The next day Ellie wakes up and feels as though she is in a dream. Her mind is swimming with the memories of the night prior. She remembers laughing with her boyfriend, her best friend, and her best friend’s boyfriend at the local diner but she doesn’t remember what any of the conversations were about. The most clear things she remembers from the night were really only glimpses of some green eyed boy who she couldn’t remember knowing.
As she got ready, the rest of the night prior to the diner hit her. The green eyed boy was just some random kid in the stands that had caught her curiosity. Satisfied that the reason she only remembered the boy was because of her curiosity, Ellie grabs her book bag and heads down to her kitchen to have some breakfast before driving off to school.
While waiting at a red light at the intersection in front of the senior parking lot, drinking her coffee, something in the shadows of the abandoned box factory that never got torn down catches Ellie’s eye. She looks over to see two shining green eyes peeking out at her from a hole in one of the boarded windows. Startled, Ellie lets out a small shriek of fear. The boy had been in her dreams the entire night, his sparkling emerald colored eyes poking out of his beautiful pale face, haunting her from the moment she fell into the deep clutches of sleep.
Ellie couldn’t pull her eyes away from the green ones staring at her for several minutes. Then, many impatient teenagers and parents blare their horns, startling Ellie into realizing that the red light had turned to a green light. When she looks back to where the eyes had been, they are gone. She feels something like sadness tugging at her heart, although she knew that he would be gone when she looked again. He always was.
Pulling herself back to the here and now, Ellie turns into the senior parking lot and finds herself a spot not too far from the front of the school. Climbing out of her car, she looks around for the boy. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t see him anywhere. I never see him when I am actually looking for him, Ellie thinks to herself remembering the few times she looked for him but never saw him. She only saw him the moments when he slipped her mind and then he would be right back there, testing her curiosity of him.
Ellie glances at her clock and notices that its ten past eight in the morning. Classes start in 20 minutes and I was supposed to meet Patrick at our bench at eight, she mentally scolds herself for being late. Grabbing her bag from the back seat of her car she quickly locks the doors and then rushes off to meet Patrick. The bench where Ellie and Patrick often met in the morning to talk before classes start was on the far side of the campus. It’s funny, Ellie thinks to herself. They made it such a big campus for a small town with only like 400 or 500 kids in each grade.
By the time she gets to the bench, Ellie only has 15 minutes to spend with Patrick.
“I am so completely sorry that I am so late!” she apologizes quickly, hoping that he isn’t mad. “I had a pretty sleepless night and then I woke up late this morning,” Ellie lies to him. Why am I lying to him about why I am late, she asks, reminding herself that she has no reason to lie to him because she didn’t do anything for lying about.
“It’s fine, honey,” Patrick tells her, wrapping his arms around her and drawing her closer so he can give her a kiss good morning. Ellie smiles and doesn’t resist, letting his soft, tender lips press down on hers in the caring way that they always did. The warning bell for homeroom sounds, causing Ellie and Patrick to pull apart. Looking around, Ellie sees that everyone is scurrying off to the buildings where their homeroom classrooms are.
Patrick sighs as he grabs his bag and slings it over his shoulder and Ellie does the same. He pulls her into a hug and gives her a quick peck on the cheek before running off to his homeroom. Ellie watches him go, her eyes shining with the look of a girl in love or at least the look of a girl in lust. Once he’s out of sight, Ellie glances down at her watch and realizes that there are only 3 minutes left until final bell rings for homeroom. She sighs with relief when she remembers that her homeroom class in building D which is one of the building on the larger quad which just so happens to be where she is.
Ellie runs to the building and pulls the door open, racing down the hallway and up the stairs to the second floor of the building to get to her classroom before final bell rings. She slides into her seat in the back of the room with a few of the cheerleaders and some B-string football players just as the final bell echoes through the classroom. Mr. Varner looks up and gives Ellie a disapproving look about her barely having made it into the classroom and to her seat before the bell rang.
She ducks her head to avoid eye contact with the creepy teacher. It isn’t really his personality that creeps out Ellie, its a lot more of his appearance. He has a beer belly and is always wearing flannel button ups and tan slacks with his penny loafers. He has long, greasy, dark brown hair with a decreasing hair line that seems to be getting further back noticeably every day. And that beard! His long curly beard that he never bothers to pick his breakfast out of before class seems even greasier than his uncombed hair.
Ellie is pulled out of her thoughts about her creepy teacher when one of the football guys pokes her in the side, obviously impatient about something that he had said but Ellie had not heard. “What?” she snaps at him. She hated being poked, it made her feel like a small child being picked on by a large bully.
He’s puts his hands up in the sign of surrendering. “Sorry, El. I didn’t mean to make u go all mental on me, I just thought that you didn’t hear me or something and it seems like you didn’t since you didn’t answer me or anything.” He looked kind of scared of her which made Ellie kind of happy.
“It’s cool, dude. I was just thinking about stuff. So, what was it that you asked me?” Ellie says in her sweetest voice that apologizes without having to actually say the words “I am sorry.” Her smile seems to make him stumble over his words like a little boy in the seventh grade asking out a girl for the first time in his life.
“Oh… umm I was just um wondering if like you and um what’s his name are serious. I heard you were like um wearing his class ring or something now…” he trails off, obviously having been put up to asking Ellie the question by his B-string football buddies. Ellie looks at him and can’t help but feel sorry for him, sitting there, squirming in his seat and obviously uncomfortable.
Other than a verbal response which Ellie feels might rattle him a little more, she just holds up her hand, showing him the specializes class ring that is for the graduating football captain. And what if the football captain isn’t graduating that year? Well, then no one gets the specialized class ring. When he sees the ring, he swallows hard and averts his eyes from both the class ring and Ellie herself.
“Oh um that’s like cool. Congrats,” he says and turns back around to be poked by his B-string football buddies while they chuckle and he tries to focus on whatever the teacher is babbling on about.
Ellie looks down at Patrick’s ring, sitting on her finger and feels a pang of something inside of her. She can’t tell what it is. Instinctively she reaches up to the necklace that never leaves her neck. It has a real crystal on it that she always squeezed for good luck when she was confused or felt any negative energy. She’s had it for so many years that she can’t even remember when or how she got it. It never really mattered to her though because she knew it came from someone that meant a lot to her even though she could never remember who it was. Whenever she wore it, which was always, she felt close to someone or something. She felt like the crystal somehow had emotional ties to her heart.
Looking at the clock, Ellie notices that the first 10 minutes of homeroom was over and that only left 5 more minutes of sitting in this boring class. She was still pretty tired from the night before. The school decided to have the game on a Thursday night instead of Friday for some faculty reason so most of the kids were like zombies walking through halls. At least the ones without red bulls in their hands were like zombies. Thinking of that reminds Ellie that she stashed a red bull in her purse in case she started feeling sleepy.
She reaches into and bag and pulls it out. Just as she is about to pull the tab to open it, the green eyed boy walks into the room, not hiding behind anything for once. Something in the way he walked into the room, seeing him up close made Ellie’s hands start to shake. A faint memory flickers to life in the back of her head.
In it, she is only in the first grade. She is outside at recess, playing behind the swings with a little boy who has very short black hair. He has his head down though, concentrating on drawing something in the dirt with his stick. Ellie is watching him with a strong feeling of admiration in her heart. He is her best friend. The first grade version of herself peers over to get a better look at what he is drawing and sees a picture of the necklace that she is wearing right now. He starts to look up at her but then the memory fades away before she can look at his face.
Shocked by the memory, Ellie drops the red bull that her shaking hands had held on to. When it hit’s the ground, it explodes and the contents of the can spray onto a few of the regular students and some of the cheerleaders. They all scream and jump up to try to get the drink off of their clothes and bags.
Ellie keeps shaking though. It’s not only her hands. By now its spread up her arms and down to her legs and her entire body is shaking. She pulls her legs in and squeezes them to her chest in an attempt to make it stop. Now, most of the students in the class and the teacher are staring at her shaking body. The last few who hadn’t turned around turn around now when sobs escape from her swollen throat. Sweat starts to trickle down her forehead and the back of her neck as she feels the blood rush from her face and she can only imagine how pale she must look.
No, this can not be happening again, she says to herself. Ellie squeezes her eyes shut trying to block out the staring faces. Remembering the anxiety pills she always has on her, Ellie reaches into her purse and pulls out the little bottle ignoring the way the teacher is looking at it. It is a known rule throughout the school that students are not allowed to carry medication with them. She didn’t care.
With her shaking hands, she can’t seem to get one out so she dumps them on her desks. Her hands still shaking, she grabs one and pops it into her mouth and dry swallows it. Once it goes down, she waits, shaking, sweating, and pale, for it to work. Slowly, she starts to feel the blood return to her face and the sweat to stop, leaving her face cool from the perspiration. Then finally, after a few minutes, the shaking stops altogether and she can breath normally.
Looking up, she realizes that the next class has entered the room but the homeroom class is still there. They are all staring at her with worried looks on their faces. Since all of the rooms are very spacious, they all fit into the room without any problems. Mr. Varner is standing at her desk now, looking very uncomfortable with the whole situation.
“Are you alright, Ms. Lawson?” he asks, just standing there.
Ellie looks up at him, embarrassed that so many people had seen her have an anxiety attack in the middle of class. Again. Yes, the blood had defiantly returned to her face because a blush was creeping up her neck and covering her cheeks. “Yes, I am fine… now.” she glances down at the pills that she had spilled onto her desk. “But I think I might need to go visit the nurse first. Well, if that is alright with you, Mr. Varner,” she says in her sweetest voice, trying to brush off the aftershock of her anxiety attack.
He nods quickly in agreement. “Yes, yes. You should go see the nurse immediately. I will go write you a pass so you can take your time getting there.” He rushes off to his desk and pulls out a pad of paper for passes and a pen. While he’s writing down the pass for the nurse’s office, Ellie puts the top back on her pill bottle and puts it back into her purse. She stands up and puts her bag on her shoulder, scooping the pills left on her desk and holding them in her hand. Ellie walks up to the trash can at the front of the room and dumps the pills in it, not wanting to keep them because she has no idea what kind of germs are on the desk. Thinking of this, she pulls out her small bottle of hand sanitizer to clean her hands.
Mr. Varner walks over with the pink pass in his hand. He had written which student the pass for, checked where the student was allowed to go, and wrote down an explanation for the nurse incase Ellie wouldn’t be able to tell her. Ellie takes the note and thanks Mr. Varner before making a beeline through the other students for the doorway. Once outside of the classroom, Ellie lets out a long groan and glances around to see that there wasn’t anyone else in the second story hallway of building D.
Holding the crystal necklace even tighter than she had before, Ellie makes her way out of the building only to run straight into the green eyed boy that seemed to have disappeared from the classroom before her anxiety attack was over. Startled, Ellie takes a few steps back and looks at the boy somewhat with something that is almost fear but not quite. He smiles at her, or more specifically, her hand.
“I see you are still wearing the necklace,” says a deep, enchanting voice from between two perfect lips on the pale face in front of her. A quizzical look crosses her face.
“Wh-who are you??” she demands. Now the boy looks confused.
“You don’t remember me? Oh my, it was worse than I had though.” Ellie’s eyebrows knit together, confusion clouding her features. “Well for starters, my name is Justin. I am your best friend.; always have been; always will be,” he says with a wink.
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