Ellie Ever

by Nancy Ruth Patterson

  “And I ordered French fries because it was the only French food I’d ever heard of,” Ellie added.

  “You did order French fries,” her mother said, nodding. “After lunch, we were walking back to where we had parked the Blue Goose when you spied a pair of black patent leather ballet flats in the window of a boutique for children.”

  “Boutique is the French word for store,” Ellie reminded her mother. “A very expensive store.”

  “It was a very expensive store,” her mother agreed. “But that didn’t stop your father. He didn’t even ask how much the shoes cost when he took you in to try them on, though he knew perfectly well that we couldn’t afford them.”

  “Did you ask how much they cost?”

  “Of course,” her mother said. “Someone in the family had to be sensible, and your father never was when it came to you. He spoiled you rotten.”

  “Really rotten?” Ellie knew the answer, but she wanted her mother to say it.

  “Rottenest of the rotten,” her mother said. “Not only did the shoes cost five times as much as a perfectly good pair would cost where we usually shopped, but the store didn’t even have a pair that fit you. The ones you had fallen in love with were a size too big!”

  “And Dad said that I’d grow into them one day.”

  “He did say that, didn’t he?” She smiled at Ellie. “I knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue with him,” her mother said softly, shaking her head in pretend disapproval. “Those way-too-expensive, too-big black patent leather shoes already had your name on them!”

  “And that night, when he tucked me in, I asked him if my new shoes were as good as his Taylor-Made shoes.”

  “You did indeed.”

  “And he said, ‘Well, almost as good.’ ” Ellie tried to imitate her father’s low voice.

  “Yes. That’s what he said—almost as good!”

  “Almost as good as Taylor-Made shoes,” Ellie said proudly, trying to keep up with her mother’s stride.

  Mrs. Taylor left a bucket of sweet feed for Outlaw and scattered a hunk of hay that she had carried there in a burlap bag. Then she checked his water and block of salt.

  “You think anybody could ever tame Outlaw?” Ellie asked as they walked away.

  “If the right person tried, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “How would the right person start?” Ellie asked.

  “By changing his name,” her mother said. “How would you liked to be called Outlaw?”

  “Can you change a horse’s name?”

  “I’m sure Outlaw wouldn’t mind, and I don’t see anybody else around here to tell us not to. Think of a good name for him, Ellie, something wonderful. But don’t you dare go near him when I’m not with you, you hear me?”

  Ellie knew her mother meant business when she used that tone of voice.

  “I’ll just think of a name from a distance,” Ellie said as they went inside for a supper of the pot roast and green beans and chocolate pie that Mr. Cook’s wife had left in their refrigerator that morning.

  Ellie had a hard time falling asleep the first night in their new house. So much for her to think about. What would TCPS be like? Would she be as smart as the other girls there? Would she have friends? Would there be bullies? Probably not, Ellie thought. Girls wouldn’t be bullies, would they? But what about snobs?

  Most of all, she kept thinking about Mr. Hunter. She had never heard of anybody like him before. He could probably buy any horse he wanted, but instead he had brought a whole stable of what Mr. Cook had called misfits to live at Hunters’ Hill. She herself would never call them misfits, that was for sure.

  “I know, Mom. Let’s name him Pandora,” Ellie yelled through the darkness to her mother. Pandora was her dog Pandy’s real name.

  “That’s a girl’s name. Now go to sleep.”

  “How about Pandemonium? That’s what Dad called Pandy sometimes.”

  “That word means chaos, Ellie. Your father was teasing when he called your dog that. Now go to sleep.”

  “How about Okey? As in Okey Dokey,” Ellie suggested. “Dad used to say ‘okey dokey’ all the time.” Ellie remembered her father’s deep voice saying that. Not “okay” or “fine,” like other fathers said, always “okey dokey.”

  “Go to sleep, Ellie. It’s almost tomorrow.”

  “Okey dokey,” she said.

  The last thing Ellie remembered before drifting off was seeing the almost-as-good-as-Taylor-Made shoes standing at attention beside her bed.

  6

  Alphabetical order! Mrs. Crispin said her fourth grade had to sit in alphabetical order—just like the other fourth-grade classes she had taught for forty-two years at Twin Creeks Prep. She sat Ellie Taylor in the row next to the window right between Chloe Sampson and Hannah Williams, who definitely acted like best friends. If she could have, Ellie would have traded places with Hannah so the two friends could still sit together the way they wanted to, but she bet nobody had ever defied Mrs. Crispin’s rules.

  Of the sixteen girls in Mrs. Crispin’s class, fifteen already knew one another. Ellie could feel thirty eyes, not counting Mrs. Crispin’s, staring at her as she stood by her desk and said her name.

  “Ellie Taylor,” she mumbled quietly.

  Mrs. Crispin peered from behind an extra-large pair of tortoiseshell glasses. “Now say your name again, young lady—only this time louder, as if you are proud of it.”

  Ellie felt her face flush. “Elizabeth Ever Taylor,” she said again, this time in the loudest indoor voice she could muster. “Everybody calls me Ellie.”

  Mrs. Crispin walked toward Ellie and pulled back gently on her shoulders. “Stand up straight,” she commanded.

  Ellie could feel the slouchiness straighten under Mrs. Crispin’s bony hands. Then Mrs. Crispin cradled Ellie’s chin in her palm and lifted it uncomfortably high. She thought she heard someone behind her start to giggle, but the giggle stopped as quickly as it started.

  “My girls always keep their heads high and their shoulders squared,” Mrs. Crispin said. “And they always say their names proudly.

  “Ellie Taylor is one of three girls new to Twin Creeks second semester,” Mrs. Crispin said as she walked to the front of the room, “but she is the only new girl in the fourth grade. I know you’ll make her feel welcome. Now please stand and introduce yourself to Ellie.”

  One by one, each of the girls stood by her desk, straightened her shoulders, and said her name proudly.

  Ellie thought some of the first names sounded strange—like last names—McGregor Adams, for example, and Kennedy Cartright. She was glad they all dressed in the same old-fashioned uniforms. She wondered if anybody had noticed her shoes yet. They were so much prettier than the plain brown ones most of the other girls wore.

  “Now let’s see how much you forgot over the holidays,” Mrs. Crispin said. She moved a wheel—kind of like the one Ellie had seen on Wheel of Fortune—in front of her desk and gave it a spin. Slips of paper containing review questions from first semester were taped by each number, and they fluttered when the pointer on the wheel whizzed by. “When you know the answer to the question, raise your hand.”

  Mrs. Crispin’s mood seemed to brighten every time Ellie raised her hand to answer a question. “384 divided by 24?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Mrs. Crispin gave the wheel another spin.

  “Year Jamestown was founded?”

  “1607.”

  “That’s correct, Ellie.”

  Another spin.

  “Second president of the United States?”

  Ellie raised her hand for that one, too.

  “John Adams.”

  Mrs. Crispin smiled when the spinner landed on the next question. “This is a three-part question—a really tough one,” she said. “What do you call a group of rattlesnakes?”

  “A rhumba,” Ellie answered before anyone else could raise a hand.

  “And group of toads?”

  “A knot.”

 
“And a group of dolphins?”

  “A pod.” Ellie was glad she knew so much about animals.

  Mrs. Crispin nodded. “Excellent, Ellie!”

  Ellie could feel the other girls staring at her again. She felt proud that she could answer the questions before anyone else—even Mrs. Crispin’s extra-hard three-part question. She waited for the wheel to stop again.

  “Who remembers how to spell and define braggadocio?” Mrs. Crispin asked.

  Ellie was the first to spell that right. “It means boasting,” she added. Mrs. Crispin smiled and sat down at her desk.

  Then Mrs. Crispin gave them twenty minutes to start writing their autobiographies, which were due in a month.

  Ellie liked this assignment, but she wasn’t sure where to start. Before the hurricane? With her time at the shelters? She also wanted to write about the trip to Virginia in the Blue Goose. On the way, she and her mother had spent the night in a motel, and they had splurged on banana splits at the Granna Banana ice cream store nearby. And they had sung “The Wheels on the Truck Go Round and Round” at the top of their voices every time they crossed another state line.

  She began to write the first sentence of her essay in her very best cursive. She tried to make her capital I bow out nicely and her capital S twirl around—sort of like a treble clef on a sheet of music.

  Ellie had just finished the first paragraph when she heard the sound of a piece of folded paper whisper to the floor by her desk. She thought it might be Hannah’s essay, and she reached down to pick it up for her.

  But it didn’t look like an essay. The lined notebook paper was folded in a tiny little square, and it had Ellie’s name printed on the front in block letters. Ellie opened the note and read:

  How could someone who thinks she’s so smart wear such prissy shoes?

  She balled it up quickly.

  But she didn’t do it quickly enough.

  Mrs. Crispin’s voice roared out. “We don’t pass notes in class at Twin Creeks,” she said sternly, giving Chloe and Hannah each a detention slip without even asking who had passed it. Then she headed straight toward Ellie. “Give me that note right now.”

  Ellie could feel all the eyes in the classroom staring at her—yet again. She had to think fast. No matter what, she couldn’t let anyone—not even Mrs. Crispin—know what the note said.

  Just before Mrs. Crispin reached her desk, Ellie stuffed the paper in her mouth where she knew it would be safe from Mrs. Crispin’s grasp. She heard someone in the front row gasp.

  But Ellie knew that nothing Mrs. Crispin could say or do could hurt her any worse than the words she had read on that paper.

  The words would start to smear in her throat and swirl into nothingness somewhere near her esophagus, and Mrs. Crispin would never know what someone had written.

  That Ellie Taylor was wearing prissy-looking shoes.

  Ellie looked down at those shoes all the way to the headmaster’s office, with Mrs. Crispin marching behind her, scolding her at every step.

  7

  The headmaster, Mr. Flannery, motioned Ellie to a hard bench in the outer office. Then he ushered Mrs. Crispin into his private office and closed the door behind them. Ellie looked around, trying not to gawk at the hundred years of Twin Creeks history hanging in fancy frames on the wall or at the school secretary, who looked almost as old and mean as Mrs. Crispin herself.

  Even with the door closed, Ellie could hear some of the words Mrs. Crispin was telling the headmaster.

  DELIBERATELY DISOBEYED! Those were the ones that came out the loudest.

  PUT IT IN HER MOUTH! Those came out pretty loud, too.

  SHOES NOT EVEN REGULATION!

  Mrs. Crispin huffed out of his office without even looking at Ellie.

  “Come on in,” Mr. Flannery said.

  Ellie walked into his mahogany-paneled office and took a seat in a leather wing-back chair. She looked down at the floor, rubbing the toe of her shoe against a thick oriental rug. We Taylors are sturdy stock, she kept reminding herself, but somehow she didn’t feel too sturdy sitting in that office under Mr. Flannery’s stare.

  “I hear you’ve had a noteworthy day,” he said after a minute of silence.

  Ellie looked up, surprised to see a semi-smile creep across his face. Noteworthy. She suddenly realized he was making a pun. He couldn’t be all that angry if he was trying to make a joke. She wished she could think of something noteworthy to say, but nothing would come out.

  “I’ve had to eat my words before, too.” Mr. Flannery cleared his throat. “Not literally, of course.”

  It was another joke. Ellie was almost sure of it.

  Mr. Flannery opened a folder in front of him.

  “Elizabeth Ever Taylor. That’s a pretty name.”

  “My mom named me after a movie star. I don’t think people called her Ellie, though, like they call me.”

  “Yes. Elizabeth Taylor. One of my favorites,” he said. “What about Ever? I’ve never known anyone named Ever before. Is that a family name?”

  Ellie wasn’t exactly sure what Mr. Flannery meant. Maybe he meant a name like McGregor or Kennedy—one of those first-last names she had heard in class.

  Ellie nodded. “Sort of,” she said. “My dad thought it up. He said I’d be the first person in his family ever to go to college. That maybe I’d be the first ever female chief justice of the Supreme Court. Or maybe even the first woman president ever. Mostly he just wanted me to be the best me ever. When I made a mistake, a really big one, that’s what he’d always say to me.”

  Mr. Flannery shuffled through the folder labeled with Ellie’s name.

  “I saw from the material your mother sent us that you made a perfect score on your state test last year. And straight A’s both in your old school and the one you attended this fall. Excellent recommendations from your teachers. The admissions board found you worthy of a full scholarship.” He paused and closed her folder. “We have put our faith in you, Ellie,” he said. “I trust you’ll never let something like this happen again.”

  Ellie nodded. She was trying hard not to cry.

  “I can’t even imagine living through a hurricane,” he said kindly, changing the subject.

  “We loaded up everything we could in the Blue Goose—that’s our truck—and drove out of town where we’d be safe from the storm. We were supposed to meet up with my dad and our dog, but they never made it.”

  “Did you stay with relatives? Friends?”

  “They all had their homes destroyed, too, but we were lucky in a way. We had to stay in a smelly shelter in a gym for just a month. Then we moved to a room of our own in a nice shelter. The hurricane left a lot of people homeless, but Mom said we weren’t really homeless. We were just between homes for a while—it ended up only being four months.”

  “Your mother must be a very smart woman.”

  “Yes, sir. She didn’t go to college, but that didn’t keep her from getting smart on her own. Why, B.H., she worked as the head cook at Sally’s Salty Dog. People came there from all over just to get some of my mother’s famous potato salad.”

  “B.H.?”

  “B.H. Before the Hurricane. Mom divides everything into Before the Hurricane and After the Hurricane. B.H. and A.H.”

  Mr. Flannery stood up and looked out the window. He cleared his throat again.

  “And the hurricane washed Sally’s Salty Dog away, too?”

  Ellie nodded yes. “That’s what they say, though I’ve never actually been back to see for myself.”

  “You’ve been through a lot, Ellie.” He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his left eye. “I can’t imagine losing everything.”

  “We didn’t lose everything, Mr. Flannery. A lot, maybe, but not everything. Mom says you can’t count on anything you can touch lasting forever, anyway . . . not buildings, not people, not even pretty shoes.”

  Silence wrapped around the two of them—Mr. Flannery still looking out the window, Ellie still rubbing the toe of he
r shoe on the patterned rug.

  Mr. Flannery must have heard the soft shuffle her shoe was making. He looked down and stared at it. “Your shoes are beautiful.”

  “My dad bought them for me. But they’re not regulation, are they?” Ellie asked, remembering what Mrs. Crispin had said.

  Mr. Flannery thought for a minute. “Well, they’re black. They’re leather. They’re not tennis shoes, and they don’t have high heels. They may not be like the ones most students here wear, but I think we might be able to consider them regulation.”

  “So I can wear my shoes again tomorrow?”

  “On one condition. If you’ll write Mrs. Crispin a letter saying you’re sorry you disobeyed her, I’ll tell her you may wear the shoes.”

  Ellie wanted to say “okey dokey.” Instead, she nodded yes. After a few seconds, she cocked her head to one side. “Do you think the other girls might be jealous because my shoes are so pretty?” she asked.

  “Maybe. But maybe they’re jealous because you’re so smart.”

  Ellie couldn’t imagine that anybody would be jealous because she was smart.

  “I think it’s my shoes,” she said.

  8

  On the way from Mr. Flannery’s office to Mrs. Crispin’s class, Ellie could think of a few questions she’d like to ask her teacher.

  Like, “What do you call a group of Twin Creeks girls?”

  That one was easy, Ellie thought. Mr. Cook had been right. They were snobs.

  Or, “What do you call a group of teachers like Mrs. Crispin?”

  The thought of what she would like to answer almost made her laugh. A quiver, Ellie thought. Just like a quiver of cobras—ready to strike at any minute. Or a shiver. That’s what you called a group of sharks. A shiver of Crispins would make any student shiver.

  A few of the girls giggled when she walked by them and back to her desk. When Mrs. Crispin cleared her throat loudly, the giggles stopped. “We were just starting the word problems on page 182, Ellie,” Mrs. Crispin said. Her voice didn’t sound so angry anymore.