Up and down.
Over and over again.
“Why do you rub your hands?” she asks.
I don’t answer her. I rub harder.
Ellie picks up my notebook.
“Give that back!” I tell her. She ignores me.
“Did you draw these?” she asks, pointing to the picture of the Parthenon I had done a few minutes ago.
I stop rubbing my hands and take my notebook back. I don’t touch her.
I want to touch her.
I couldn’t.
“Yes,” I said, closing it.
“They’re really good,” she said. Her mouth stretching and doing something strange. It looks like a smile but not the one she usually wears. Not the one I see when I was yelling.
“What’s wrong with your face?” I ask her.
Ellie’s mouth stops stretching.
“You are such an asshole,” she said.
The teacher comes around then and Ellie asks to be move to another group.
I’ll give her a picture another day.
-Ellie-
Living in a small town really sucked sometimes. Well, most of the time, but some days were worse than others.
Particularly when you were trying to avoid someone.
Flynn was everywhere and nowhere.
I’d see him in places I hadn’t expected him to be but he’d never show himself when I was actually looking.
I could admit I was becoming slightly obsessed with knowing where he was and what he was doing.
I couldn’t sort out in my fucked up head why I was so fixated on him. My emotions were a jumbled mess. I resented Flynn Hendrick reappearing in the small, dreary world I inhabited as though he had a right to be there.
But his appearance did one thing. It snapped me out of my self-pitying funk.
So I returned to my English class. Professor Smith seemed surprised when I returned for the Thursday morning class but he didn’t bring up my abrupt and angry exit earlier in the week. Casey, Davis, and Andrew gave me shaky smiles but made sure to sit several desks away from me.
I tried to ignore the sideways glances I was given by the other students and I gloried in a small sense of accomplishment when I was able to swallow my angry retorts andnottell them to take a picture because it lasted longer.
I buried my nose in the textbook and lost myself in the dark, depressing world of Edgar Allen Poe. And I actually became excited when we were given our first essay topic on the use of fear in Poe’s short stories.
I found myself sitting in the library after class, reading through my assignment, writing notes in the margins. For the first time I felt like perhaps, just maybe, I could do this.
“How’s the class going?” the short, stocky woman with the flower print shirt and socks up to her knees asked as she sat across from me a week later.
