Chapter 39
Ellie
“Ellie? …Ellie. ELLIE.”
The shout yanks me unceremoniously back to reality. I’m not sure exactly how long I’ve been zoned out, but I can tell from Jenna’s face that it was long enough for her to get annoyed. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
Jenna rolls her eyes in exasperation. “I was saying that physics is stupid and Dr. Hayes clearly has a vendetta against me.”
Right. We’re supposed to be studying for our midterms. Something I have not thought about once in the…however many hours we’ve been sitting in the courtyard, enjoying what will probably be the only true spring weekend we get before we go straight into summer heat.
It’s the weekend before spring break, but Texas is Texas, so it’s 75 degrees, even though it snowed on Monday–the warm respite would be much more enjoyable if finals weren’t threatening to melt our brains out of our ears.
Jenna narrows her eyes, shooting me a suspicious look. “What’s the matter with you today? Normally you’re the one keeping me on the rails. If you’ve lost focus then what hope do we have of passing this final?”
Tossing her textbook to the side, she flops back onto the grass and lets out a dramatic huff, her silky dark curtain of hair fanning out around her.
“You might as well tell me what’s going on. You’ve been weird all day, and you know I’m going to bug the living daylights out of you until you tell me.”
Despite the inner turmoil I’m trying very hard to avoid, I can’t help but smile at the use of the southern colloquialism she used to make fun of me for. I’ve been rubbing off on her.
“Nothing is going on, I think I’m just fried from all of this studying,” I say casually, looking down at where I’m picking at the grass.
She probably already thinks I’m lying, but if I look her in the eyes she will know it for an absolute fact.
Her eyes narrow even further, which doesn’t actually seem physically possible. “Eleanor Camellia, you’ve got to be the worst liar in the history of the universe, I don’t know why you even try,” she says, propping herself up on her elbows to face me.
I wince at the sound of my full name.
No one calls me that anymore.
Shoving that thought out of my mind, I brace myself for her to press the issue, but instead she lets out a defeated sigh and says, “But I also know that if you’ve made up your mind not to talk about it, no amount of bugging from me is going to make you tell me any faster.
It’s just going to make me batty, and Dr. Hayes, who absolutely does have a vendetta against me, is already doing that so I’m at max capacity. ”
I jerk my head up to see her lying back down on the grass, arm draped over her eyes to block out the sun.
I met Jenna Wilbanks during first semester move-in week when she came barrelling down our hall with a bright turquoise suitcase and started unpacking her things, talking a mile a minute before I managed to get a word in to tell her that she was in the wrong room.
She’s down the hall in her actual room now, but we’ve been attached at the hip ever since.
She’s from the Pacific Northwest, so we couldn’t have grown up more differently, but she’s my kindred spirit in every way.
She even begged to visit Larkspur with me over fall break, spending the full week squealing every time she saw even the most mundane of small town clichés.
“It’s just like Friday Night Lights, I didn’t think shit like this was real!”
At first I was nervous about introducing her to Jack and Abby–I’ve never had to mix friend groups before, and I was convinced that somehow my three favorite people would hate each other. Even though Jack and Abby have also been friends for years, and Jenna has never met a stranger.
To my immense surprise, Jack and Jenna have eerily similar niche interests, and talked about how scientists use samples from the ice caps to determine when volcanic eruptions have occurred for the better part of an hour until they remembered that I was, in fact, still at the table with them.
When Abby came over for a sleepover, it was a huge relief that they instantly clicked. It then became a huge nightmare, because the two of them together is akin to every version of the Joker teaming up, but instead of destroying Gotham City, they force me to talk about my feelings.
Something I have been adamantly opposed to since I broke my own heart, as well as his.
To Abby’s credit though, she didn’t bring up Griffin at all, and Jenna was fascinated by my personality as a child, so she didn’t even notice that the topic of boys never came up.
That’s why it’s so jarring to see her back down so quickly. Jenna is studying psychology, and by that I mean she’s taken Psych 101 and has been locked in on determining exactly where all of my anxieties stem from ever since. (The conclusion is nearly always sexual frustration, obviously.)
Is she trying to lull me into a false sense of security before she really pounces?
“I can feel you looking at me,” she says without bothering to move her arm to look at me.
“Believe it or not, I do know when to pick my battles. You’ve got that look on your face that you get when you think about home, and I know better than to push you on that.
Just know it’s going to haunt me forever and I will hold it against you until the day we die. ”
Even though I know she can’t see it, I’m certain she can feel the way I roll my eyes dramatically, even as my stomach clenches at the tangential mention of Larkspur.
“Have you ever considered toning down the drama for one day in your life?”
Mirroring her movements, I lay down next to her and throw my arm over my face.
Without missing a beat, she snarks, “No I haven’t, and that’s a stupid question and I resent it.”
I laugh out loud, realizing it might be the first time I’ve laughed all day as Jenna joins in.
***
Earlier today, my morning had started off the way it has every day since we switched back to Daylight Savings Time– with the sunlight peeking through the curtains in my dorm room directly onto my face, very rudely waking me up well before I’m ready to be awake.
When I rolled over to grab my phone from under my pillow to check what time it was, two notifications made my heart skip several beats before I could even register how early it was.
[1 Missed Call & 1 New Voicemail]
Frowning at my phone, I was still half asleep as I checked to see who called me in the middle of the night.
[Griffin Hart]
Surely not, I thought to myself, bringing my phone up to my ear to listen to the voicemail. It had to be a pocket dial. My heart stopped entirely when I heard the southern drawl coming through the speaker.
“Uh, hey darlin’.
Listen, I’m sorry to call you.
I actually don’t even know why I’m calling you.
Uh, basically I fucked up and I don’t know what to do.
And things always make more sense when I talk to you.
Or maybe they don’t anymore. I don’t know.
Shit, this was a bad idea.”
He was very clearly drunk, and ended the call with a humorless chuckle without saying goodbye. I listened to the voicemail three more times, and before I could start to process it, my phone buzzed with a new notification. This time, I get a text that reads:
Griffin: I shouldn’t have called you. That was a mistake. Ignore it.
My heart plummeted into my stomach as I read the text over and over and over. An onslaught of a million different emotions sent me reeling– I still can’t tell if I’m more shocked, sad, or angry.
As I lay next to Jenna on what should be a perfectly lovely day, I decide to hone in on anger, fists clenching so tight I can feel the crescent moon indents from my nails that will probably linger for hours.
The problem is I can’t tell if I’m upset that he called me in the first place, or that he so flippantly said it was a mistake.
Ironic, coming from me.
And even worse, that I should forget it.
I haven’t heard from, or spoken to, or even talked about Griffin since I left for college.
It pisses me off that he told me to ignore it, even though that’s exactly what I planned to do when I showed up here–ignore and forget everything to do with Larkspur High and the cowboy I left behind.
Jenna has badgered me relentlessly about what she refers to as my “mysterious sordid past,” but I know if I talk about it, that means I have to think about it, and I’ve worked painstakingly hard not to do that exact thing. To think about it. To think about him.
All it took was a voicemail and a text to crack open the vault in my heart where I shoved everything to do with Griffin Hart the moment I left his house that morning–left, and never looked back.