I point at the ring. “That’s ugly. You should take it out.”

Ellie touches her nose. I want to touch her nose. But I can’t.

I don’t like touching people.

But I want to touch her.

Ellie didn’t call me any more names. She turns around so I can’t look at her face anymore.

Her hair is all over my desk again. It upsets me.

I push it off with my pencil and then start to draw. I had been reading a book about the history of the Eiffel Tower last night. I can draw things after seeing them.

I would count the lines. I would measure the spaces. And then I would draw it.

I could draw anything.

I am drawing now. I will draw something for Ellie.

Maybe then she will be my friend.

When she is nice, I’ll give it to her.

I wait for her to look at me again so I can give it to her.

I keep the drawing.

“Freaky, Freaky Flynn!”

That’s what everyone calls me now. I know it is bad name. They say it before they do something that makes me angry.

The boy with the big nose is the worst. And the girl with the black hair that Ellie talks to a lot.

They took my notebook after school yesterday. They took my pictures of the Eiffel Tower and tore them up.

I yelled. I threw rocks at them. They laughed.

My mom had screamed at them when she came to take me home.

I had cried and Mom had tried to hug me.

I hit her.

Then she cried and I knew I had hurt her. She told me I shouldn’t do that. That I should talk about what makes me mad.

I didn’t say anything.

But I still liked looking at Ellie.

She had a pretty smile when she laughed. She liked to laugh when I yelled.

She laughed a lot.

The teacher tells me to work with Ellie for a paper in class.

Her hair is purple again. I like it more than the blue. But I still hate it.

“Why is your hair purple now?” I ask her.

“Why are you so weird?” she asks me.

“I’m not weird,” I said back.

“You’re a freak,” she said.

I don’t like that word. Freak. It makes me so mad I want to break my pencil.

I throw my book on the floor and start rubbing my hands. Fingers smoothing down over the back of my hand.

Up and down.

Over and over again.

Ellie looks at me and I can see her eyes are brown. Like my bedroom in Massachusetts.

I look down at my hands. I keep rubbing them. I don’t like to be looked at.

“Why do you do that?” she asks.

Up and down.

Over and over again.

“Why do you rub your hands?” she asks.

I don’t answer her. I rub harder.

Ellie picks up my notebook.

“Give that back!” I tell her. She ignores me.

“Did you draw these?” she asks, pointing to the picture of the Parthenon I had done a few minutes ago.

I stop rubbing my hands and take my notebook back. I don’t touch her.

I want to touch her.

I couldn’t.

“Yes,” I said, closing it.

“They’re really good,” she said. Her mouth stretching and doing something strange. It looks like a smile but not the one she usually wears. Not the one I see when I was yelling.

“What’s wrong with your face?” I ask her.

Ellie’s mouth stops stretching.

“You are such an ass**le,” she said.

The teacher comes around then and Ellie asks to be move to another group.

I’ll give her a picture another day.

7

-Ellie-

Living in a small town really sucked sometimes. Well, most of the time, but some days were worse than others.

Particularly when you were trying to avoid someone.

Flynn was everywhere and nowhere.

I’d see him in places I hadn’t expected him to be but he’d never show himself when I was actually looking.

I could admit I was becoming slightly obsessed with knowing where he was and what he was doing.

I couldn’t sort out in my f**ked up head why I was so fixated on him. My emotions were a jumbled mess. I resented Flynn Hendrick reappearing in the small, dreary world I inhabited as though he had a right to be there.

But his appearance did one thing. It snapped me out of my self-pitying funk.

So I returned to my English class. Professor Smith seemed surprised when I returned for the Thursday morning class but he didn’t bring up my abrupt and angry exit earlier in the week. Casey, Davis, and Andrew gave me shaky smiles but made sure to sit several desks away from me.

I tried to ignore the sideways glances I was given by the other students and I gloried in a small sense of accomplishment when I was able to swallow my angry retorts and not tell them to take a picture because it lasted longer.

I buried my nose in the textbook and lost myself in the dark, depressing world of Edgar Allen Poe. And I actually became excited when we were given our first essay topic on the use of fear in Poe’s short stories.

I found myself sitting in the library after class, reading through my assignment, writing notes in the margins. For the first time I felt like perhaps, just maybe, I could do this.

“How’s the class going?” the short, stocky woman with the flower print shirt and socks up to her knees asked as she sat across from me a week later.

I was sitting in Wellsburg’s only excuse for a coffee shop. And that was giving it a lot of credit. In reality, Darla’s Drink and Dine was a collection of four tables pushed into the corner of a thrift shop.