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

“Why are you so weird?” she asks me.

“I’m not weird,” I said back.

“You’re a freak,” she said.

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

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

Up and down.

Over and over again.

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

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

“Why do you do that?” she asks.

Up and down.

Over and over again.

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

I don’t answer her. I rub harder.

Ellie picks up my notebook.

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

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

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

I want to touch her.

I couldn’t.

“Yes,” I said, closing it.

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

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

Ellie’s mouth stops stretching.

“You are such an asshole,” she said.

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

I’ll give her a picture another day.

-Ellie-

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

Particularly when you were trying to avoid someone.

Flynn was everywhere and nowhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darla, the owner, had a low-end commercial coffee machine and made fresh donuts every morning. It was her one saving grace. If it weren’t for those freaking donuts, she’d have no business at all.

I shrugged, dusting powdered sugar off my fingers. “It’s going,” I said. I was the queen of evasive. But the woman with shrewd eyes behind wire rimmed glasses was entirely too astute for my defensive tactics.

“You’re loving it,” Julie Waterman stated with a small smile after wiping a bead of coffee from her upper lip.

Julie Waterman was in her early forties but dressed like somebody’s grandma. She was pushy and in your face and exactly the type of person that drove me bat shit crazy. But I liked her. As much as I was capable of liking anyone.

She was the foster care worker who had been assigned my case when I was only six years old. She had been fresh out of college and was one of those idealistic, change the world types.

I remembered so little about my early childhood. Flashes of memories here and there. Most of what I remembered was ugly. Being taken out of my home after being found alone. I had been abandoned by my mother five days previously. I had been eating things out of the cabinet that I could reach and by the time police broke down the door, I was starving and dehydrated. Apparently, the school had alerted the authorities, saying they hadn’t seen me in a while and my mother hadn’t called me in sick.

I remembered the first horrible foster home I had lived in. There had been three older children who resented the sudden appearance of a young girl, who refused to talk. A shadow child who had been rendered mute by her experiences.

The eldest girl would pinch me when her mother wasn’t looking, leaving bruises on my pale skin. The boy, who was only a few years older than me, would lock me in closets. Sometimes for hours, until their mother would come looking for me.

My foster mother never asked why I was sat huddled in a closet with the door locked from the outside. She turned the other cheek when her three children spat in my food so I couldn’t eat my dinner. She ignored the names they called me under their breath. The nasty truths they’d throw at me when they thought she was out of hearing.

Your mom didn’t want you.

We don’t want you.

No one will ever love you.

Those were harsh words for a child to hear. Especially one who had already been to hell.

And I never said anything to anyone about the way they treated me. I kept it buried deep inside me. I never cried. I never screamed. I never spoke.

Mostly because I went almost an entire year without saying anything.

My words had failed me. I had nothing to say. So I kept silent, lost in the world inside my head.

But smashed in between those memories were those of a young social worker with kind eyes and a soft voice who refused to give up on me. Julie had been my one and only constant in a chaotic, out of control life. She tried really hard to make up for the shitty hand I had been dealt, but she could only do so much.

I had seen how much it hurt her when my foster families couldn’t handle me anymore and invariably sent me back. I knew it broke her heart each and every time she had to pick me up, sometimes in the middle of the night, and take me to yet another home that didn’t want me.

I remembered the way she bit down on her lip to stop the tears from falling as I curled into a ball on her backseat, my stuffed dog, Clyde, tucked beneath my shirt. She hadn’t wanted me to see the grief on her face. But I had. Even if my own grief had bled out of me a long time ago.

She had tried to turn my life around. She got me counseling. She tried to coax me into sitting through support groups. She insisted that I get evaluation after evaluation to determine what exactly was wrong with me. To get answers to why I was unable to connect with anyone or anything. To find out if what was broken inside me could ever be fixed.

When I was seven, some therapist diagnosed me with Reactive Attachment Disorder brought on by a lack of nurturing and my traumatic past. My label did nothing to make me any more loveable or easier to deal with.