Ella's Twisted Senior Year(5)
She’d made sure to cut me out of her life, and she couldn’t even tell me herself.
I remember it all like it’s a home movie that I’ve watched a dozen times. Ella and I had spent the entire summer before eighth grade swimming in my pool and hanging out. Back then we hung out so much that our parents would let us have sleep overs in my rec room.
That particular day that everything went wrong had started out as the best day of my life. Ella had slept over and we’d stayed up late watching Harry Potter movies then crashed on the floor in our own sleeping bags.
I woke up with her curled in my arms, only our sleeping bags between us. We didn’t talk about it but we’d both seemed happy to wake up so close together. I’d planned on kissing her that day. Like, I really planned it, right up to exactly what I’d do when I asked her permission to kiss her.
And then Corey pulled me aside and said she’d asked him to personally tell me to leave her alone. He said she thought I was creepy and didn’t like, like me and that I should back off.
It crushed me, but I didn’t think it would ruin our friendship for good.
It’d taken most of eighth grade for me to get over losing her and eventually I’d had to change my entire friend group to find new friends that wouldn’t overlap with her and all of our old haunts.
Today brought all of those feelings crashing back to me. West Canyon High wasn’t a huge school, but if you tried hard enough you could avoid a person for all four years. I’d almost been successful.
“Are you even listening?” Kennedy says, poking me in the arm with her long acrylic nail.
“Yeah, what’s up?” I turn into her neighborhood. There’s already three familiar cars parked on the side of the road in front of her house. Looks like we have plans.
She flips her hair over her shoulder. “I said the guys want to go to Burger Barn.”
I pull up behind Toby’s Mazda and cut the engine. I try not to let it bother me that the guys made plans to meet at my girlfriend’s house without telling me first. “Sounds good,” I say. “I’m starving.”
“I’m still mad at you for not sticking up for me,” Kennedy says, sliding over to sit in the middle of the front seat. The guys get out of their cars and climb into mine. She runs her hand down my thigh and leans in, the scent of her perfume making my eyes water. “But it’s not like we’ll ever see that loser again, so I guess I can’t stay mad forever.”
Now is definitely not the time to tell her that Ella is my neighbor and I see her all the time. Sure, Ella ignores me and I ignore her on the awkward occasions when we’re both walking outside at the same time. But I am fully aware that pretending she doesn’t exist doesn’t make her truly invisible.
Chapter 3
Mom calls me when I’m walking out to my car and I lean against the hood to answer it. If one of the teachers on duty sees us on phones in our car, driving or not, they freak out like we’re trying to set the world on fire with our reckless decision making.
Mom’s frantic greeting sounds about normal for her. “Please tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m fine, Mom. The whole school is fine, actually. There’s some fallen tree branches but that’s all.”
“Okay, listen to me,” she says, and I picture her standing at work in her scrubs, her expression serious like she’s talking to a patient that’s about to bleed out. “I need you to drive straight home and call me the second you get there.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
She’s quiet for a moment, the only sound the shuffling of papers and random hospital noises. “Honey, I can’t get ahold of your dad. I tried leaving but they’ve brought in a ton of people who got hurt in the tornado. I can’t leave. I need you to check on him.”
My mom works twelve hour shifts at the hospital which is an hour away so she’s gone fourteen hours a day. Even after her longest, most nerve-wracking shifts, she’s never sounded this stressed out.
“Dad’s probably asleep,” I say, drawing shapes in the water droplets on the Corolla. It’s Mom’s old car that I got after she upgraded to a Lexus. “You know how he is on his days off.”
Dad’s a paramedic and his shifts are even weirder than Mom’s. Sometimes he works half a day, other times it’s twenty-four hour shifts. When he’s home in the daytime, he’s usually sleeping.
Mom sighs. “Just hurry home and call me. And be safe, Ella. I can’t get ahold of Mrs. Poe next door and I can’t get ahold of your father. It’s a madhouse here, and I’m going insane right along with it.”
“Mom, everything is fine,” I say. “I’ll call you as soon as I get home. Now go fix some people.”
The drive home takes forever. Once I’m out of the school zone, Main Street is backed up for a mile. I peer out of my window and see the blinking lights of a road crew hauling broken trees off the road. The fence to my right is busted up and there’s an old canoe upside down in the middle of the ditch.
As I drive along, I can see the path the tornado took as it ripped through Hockley. On one side of the road, everything looks fine but on the other, debris litters a roughed up ground. It’s eerie, almost like I’m driving through some post-apocalyptic version of my town.