Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [50]
I’m not saying I want to run around hugging everyone or skipping through fields of flowers, but the hard knot of anger—the one that’s lived and breathed across and around my heart—has loosened.
And so my first glimpse of Eli’s classmates doesn’t make me want to find large rocks and hurl them at their heads, even though I see them eyeing me and writing me off, able to spot my cheap jeans and not-faded-on-purpose shirt for what they are, where they show I’m from.
Eli hasn’t written me off. Eli wants me here.
Although, once we’re in the cafeteria, he doesn’t really look like he wants to be here. He doesn’t look upset, exactly, and his fingers aren’t twitching, but he looks—he looks like he’s holding everything inside himself very still. Like he’s willing himself to be calm.
The problem is, it shows. I can see it, in how the fluid grace of his walk is slowed down, stiffened, and in how he keeps looking around. Like he can stop his fingers, but he keeps expecting people to see him doing something they don’t want to see anyway.
And then I notice something else. No one talks to him. We’ve passed by at least twenty guys in their white shirts and khaki pants and acne constellations ranging from a few stars to entire galaxies, and no one has said anything.
Even I get “Hey,” at school from people I see in my classes, girls who used to call me “friend” and hang around the house, hoping to talk to Tess until before she went off to college and I drew into myself.
Eli gets nothing, and as we wait in line for food that looks better than anything I’ve ever seen in Ferrisville High’s cafeteria or, frankly, anywhere, I notice that everyone acts as if he isn’t even there.
We get our food—and we don’t even have to pay, I guess it’s part of the tuition—and walk back into the main part of the cafeteria.
It’s gorgeous, all windows and light and I think there’s even soothing music piped in. It’s like a museum or something—at least until you see that everyone is eating normally, the guys furiously shoveling in food just like they do in my school.
It’s not that I was feeling like I didn’t belong, exactly, but a reminder that guys are guys, even if you give them tablecloths, is a pretty welcome one.
I wait for Eli to make a move to sit down somewhere, but he’s just standing there, holding his plate so tightly his fingertips are white with strain, the tips tapping against the bottom over and over.
“Excuse me,” a guy says, all sneer, and shoves past me, heading toward a table.
“You might as well leave,” he says to Eli as he passes him. “Last thing anyone wants to see is you doing your twitch thing while we’re trying to eat. Bad enough having to watch it in class.”
Ass. I shift, like I’m turning, and “accidentally” catch my elbow on the guy’s plate, sending everything on it flying into him.
“Great, you found a friend as fucked up as you,” the guy says, scowling, and then adds, “Retard,” in my direction.
I’m ready to match his belligerence head-on, because I don’t like how he talked to Eli, to me, but Eli’s face has gone from fake calm to a kind of barely controlled rage/sorrow, and it’s the sorrow that gets to me. Stops me.
Rage I can handle. Bring it on, slam it into the big ball of anger that fills me up. I can take that. I understand it.
But sorrow—that I have no defense against. Part of why I hated Jack so much the night I realized he was never going to love me was that he really and truly was sorry. He could have kept screwing me and trying to get Tess to notice him, but he didn’t want to hurt me.
And that’s what broke my heart. Like Tess lying silent in her hospital bed, like the way my parents looked as they stared at the few, slight boxes of her things, the very stillness of sorrow, the soul-deep endlessness of it—it scares me. There is nothing I can do to push it back, to keep it away.
Anger can try to break your heart, but sorrow is what will. What can. What does.
I don’t know what to do, though. I don’t know how to fix things—Tess’s continued stillness is proof of that. I don’t know how to make everything all right.
But