Reclaiming the Sand

by A. Meredith Walters

  But she doesn’t like it when I look at her. She frowns at me a lot and calls me names. Her friends say nasty things to me when I leave class.

  Last week a guy with a big nose took my lunch. I was really hungry. My mom made me my favorite chicken salad sandwich. It was my lunch, not theirs. I hate it when they’re mean to me.

  It makes me really angry.

  I yelled and told him to give it back. He laughed, though I didn’t think it was funny.

  But he didn’t give it back.

  And I was really hungry.

  I ate a whole bag of potato chips when I got home.

  “Stop looking at me, freak!”

  Ellie is talking to me again. I was looking at the new ring in her nose. Why did she put it there? Her nose is pretty without it.

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

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

  I don’t like touching people.

  But I want to touch her.

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

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

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

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

  I could draw anything.

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

  Maybe then she will be my friend.

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

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

  I keep the drawing.

  “Freaky, Freaky Flynn!”

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

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

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

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

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

  I had cried and Mom had tried to hug me.

  I hit her.

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

  I didn’t say anything.

  But I still liked looking at Ellie.

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

  She laughed a lot.

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

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

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

  “Why are you so weird?” she asks me.

  “I’m not weird,” I said back.

  “You’re a freak,” she said.

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

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

  Up and down.

  Over and over again.

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

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

  “Why do you do that?” she asks.

  Up and down.

  Over and over again.

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

  I don’t answer her. I rub harder.

  Ellie picks up my notebook.

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

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

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

  I want to touch her.

  I couldn’t.

  “Yes,” I said, closing it.

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

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

  Ellie’s mouth stops stretching.

  “You are such an 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 h
ome 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.

  Even armed with the understanding of what made me the way I was, my foster families were never equipped to handle the angry, violent girl who had invaded their homes.

  So I would have to leave. I never settled. I never allowed myself to get comfortable. Because I knew it would be over soon enough. Even the nice ones never lasted long.

  My life had been a series of temporary situations.

  But Julie continued to try. I’d give her that.

  And I could still see the disappointment on her face when I was carted off to juvie six years ago. Her tears were the only ones that fell.

  So now, even though I had outgrown her services years ago, she still insisted on “touching base” with me every few months. And living in a small town, we ran into each other a lot more than that.

  It wasn’t a coincidence that she stopped by on my shifts at JAC’s, even though she lived and worked across town.

  And she, more than most people, knew when I was bullshitting and evading. She sipped on her coffee, a brown lock of hair flopping in her face.

  “You do. I can tell. I’m so glad!” she enthused and I knew a grilling session was imminent.

  I rolled my eyes but didn’t deny her statement. What was the point? She was right.

  “Are you going to take any more classes?” Julie asked, dumping more sugar into her coffee.

  “Let’s just take one day at a time, okay?” I said watching her over the rim of my tea mug.

  Julie was saying something. Her mouth was moving but I didn’t hear the sounds coming out. Because at that moment the bell tinkled above the door and I nonchalantly lifted my eyes toward the momentary distraction.

  And froze.

  I swear to fucking god, was nowhere safe from Flynn Hendrick’s all too visible ghost?

  He came inside, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He walked slowly toward the cashier and then stopped, staring up at the menu boards. He stood there for at least five minutes, not noticing the fact that a line was forming behind him. He took his time. Deliberating carefully as though he were developing a plan for world peace as he stood there.

  Finally he gave his order and then took out a wad of money from his pocket and meticulously laid it out on the counter, making sure to count out the exact amount so change wasn’t necessary.

  I knew he was mumbling to himself, counting out loud, his fingers hovering above the coins. He would take as long as he needed to in order to get it right.

  I knew this because I had seen him do it a hundred times before. I recognized his pattern and his routine as though I were watching a movie I had once memorized but had forgotten I knew so well.

  “Ellie!” Julie snapped her fingers in front of my face, making me blink and forcing my eyes back to her.

  “Did you hear anything I just said?” she asked me, smiling in bemusement. Only Julie Waterman could find my complete lack of manners endearing.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to go.” I grabbed my bag and dropped some money on the table. I chanced a look at Flynn and saw that he was still counting out his money and the people behind him were getting angrier by the minute.

  “Where are you going?” Julie asked, getting a concerned look on her face was reserved solely for me. She followed my not so subtle gaze to Flynn who had finally handed over his money and was tapping his fingers against the counter in a perfect, controlled rhythm.

  That was new.

  I had at one time been intimately familiar with his ticks. But this was one I hadn’t seen before.

  But a lot can change in six years.

  Julie frowned, the line between her eyebrows deepening and I watched her try to place the very good-looking, but extremely awkward man that had entirely too much of my attention.

  “Is that?” Julie began but I cut her off.

  I needed to get out of there before Flynn saw me. I didn’t want an exchange. I didn’t want any interaction. I desperately wanted to continue living my life the way it was before he had danced back into it.

  We hadn’t shared a single word in the three weeks since he first came into JAC’s but already my world felt tight and restrictive. He took up too much space and I resented him for that.

  “I’ve really got to go,” I said hurriedly, picking up my to go cup and giving Julie a frazzled smile and hurried toward the door.

  Just as Flynn was heading in the same direction.

  Smash. Crash.

  Shit.

  I had my mocha dripped down my front, plastering my shirt to my boobs. And I wasn’t wearing a bra. Great, now the entire coffee shop was getting a good, long look at my nipples.

  “Sorry,” Flynn mumbled, holding his hands out as coffee dripped from his fingers. He hadn’t realized it was me yet and I wondered what the likelihood was that I could still make it out the door without him seeing me.

  Slim to none.

  “Ellie,” he said flatly, raising his head and meeting my eyes briefly before lowering them again.

  “Flynn,” I said just as evenly. I pulled at the soaked material that was stuck to my skin. “Can you get me some napkins?” I asked, irritated that this moment I had been trying to avoid at all costs had happened in the most public and embarrassing way possible.

  “Sure. Sorry,” he said quickly, grabbing a stack of napkins from the counter. We had everyone’s attention. I purposefully made eye cont
act with a few of the gawkers closest to me and they quickly resumed their conversations.

  Being the town hot head had its advantages.

  Flynn came back and started patting at my chest with napkins. He rubbed over my breasts, trying to mop up the liquid, not aware of the fact that he was essentially groping me.

  For a man who didn’t like to be touched, he was spending an inordinate amount of time touching me in an obliviously intimate way.

  I snatched the napkins from his hands and took a step back. “I’ve got it,” I said through gritted teeth. Flynn’s cheeks blazed red and he dropped the rest of the pile onto the floor.

  “Sorry,” he muttered again.

  “Stop saying sorry,” I barked, wiping the rest of the coffee off my bare arms. It was a good thing I was only wearing a tank top. I didn’t have time to go home before my shift, so I was going to have to suffer through six hours of smelling like dried coffee.

  “Sorry,” Flynn said again and I snorted. Flynn’s lips quirked as if deciding whether he wanted to smile or not.

  We stood there stiffly, the coffee slowly drying into a sticky mess across my skin. I tried not to stare at him, but it was hard. I thought I’d never see him again. I had counted on the fact that I’d never have to be face to face with this confusing, conflicting range of emotions.

  He was still cute and unassuming. His shy smile still sweet yet uneasy. He still wore his brown hair messy and longish around his forehead and ears and he was still the only person to ever make me feel edgy and unsure.

  I hated that I knew the details of his face. I hated that I knew his favorite television show and the way he ate his cereal (dry and with two spoonfuls of sugar). I hated that I had at one time catalogued these seemingly inconsequential details with a resolute dedication. Because at one time they had mattered.

  But the girl that had known these things had died a long time ago. I had destroyed her. Flynn had ruined her. She was six feet under an unyielding earth.

  “Mocha latte three sugars,” Flynn muttered, scratching the back of his neck.

  “What?” I asked, frowning.

  “That’s what you drink. Mocha latte with three sugars. You’d bring it to school in your blue thermos and drink the entire thing before the first bell rang.” Flynn’s flat voice reciting such an innocent detail made my stomach clench.