To get to Ellie’s uncle’s date farm, I had to take the bus that trundled down Main Street then walk for a good forty-five minutes. Luckily, I had left early enough in the morning that the sun wasn’t at full strength, and there was a wind blowing up the valley, making the white blades of the windmills spin hypnotically as it dried the sweat on my skin.
When I finally made it to the street flanked by rows and rows of date palms, I felt like a dying man in the desert. Any dapperness that I might have imagined myself having was definitely gone. I really should have thought this through better. Then again, it was almost funny that I was trying to impress this girl when the first impression she had of me would probably be stuck in her head forever.
I sighed, trying not to inhale the dust that whipped through the columns of trees, and went on until I came to a small house with a cracked tile driveway and a well-kept rock garden filled with every type of cactus you could imagine. I spent my whole life in the dry valley and still found myself romanticizing cacti when I saw them, like they were some strange exotic species.
I was still admiring the cacti when the front door to the house flew open and a woman poked her head out.
“What do you want?” she said in a low, suspicious voice. She was pretty hot for an older lady, a nice face with a pointy chin and sexy, dark eyes. Her hair was dark, tinged with red, auburn, and gold, nice colors to work with—autumn colors, and pulled back from her face. I had a sudden urge to paint her.
“Oh my god, mom,” I heard Ellie’s voice from inside. “I know that boy.”
Ellie’s mother squinted at me then quickly shut the door.
Okay. Well… technically I hadn’t even knocked yet. I could have been a random passerby just admiring a cactus. I stood there for a few moments, trying to figure out what to do, then decided to suck it up. I marched up to the door, still hearing frantic yet hushed voices on the other side of it, and knocked quickly.
The voices stopped. Someone squealed. Then yelled, exasperated in the way only a thirteen-year-old girl who isn’t getting what she wants could. It sounded like Kelli and Colleen times a billion. Then the door opened and I saw Ellie.
She was wearing her jeans again, boots, and a flowery tank top with a bunch of silver necklaces on top, some with cool-looking spikes, others with skulls. Tough jewelry with a girly-looking shirt. I liked the combination. It was very her.
Even now, here, at ten in the morning, her face was contradictory in the same way. Her mouth was indecisive, her lips unsure whether to press against each other in worry or smile, her eyes were wide and nervous, yet hard and steady.
I’d practiced my speech on the way over here, but of course it all came out in a tumble of words and noises now that she was right in front of me and I knew her mother wasn’t too far out of the picture.
“Ellie. Uh. Hi. Hi, Ellie. I… I hope it’s not too early. I didn’t mean to drop by. I mean, I did. But I would have warned you. But I didn’t have your number. So I just… came by. I’m sorry. You’re busy. I’m sorry. It’s… oh, I’m Camden. We met on Monday. At the… place. In town. Where stuff happened.”
I clamped my mouth shut. God you sound like an idiot, I told myself, closing my eyes and trying to keep calm.
“I remember,” Ellie said in an oddly quiet voice. “I’m glad you came by.”
My eyes flew open to make sure she wasn’t joking.
“Really?”
She nodded. “Really. I just had breakfast so…” she stuck her head back around the door and said something to her mother who I knew was just standing off to the left. Ellie looked back. “My mom says it’s okay if I’m back before dinner.”
I grinned, a smile propelled by my heart. “Sure. Great.” I completely ignored the fact that I had no idea what my plan was. I was kinda hoping we could have hung out in her room and listened to tunes and talked, but I got the hint that her mother actually wanted us out of the house and gone.
It was confirmed when Ellie quickly stepped out the door and closed it behind her, without even saying good-bye to her mom.
“Well?” she asked me.
My mouth opened and shut like a fish. “You aren’t going to introduce me to your mother?”
Another weird flash of anxiety came through her eyes. “No. She’s… you know moms. She’s got a migraine.”
I nodded. “Oh, okay, that’s too bad.” I understood.
“No,” Ellie said quickly, placing her hand on my arm. A wave of pleasure shot through me, like art growing in my veins. “No, it’s not like that. She doesn’t care who I hang out with. She’d like you just fine… she just doesn’t feel well right now. And she’s really… weird with people. All people. Strangers. She’s… paranoid.”
“Where’s your dad?” I asked as we walked down the driveway and to the street.
“He’s in town looking for work today,” she said. “Not here, like Palm Valley. But Palm Springs. You know, the casinos on the side of the highway. He was a blackjack dealer back in… where I came from.”
“Out East and south and whatever?” I repeated.
She smiled and fell in step beside me. She was limping but wasn’t as self-conscious about it, which gave her a unique rhythm all her own. “Gulfport. Mississippi. We lived there before the… before we had to come here.”
“Why this place of all places?”
“We like dates?” she suggested. She cleared her throat and then stopped, her attention on one of the date palm rows. “Hey, ever climbed one?”
“Not really on my list of things I like to do for fun. Have you?”
“I can’t.”
I shot her a look. “Afraid of heights?”
She kept her eyes on the palm trees, hesitant to look at me. She waited a few beats before saying, “No. I don’t have… I mean… my leg… I can’t…” She sighed and started walking quickly down the street, her gait stiff again.
I watched her and then trotted after her, holding onto my hat with one hand so it wouldn’t blow away. Once I caught up to her, I grabbed her hand and pulled her back.
“Ellie,” I told her. I let go of her hand once I was certain she wasn’t taking off again. “Ellie, it’s okay, whatever you’re too afraid to say.”
“You think I’m afraid?” she asked defensively. “Of what?”
I smiled gently. “It’s the same look I see when I catch a glimpse of myself in public. I look like… I’m on guard or something. On watch. I look afraid. So do you. But I don’t know what of.”
“Why are you afraid?”
“Oh, you know. Because sometimes I think I’m going to get hurt, really hurt, and it will all be for nothing. That people, bullies, bad men… fathers, will get away with shit and not get punished.”
“Does your father hurt you?” she whispered, taking a step toward me, her dark eyes warm and concerned.
“Why?”
I shrugged as casually as I could. “He’s the sheriff. He thinks I’m asking for it. He thinks I’m gay.”
She raised her brows. “And… you’re not?”
“Is that a surprise?”
“No, actually. I didn’t think you were. I just thought you were kind of emo or goth.”
I gave her a wry look. “Well, emo is pushing it.”
“What does your father do… does he hit you?” she lowered her voice over the last words, her eyes darting around as if someone could hear us.
“Usually, yeah,” I said. I could tell it shocked her that I was being so open about it, so blasé, even though nothing could be further from reality.
“But that’s… against the law. You could get him in trouble. Big trouble. He shouldn’t be allowed to hurt you.”
“I could get him in trouble. But come on, he’s who he is and I look like this. Who are they going to believe?” I looked down at my nails; the black was faded away in spots. “Besides, I don’t know. I hate my father sometimes, I really do. But he’s still all I have. I feel like I should make the best of it. Shouldn’t I?”
“And bullies at school shouldn’t either. But they do.”
“But it’s wrong. They need to pay for it.”
“They do. I stand up for myself. Or I try to. I don’t act afraid, even if I am.”
“Do you stand up for others?”
That took me off guard for a minute. “What do you mean?”
“When you stand up for yourself, do you think you’re standing up for just you or for everyone who has ever been bullied?”
“I…” I didn’t know, actually. I brushed my hair behind my ears and licked my lips. They tasted like salt. “I think I’m the only one here who gets picked on.”
“You’re not,” she said with conviction. Her eyes began to well up with tears, a sight that made my heart break a little.
I frowned. “Did… have you been bullied? You just moved here.”
Ellie sighed and looked down the row of date palms again to a ladder that was leaning against one of the trees. “I don’t want to climb it but do you want to go over there and sit? Better to talk there than out here.”
I nodded, eager to learn more about her, yet my chest was starting to squeeze a bit, anticipating the pain she was holding back in her eyes.
We walked down the row of palms, the air immediately cooler between their spiky trunks, and took a seat on the lowest rung of the wide metal ladder. I placed my backpack on the earth and thought about all the stuff I brought with me, the stuff I was going to impress her with. But we were already opening up to each other like kindred spirits or old friends.
We sat in silence for a few moments before I had to coax her onward. “Who bullied you? What happened?”
She wiped her hands on her jeans, back and forth and back and forth, and stared up at the sky. “I walk funny. I know I do. I… have something wrong with me. Something happened to my leg. I have horrible scars and I can’t, like, ever show it. Like, ever. Or people would run screaming. Believe me. It’s happened. And I can’t do anything about it. But people, they look at me funny, you know? They say things about me when they think I can’t hear. Not just kids, but older people too. And they look at my mom like they pity her and stuff and… anyway, it sucks. It’s like… I can’t even just fucking walk anywhere without it being a big deal. I feel like I can barely… live. I can’t even explain it.”
“You don’t have to,” I said quietly. I didn’t have the same problem, but I knew exactly what she was talking about. “So what happened?”
She sighed and picked up some dirt in her hands, letting it run through her fingers. “Some stupid bitch at your lame-ass mall called me a retard. Told her friends that there was something wrong with the new girl, that I was broken and if I was a horse I would have been shot and put down.”
I winced, my heart wrenching for her. I knew how much it was hurting her and that hurt me too, more than I thought it would. Ellie was too pretty and sweet to have this done to her, to have people be this cruel. Maybe I brought it on myself, but I didn’t see how she could. Her legs and her injury, whatever had happened to her, it wasn’t her fault.
She eyed me sideways. “I guess word’s traveled fast here that I’m new.”
“It’s a fucking backwards town. Word travels fast and from idiot to idiot,” I told her, feeling frustrated with the shit we had to live with. “I’m sorry you have to put up with this.”
“Well, I’m sorry you have to put up with it too. And your father. That really blows. My parents… they’re not the greatest either. Sometimes I don’t even think my mom loves me, and I’m pretty sure my uncle Jim wishes we’d never come here. My family isn’t exactly… honorable.” She sucked on her lip, mulling something over. “You never told your father about what I stole, did you?”
I shook my head. “No way. That’s our secret.”
“I wasn’t trying to be bad,” she began to explain, “I mean, I don’t go around and steal shit.”
“I know—you had your reasons.”
“I really did,” she said, her eyes wide. “Honest. I stole this special vitamin E oil.”
I made a face. “Is that for girly problems?”
“No,” she said, smacking my arm. “It’s for scarring. I wanted to see if it would help my leg. My mom wouldn’t buy it for me. She thinks I’m hopeless and I don’t have any money, so…”
“Ellie,” I said, leaning into her and trying not to smell the top of her strawberry-scented head, “You don’t have to justify yourself or explain anything. I get it. I would have stolen it for you myself if you wanted. I’d steal you anything you wanted.”
She smiled grimly at my proposition. Too much too soon? Probably. “That’s sweet. But I don’t think a life of crime is the answer anymore.”
“It was an answer before?” I asked, half-joking.
She cocked her head at me. “We’re friends now, aren’t we?”
I couldn’t help but give her a cheesy grin at the sound of that. “I don’t have many friends, so I’d be honored if that were true.”
“Honored if that were true?” she repeated, smiling playfully. “You really are a weirdo.”
My expression grew serious. “I may be a weirdo, Ellie Watt, but from now on I’m your weirdo. You and I, we need to stick together. No one else understands us, I can tell you that right now. Well, except for musicians. They understand everything. Do you ever listen to Tool?”
“Not really,” she said. “But I’m all ears.”
I really felt like my face was going to crack in two from the way I was smiling. I leaned down to pull up my bag and my arm brushed against hers, her fine blonde hairs tickling my skin like feathers. My boner threatened to appear and my insides felt tight and fluttery. Oh boy.
Being friends might end up being harder than I thought.
I shifted against the hot ladder, thankful that my shorts were fairly loose, and propped my bag strategically on my lap while I brought out the mp3 player and the minispeaker. I decided to introduce her to the band by playing the song “Stinkfist”; its strangely metallic and electric beginning morphed into a pummeling of chords as Maynard’s ethereal yet chaotic voice filled the air around us.
“It’s interesting,” she said after a while. “I like it. Dark. Different.”
You’re interesting, dark, and different, I thought. And I like you. I didn’t tell her that though. In that moment, it was enough that I had a friend. An ally. Someone who had the potential to be as dark and different as I was.
“It’s kind of pessimistic though,” she said as the song went slightly haywire with noise. “Like, it’s sad. No way out. That kind of feeling. I dunno.”
“No,” I said quickly, getting excited. “That’s what you think. You feel like you’re trapped and you can’t see and things are going crazy and there’s no control left,” I said, timing my words to the song. “But then…”
And at around three and a half minutes, the song’s tone changed. It became lighter. Upbeat. It rose.
“Hear that,” I said, my hands waving with the beat. “It’s like that part in a movie where things turn around for the main character and you know everything is going to be okay.”
She was staring at me with a puzzled look on her face. All right, well maybe I could go a bit overboard with music and art and the things that really made me feel…
“It’s hope,” she said.
“What?”
“That change, in the song,” she explained, tapping her finger on the iPod screen, timed to the new beat of the music, “it’s the sound of hope. That’s what I feel in here.” She put a fist to her heart. “Hope.”
Hope. That’s exactly what it was.
It was exactly what she was.
I stared at her with a goofy, dumbfounded expression on my face. I couldn’t help it. Last week I was figuring out how to best get through the school year without dying, and
now I was ready to face it with a little less fear. Now I had someone other than myself to stand up for—Ellie. Now I had someone else’s battles that I would gladly fight.
I had someone that let me know I wasn’t alone in this town or even in this world. I had a friend, someone to talk to, to lean on, to laugh with, and listen to music with and just… live.
I had hope that in the end, no matter what lay ahead of me, everything was going to be all right.
“What else do you have to listen to?” Ellie asked, leaning into me and swiping through my iPod.
I grinned at her, and together we sat on that ladder and kept the hope coming.
THE END
About the Author
Karina Halle
The daughter of a Norwegian Viking and a Finnish Moomin, Karina Halle grew up in Vancouver, Canada with trolls and eternal darkness on the brain. This soon turned into a love of all things that go bump in the night and a rather sadistic appreciation for freaking people out. Like many of the flawed characters she writes, Karina never knew where to find herself and has dabbled in acting, make-up artistry, film production, screenwriting, photography, travel writing and music journalism. She eventually found herself in the pages of the very novels she wrote (if only she had looked there to begin with).
Karina holds a screenwriting degree from Vancouver Film School and a Bachelor of Journalism from TRU. Her travel writing, music reviews/interviews and photography have appeared in publications such as Consequence of Sound, Mxdwn and GoNomad Travel Guides. She currently splits her time between her apartment in downtown Vancouver and her sailboat, where a book and a bottle of wine are always at hand.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Karina-Halle/140649372629593
Twitter: @MetalBlonde
Blog: http://khalle.wordpress.com
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