by Kit Frick
2. He worked as a line cook at a Thai restaurant downtown, which was way more professional than everyone else’s after school jobs at Panera or the mall.
3. He was always dozing off during Comparative Religions, the one class we shared sophomore year.
It wasn’t a lot to go on. About once a week, I tried to talk myself into waking him up, or passing him my notes, or asking what kept him up so late at night that he couldn’t keep his eyes open by fourth period. But I never had the guts.
“You’re still here.”
Still standing frozen in the middle of the living room, at least thirty seconds later. Well-played, Ellory. Very smooth.
“I guess I don’t really need to find a bathroom,” I admitted. “It just seemed like a good excuse to avoid the pool.”
“Then I think we can combine forces in that mission. Because I have absolutely no intention of leaving this couch. And I can tell you right now that there is nothing worth seeing out by the pool. Unless you count the Smurf’s bare ass, because he is lousy at strip poker and loves to show off for the ladies.”
The Smurf was Steve Murphy, a generally lovable doofus and the third star in the Matthias-Dave-Smurf constellation. That Steve would be there was basically a given. But I hadn’t taken Matthias for the house party type, even if the house in question was Dave’s.
“I think I’ll take a rain check on the strip poker action.” I smiled, picturing Ret accepting an offer to deal her in. Ret never could turn down a dare.
He hovered an empty hand above the seat cushion next to him. “What do you say, Ellory Holland? Sit?”
My breath caught. “I didn’t know you knew my name.”
“We have fourth together.”
“You’re always asleep,” I countered.
For a second, I thought I’d pushed a button, pushed too hard. But then his face broke into a wide, easy smile.
I sat next to Matthias on the nice white couch in the Franklin’s living room, and I was feeling everything all at once. His breath barely stirring my hair. The faint mix of bar soap and mint lingering around his clothes and skin. All the scuff marks on his loafers, because that’s where my eyes were fixed until he put his hand lightly, hesitantly on top of my hand on the couch.
For a moment, it was like everything shut down and then kind of rebooted. There was a giant splash and shouting out by the pool, but it sounded really far away. In there, it was just me and Matthias, at our own private party.
“You okay?” He was looking at me, his head tilted to one side.
I breathed in and I breathed out, and I was still there. Still at a random house party, on a random day at the end of sophomore year. Sitting next to Matthias Cole. I thought about Ret. She was going to be pissed, but this was worth it. Matthias was worth it.
“Definitely okay.”
“You know, I was actually thinking about you the other day.”
“Yeah?” I kept my voice casual.
“I was in a store downtown with my sister. She’s in this ankle bracelet phase. Anyway. They had a necklace in the display case, big metal triangles with that shiny coating?”
“Enamel?”
“Yeah, enamel. It reminded me of that bracelet you always wear, and your earrings with all the colors sort of melted together.”
He’d noticed my earrings. He’d seen me.
“You do work in the metal shop, right? For Mr. Michaels?”
“Yeah, that’s me. After school, five days a week. Mostly cleaning and stuff, but I get to use all the equipment. I’m into sculpting too. I’m trying this new thing where I paint on the scrap when it’s still hot from the kiln. Kills the brushes, but it looks awesome.”
“That is seriously amazing, Ellory.” He looked straight into my eyes. “You should show me sometime.”
My insides melted, lead under a butane torch.
Then I pulled myself together and we kept talking. Metal shop, school, the guys Matthias worked with in the kitchen at Fit to Be Thai’ed. What we talked about didn’t really matter. What mattered was that we were there, together. What mattered was that I was laughing, and then he was laughing, and then his fingers were laced through my fingers. Our hands were the beginning of a spectacular, bright promise.
2
AUGUST, JUNIOR SUMMER
(NOW)
“Ellory, telephone!” My mom’s voice blasts down the hall and through the closed door, rupturing the shrine of perfect silence in my bedroom. I can’t remember the last time I got a call on our home phone. It doesn’t matter who it is; I don’t want to talk to anyone. Tomorrow is the first day of school, the start of senior year, and by my count I have twelve more hours of solitude before I have to speak to anyone aside from Bruiser, the gray and white fluff ball of a feline who loves no one but me.
I pat the comforter, and Bruiser jumps up on my bed and rubs his soft kitty cheek against my leg.
“Ellory May?”
I sigh. Do what’s expected. Do what you need to do.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Bex, honey. She said she tried your phone earlier.”
Bex has been blowing up my phone for the past week, ever since I got back to the West Shore. She’s the only one. I press my palms against my eyelids until I see a bright burst of stars. I’m not ready to talk to her, but school starts tomorrow. I can’t hide forever.
It was my choice, returning to Pine Brook for senior year. My mom calls what happened the fall. It’s a kindness, a shortcut, a way of taking something hard and shaping it into two little words that can slip off your tongue. My brain riffs on the possibilities: fallout, fall from grace, fall guy, fall apart. There’s a piece of truth in each and every variation. I could have transferred. Even now, it’s probably not too late. Every molecule in my being is screaming run away, and that’s exactly why I have to stay. Running away means not dealing with the truth. Running away means giving myself an easy out, and I don’t deserve an easy out.
Tomorrow, whether I want to or not, I’ll see everyone. I think about Bex, waiting it out on the other line. Might as well rip the Band-Aid off.
“Okay, Mom. I’ll get it up here.” My hand is shaking just a little as I pick up the phone from the desk in the spare room. I’ve always loved the wallpaper in here. Swirls of cream and lavender, from another era. Like a glimpse back in time. Like rich custard cream.
“Hello?”
“Ellory! I’ve been trying you all week. I ran into your dad at Wegmans. He told me you were back.” Her voice is cheery, filled with best intentions.
My voice is flat. “Hey, Bex.”
There’s a short stretch of silence on the other end. I wander across the hall, back into my room, and sink into the warm folds of my bed.
“I didn’t even know you’d gone to Philadelphia. You just . . . disappeared.”
She is accusing me, or she feels left out. I don’t need to ask to figure out that Bex spent the last three months right here, sweating through another summer at the West Shore’s mediocre ballet academy. She’s too good for that place. Why should I get a summer of art camp, a summer away? Why should I get to disappear? If she thinks that I didn’t deserve an escape, she’s probably right.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “Not telling anyone was kind of the point.” But now I’m back. No more escape for Ellory.
I can hear a sharp intake of breath on the other end. It’s okay. It’s not like we’re friends anymore. We haven’t spoken in months, which is entirely my doing. I shut down my Instagram and Snapchat and everything else. I turned off my phone and let the battery drain until I got back from camp. I went dark.
When I charged my phone back up this week, I had a backlog of messages from Bex and one solitary text from Jenni: I’m praying for you. I can’t be sure without reactiving my social media accounts to snoop, but I’d bet anything she finally took her aunt and uncle—the ones she always called “the born-again Randalls”—up on their offer to spend the summer in Tennessee. I guess I wasn’t the only one w
ho needed a summer away.
Jenni’s text was easy to ignore. Whatever prayers she’s sending my way, they’re not the forgiving kind. Bex’s persistence is throwing me off, though. It’s not like we were ever super tight, not in a one-on-one kind of way.
My thoughts drift back to sophomore year, spring. Bex had been living on the West Shore since middle school, but Ret had just recently drawn her into our group, making our triangle a square. Having Bex around immediately made things easier. When it was just the three of us, Jenni and I were constantly chafing at each other. Ret fed off our spats, but Bex diffused things. She wasn’t about to compete for a spot as Ret’s favorite. We still had our moments, but she balanced Jenni and me out.
So when Ret set us up on a kind of “friend date,” I didn’t know what to expect. Bex had been part of our group for a couple months, but we’d never hung out without Ret there. We met for coffee at Starbucks, Bex’s choice. I preferred the Roaster, but Bex was on an espresso macchiato kick and swore Starbucks did it best.
Without Ret, we grasped for stuff we had in common. I asked about her dance lessons, and she quickly turned the conversation to metal shop. I hate talking about my art. It sounds so . . . pretentious, or something. Yeah, me too. Are you thinking about studio programs? What, for college? Yeah. Sure, but I don’t want to jinx it. Right, me either.
The conversation quickly died out. We ended up talking about Ret, our common denominator. She and Bex had just come back from Canada, a spring break trip to visit her grandparents. Bex said it was the first time she’d brought an American friend to Montreal, how cool it had been to show off her hometown to someone who really cared about language and art. I almost choked on my latte. You could have fooled me that Ret cared about art—aside from giving it her blessing, she’d never shown any interest in my metalworking. I always figured it just wasn’t her thing, but maybe art wasn’t her thing with me. She’d saved it all for Bex.
We talked about their trip until we’d drained our coffees, and then I dropped Bex at home and texted Ret: That was kind of weird. I’m sure Bex sent her a version of the same text. Ret acted bummed for days, like we’d let her down. Inside, she was gloating. I could see it in the spark of her eye, feel it in the brush of her fingertips across the inside of my wrist. You need me. Without Ret, none of us worked. We were her solar system, her creation.
My brain snaps back to the present. Four months after the fall, no one even remembers how Ret broke all of us apart. The facts—what she did, how she lied—were immediately lost in what followed. In the end, who hurt who didn’t matter. The result was the same: the four of us split down the seams and a world of pain in my heart.
I needed this summer away, and not just because I couldn’t face them. At camp, I poured everything I had into taking my sculpture and metalworking to the next level. I put together the portfolio that’s going to get me into college, get me out of the West Shore forever.
I’m not going to spend senior year navigating the waters, playing nice. Making it through to graduation is the only thing I care about. Bex has dance team at school and the girls at her studio. She’ll be just fine without me, like I’m sure she has been all summer. And the truth is, I’ll be better off without her sympathy spiked with blame, her careful words, her eyes that hold all the memories I don’t want to relive.
I may be going back to Pine Brook tomorrow, but I don’t have to go back to Bex or anyone else. I’m going back alone.
“Listen, Ellory. I’m happy you got away from the West Shore for a while. I really am. But school starts tomorrow, and look. It’s our senior year. And I’m Switzerland, got it?”
“What?”
I can hear her breath soften against the phone. “Switzerland. It’s a neutral country? I just mean it was nobody’s fault, or everyone’s fault. I don’t blame you, okay? We’ve all had a few months to put it behind us, and it would be nice . . .”
I mentally complete Bex’s sentence. If we could all be friends again. If we could just go back to the way things were. Yeah, that would be nice. But nice and real are two separate things.
It must have taken a lot of guts to call me, I’ll give Bex that. To go against Jenni, her steadfast adherence to Ret’s interests, to Ret’s never-ending demands. What would she think, if she knew Bex was on the phone with me right now?
I shift aside to make room for Bruiser. His soft kitty face nestles into the spot in the center of the bed where the sun has been beating down all afternoon. I move too fast. My insides crackle as I scoot over. Crack, crack, pop. If you cut me open, split me apart, you’d find a blackened cavity. Charred. Nothing but ash. A burned-out wasteland of a girl where a living, breathing human being used to be.
“Yeah, got it,” I say, suddenly exhausted. “But I don’t need your pity.”
“This isn’t pity. It’s . . .” But she can’t finish the sentence.
“Save it,” I say, too sharp. “You don’t want to be seen with me. Believe me, your senior year will be much better without me in it.” I’m being mean, and I kind of hate myself for it, but it’s the truth. I’m sparing her. And besides, I can’t be friends with Bex, not anymore. It’s too hard.
“Fine.” Her voice falters. She tried to make an offering, and I threw it back in her face. Now she’s not sure which Ellory she’ll encounter tomorrow in the halls. Will it be angry Ellory? Fake-nice Ellory? Bitter, acidic Ellory? Sobbing and screaming and wracked-with-guilt Ellory?
The truth is, she has nothing to be scared of. I don’t have any of those things left in me. The Ellory who’s starting senior year tomorrow would rather curl up and die than have any sort of confrontation in the halls—saccharine sweet or acid burn or otherwise. The Ellory who’s starting senior year tomorrow had all the fight burned out of her last spring.
But they don’t know how much I’ve changed—Bex, and everyone else. They haven’t seen me in four months. They don’t know that the Ellory returning to Pine Brook tomorrow wants nothing more than to keep her head down and get through her classes and escape to the metal shop after school where she doesn’t have to talk to anyone. If it were possible, if the teachers wouldn’t fail me, I’d drift through the next nine months until graduation without saying a single, solitary word.
3
JUNE, SOPHOMORE SUMMER
(THEN)
It took Matthias three days to text me. Four days after that, he had a night off from Fit to Be Thai’ed. The distance between Dave Franklin’s party and our first date felt epic, but by the time we were starting our second loop around the upper tier of the Crestview Mall, cold smoothie cups in hand, the space was shrinking fast. When his gaze fell on me, I felt myself transform—black and white to color, two-dimensional to three. I was fully, wildly alive. I slipped my free hand into his, and he closed his fingers around mine.
As we walked, I snuck a glance at our filmy forms in a store window. Boy, girl. Together, apart. Long stride matched to long stride. For a moment, I was transfixed by our doubles, gliding easily through the stiff mannequins in their pencil skirts and pastel cardigans. In the window, the top of his head bobbed just above mine. He wasn’t exactly basketball material, but the boy had impressive posture.
I turned away from the glass and let my hair fall back, away from my face. I wore it down, always, covering my long arms and sharp shoulders. At five foot ten, I towered over most of my classmates. But standing next to Matthias, walking past the racks of sneakers and the dark suits on their wooden hangers and the rainbow of little bottles on the nail salon wall, I felt confident. The right proportion of legs to torso to hair. The right outfit—tank top, jeans that flared over my sandals, green and gold enamel teardrops dangling from my ears.
Only one thing about tonight was less than perfect—the setting. It was the bright fluorescent lights and the smell of wild cherry that swirled out through the vents. The mall was maybe the West Shore’s least romantic destination, but this is where he had brought me. My confidence flickered.
“I
f you weren’t here with me, what would a Friday night in the life of Matthias Cole look like?”
His eyes—brown with tiny, dark green flecks—latched onto mine. “You are aware that everyone on the West Shore, including teachers and old babysitters, calls me Matty?” he asked.
“I prefer Matthias. You hate it?”
“Not exactly. It’s just so . . .”
“Formal? Biblical?” I suggested.
“Let’s just say my parents were . . . aspirational when they had me. Matthias does not say ‘music writer.’ Or ‘person under forty,’ for that matter.”
“Music writer?”
“I run a website. Concert write-ups, album reviews, new bands. That sort of stuff.”
I fought an inward groan. Writer? Hot. Audiophile? Not so hot. I could see my future stretch out before me like an unending track list. Creating playlists with my friends was one thing, but I was not down for the preaching and preening, the reverent silence for the not-yet-released single from the next greatest indie band in central Pennsylvania. The fly sound system. The dark, poster-plastered bedroom.
“I see your face, Ellory Holland, and I am not that guy, promise. You can listen to stuff or not. It’s kind of something I do on my own. And since you asked, that’s what I’d be doing on a regular Friday. Hang out with Dave and the Smurf for a while, stop in at home to tuck my little sis into bed and borrow the truck, then head downtown and find a show. I review concerts, local music scene stuff.” He shrugged, take it or leave it.
“It’s just, I never knew that about you.”
“To be fair, we’ve never talked about much of anything before.”
I could feel the live feed of regret flash across my face. We started to speak at the same time.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I promise—”
“I’m sorry, you go,” I offered.
“I was just going to say, I promise my conversational abilities range beyond my animal obsession with indie bands. Stick with me, and I will never subject you to a Purling Hiss deep cut. You have my word.”
