felt a deep sadness that was less to do with the shattered camera than what its destruction symbolised.

‘I could always send it back to the manufacturer – maybe they could do something?’ Mitch offered tentatively, reacting to Winter’s crestfallen expression.

She dropped the camera back onto the counter. ‘Thanks anyway, Mitch, but it’d just be a waste of time. It’s past saving.’

Mitch’s face brightened. ‘Hey, I nearly forgot.’ He bent down again to rummage underneath the counter, this time coming up with a packet of photographs. He handed them to her proudly. ‘The camera might be a goner, but I was able to salvage the film and develop the pictures. You got some nice shots here, Winter.’

Winter felt a glimmer of relief – at least there was a silver lining to this dark, dark cloud. She opened the packet and started rifling through the photographs and was delighted to discover Mitch was right. She
had
taken some nice shots of Pilgrim’s Lament.
Nice
was actually a bit of an understatement; her shots were interesting, well composed, and – dare she think it – artistic. It seemed the Nikon hadn’t died in vain.