But the big question was…why? Why would she do this for me when she barely knows me? I wasn’t used to people helping me, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Normally, I would assume that whoever had helped me had done it with ulterior motives, but I doubted that was the case with Emma. There was nothing I could give her that she didn’t already have. I was stumped, but I was determined to figure out why she had helped me.
I had to be at work soon, but I would corner her tomorrow before school and ask her why she’d helped me. I stood back up and grabbed a notebook from my bag. After scribbling a quick note on a piece of paper, I ripped it out and walked to Emma’s car. I stuck it under the windshield wiper and returned to my car, satisfied that she would know she had been busted. I pulled away from the school and floored it to make it to work on time.
I sighed as I stared out the window at the ocean beside me as I drove. It had been too long since I’d been out there on a board. Next to tattooing, surfing was my life. There was nothing like being out there—just you against the ocean. I had crashed and burned a lot when I first decided to try it, but now, I conquered it most of the time. I made a mental note to get Andy after school tomorrow and go surfing since I wasn’t scheduled at the shop.
I pulled into the shop’s parking lot and shut off my car. I’d been wound tight all day, but at the familiar sight of the shop, I felt myself relax. This was where I belonged. This was home. I’d made no attempts to fit in at Hamrick High, and I didn’t plan to. I had nothing in common with those people, and I was okay with that. I didn’t need a bunch of stuck-up snobs to tell me how I wasn’t good enough to be at their school.
The bell above the door dinged as I opened it and slipped inside. As soon as I was walked in, I could hear The Amity Affliction’s “Open Letter” playing. They were one of my favorite bands, and I instantly perked up.
Rick was sitting behind the counter with a pencil in his hand. He glanced up at the sound of the bell. “Afternoon, Jesse.”
“Rick.” I nodded as I walked past him to go into the room we used as our employee room.
It was small to begin with, but with the table, two chairs, and lockers that Rick had shoved in, there was barely enough room to walk around. I threw my bag in the locker that I used, and then I slipped off my school shirt to change into one of the shirts with Rick’s Tattoo written across the front of it.
I walked back into the shop and stepped behind the counter with Rick to see what he was working on. As usual, his artistic ability blew my mind. The piece he was messing around with now was so real that it practically jumped off the page. It was of a young girl, no older than ten, sitting on a beautiful white horse.
“That’s amazing,” I said as I watched his hand move across the paper, shading around her face.
“Thanks. It’s going to be a back piece. My client’s daughter was big into horse riding competitions, and she was killed while performing. Something spooked the horse, it threw her, and she was trampled while her mother watched,” Rick said as he stared down at his work.
“Shit,” I said. I couldn’t even imagine watching that happen to someone I loved, especially a kid.
“I know. I wasn’t sure I could even do it when she asked me to, but I knew I had to. This piece is too important to pass up,” Rick said.
“Yeah, I can see why you were conflicted,” I said.
This tattoo was a perfect example of why I wanted to go into this business. People looked down on those who were inked, but the truth of it was that for most people, their tattoos represented something major in their lives—a birth, a death, a marriage, or anything that was important to them. Their tattoos were a way of remembering, of dealing with the shit-ass hand they had been dealt in life. They shouldn’t be looked down on. They should be praised for having the balls to put their lives on their skin for the world to see.
Getting tattooed was bliss masked by pain. Sure, it hurt to have a needle go deep into your skin and leave a mark, but the feeling was also about the pleasure and euphoria of it as well. At least, it had been that way for me. The pleasure of feeling the needle go deep into my skin was like nothing I’d ever felt before.
I pulled myself from my thoughts as I looked up at Rick. “What do you want me to do today, boss?”
“We’re kind of slow, so just clean up a bit, and then you can watch the front when my six o’clock appointment comes in.”
“Sounds good to me. I have some homework in my bag. Is it okay to work on it while I watch the front?” I asked.
He smacked me across the back of my head. “You know better than to ask me that. You can always work on your school shit here.”