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,
