✶nini✶

slowly, she got better. it took time and it took you telling her, once, that the silence made your brain do things. once she did, her messages became unbearably tender. tiny updates throughout the day, pictures of things that reminded her of you, half-finished thoughts sent at three in the morning because she suddenly missed you too much to stay quiet about it.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie treats facetime like the sacred thing it is. there are loose scheduled times that you two try to keep but honestly it just happens whenever it happens. she'll be deep in research at midnight, papers spread everywhere, and you'll call because you just got off your shift and she'll always answer immediately, without hesitation. sometimes you two talk for hours. sometimes you two just exist together on screen. her at her desk, you wherever you are, neither of you saying much. just there, present. it's more than enough.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has fallen asleep during your calls more than once and this embarrasses her deeply. you have a collection of pictures and screenshots, evidence of her sleeping like a log. one of them has her drooling slightly on her notes. the irony is, you're statistically the more frequent offender; you've fallen asleep on call more times than either of you can count, but ellie's cases are documented and that's what matters. she has pretended, every single time, that it didn't happen. you have let her have this because you sense her embarrassment.

͙͘͡★ will watch you do your skincare routine with her chin in her hand and not say a single word. you prop your phone up against the mirror and just talk, rambling about your day, about your students, about whatever is happening in your busy head at eleven pm. she listens and watches carefully every single time. something about the domesticity of it does something to her that she couldn't name even if she tried.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who sometimes plays guitar on call because you ask her. at first, she refused but you asked again and then asked again after that. she caved eventually and now it's a thing. her, her guitar in her lap, her phone propped somewhere nearby, playing quietly while you listen. if she's feeling particularly daring she'll even sing a little, just a bit. she acts embarrassed every time, but she's not that embarrassed anymore. she loves it and she loves that you love it.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who secretly saves every photo you send her, every single one. selfies, coffee pictures, random screenshots, your classroom decorations, your dog, your lunch. it doesn’t matter. her camera roll is basically just evidence that she’s deeply in love with you.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie never gets used to missing you, but also never stops feeling grateful that she gets to. missing you means that she gets to love you and to her that’s worth every ache.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie struggles with the distance more than you do, even if she doesn’t always know how to say it. she isn’t clingy exactly, but she needs and craves closeness. she just feels the distance differently than you do. you miss her terribly but you can hold yourself together with words, the connection sustains you as long as it's there.

ellie needs the words and the physical. she doesn't need much, she just needs something. kissing your temple while passing behind you in the kitchen, feeling your fingers play with the baby hairs at the back of her neck, you, specifically, scratching slow circles between her shoulder blades... she especially misses all the tiny unconscious intimacy.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who genuinely cannot believe she’s dating you, like actually. sometimes she’ll just look at you and think what the fuck. the prettiest girl she’s ever seen is talking to her... willingly. that's crazy.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets sent a lot of pictures per week of your newest coffee creations. little foam flowers, hearts, leaves... one time, somehow, an actual swan. most of these look a little curious but that's okay.

ellie 🦕

oh i know that coffee is fire

you

you don’t even like coffee so how would you know...

ellie 🦕

the barista is gay as hell so i know actually

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie especially loves when your hands are visible in the photos you send her. when she can see your rings, the chipped red nail polish, the little ink stains you get from correcting papers. sometimes there’s glitter stuck to the side of your hand from classroom crafts or faint marker smudges near your wrist. all these tiny traces of your life she’s grown so painfully fond of. tiny fragments of a life she wishes she was standing inside of instead of only witnessing through pictures on her phone.

she stares at those pictures longer than she means to because she misses your hands terribly. misses the feeling of them in her hair, your fingers softly tracing shapes against her arm while talking or the outline of her tattoo, misses holding your hand while walking somewhere with no rush to get there.

sometimes she catches herself staring at a picture and thinking how badly she wants to hold your hands again. not even for long, just once.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie thinks you’re beautiful in a way that actually disorients her a little. especially because you’re not just hot — you’re sweet. she does think that you’re the hottest person alive but also the sweetest. and somehow the combination completely ruins her. because okay yeah your tits are incredible but you also remember little things she says in passing and send her voice notes when you walk home and talk about your kids so lovingly and suddenly she’s sitting there like damn... i’m doomed.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who sends you bouquets of flowers quite frequently. she found a flower shop near your house and even though they didn't do house deliveries, she got them to do it somehow. the florist on the other end of that call was charmed within thirty seconds when ellie first called and agreed to deliver a bouquet to your house.

it started because you had a terrible week. like genuinely awful — double shift at the café, a difficult class, one of your kids was having a hard time and it was breaking your heart, and you mentioned it to ellie scattered across three different conversations that she was paying close attention to even when she didn't say much.

the flowers arrived next day. you just got home from your classes when your mom called you to the door and there it was, a bouquet of pink flowers with a little card.

"you're doing really good. i mean it. - e"

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie after that, it becomes a thing, though not on a schedule. it just happens when it happens, which somehow makes it more devastating each time because you never see it coming. tucked between the stems there’s always a tiny little note. in it it's not her handwriting, but definitely her words.

"obviously. you studied for two weeks straight. - e"

“i kissed you in my thoughts did you felt it... -e"

"that bus driver will go to hell. -e"

"i beleaf in you -e"

“for my favorite teacher ♡ -e"

"you're worth every mile between us. -e"

“sometimes i think the universe made you specifically for me. like okay. pretty girl who smells like coffee and oranges and kisses me softly. alright man. - e”

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie once opened tiktok late at night and got one of those tarot readings that are now flooding her fyp thanks to you. the woman in the video was saying something like "YOUR PERSON IS A STUBBORN FIRE SIGN WHO MISSES YOU EVERY NIGHT. YOU WILL BE SOON TOGETHER ONCE AGAIN." she was already prepared to scroll past it but she opened the comments and noticed your profile picture in the comments, dead serious:

"i claim this energy ✨🧿"

she laughed so hard she had to put her phone down for a second. still, she found the whole thing weirdly endearing... it was just so painfully you. romantic and earnest without embarrassment. you love things wholeheartedly and openly in a way ellie still still isn't fully used to.

okay, maybe the universe is speaking directly to her girlfriend through tiktok tarot readings. WHO is she to judge.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie teases you relentlessly for your tarot habits but also listens with complete seriousness whenever you start explaining them. she'll sit there nodding while you talk about crystals and energies and card pulls like you're presenting groundbreaking scientific research.

sometimes, she'll pretend to be skeptical just to hear you defend it harder. she even lets you do readings for her and acts deeply unimpressed about it. "this is bullshit.... okay, pull another card though."

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is incapable of saying goodnight first, you've noticed. no matter how tired she is, no matter what time it is, ellie will not be the one to end the conversation. you have to do it every single time, and even then she always sends one more thing after just in case.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie misses your country’s summers so much it physically pains her, even though she spent the entire time complaining. she genuinely hated it. your room had no AC, only that loud ass fan that sounded like a plane preparing for takeoff and barely helped at all. secretly, she loved feeling your skin warm and sticky against hers. both of you were always too overheated to fully cuddle but still found a way to touch each other somehow; a leg thrown over hers, your fingers sleepily scratching her stomach, her face tucked into your chest at 3am while the fan rattled violently in the background...

she complained about it and yet, she would give anything to be back in your bedroom right now. she misses those horrible sweaty nights more than she can explain once she’s back in jackson.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie randomly sends you songs, and you do the same. it's like another form of communication at this point.

ellie’s are usually late night sends with absolutely zero context. just a link, no caption. just the song and the implication that she heard something and thought of you or thought of herself or thought of the two of you and couldn't not send it.

you send her songs too, even though your music taste is a tad different than hers. she listens to every single song carefully because a song you love is information about you and she wants all the information about you she can get.

your contributions to this arrangement include playlists with titles like songs to kiss me to when you see me again and, inexplicably (or not so inexplicably if she thinks about it), multiple tracks from the shrek soundtrack.

you

this is the greatest song of all time

ellie 🦕

disespectfully i disagree

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie cannot, under any circumstances, maintain a single linear conversation and neither can you. this is a ongoing issue. you will be mid-sentence about something important and one of you will say something that reminds the other of something completely unrelated and suddenly you're three topics deep with no map back. many important conversations have been lost this way. every discussion becomes like ten different discussions stitched together badly.

the solution you implemented, after one too many "wait what were we talking about" moments was the parentheses system because otherwise neither of you would ever finish a story.

you say parentheses out loud and whatever comes after is a detour. you're allowed to go as far off road as you want but when you close the parentheses, you go back, no exceptions. and it works! you actually finish conversations now... occasionally.

both of you say the word “parentheses” out loud constantly because both your brains work at the speed of light apparently.

“PARENTHESES. did i tell you dina and jesse are dating again?"

“okay so my professor said— wait, parentheses. remind me to tell you what happened at the café afterwards.”

of course, you forget to close the parentheses half the time anyway. you absolutely enable each other’s tangents too, neither of you are helping the situation AT ALL.

͙͘͡★ the issue now is nested parentheses, which happen constantly and were not accounted for in the original system design.

"so the kid did the funniest thing— PARENTHESES this reminds me of what you said about the museum tours— PARENTHESES wait that also reminds me of— okay i have THREE parentheses open right now."

"well, close them in order?"

"i don't remember what order i opened them in."

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie actually loves listening to your brain jump around topics though. loves seeing how excited you get when you remember something halfway through another sentence. she thinks it’s very cute!

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets sent approximately eight hundred tiktoks per day. genuinely an alarming amount considering you are both busy adults... you send her tiktoks like you're being PAID per video sent. ellie wakes up to at least five notifications minimum on a slow day. she's completely baffled by it, but she still watches every single one, always.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie on the other hand, is an instagram reels person and this is genuinely incomprehensible to you. you receive reels from ellie that were funny approximately four to six months ago. memes that have been dead and buried and mourned.

you

ellie. this meme is from february

ellie 🦕

okay? it's funny

you

it was funny... in FEBRUARY

ellie 🦕

it was funny in february and it's still funny now

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie who receives a good morning texts from you every single day, without fail. even if it's just "gm <3" at 6am while half asleep. ellie wakes up to them and her whole morning is different.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie quietly opens her camera roll and just looks at your pictures for a while when the missing gets particularly bad. she always avoided cameras, even before meeting you. always turned her face away or groaned whenever someone pulled out a phone, but now she wishes she had documented every ordinary little moment that felt infinite at the time. she regrets not taking more pictures so much.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is a composed person... generally. she acts all cocky over text until you tell her “i’ll send you something later” and suddenly she’s typing like her hands are vibrating because they, in fact, are. her body just responds before her brain can do anything about it. she genuinely shakes in excitement when she knows you’re about to send boobs or ass, like a damn chihuahua. pacing around her room and checking her phone every four seconds.

you figured out very early that you have an extraordinary amount of power in this specific situation and you use it responsibly (well... no.)

ellie 🦕

i was in a meeting????

you

i know 😚

ellie 🦕

ok so you did that on purpose

you

it was on purpose yes

ellie 🦕

i hate you

you

booo you don't

ellie 🦕

were you actually thinking about me or

you

literally yes. i'm thinking about you alllll the time <33

ellie 🦕

okay

i don't have another meeting until 3

you

LMFAOOO

ellie 🦕

what

you

nothing nothing 😇

you're so cute i can't stand it

ellie 🦕

i'm not cute

so about that 3pm window

you

yes els

yes okay 😭

ellie 🦕

cool cool cool

i mean

good

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie literally gets hit with longing at the the most mundane moments that have no business making her feel like this. like, when she's doing the dishes, or when she hears a song you love, or when she wakes up from naps and reaches for you before remembering... just yearning and daydreaming all day long.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a moment, just a few months in, where she genuinely cannot see how this works long term and it terrifies her. she almost texts you about it at 2am. instead, she stared at the ceiling for an hour and then send "i really like you" completely unprompted. you answer immediately "i really like you too ILOVEYOUUUU <3333 go to sleep. long day tomorrow"

and the crisis passes, just like that.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie owns an “i ♡ my girlfriend” pin. it’s clipped onto her backpack right beside the one joel got her for her birthday a few years ago. she looks super proud every time someone points it out and will talk about her awesome girlfriend—you, of course. it has never been removed and it will never be removed. it will be on that backpack until the backpack disintegrates.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets a summer position doing guided tours for children at her local natural history museum. this is objectively perfect for her and also a disaster because ellie is great at information but not so great at children, or so she claims. she called you in a quiet panic on her second day.

"there's so many of them and they won't stop moving and one of them just licked a bone?"

obviously, you immediately appoint yourself as ellie's unofficial child-wrangling consultant. you had been handling this exact category of chaos for some time now, so you gave her the tips you'd collected the hard way. the advice starts coming in unprompted, but ellie listens to all of it and takes notes.

"okay, if a kid won't stop touching the display, what you do is give them a job. tell them they're the official display guardian. suddenly it's their responsibility to protect it."

ellie tries this the next day, and it miraculously works.

͙͘͡★ so, this becomes a thing. ellie encounters a child situation, texts you, you provide a strategy, ellie implements it, and it works most of the time, so she ends up using your techniques constantly.

“okay guys, if you can hear me clap once!” and suddenly twenty children are listening to her. holy shit. witchcraft? maybe.

ellie starts looking forward to having problems just so she can ask you about them.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie by the end of the summer is genuinely good with the kids on her tours. like actually really good. she crouches down to their level and speaks to them like small intelligent people and gets them excited about bones and fossils they did not care about in the first place.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a contact photo of you that you hate with your whole entire heart. it was taken during autumn. you're sitting on a park bench, mikey in your arms, laughing at something off camera — something she said, probably, though neither of you can remember what. you were not aware that she was taking a picture; your hair is messy from the wind and your mouth is wide open mid-laugh, your nose scrunched the way it does when you laugh. mikey is looking at the camera with his whole little face.

you've asked her to change it an ungodly number of times but ellie genuinely loves that picture so much that her eyes go a little watery when she looks at it for a long time.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is not a words of affirmation person in general EXCEPT with you over long distance. because she can't touch you or show up the way she wants, so she has to say it. and every time she does, you stores her words up like treasure.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is not sending nudes. this is a non-negotiable that she established early and has maintained with great conviction. she's glad that you respect that completely and never make her feel weird about it.

you, on the other hand, have no such convictions. you send her nudes like you're sending a good morning text. she receives these and has to take a minute because holy fuck? she loves receiving them, loves them BAD. but sending things back? uh, that's an horrifying concept. she just doesn’t feel fully comfortable with it at first, not because she doesn’t trust you —she trusts you completely— she’s just awkward and weirdly shy about it.

the first time ellie sent something, it was completely unannounced. just a mirror picture of her in her sports bra after coming back from the gym.

she slowly starts getting more confident over time, little by little. at first it’s just mirror selfies in sports bras. then maybe the waistband of her boxers peeking out low on her hips, maybe a blurry picture of her stomach while she’s laying in bed... she always sends what she's comfortable with and nothing more, so, her face isn't showing in most of these pictures.

the no face rule is also firm and you think it's actually really cute.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie spends like twenty minutes deciding whether or not to send a picture only for it to be the tamest thing you’ve ever received in your life, but to her it feels insanely vulnerable. she gets embarrassingly proud of herself afterwards too, trying to act all casual while clearly waiting for praise.

ellie 🦕

so

was that like. cool or whatever.

you

i almost passed out in the middle of the grocery store

ellie 🦕

okay relax

you

NO because why are you casually sending me stomach like that ??? happy pride to ME !!!!

need you so bad phone sex isn’t enough anymore actually i’m being serious

and then you said the most explicit shit she ever read.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie gets so flustered when you’re explicit because she never expects it despite the fact that you have literally been dating for ages. you’ll say the most insane out of pocket thing imaginable and she’ll just stare at her phone blinking slowly with her cheeks burning bright red. she secretly loves knowing she can affect you like that, loves when you lose your mind over the smallest things she sends. she still genuinely can’t believe you want her that much.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie is, however, extremely and immediately down for phone sex every single time. her consistency is actually remarkable... this is not something she needs convincing about AT ALL. she's down for it literally every time, there is no situation where she’s turning down phone sex. you could text “u busy" and she’s already plugging her headphones in. the contrast between "will not send a single picture" and "phone call? yes. right now? yes." is something you find both hilarious and incredibly her.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a name for you when you're grumpy. it started because you called her once when you were in a sour mood that had no single cause, just the accumulation of a long day. she listened to you rant for minutes before saying, very calmly:

"okay, miss trunchbull."

you got grumpier immediately, which made her laugh. and you cannot stay grumpy through that laugh, you've tried, and it's physically impossible, but you were determined that day so you stayed grumpy a little while through sheer force of will before it cracked you open.

so, she calls you miss trunchbull just when you're grumpy because it makes you grumpier first and then not grumpy at all. it's the most efficient method of fixing your mood and she uses it without shame.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie almost cried tears of joy when your old phone finally died. not because she hated it or anything — she had defended that thing for months actually. “it’s still working” she’d say every time you complained about storage or battery life or the camera quality resembling active surveillance footage. it served you well. it was a good phone. she harbors no ill will toward it whatsoever.

but the second you texted her my phone finally gave up she sat up so fast because okay, that meant you were getting a new one… a better one. with a better camera, probably. which meant she got to see you in HIGH DEFINITION.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie was genuinely stunned into silence for a second the first facetime call after you got the new phone. because suddenly there you were, her girl. all pretty and alive looking on her screen. your face clear and detailed in a way she hadn't seen in months. she could see the exact shade of your eyes, the little moves your eyebrows made while talking, the texture of your lip gloss. the tiny beauty mark in your face that she used to kiss all the time.

her eyes went embarrassingly wet.

obviously, she became immediately unbearable afterwards.

“wait hold on move closer.”

“lemme see your makeup.”

“baby your skin looks crazy good on this thing, what the fuck?"

“wait, smile again”

“okay now turn your head to the side please— wait, you got a new piercing?"

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie did not come pre-assembled for this relationship. opening up —about feelings, mostly— did not come naturally to her. it took time, an embarrassing amount of time, by her own private admission.

joel miller raised her, so one can do the math.

early on she'd go quiet when something was wrong and you'd be on the other side of it not knowing what you'd done or what she needed. more than once you asked are you okay and got yeah and had to decide whether to believe it or not. sometimes you pushed gently and sometimes you waited, but you got good at reading the difference.

she's quite good at it now. not perfect, and she's probably never going to be perfect, but now she'll tell you when something's wrong and she'll tell you what she needs and she'll say it was a bad day and instead of just not saying it and hoping you somehow know.

you think it's one of the bravest things about her, and you love her a little more for that.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie thinks loving you feels a little like adding honey to bitter things. the bad parts don’t disappear completely, but somehow they become easier to swallow.

you are, very literally, the sweetness of her life.

since you got into her life, her days started feeling softer around the edges simply because you were in them. she notices it especially on bad days, because even when everything feels exhausting and frustrating, there’s still this quiet thought in the back of her mind:

i can call her later.

and somehow, that makes everything feel a little more survivable.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie doesn't talk about you much with joel. not because she doesn't want to, it's just kind of weird, so she keeps it brief. like, she mentions you occasionally. "she's good" when he asks about you. "yeah, we're good" when he asks how's everything between you two. joel doesn't push much and she's thankful for that. still, somehow, he ends up knowing plenty about you anyway through little things she mentions.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie whose lockscreen is a strip of those vintage photobooth pictures with three frames.

in the first, the two of you are side by side, just looking at the camera, her arm around your shoulder

in the second frame, you've turned toward her, one of your hands grabbing her face with absolutely zero gentleness, and you're kissing her cheek so hard she has her eyes closed. her expression is somewhere between laughing and suffering, even though she was delighted.

in the third one you're sitting in her lap and you're kissing her properly.

she’s changed phones twice and somehow the lockscreen always stays the same. she's never changed and never will because you look so pretty in it. she's told you this more than once and she's not saying it to be nice, she's saying it because it's just true.

once she admitted very quietly that she likes it so much because it captured you exactly as she remembers you, just loud and sweet and all over her in the most loving way possible.

“i dunno,” she shrugged afterwards, all awkward about the vulnerability. “you just look really happy with me in them. i like it.”

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie sends you a picture immediately every single time she sees hello kitty and spiderman together anywhere. doesn’t matter where she is. random stores, at the shopping, on gas stations, when she's doing her groceries... you best believe she’ll stop dead in the aisle to take a picture.

ellie 🦕

thought you should know we’re apparently luggage now?

ellie 🦕

you and me

ellie 🦕

i got these two. they reminded me of us

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie stole your hello kitty plushie before leaving. technically, you let her borrow it while she stayed in your place, but one day she left with it tucked under her arm and never gave it back.

in her defense, she fully intended to tell you before leaving. then she forgot. she got back to jackson and unpacked and there it was, sitting in her lap looking guilty as hell. you discovered the theft like four days later.

you

ellie. WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?

turns out, she underestimated how emotionally attached you were to that thing. she should've known, of course, since it was very obviously beloved. poor thing looked like it had survived several wars. one eye missing, fur all faded and discolored, stuffing slightly lumpy from years of being held too much. maybe that’s part of why she loved it immediately.

eventually, after a long dramatic exchange where you accused her of kidnapping and demanded visitation rights that she had to pay, you relented.

you

okay okay okay… you can keep her

take care of my daughter please ☹️

now it sits on her bed in jackson like it belongs there. she uses it as a pillow sometimes, mostly when the missing you thing gets particularly bad. not because it’s comfortable but because it smells like you. like coffee, your shampoo, and that sweet clean scent that clings to your sheets. every time the smell faded a little more she genuinely felt devastated.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie cannot peel an orange without getting nostalgic.

it’s genuinely baffling to her how specific the memory is, too. every time she peels one, the memory just hits her. the juice on your fingers, the smell sharp and sweet in the warm air.

it's this really specific memory: the two of you sitting outside in the sun, eating oranges like two elderly people with nowhere to be and nothing to do. you beside her, handing her a piece before she asked.

you’d peel them together and leave little piles of orange skins between you while talking about absolutely nothing.

it was genuinely nothing. no special occasion, no milestone. just a random afternoon in your backyard eating oranges in the sun because you insisted you needed “vitamin D and enrichment,” so you dragged ellie outside with a bowl of oranges.

she'd been so hot that day, she remembers. she'd also been so happy, but she hadn't said that part out loud.

every time she peels one, she immediately gets hit with this horrible ache in her chest because suddenly she could practically hear your voice again in her ear.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie has a locket with a tiny photo of you inside it.

you both do. they're small matching ones in silver, heart shaped and worn from constant use — your idea, which she called cheesy and agreed to in the same breath.

inside hers there’s a tiny picture of you on one side and a picture of the two of you together on the other. inside yours, the same. just ellie where you were. the photos are cut unevenly because you were laughing too hard while trying to trim them with tiny scissors.

she touches it constantly without realizing.

when she’s stressed, her fingers drift there automatically. when she’s tired. when she’s thinking. when she misses you. she’ll rub her thumb over the edge of it absentmindedly over it.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie knows the distance is hard and ugly sometimes. there are nights where missing you sits so heavy in her chest she genuinely doesn’t know what to do with herself besides call you and listen to you breathe for a while. there are days where the time difference frustrates her so badly she has to put her phone down and walk around the block before she starts feeling too miserable about it.

but still, underneath all of that there’s certainty. quiet certainty, but certainty anyway.

it won’t be like this forever.

maybe she’ll come back to you, or maybe you’ll come to her. maybe it’ll take longer than either of you want, but it will happen because she’s sure of it, like the way she’s sure the sun rises every morning in the east. it's not blind optimism, just faith. in you and in what this became. faith in the fact that loving you has rooted itself too deeply into her life to ever become temporary

she doesn't know when it will happen and she's made peace with it, mostly. the logistics are complicated, after all. visas, flights, money, schedules and a thousand more small bureaucratic obstacles that stand between two people who just want to be in the same room again.

she knows all of them by heart. she's been working through them one by one, but she doesn't talk about it much. doesn't say i've been researching flights or i asked about visa requirements again or i've been putting money aside every month since i got back. she just does it without fanfare.

you know, anyway. you can tell by the way she says when instead of if. always when. from the very beginning, it has always been when.

when i visit.

when you come to jackson.

when we're in the same place again.

when i see you again.

when, when, when.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie works so hard for it too. probably harder than you realize. taking extra shifts at the museum and saving money whenever she can, researching programs for once she graduates and jobs late at night when she should be sleeping.

she's building a bridge back to you, piece by piece. slowly but surely.

͙͘͡★ bittersweet!ellie once told you, after one particularly difficult night apart:

“i don’t know exactly how yet. but i know i’ll find my way back to you.”

and she meant it with her whole heart.

───────── ⋆ ˖ ─────────

⋆｡° ⋆ ˖ a/n:

honey-sick because... homesick. but honey. because she misses you and you’re the sweetness of her life. get it... 😚 maybe it sounded better in my head BUT WHATEVER. maybe i’ll rename this part later hehe

this was originally written as a little extra or as companion piece for my one shot bittersweet, but honestly i think it can be read as a standalone too. it’s basically just ellie and reader being painfully in love across several time zones and trying to survive it <3 also this is my first time writing in this format so i genuinely have no idea if i did this correctly LMFAOOOO but i had so much fun writing it. these two mean everything to me actually. like genuinely i think about them all the time

i wrote this in one sitting and didn't proofread it so the tenses are probably all over the place i’m SO sorry i’ll probably fix them later. or not..

anyway thank you so much for reading ♡ and if you have any requests or thoughts about these two PLEASEEE send them my way because i will take literally any excuse to write more of them 😚 mwah

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐗 :

𝑂𝑁𝐸 •

That was the only way to make sense of it — the way the afternoon light came through the high windows at just the right angle, just the right moment, and found you like it had been searching. Like it had crossed ninety-three million miles of empty, freezing, indifferent space with one singular destination in mind, and that destination was you. It poured into your hair like liquid gold being tipped from a jug, pooled at your shoulders like it was reluctant to go any further, gilded the edges of you until you were less a girl eating lunch and more a Renaissance painting that had gotten up, gotten dressed, and decided to haunt a school cafeteria for reasons of its own.

The noise, the chaos, the aggressive institutional ugliness of the room itself — none of it touched you. It broke around you the way water broke around a stone. You had your own atmosphere. A separate, sovereign one, with a pressure system all its own and weather that Ellie had never once been able to predict.

You were talking to your friends, gesturing at something with one hand — laughing, maybe, it was hard to tell from here, which was a tragedy that Ellie felt in her actual ribcage — and even the gesture was a small catastrophe, a grenade with the pin pulled, because you moved like punctuation. Like every motion was a sentence that knew exactly where it was going. Even a wave of your hand was a complete thought.

"Ellie."

The rest of the room had become scenery, a painted backdrop, a film set that existed purely as context for you, and the light kept doing what it was doing and you kept being what you were, this impossible, incandescent, gravity-bending —

"Ellie."

— thing, this force, because that's what it was, that's the only word that fit, a force, the kind that couldn't be reasoned with or negotiated with or looked at directly for too long without something in Ellie's chest doing something embarrassing and structural, like a building developing cracks along its foundational walls, and she was aware, distantly, the way you're aware of weather through a closed window, that she was staring, that she had been staring, that staring was an understatement for what she was doing, which was closer to orbiting, helplessly, uselessly, like a satellite that had long since run out of fuel but kept going anyway because gravity didn't care about her situation —

"ELLIE."

The world detonated back into existence.

"What —" She startled so violently she nearly launched her lunch tray off the table like a trebuchet, one hand slamming down on it a half second before disaster, her elbow catching the edge of her drink hard enough to send it rocking, and a fork went skidding off the edge and clattered across the linoleum with the specific kind of loud that made three nearby tables look over at once. "Jesus — Greg —"

Greg was watching her with the serene, comfortable expression of a man sitting in a lawn chair watching someone else's house burn down. He had his chin propped in his palm, his lunch sitting half-eaten in front of him, and he radiated the energy of someone who had been attempting this intervention for a deeply unreasonable amount of time and had made his peace with the wait.

"You were gone," he said. Not accusatory. Almost impressed. "Like, not just checked out. Like, evacuated. I was one minute away from checking you for a pulse."

"I was thinking," Ellie said, and she said it with the dignity of a person who had not just nearly catapulted a fork across a public space.

"Yeah." Greg's gaze drifted, slow and inevitable as a tide going out, over Ellie's shoulder. She knew the trajectory. She watched it arrive at its destination. She watched his face conduct a rapid and unflattering series of calculations. "About her."

Ellie did not turn around. She retrieved her fork from the floor, set it back on the tray with surgical precision, and took a long, unhurried drink of water. Buying time. Building a wall out of nothing.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ellie. I could trace your eyeline with a ruler."

"I was zoning out. It happens."

"In the exact direction —"

"Greg."

"— of the girl who is, conservatively, so far out of your league that the concept of a league is no longer a useful framework —"

"Greg."

"— like we're talking different sports, different continents, she is playing chess and you are, with an enormous heart and terrible odds, playing Go Fish —"

"I know," Ellie said.

And that was the end of it. The words landed flat and definitive, a period at the end of a sentence that had already been written and wasn't looking for edits. Not angry. Not wounded. Just the particular heaviness of something that had already been turned over so many times in her hands that all the sharp edges were worn smooth. She knew. She had always known. She kept the knowing in a locked box in the basement of herself and did not go down there on purpose, and on the occasions she found herself there anyway, she turned the light off and went back upstairs.

"I'm not doing anything," she said, quieter. "I'm not trying anything. I'm not an idiot."

Greg looked at her for a moment. The entertainment evaporated off his face and left something more honest behind.

"I know you're not," he said.

"Don't," she said.

He closed his mouth. He understood, which was why she kept him around.

She stood up and grabbed her tray. "Come on."

They wove through the thinning cafeteria toward the tray return, moving in the comfortable tandem of two people who had been navigating spaces together long enough to do it without thinking. Greg had pivoted to a detailed critique of the comic run Ellie had lent him last week — specifically, and incorrectly, the third act — and Ellie was in the process of constructing a rebuttal like a lawyer who had been waiting for this cross-examination, because the third act was a masterpiece and Greg's problem was not with the writing but with his own constitutional inability to sit still for a slow build, which was a character flaw she had been documenting for years and intended, eventually, to cite formally —

"Hey."

A beat.

"Loser."

Time did not stop. Ellie would not say time stopped, because that was dramatic and she was not dramatic. What she would say was that the word hit her nervous system like a match to a fuse, that her heartbeat went from baseline to a full sprint in the space between one syllable and the next, that her hands flooded with cold sweat against the lunch tray and her face became a furnace and every hair on the back of her neck stood at attention like soldiers who had been called into service and were extremely aware of it.

She didn't need to hear it twice. She didn't need context or confirmation. She knew that voice the way she knew her own name — better, maybe, in some humiliating biological sense, the way a compass needle knew north, not by choice, not by any conscious arrangement, but by something deep and structural and completely indifferent to her feelings on the matter.

She turned around.

There you were.

Three feet away, wearing an expression like a knife that had learned to look decorative. Your posse arranged behind you the way shadows arranged themselves around a light source: instinctive, inevitable, orbiting without meaning to. You were looking at Ellie with the lazy, half-lidded assessment of a cat watching something cross the floor — mildly curious, entirely unbothered, already certain of the outcome.

In your hand, held up with the casualness of someone displaying a particularly boring trophy, was a journal. Thick, soft-cornered from years of being shoved into backpacks, colonised by stickers from a collection that Ellie had been curating since she was eleven. Her name was written on the inside cover in her own handwriting.

Her brain, normally a loud and opinionated instrument, went briefly and completely silent.

"Forget something?" you asked, and your voice was warm the way a lit match was warm: pleasant right up until it wasn't.

"I —" Ellie started.

That was as far as she got.

"I," you repeated, tasting the word, turning it over in your mouth like you were deciding whether it was worth swallowing. The syllable became a scalpel in your hands. A small, precise, devastating one.

Ellie's face was a bonfire. Her brain came back online in fragments.

"Yes," she managed, and it exited her mouth at half the intended volume and twice the intended vulnerability, thin and breathless as a thread pulled too tight. "Can I — that's mine —"

She stepped forward. This was reasonable. This was rational. She was simply recovering her property; this was not a big deal; her heart was not trying to punch its way out of her chest cavity like something in an action movie.

Behind you, your friends had formed a small, murmuring parliament of cruelty. A sound drifted over — something about the jacket, probably, or the shoes, delivered in the specifically calibrated register of not-quite-quiet, the kind of cruelty that wore plausible deniability like a coat — accompanied by laughter as thin and sharp as paper and just as capable of leaving a cut.

Ellie's jaw locked. She kept her eyes on the journal.

"Sure," you said, and the word was a door being closed politely in someone's face. You pivoted the journal out of reach as naturally as breathing, as if your arm had always intended to be somewhere Ellie couldn't quite reach, and flipped it open with the air of someone settling into a very good armchair with a very good book. "Oh, this is — hm. This is interesting."

"Give it back," Ellie said, and the panic was a live wire dragged straight up her spine, white-hot and instantaneous, burning the last of the embarrassment off her clean. She stepped in with her hand out, reaching — "Now —"

You stepped back. Ellie followed. You turned, still reading, unhurried as a Sunday morning, and what unfolded next was not in any way a graceful sequence of events. It was not choreographed. It did not reflect well on anyone. It ended with Ellie's chest pressed to your back and her arms stretched forward, hands closing over yours where they held the journal, the two of you stacked together and frozen mid-reach like a sculpture depicting something its artist was still working out the title for.

The cafeteria became a distant concept.

The noise fell away like wallpaper peeling off a wall.

Ellie could feel the warmth radiating off you through two layers of fabric — could feel it the way you feel sunlight through a window, in the places it touched and the places it didn't, could feel the arrested stillness in your frame like a held breath, the sudden awareness of two bodies that had not consulted each other before arriving here, at this precise and inadvertent geography, pressed together like two notes accidentally played at the same time that turned out, improbably, to be a chord.

Her lungs had forgotten their job. Her ribs felt like they were made of glass.

And your face — she couldn't see your face, not from this angle, not with her chin nearly at your shoulder, but she could see the tip of your ear from here, and the tip of your ear was the deep, telling pink of something that had not been prepared for this either, a bloom of colour as involuntary as a confession, and Ellie filed it away in a compartment so far beneath her conscious mind that she could almost believe it didn't exist.

Almost.

"Hey."

The word fell into the moment like a stone into still water, and the ripples were immediate and violent. They jumped apart like they'd been defibrillated — Ellie backward, two full steps, landing unsteadily; you forward, spine snapping upright, shoulders squaring, the whole architecture of your expression rearranging itself in the half second it took for the situation to demand it.

Asher (your dickhead of a boyfriend) materialised like something the room had grown specifically to be inconvenient. He was leaning against the nearest table with his arms folded across his chest, a physical equation that was trying very hard to add up to something intimidating, all jaw and crossed arms and the specific energy of a person who considered his own arrival a statement. He was looking at Ellie the way you looked at something sticky on the bottom of a shoe.

"She got a problem?" he said, and the she was a dart aimed directly at Ellie's general existence, casual and contemptuous and entirely comfortable with itself.

"No," Ellie said.

It came out the way water came out of a tap. No temperature, no texture, no particular feeling about itself. She looked at him the way she looked at a blank wall — registered the surface, found it offered nothing of interest, moved on. It wasn't hostility. It was the total, undecorated absence of it: the specific brand of indifference she reserved for things and people who had not earned the dignity of her actual disdain. He blinked. He'd been expecting a different kind of reaction, the kind he could do something with, and she'd handed him a door that opened onto nothing.

She watched him recalibrate. It was not entertaining enough to be interesting.

You, meanwhile — you were not looking at him.

You were looking at Ellie, and your expression was doing something that Ellie's brain started reaching for and then abandoned, because it was shuttering closed too fast, the way curtains got drawn against the light, a smooth and practised motion that left no evidence of what had been there before it. Whatever it was, it was gone. You looked at Ellie the way you looked at a finished conversation. Then you held out the journal.

Quietly. No theatre. No ceremony.

Ellie reached out and took it.

Your fingers did not immediately let go.

One heartbeat. One single, suspended, airless beat where time seemed to hold its breath and fold itself in half — the journal floating between you in the space where both your hands met, your fingers against hers, a contact so small and accidental and fleeting it barely qualified as a thing that had technically happened.

It was the loudest thing in the room.

Then your fingers fell away like autumn, like something letting go on purpose. You turned, reached back, and looped your hand through Asher's arm with the brisk efficiency of someone closing a tab they'd had open too long. He said something; you didn't look like you were listening. You moved, and your constellation moved with you — a brief, ungainly scramble of heels and murmurs and people rearranging themselves like iron filings following a magnet — and then the cafeteria swallowed you whole, and you were gone, and the room left behind by your absence was a smaller, flatter, considerably less interesting place.

Greg appeared at Ellie's elbow like a dog who had been sitting at the door for a while.

"Hey." His voice had shed every last layer of amusement. He was watching the direction Asher had gone with an expression that had real structural integrity — the kind that was built out of something other than a passing feeling, something load-bearing. "You okay?"

Ellie looked down at the journal in her hands. Turned it over once. Pressed her thumb to the corner of the cover.

"Yeah," she said. "Fine."

She tucked it under her arm, and they walked out, and the noise of the cafeteria closed over them like water over a stone, and that was that.

Except.

Except that Ellie Williams, who was not an idiot, who had told Greg less than ten minutes ago that she knew better, who kept the box in the basement and did not open it —

— smiled.

Not a performance of a smile. Not the sarcastic, armoured, public-facing smile she used as a deflection tool. This was something that happened without her permission, small and private and stubborn, living only in the corners of her mouth and the interior of her chest, where it had no witnesses and she could maintain, in good conscience, the polite fiction that she was absolutely fine and none of this was happening to her.

Your fingers against hers had been a spark. A stupid, accidental, three-second spark.

It burned in her chest all the way to fourth period, faithful as a pilot light, small as a star seen from a very long way away.

It did not go out.

The parking lot in the middle of the school period was its own kind of quiet.

Not the quiet of absence — the school was still full, still breathing, still running through its daily machinery of bells and syllabi and thirty-something students staring at whiteboards and willing the clock to move faster by sheer collective force of misery. The noise of it bled through the brick in a low, institutional hum. But out here, between the rows of cars baking slowly in the afternoon heat, the air had a different quality. Looser. Unsupervised. The kind of quiet that belonged to people who had made an executive decision about how to spend their Tuesday and were at peace with the consequences.

Ellie was at peace with the consequences.

She was sitting on the concrete kerb at the far edge of the lot, the secluded corner where the English teacher's ancient Volvo created a natural wall against the sight lines from the main building's windows — a discovery she had made in ninth grade and guarded with the same devotion other people reserved for good parking spots. Her skateboard was on the ground beside her, one wheel spinning idly in the breeze like it was bored. Greg was next to her, both of them nursing vending machine drinks and the mutual, comfortable warmth of two people who had agreed wordlessly that whatever was happening in this period could happen without them.

"He reads off the slides," Ellie was saying, with the tone of someone delivering a verdict after a very long deliberation. "Like, verbatim. Word for word. He prints the PowerPoint, puts it on the projector, and then reads it back to us like we're not all sitting there looking at the exact same words in real time —"

"He does the thing," Greg said, pointing at her, nodding with the intensity of a man who had been waiting for permission to bring this up. "The thing where he pauses and looks at the class like he just said something profound —"

"Like he's waiting for applause —"

"Like he expects someone to weep —"

"I was there for thirty-five minutes last Thursday," Ellie said, with the dead-eyed sincerity of a trauma survivor recounting the incident, "and I learned nothing. Genuinely. I came in knowing nothing, I left knowing the same nothing, except I was also tired —"

"You were asleep for twenty of those minutes —"

"I was resting my eyes —"

"Ellie, you snored."

"I breathe loudly —"

Greg laughed, that full-body thing he did where it seemed to involve his entire skeleton, and Ellie let herself grin, let the afternoon settle around them like a blanket, let the tension of the cafeteria — the journal, the journal pressed between your hands, the pink tip of your ear — slide off her back for the first time in an hour. This was good. This was normal. This was the world as it should operate: just her and Greg and the sun on the asphalt and nothing that required her to feel anything complicated.

She picked up her skateboard and set it across her knees, running her thumb along the edge of the deck out of habit, the worn texture of it as familiar as a heartbeat.

"Mr. Peterson, though," Greg was saying, warming to the subject with the enthusiasm of a man who had been storing this grievance for weeks. "He talks about himself. He will segue from mitosis — mitosis, Ellie — to a story about his lake house, and no one has ever once questioned it, we all just sit there and let it happen like we've been hypnotised —"

"The lake house," Ellie echoed reverently. "We know more about that lake house than we know about anything on the curriculum. I could pass a test on that lake house. I could write a thesis —"

The doors of the school opened.

Not the way doors opened normally — with the casual, mundane swing of someone who had somewhere to be and was going there. These doors opened the way things opened when they were preceded by intention, flung wide with the particular momentum of a group of people who had decided on a direction and were not planning to be stopped by something as minor as a fire door. The bang of it carried across the parking lot like a starting pistol.

Ellie heard it. Her thumb stilled on the edge of the deck.

Four of them came through first — Asher's usual architecture of loyalty, the specific collection of broad shoulders and performative swagger that trailed in his wake the way debris trailed a comet. They came down the steps with their eyes already moving, already scanning, already locked onto the target with a speed that meant this had not been an accident, that someone had looked out a window, that the secluded corner had been found. They moved across the parking lot with the kind of coordinated, purposeful energy that turned a group of boys into something with a different name, something that rhymed with mob and felt like a weather front.

Ellie was on her feet before she knew she'd decided to stand.

"Greg," she said.

"Yeah," Greg said. He was already up. His voice had flattened out, gone careful. "I see them."

They came fast, spreading out as they approached, a net tightening around its catch, until they had formed a loose but deliberate ring around the corner — one on the left, two coming from the right, cutting off the gap between the Volvo and the kerb with the practised ease of people who had done this before, who knew the geometry of cornering someone and applied it without needing to think. Ellie assessed the exits in the half second available to her and found them all closed. Beside her, she felt Greg go very still, the way prey went still, the deep animal instinct of something that understood what was happening and was calculating on its feet.

Then Asher came through the doors.

He didn't rush. That was the thing about Asher — he never rushed. He had the kind of confidence that didn't need to hurry because it had already decided how things were going to go and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. He came down the steps with the unhurried, heavy-footed certainty of a man crossing a room he owned, hands relaxed at his sides, jaw set, eyes moving across the parking lot until they found Ellie and stopped.

He walked over. His friends parted for him without looking.

He stopped two feet in front of them.

He was tall in the way that had always seemed specifically designed to be used on someone — not incidental height, not just the result of genetics, but height that had been weaponised, deployed, stood up to its full advantage and pointed at the world like an argument. He stood in front of them and looked down, and his gaze did a slow, pendulous swing from Greg to Ellie and then settled there, on Ellie, with the weight and precision of a pin through a butterfly.

The silence stretched like taffy. Like something being pulled past the point it wanted to go.

"Cafeteria," he said finally. Just the word, dropped in front of them like a coin on a counter. His voice was low, conversational, the kind of low that was a performance of casualness, wearing it the way a fist wore a glove. "What was that."

Ellie's hands were steady. Her heartbeat was not. "Nothing," she said. "She had something of mine. I got it back. That's it."

"Hm." He tilted his head. Considered her the way you considered something you hadn't decided what to do with yet. "See, here's my thing. My thing is, she doesn't like you. She doesn't wanna be around you. And I've seen the way you look at her." He paused, and the pause was a shovel. "I know what that is."

"Then you know it wasn't a problem," Ellie said.

Something moved across his face. Not a flinch. More like a gear catching.

"Let me be clear about something," he said, and the conversational register dropped away entirely, shed like a coat, leaving something colder and more architectural underneath. He leaned forward, just fractionally, just enough to shrink the two feet between them into something that felt like inches. "You don't talk to her. You don't look at her. You don't exist near her if you can avoid it. Because girls like you —" and he dsaid girls like you the way people said things they had decided were self-explanatory, the way people said things they considered too obvious to require completion, and he left it there, in the air between them, to do its work. "She doesn't need that around her. You understand me? Keep your issues to yourself."

The words were rocks dropped into still water. Ellie felt the ripples move through her in a straight, cold line from her throat to her stomach to somewhere deeper than that, somewhere the words found the places she'd already worn thin and pressed down on them with deliberate, knowing weight. Her jaw tightened. Her hands found each other at her sides and she pressed her knuckles together and breathed through it, slow and even, the breathing of someone who had learned, through repeated occasions, to absorb this particular kind of hit and stay standing.

She was fine. She was fine. She had been called worse, implied worse, had the shape of herself outlined in uglier terms, and she was fine, she could take it.

Then Asher turned to Greg.

And said what he said.

It was quick. It was almost casual. It was the kind of comment that arrived with no fanfare, no escalation, dressed in the same tone as everything else — a flat, offhand, contemptible thing delivered the way you delivered trash, which was to say without ceremony, because it didn't require any. Just words. Just a sentence. Just Greg's most personal geography laid out and stepped on by someone who hadn't earned the right to know it, let alone flatten it.

And well, that’s all she could remember.

The thing that moved through Ellie was not anger, exactly — anger was something she had a relationship with, something she could negotiate with, something she could put on a leash and walk. This was different. This was the thing underneath the anger, the subterranean thing, the fault line going — and she thought about Greg's face, what was on Greg's face right now, and she didn't look, she couldn't look, because if she looked she would see it and then it would be worse and she couldn't afford for it to be worse —

Her fist connected with Asher's face with the full force of every last gram of it.

The sound was a single, sharp, declarative crack, as definitive as a full stop, as satisfying and as catastrophic as a window shattering from the inside. His head snapped back. He staggered — one step, two, genuinely staggered, not performed, not for effect, but rocked back on his heels by the geometry of a hit he had not, in his fundamental and structurally unsound confidence, seen coming. For one bright, blazing, fleeting second that Ellie would store in a separate compartment from everything else — the good compartment, the one without a lock — he looked genuinely surprised.

Then his hand went to his face.

Then the parking lot became a different place entirely.

It happened the way natural disasters happened: with a speed that outpaced comprehension, with a force that didn't wait for consent, with the kind of scale that reduced the individual to a small thing caught inside a much larger motion. Asher's friends moved like a single organism, a flock of something with no good intentions, and Ellie had time for one sharp, preparatory breath before the first hit landed, and then it was just sound and motion and the hard, specific language of a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon being used for something parking lots were not designed for.

She took three hits before she stopped counting. They came fast — face, shoulder, ribs — each one a blunt, percussive argument, each one the sound of knuckles meeting bone with the particular intimacy of violence, which was to say without any distance at all. Her face became a series of points of impact, her eye socket a lit fuse, her cheekbone a bruise still in the process of deciding its final shape. She did not go down. This was the thing about Ellie — and she was not proud of it, because she knew it said something about the kind of life that had made her — she did not go down easily. She was built for absorbing things. She was architecture designed for load-bearing.

She went down on one knee. Her palm hit the asphalt.

To her left, Greg was fighting a different battle — fighting to move, which was the more maddening one, two of them holding his arms back and behind him in a vice grip that was not about hurting him so much as making him watch, which was crueller, which was the point, and the bruises blooming up his arms from the grip of their fingers were the colour of storm clouds, deep and spreading and wrong against his skin in a way that made Ellie's vision go briefly, incandescently red even through her own pain.

"Greg —" she started.

"I'm fine," he said, tight and breathless. "Ellie, I'm fine —"

Asher crouched down to her level. His nose was a swelling event. There was a satisfaction lodged in Ellie's chest that not even the current circumstances could fully dislodge, stubborn as a splinter. He looked at her from six inches away with his jaw working and his eyes doing something flat and final, and he stayed there for a moment the way you stayed somewhere to make sure the point had been made.

Then he stood up.

"Stay away from her," he said, and it came out nasal and compressed and considerably less authoritative than it had been ten minutes ago, and that too went into the good compartment, filed under small victories, cherish these.

He walked away. His friends unpeeled themselves from Greg and followed, the whole assembly retreating across the parking lot with the energy of something that had said what it came to say and was ready to be done, and the sound of the doors closing behind them was an ending the same way a curtain dropping was an ending — definitive, institutional, this portion of the programme is now concluded.

The parking lot settled back into its Tuesday afternoon quiet.

Ellie stayed on one knee on the asphalt for a moment, breathing. Just breathing. Cataloguing. The side of her face was a symphony of wrongness, two or three distinct movements playing simultaneously in the key of this is going to look terrible tomorrow. Her ribs were filing a formal complaint. Her eye was beginning to swell in the unhurried, committed way of injuries that had decided to take this seriously.

Greg appeared in front of her, folding down to the ground, and she saw his arms — the dark thumbprint bruises already stamped into his skin like signatures — and her stomach turned over hard.

"Don't," he said, reading her face with the accuracy of four years of practice. "I'm fine. They were just holding me. I'm fine."

"Your arms —"

"Ellie."

She looked at him. He looked back at her, steady, with the quiet and deliberate fortitude of a person who had decided how they were going to hold themselves and was holding. She thought about what Asher had said. She thought about the look on Greg's face when he'd said it, which she had seen in the half second before she'd stopped thinking and started moving, and she pressed that image down and sealed it over.

"I'm sorry," she said. Flat. Sincere. The most genuine two words she owned.

"Don't be," Greg said. "The nose was worth it."

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

"It really was," he said.

She let out a breath that was almost, in some technical sense, a laugh.

They sat on the asphalt in the thin afternoon sunlight, two people held together by years and a shared disaster, bruised and slightly wrecked, and the parking lot sat around them in its middle-of-the-day quiet, and Ellie's skateboard lay on the ground a few feet away with one wheel still spinning, idly, faithfully, like it was waiting for her to come back.

She reached over and stopped it with her hand.

Then she sat back, pressed the heel of her palm gently against her swelling eye, looked up at the sky — wide and indifferent and enormous, stretched out over the whole unreasonable mess of her life like it had all the time in the world — and breathed.

The skate park at four-thirty in the afternoon was the closest thing Ellie had to a church.

Not in the quiet way — the park was never quiet, not really, always threaded through with the percussion of wheels on concrete and the occasional sharp crack of a board meeting the lip of a ramp at the wrong angle and the distant, overlapping noise of the city doing what cities did at the end of a school day. But church wasn't about quiet, not really. It was about the particular quality of being somewhere that received you. That didn't ask anything of you except your presence. The skate park took Ellie the same way it took everyone — bruised, badly, on a Tuesday with a swelling eye — and simply continued to exist around her, indifferent and solid and endlessly, reliably itself.

She pushed off and rolled, long and unhurried, from one end of the flat section to the other, the wheels humming their low, continuous note against the concrete. Then back. Then forward. Back and forth, back and forth, a metronome that had forgotten what it was counting.

Greg, sitting on the bench behind her with his skateboard upended across his knees and a rag and a small bottle of wheel oil in his hands, was in the middle of what could generously be called a monologue and less generously called a one-man theatre production about the subject of Asher and what Greg thought about Asher and where, specifically, Greg felt Asher could go and what he could do with himself when he got there. He had been in the middle of this monologue for approximately twenty-five minutes. He was, by any reasonable metric, nowhere near the end of it.

"— and the audacity," Greg was saying, working the oil into the bearing with the focused aggression of someone who was only technically performing maintenance and was mostly just doing something with his hands before his hands did something else. "The sheer, uncut, factory-grade audacity of him walking out there like he owns the — like we're the ones who —" He stopped. Regrouped. Swore, comprehensively, in the manner of someone who had run out of regular words and needed to reach for a different register entirely. "I'm telling you, Ellie, I'm telling you, the next time he comes within ten feet of either of us, I swear to every god that has ever been worshipped on this earth —"

Push. Roll. The wheels hummed.

"— and what he said — " Greg's voice tightened around the edges, briefly, before he pried it back open. "What he had the absolute nerve to say, I have been turning it over in my head for the past three hours and every time I do I want to —"

Push. Roll.

"— because it's not even the hitting, right, the hitting I can process, the hitting is a known quantity, but the words — "

Push.

"— Ellie. Ellie, I'm saying, are you even —"

"Do you think she really likes him?"

The monologue stopped.

The wheel oil paused mid-application.

Greg looked up from the undercarriage of his board with the slow, blinking expression of someone whose train of thought had just been derailed by something that had come from an entirely perpendicular direction. The silence stretched out between them, thin and slightly bewildered.

"...What?" he said.

Ellie rolled back toward him, one foot dragging lazily against the concrete to slow herself, and came to a stop a few feet from the bench. She was looking off to the left, at the middle distance, at nothing in particular — or more specifically at the particular kind of nothing that served as a screen for the something she was actually looking at, the interior movie reel that had been running on loop since approximately noon.

"Her," she said, with the self-evident tone of someone who felt the pronoun was sufficient context and didn't understand why clarification was being requested.

Greg stared at her. "Ellie. I need you to understand that I was in the middle of a very important —"

"Her," Ellie said again, and this time she turned her head and looked at Greg, and the look said everything the word wasn't bothering to.

Greg's expression completed its journey from confused to resigned with a brief layover at of course. He set the oil bottle down on the bench beside him with the measured care of a man putting down something that needed to be put down before he could fully engage with the situation at hand.

"Are you," he said, "telling me that I have been talking to you for —" he checked his phone "— twenty-seven minutes, and your brain has been —"

"Can you just answer the question."

"— has been entirely elsewhere, specifically at the address of —"

"Greg."

"— the girl who makes your eye twitch every time she's within fifty feet —"

"I will leave," Ellie said. "I will get on that board and I will physically remove myself from this conversation."

Greg held up a hand. A concession. He looked at the sky for a moment, the way people looked at the sky when they were deciding how to deliver information they already knew wasn't going to land well, and then he looked back at her.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. You want my honest opinion?"

"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't."

"She likes him enough," Greg said, picking the words with the care of someone navigating something that had sharp edges and didn't want to be held. "Or — she likes something about the situation. The stability of it, maybe, or the way it looks from the outside, or — I don't know, maybe she genuinely —" He made a gesture that was trying to be diplomatic and mostly just looked tired. "People stay in things for all kinds of reasons, and not all of them are because they're madly in love, and not all of them are because they aren't. She could like him. She could be in it for something else entirely. She could be doing the thing where you convince yourself you like something because the alternative is figuring out what you actually —"

He stopped.

The rag went still in his hands.

He looked at Ellie.

Something had crossed his face — quick, electric, the specific expression of a thought arriving at full speed from a direction he hadn't been watching. His eyes went slightly wider. His mouth opened a fraction. He had the look of a man who had been putting together a puzzle for a long time and had just found the piece that told him what the picture actually was.

"Oh," he said.

Ellie said nothing. She was studying the ground with the focused intensity of someone who had suddenly developed a profound interest in the specific texture of skate park concrete.

"Oh," Greg said again, louder, the vowel round and full and carrying all the weight of the realisation behind it. He sat up straight. He set the skateboard fully aside. He was now giving this conversation the entirety of his posture. "Ellie. Ellie. You're not — tell me you're not actually —" He pointed at her. She did not look at the pointing finger. "Are you planning something?"

The concrete was very interesting. Genuinely fascinating. A rich subject.

"Ellie Williams," Greg said.

"You're being dramatic —"

"Am I?" He leaned forward on the bench, elbows on his knees, and levelled a look at her that could have stripped paint. "Because from where I'm sitting, you just interrupted twenty-seven minutes of completely justified grievance to ask me whether your bully — your bully, Ellie, the girl who has made it her personal mission to —"

"She's not that bad —"

"She called you a loser in front of half the school this morning —"

"That's just how she —"

"She does it regularly, with consistency, like it's a hobby she's committed to —"

"Greg —"

"And not only is she your bully," Greg continued, steamrolling ahead with the unstoppable momentum of someone who had been handed a point and intended to arrive at it regardless of the terrain, "she is also the girlfriend of the guy who just rearranged your face —" he gestured broadly at Ellie's swelling eye, which was, admittedly, making its presence felt with increasing insistence — "in a school parking lot —"

"I'm aware —"

"In broad daylight —"

"I was there —"

"And despite all of that," Greg said, spreading his hands like a lawyer addressing a jury he had begun to lose faith in, "you are sitting here — you, specifically, Ellie, with your one functioning eye — thinking about whether she genuinely likes the guy who gave you the other one." He paused. Let it settle. "Does that sound like a person who is not planning something?"

Ellie pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. This did not help her eye. She did it anyway, because she needed to do something with her hands and it felt approximately right for the quality of this moment.

Greg was off the bench now, pacing the short strip of concrete in front of her with the energy of a man who had been handed more than he could hold still with. "She has a boyfriend, Ellie. A boyfriend who is a nightmare, yes, an absolute portrait of everything wrong with —yes, fine, terrible person, we are agreed — but he is still there, he is a real and present entity, and you are standing here — skating here, whatever — daydreaming about a girl who called you a loser this morning —"

"She gave me my journal back," Ellie said.

Greg stopped pacing.

He looked at her.

"Her fingers," Ellie said, and then immediately looked like she wished she hadn't said that.

There was a silence.

"Her fingers," Greg repeated. Slowly. As if handling it carefully.

"Forget I said that."

"Her fingers have convinced you —"

"I said forget it —"

"— to potentially pursue a girl with a boyfriend who employs muscle, " Greg said, resuming his pacing with renewed conviction, "because her fingers touched yours during what was, by any objective measure, a bullying incident —"

"It wasn't —"

"She was reading your journal out loud in front of her friends!"

"She stopped!"

"Why are you defending this!"

"I'm not defending anything," Ellie said, and she said it too quietly, too evenly, and that was the thing that was the most damning thing about it — not the volume or the heat but the flatness of it, the calm of someone saying something that had been sitting inside them for long enough to settle. "I'm not planning anything. I just — I was just asking."

Greg stopped pacing.

He looked at her for a long moment. The skate park moved around them, indifferent and continuous — a kid on a half-pipe in the distance, the sound of wheels, the long flat light of late afternoon falling sideways across the concrete and turning everything gold and slightly elegiac. Greg's expression had been cycling, rapid and expressive, through its range, but it landed now on something quieter. The specific quiet of someone who knew their friend better than their friend thought they did, and was choosing, carefully, how to carry that.

He sat back down on the bench.

"Ellie," he said. Gentler, now. Sanded down.

"Don't," she said.

"I'm just saying —"

"Greg. I know." She pushed off, one small, restless kick, and rolled a few feet and came back. "I know what I'm doing. Or I know what I'm not doing. I'm not doing anything. I'm just — I'm thinking." She dragged the heel of her shoe against the concrete, scuffing it, staring at the mark it left. "People are allowed to think."

Greg watched her. Said nothing. Let her have it.

"It's fine," she said.

It landed like a coin dropping into an empty jar: small, definitive, slightly hollow.

The wheel on her skateboard hummed beneath her, low and constant, rolling and rolling and going nowhere, and the afternoon light kept doing its gold, indiscriminate thing all across the park, and somewhere above them the sky stretched out in that enormous, unbroken way it had, and Ellie stood in the middle of all of it and looked at the horizon and thought about the pink tip of your ear and the ghost of your fingers and the specific gravity of a feeling she had decided, months ago, she was not going to do anything about.

She pushed off again.

Greg picked up his oil and his rag and went back to work.

Neither of them said anything else for a long time.

It was enough.

Ellie's room looked like the inside of a very specific kind of mind.

Which was to say: it looked like chaos, but the organised kind, the kind that had a logic to it that only made sense from the inside. The walls had long since surrendered to the occupation — band posters colonised every available surface from the baseboards to the ceiling, overlapping at the edges, layered in the geological way of something that had been accumulating for years, each one a timestamp, a mood, a particular Tuesday afternoon when she'd decided this mattered and put it up with tape that had since yellowed at the corners. The Misfits. Bikini Kill. Hole. A large, slightly lopsided poster of the solar system that she'd had since she was nine and refused to take down on principle, the planets faded now to softer versions of themselves, Jupiter a pale shadow of its former drama. Beside it, a hand-drawn map of a comic universe she'd been building in her head since middle school, tacked up in pieces, connected by lines of red string that had seemed less unhinged when she'd put it up and now looked, in certain lights, like a conspiracy board.

The desk in the corner was a civilisation unto itself. Stacks of comics, organised by a system that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else but was, to Ellie, as legible as a library catalogue. A half-finished drawing she'd abandoned two weeks ago. Three pens that worked and one that definitely didn't but kept getting picked up by mistake. A small potted cactus that she'd named Gerald and watered erratically and which had, against all reasonable odds, survived.

The guitar lived against the wall beside the window — an old acoustic with a crack along the body that had been there when it was given to her by her dad, Joel, at fifteen and which she'd never gotten around to fixing, partly because she didn't have the money and partly because she'd come to think of the crack as a feature, a mark of character, a thing that had a story. Its presence filled the room the way all instruments filled rooms, with a particular kind of potential energy, the sense of something that could become sound at any moment if asked.

On the floor, a skateboard she hadn't put away yet. On the ceiling, a cluster of glow-in-the-dark stars she'd put up in seventh grade, arranged not randomly but in the actual configuration of Orion's Belt, because she had been that kind of twelve-year-old and some things didn't change.

It was, in every way that mattered, entirely hers. The room of a person who had been filling space with the evidence of herself for years, who decorated like she was leaving proof.

Tonight, it felt like a very small place to contain a very large mood.

The journal was open across her knees, and the pen in her hand was moving with the furious velocity of something trying to outrun itself.

She was not writing neatly. Neat was not the register she was operating in. The words came out pressed hard into the page, the pen dragging with the specific pressure of a hand that was communicating with its whole body weight, the letters angular and fast and running slightly uphill the way her handwriting always did when she was past the point of caring about presentation. It was less like writing and more like an exorcism — dragging things out of the dark interior of herself and pinning them to the page before they could do any more damage in there, getting them outside where they could be looked at from a distance, filed and categorised and rendered slightly less enormous by the act of having been named.

Asher, she wrote, and what followed was a paragraph that would have made Greg applaud and her mother weep, a dense architectural construction of frustration and fury with its foundations in the parking lot and its towers reaching all the way up into the general, aching unfairness of how the world was organised, who it rewarded, what it permitted and what it quietly endorsed by its silence. She wrote about his face when he'd said what he'd said to Greg, the flat, casual cruelty of it, and felt the anger move through her again like a current — still live, still hot, still capable. She wrote about the parking lot and the hits she'd taken and the hits Greg had taken, and her pen pressed so hard into the paper at that part that she went through slightly, leaving a ghost of the letters on the page beneath.

She wrote: I don't regret it. And underlined it twice. And then a third time for structural integrity.

She wrote about the cafeteria, and the journal being held out to her at the end of everything, and she wrote her fingers and then went back and scribbled it out, several times, with the pen going back and forth until the ink was a solid dark bar, a redaction, a classified document. She was not writing about that. That was not the kind of thing she was writing about tonight.

She filled two more pages. She didn't time it. When she finally stopped, the pen hovering over the paper, there was nothing left to write that wouldn't be circling back to things she'd already been over twice, so she stopped.

She closed the journal.

She sat in the quiet of her room — the quiet that wasn't silence, that was the city outside the window and the hum of the light above the desk and the creak of the building settling into itself — and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes.

Breathed.

Let the anger cool the way things cooled: slowly, unevenly, the heat still present in places.

She sighed — a long, full-body thing, the sigh of something deflating by degrees — and dropped her hands from her face, and her right hand caught the side of her cheekbone on the way down.

"—hss—"

The pain fired up sharp and immediate, a lit match dragged across the bruise, and she pulled her hand away and held it in the air as if apologising to it. She reached up gingerly, instead, and pressed two careful fingers to the ridge of her cheekbone, testing the topography of the damage like a geologist assessing unstable ground. 

The bruise had fully committed now, had moved from possibility to statement, a deep and spreading thing beneath her eye that she'd glimpsed in the bathroom mirror an hour ago and decided not to look at again until morning, when presumably she'd be better prepared to deal with the particular aesthetic of having been punched in the face by someone with more mass than personality.

She sat with her eyes closed.

The room was quiet. Gerald the cactus did not offer any comments.

And in the dark behind her eyelids, where there was nothing to look at and therefore nothing to choose not to look at, you arrived without invitation or preamble, the way you always arrived in the unguarded spaces — not dramatically, not with any of the fanfare you'd think something that caused this much structural damage would bring, but quietly, almost gently, settling in like a tide coming in, like a frequency she was already tuned to.

The afternoon light in your hair.

The pink at the tip of your ear.

The way your fingers hadn't immediately let go.

Ellie exhaled. Slow. Measured. The exhale of someone practising containment.

Her thumb, moving with its own agenda, was already tracing the edge of the journal in her lap. She noticed it doing this. She told it not to. It continued anyway, the way the body continued things the brain hadn't signed off on, operating on a different authority entirely — the authority of want, which didn't ask permission and didn't particularly care about consequences.

She opened the journal.

Not to the new pages. Her fingers moved backward through the book with the instinct of something that had made this trip before — back past the furious entry, back past the half-finished thoughts and the doodles in the margins, back through weeks of herself, until the pages changed quality. Until the writing gave way to something else.

She stopped.

There you were.

Spread across three pages in soft graphite, built out of the kind of careful, compulsive observation that Ellie could only justify to herself by the fact that she'd never intended to show these to anyone, ever, and therefore they existed in a separate category from things she needed to be accountable for. They were not portraits, exactly. They were studies. Fragments. The way a scientist filled a notebook with measurements of something they were trying to understand — not to possess it, but to comprehend it, to make it less mysterious by breaking it into its component parts and looking at each one.

Except the thing being studied was you. And Ellie was not, if she was being honest with herself, and she was not being honest with herself, approaching this scientifically.

There was the sketch of just your hands — the one she'd done from memory, which meant it was probably slightly wrong in the specifics and completely right in the feeling, your fingers curled loosely around a pen in third period, the particular way you held things, unhurried, like everything you touched could wait for you. Beside it, in her small cramped handwriting, a note: always looks like she's about to say something important. And below that, a bracket, and the word: doesn't. And then: or maybe she does and I'm not close enough to hear it. She'd written that last part in smaller letters, like she'd been trying to make it take up less space.

There was the sketch of your profile — just the outline, the particular architecture of your face seen from the side in the forty seconds she'd had in the lunch line two weeks ago before you'd moved and she'd had to stop looking before someone noticed. Annotated: the way her chin tilts up when she's talking to someone she thinks is boring. And then, at the bottom of the page, almost to herself, a note that she'd pressed lighter than the others, barely there, a whisper in graphite: tilted up at me once. in the corridor. didn't look bored.

There was a sketch of the back of your head. Of your hands again, different angle. Of the particular way you sat — spine straight, never fully relaxed, like you were always half-prepared for something, like rest was a performance you'd learned and not a thing that came naturally. She'd written next to that one: who taught her she had to sit like that?

And threading through all of it, the annotations of a person trying to decode a language they'd never been taught — small observations, careful and private and slightly devastating in their honesty, the handwriting of someone writing for an audience of one and still hedging.

Ellie looked at the pages spread across her knees and felt something move through her that was the internal equivalent of stepping off a curb you hadn't seen — that sudden, weightless, stomach-dropping moment of oh, this is happening.

You did ballet. She knew this the way she knew most things about you — involuntarily, through the osmosis of proximity, information that arrived without being asked for and then refused to leave. She'd seen you come out of the gym once in the early morning with your hair up and a bag over your shoulder and the specific, turned-out way you walked that she'd catalogued and filed and told herself was nothing. Ballet. Pink and precise and entirely incompatible with the girl sitting in her room right now with a bruised face and band posters and a cracked guitar and a cactus she'd named after a middle-aged man.

She was a punk. She owned three shirts in any colour other than black and wore two of them ironically. She had skated so many times she could feel the specific texture of the park's concrete in her sleep. She read comics by lamplight and knew the names of every star you could see from the roof of this building and had strong, extensive, practised opinions about guitar riffs.

And you — you were the opposite of all of it. You were the negative image of her. You moved through the world like it had been arranged for you ahead of time, like the lights came on as you walked and went off when you left, like everything that touched you either belonged there or briefly believed it did. You were held together at every seam. You were the popular girl with the popular boyfriend and the posse and the rich, perfect family.

You were so completely, utterly, structurally different from her that it should have been a closed case. A non-starter. A door that had never been open in the first place.

And yet.

And yet here were three pages of graphite evidence, pressed into the paper with varying degrees of pressure and annotated in small handwriting by the specific, traitorous hand of a girl who knew better.

"Oh, come on," Ellie said aloud, to no one. To the room. To Gerald.

She slammed the journal shut.

The sound was a verdict. Sharp and final and slightly embarrassing, muffled by the room's soft clutter, absorbed by the band posters and the solar system and the three-years-worth of herself layered on every surface. The journal sat in her lap with the smug, inanimate energy of something that knew exactly what it contained and had no feelings about it.

She pressed both palms down on the cover. Held them there.

You don't even like me, she thought, and the thought was directed at the journal, at the pages inside, at the graphite studies of someone who called her a loser in public and held her journal out of reach and looked at her with an expression that shuttered closed before Ellie could read it. You don't even — I shouldn't even — this is so —

She groaned. A full, low, ceiling-directed groan, the sound of a person losing an argument with themselves that they'd been winning for months and had now, clearly, decisively, completely lost.

She fell back onto her bed. The journal went with her, clutched to her chest. She stared at the glow-in-the-dark Orion's Belt on the ceiling, which had not yet charged enough to glow, just sat there in the dark in the plain and patient configuration of three stars that had been called a hunter for thousands of years by people who needed the sky to make sense.

She understood the impulse.

She closed her eyes.

You shouldn't like her, she told herself, with the firm, reasonable authority of someone delivering a memo to a department that had already stopped listening. She is your bully. She has a boyfriend. She is the opposite of everything you are. You are going to get nothing from this except an inventory of the ways it doesn't work out. You know this. You have known this for months. You have the knowledge. You have the evidence. You are an idiot for even thinking that you have a chance—

The tip of your ear. Pink as a secret.

"Shut up," Ellie whispered, to herself, to the ceiling, to the three stars she'd arranged up there at twelve years old because even then she'd been the kind of person who needed to put things in their right places and call them by their names.

Outside her window, the city moved through its evening, unhurried, enormous, deeply uninterested in her predicament. Gerald sat on the desk in his usual posture, which was the posture of a cactus and therefore involved no feelings about the situation. The guitar leaned against the wall, all that potential sound locked inside it, waiting.

The glow-in-the-dark stars, slowly, began to glow.

The morning had the particular quality of mornings that had not yet decided what they wanted to be.

Grey at the edges, the sky outside the school's narrow corridor windows the colour of a thought that hadn't finished forming yet, the light filtering through the glass in thin, uncommitted strips that fell across the linoleum and did nothing especially interesting with it. The hallway between second and third period was its usual organised catastrophe — a river of shoulders and backpacks and the overlapping percussion of lockers being opened and closed with varying degrees of emotional investment, conversations fragmenting and reconnecting like mercury, the whole thing operating on the specific frequency of two hundred teenagers who had been awake for two hours and were deeply unconvinced it had been worth it.

Ellie stood with her back against the locker beside Greg's open one, one foot propped against the metal, watching the hallway with the detached observational energy of someone standing on the bank of a river they had no intention of entering. Greg was elbow-deep in his locker, conducting what appeared to be an archaeological excavation of its contents, narrating the discovery of each item with the running commentary of a man to whom silence was a personal affront.

"— and I genuinely don't know when I started keeping a granola bar in here, but it's been here long enough that I'm emotionally attached to it —"

"Throw it away," Ellie said.

"I can't, it's like a roommate at this point —"

"It's a granola bar, Greg."

"But it's been here longer than some of my friendships —"

She was listening. She was mostly listening. Some percentage of her attention was on Greg and his emotional support granola bar, and the rest of it — the percentage she would not have been able to name without incriminating herself — was doing what it always did in crowded hallways, which was run a quiet, automatic, completely involuntary background process. A scan. A search function she hadn't installed and couldn't uninstall, running on a frequency she didn't choose, returning one specific result.

Her eyes moved across the hallway.

Found your friend group first — the constellation without its sun, gathered in the usual corner with the usual architecture of performance: someone doing the talking, someone doing the agreeing, phones out, hair touched, the elaborate social machinery running at full operational capacity.

Her eyes moved across the group.

Moved again.

Her brow furrowed.

You weren't there.

The group was complete in every other respect, the full roster present and performing, but you — the axis, the fixed point, the thing the whole arrangement orbited around — were absent. The constellation without its brightest star, still going through the motions of being a constellation, slightly less luminous for the gap at its centre.

Ellie's gaze swept the hallway with the efficiency of something that had done this before.

Then it snagged on the other absence.

Asher wasn't there either.

The realisation settled into her stomach the way something unwelcome settled — not loudly, not dramatically, but with a quiet, uninvited weight, a stone dropped into still water with no splash, just the rings spreading outward and the thing sitting at the bottom, heavy and unreasonable and not prepared to be reasoned with. It was jealousy, plain and ugly and domesticated, the kind that had been living inside her long enough to know its way around, and she hated it the way you hated something that knew too much about you — personally, and with a specific resentment reserved for things you couldn't evict.

She looked away.

Looked at the ceiling. Looked at Greg, who had located his textbook beneath what appeared to be three months of other people's futures and was now regarding it with the expression of a man encountering a distant relative he hadn't expected at a family gathering.

"There it is," he said. With feeling.

"Incredible," Ellie said. Flat. Meaning it.

The bell rang, cleaving the hallway noise in two.

Greg closed the locker with the definitive thud of a chapter ending and turned to her, already re-organising his bag. "You've got math," he said, with the tone of someone delivering a piece of information they already knew wasn't going to be well-received.

Ellie's expression underwent a brief, specific journey. "I have allegedly got math," she said.

"Ellie —"

"The keyword being allegedly."

"You've already missed it three times this —"

"Three is a coincidence," Ellie said, pushing off from the locker with her foot. "Four is a pattern. I'm not ready to be a pattern."

Greg looked at her with the resigned, sun-weathered expression of someone who had stopped fighting a tide a long time ago and was now simply observing it with documentary interest. "You're going to fail," he said.

"Not today though," she said. "And today is all I've got."

He opened his mouth.

"Go to class, Greg."

"I'm just —"

"I'll see you at lunch."

He pointed at her. The point said: we're going to talk about this. She pointed back. Her point said: no we aren't. They had an entire conversation in the space between their index fingers, and then Greg sighed the sigh of a man who had made his peace with a great many things and walked away, absorbed into the thinning river of the hallway.

Ellie walked.

The hallway was emptying out in the rapid, purposeful way it emptied when the bell had technically rung and the window between acceptable lateness and actual consequences was closing by the second. She moved against the current of the last stragglers, unhurried, hands in the front pocket of her hoodie, the bruise under her eye making its daily editorial comments about her life choices.

She passed your friend group on the way.

She didn't look at them. This was a practiced art — the deliberate, forward-facing non-look of someone who had learned that acknowledging a thing gave it power and had therefore developed an aggressive policy of visual neutrality. Eyes ahead. Jaw easy. The posture of someone who was simply a person moving through a hallway, which was all she was, which was absolutely and completely all she was.

"Nice jacket," said a voice from the group, in the particular register that made nice mean the opposite of nice, the word hollowed out and repacked with something else entirely.

Ellie did not break stride.

"Does she buy those at the men's section, or —"

She did not look. She did not slow down. She let the words move over her the way weather moved over a landscape — it happened, it passed, the landscape remained. She had built herself to be the landscape. It had taken a while, and there were still storms that found the cracks, but on a Wednesday morning in a school hallway about a jacket, she was fine.

She was fine.

She rounded the corner, and the voices dissolved back into the general noise of the school.

She was fine.

The plan was simple. The bathroom at the end of the east wing was the jurisdiction of no one, a neutral zone, tucked past the art rooms in a corridor that smelled like turpentine and ambition and where the traffic dropped to near-zero once the bell had rung. She'd skipped in worse places. She'd skipped in better places. The bathroom was comfortable. She'd read half a comic in there last Thursday and nobody had come in the whole time.

She heard it before she reached the door.

Soft. Barely there. The kind of sound that was trying very hard not to be a sound at all — compressed and controlled, held between the teeth, with all the effort of something that had been trained to take up as little space as possible. It was the specific acoustic signature of someone crying who had no interest in being caught crying, crying the way you cried when you'd gotten good at crying privately, when the architecture of your composure was still technically standing but the foundations were doing something structural and quiet and not visible from the outside.

Ellie stopped.

She stood outside the bathroom door with her hand not quite on the handle, and the sound came through the gap and she turned it over in her head for a moment, this small, compressed, trying-not-to-be thing.

Then she pushed the door open.

The sniffling stopped. Immediately. Like a tap turned off. Like a light switch. The silence that replaced it was the specific silence of someone going very still and performing the absence of themselves, the aggressive quiet of a person trying to convince the room they weren't there.

Ellie stepped in.

The bathroom was cold and fluorescent, the kind of lighting that did nobody any favours, the kind that turned everything it touched slightly greenish and exposed. Two sinks, the mirror above them running the full width of the wall, a paper towel dispenser with a broken lever that had been broken since September. The tiles on the floor were the colour of old cream.

At the far end of the mirror, you stood.

Not crying. The crying was gone — vanished, packed away, dismantled with a speed and thoroughness that was itself a kind of performance, the performance of a person who had long practice in making themselves presentable under any conditions. Your eyes were clear. Your chin was level. You had constructed the face you wore in the hallways and you were wearing it, complete and armoured and assembled with the precision of something that knew it might need to withstand scrutiny.

The only evidence was the slight, betraying pinkness at the rim of your eyes. The kind of pinkness that no amount of composure could fully recall. The kind that stayed after everything else had been packed up, small and stubborn, the last ember of something that had briefly been a fire.

Ellie looked at you.

You looked at her.

For one unguarded half-second, your eyes went wide — just slightly, just briefly, a crack in the composure, a hairline fracture that the camera would have missed but Ellie, standing four feet away in a fluorescent bathroom, did not. It was the expression of someone who had been expecting anyone else. Anyone in the world. Anyone but the specific person who had just walked through the door.

Then it was gone. Shuttered. The curtains drawn so fast the motion was almost theoretical.

Your gaze dropped.

And landed on her face.

Specifically: on the bruise that had made its full, committed entrance overnight, spreading beneath her eye in the deep, decided colours of something that had settled in for the long haul — purpled at the centre, fading outward through red into a yellowish green at the edges, the cartography of someone's knuckles mapped in pigment onto her cheekbone. She had looked at it in the mirror that morning and felt the way you felt about weather you'd predicted correctly: grimly vindicated.

Something moved along your jaw. Subtle. Quick. A tensing, barely visible, the muscle pulling tight the way things pulled tight when they were working against something. A reflex with a latch on it. Your eyes stayed on the bruise for a fraction of a second too long before your expression reassembled itself back into its default setting, which was impeccable and slightly arctic.

"Who did that to you?" you said.

You said it the way you said most things — with the bored, ambient cool of a person enquiring about something that was mildly interesting and completely beneath them. The question wrapped in the tone of someone who didn't particularly care about the answer and was asking purely as a formality, as a social gesture, as the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

Ellie blinked.

She realised, in the same moment she registered that she was staring at you, that she had been staring at you. She pulled her gaze sideways, looked at the broken paper towel dispenser, looked at the wall, rearranged her face into something approaching functional.

"Fell," she said.

Your eyebrows rose. A millimetre. Maybe two. In the language of your face, which operated on a scale of extraordinary subtlety, this was practically a standing ovation.

"You fell," you said.

"Down some stairs," Ellie said. "It was a whole thing."

The corner of your mouth moved. It was the smallest possible distance the corner of a mouth could travel and still technically qualify as movement, and it was weighted with the specific amusement of someone who had heard something they found contemptible but couldn't entirely suppress finding funny. It was not a kind expression. It was the expression of a scalpel that had been taught to smile.

"You fell," you said again, savouring the syllables like they were something to be tasted. "Down stairs."

"It happens to people," Ellie said.

"To you apparently." You turned back to the mirror, extracted a lip gloss from somewhere with the practiced ease of a magician producing something from their sleeve, and uncapped it. "Must have been quite the fall. Stairs do all that on their own, or did you trip over your —" your eyes moved, briefly, to the reflection of her, starting at the shoes, moving upward with the unhurried assessment of a customs officer looking for contraband, "— ensemble."

"The stairs had strong opinions about my hoodie," Ellie said. "Very aggressive. We had words."

You applied the lip gloss with the focused, deliberate attention of a painter adding a final detail, pressing your lips together after in the way that Ellie absolutely did not clock and was not filing anywhere. "You should watch where you're going," you said.

"Noted."

"Especially in buildings," you said. "Buildings with floors. Which you seem to have some difficulty navigating."

"Really valuable advice," Ellie said. "Transformative, even. I feel like a different person."

You made a sound. It was the sound of something that had started to be a laugh and been intercepted and redirected into something more architecturally appropriate, something that emerged as a breath through the nose with an undercurrent of something warmer that was gone almost before it arrived, like a radio signal passing through from a distance.

You put the lip gloss away. You turned to the mirror again, ran your fingers through your hair with the particular efficiency of someone re-assembling something that had briefly been in disarray, each movement precise and practised, the ritual of a person who understood that their appearance was armour and maintained it accordingly. Ellie watched the side of your face in the mirror and thought: who taught you to hold yourself like that, and the thought arrived in the same handwriting as the annotation in her journal and she told it firmly to leave.

"There's a party," you said.

It was casual. So casual it was practically horizontal — laid out flat in the sentence with all the deliberate nonchalance of something that had been dropped in very specifically and was pretending it had always been there. You said it to the mirror. To the reflection of your own hair. To the air approximately six inches to the left of anything that could be interpreted as intention.

Ellie's brain, which had been running at a manageable pace, briefly redlined.

"A party," she said.

"Friday," you said. "At Jake Brown's place. It's a whole thing apparently."

"Right," Ellie said.

"People are going," you said.

"People tend to," Ellie agreed.

A beat.

Another beat.

Ellie felt the thing that was happening in her chest doing what it was doing, which was building toward something she wasn't certain was a good idea, and she looked at you in the mirror and you were still looking at your own reflection, still straightening up your hair with the focused indifference of someone who had not said what they'd just said, who had not brought up a party in the middle of a school bathroom on a Wednesday morning to a girl they had allegedly no opinions about.

"Are you —" Ellie started, and she kept her voice flat, kept it level, kept it from doing the hopeful, cresting, idiotic thing it wanted to do, "— are you inviting me?"

The transformation was immediate.

Like a wall going up in real time, brick by visible brick — your spine straightened, your expression cooled, and something moved across your features that was not quite disgust and not quite discomfort and was instead the specific, hybrid product of both, the look of someone who had been caught doing something they'd decided they weren't doing and was now administering a correction.

"Inviting —" you said, and the word in your mouth was a thing you were holding at arm's length, something retrieved from a surface you wouldn't normally touch. You turned from the mirror to look at her directly, fully, the first time you'd done it since she'd walked in, and your eyes were winter. "I was making conversation. It's called small talk. People do it."

"Right," Ellie said.

"I wasn't inviting you," you said. The emphasis landed like a gavel. "Why would I invite you? You're —" your gaze moved over her again, brief and merciless, "— you."

"Me," Ellie said.

"You'd show up in that," you said, gesturing at the hoodie with a hand that conveyed an entire aesthetic philosophy in a single motion, "and stand in the corner reading a comic book about the solar system or whatever —"

"I don't read comics at parties —"

"— and bore everyone within a five-foot radius with facts about space —"

"I've been to parties," Ellie said, with great dignity.

"Have you," you said, in the tone of someone granting a point they did not grant.

"Multiple," Ellie said. "I've been to several parties."

You looked at her. Something moved at the very edge of your expression — that intercepted almost-laugh again, surfacing and being pushed back down, your mouth pressed into a line that was working harder than a line normally needed to. You held her gaze for a moment, and in that moment the cold of your expression had the thinnest possible layer of something else over it, something that was almost, from a distance, in poor lighting, with a significant number of caveats, almost warm.

Then you looked away.

You turned to the mirror one final time, checked your reflection with the swift, comprehensive, top-to-bottom assessment of a general reviewing troops before a deployment, found it satisfactory. You picked up your bag.

"It's a good thing you weren't invited then," you said, and your voice had recollected itself fully, was back in its regular register, smooth and cool and armoured at every seam. You moved toward the door, your heels a clean, deliberate percussion against the old cream tiles. At the door, you paused — not long, not dramatically, just a fraction of a moment, a held note — and said, without turning around, to the door, to the air, to no one specific:

"You'd never get in anyway, loser."

The door swung shut behind you.

The bathroom returned to its cold fluorescent quiet. The paper towel dispenser stood broken at the wall. The mirror showed Ellie her own reflection: bruised eye, worn hoodie, the expression of someone who had just been dropped into deep water and was still working out which direction was up.

She stood very still.

Then she turned to the mirror.

Looked at herself for a long moment — at the bruise, at the hoodie, at the face she had been born with and the expression currently living on it, which was confused and flustered and just fractionally, structurally annoyed — and she breathed.

She thought about the way you'd asked who did that to her.

She thought about your jaw, tightening at the sight of the bruise like it had done it without asking you first.

She thought about the party you hadn't invited her to.

She thought about the way the corner of your mouth had moved and the sound that had been a laugh before you'd stopped it and the way you'd said you'd never get in anyway to a door you were already walking out of, like it needed to be said quickly, like it needed to be said away from her, like the distance was load-bearing.

She straightened up.

She rolled her shoulders back.

She looked at her own reflection with the focused, calm, absolute certainty of a person who had just made a decision and felt good about it, who had identified a direction and was pointing herself at it, who had been told she couldn't and had heard, beneath the can't, in the register beneath language, underneath the cold of it all — something entirely different.

She was going to that party.

She was going to that party, and she was going to wear whatever she wanted, and she was not going to bring a comic book.

Probably.

perm taglist :: @cinnamongirlsev , @m0on1ight1 , @pain-in-the-ashe , @nebulamor , @liztreez , @les4elliewilliams , @andieprincessofpower , @letmebeurbaby , @ph4rmacyfa1rie . . . comment (here) to be added <3