Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

Eli hasn’t written me off. Eli wants me here.

Although, once we’re in the cafeteria, he doesn’t real y look like he wants to be here. He doesn’t look upset, exactly, and his fingers aren’t twitching, but he looks—he looks like he’s holding everything inside himself very stil . Like he’s wil ing himself to be calm.

The problem is, it shows. I can see it, in how the fluid grace of his walk is slowed down, stiffened, and in how he keeps looking around. Like he can stop his fingers, but he keeps expecting people to see him doing something they don’t want to see anyway.

And then I notice something else. No one talks to him. We’ve passed by at least twenty guys in their white shirts and khaki pants and acne constel ations ranging from a few stars to entire galaxies, and no one has said anything.

Even I get “Hey,” at school from people I see in my classes, girls who used to cal me “friend” and hang around the house, hoping to talk to Tess until before she went off to col ege and I drew into myself.

Eli gets nothing, and as we wait in line for food that looks better than anything I’ve ever seen in Ferrisvil e High’s cafeteria or, frankly, anywhere, I notice that everyone acts as if he isn’t even there.

We get our food—and we don’t even have to pay, I guess it’s part of the tuition—and walk back into the main part of the cafeteria.

It’s gorgeous, al windows and light and I think there’s even soothing music piped in. It’s like a museum or something—at least until you see that everyone is eating normal y, the guys furiously shoveling in food just like they do in my school.

It’s not that I was feeling like I didn’t belong, exactly, but a reminder that guys are guys, even if you give them tablecloths, is a pretty welcome one.

I wait for Eli to make a move to sit down somewhere, but he’s just standing there, holding his plate so tightly his fingertips are white with strain, the tips tapping against the bottom over and over.

“Excuse me,” a guy says, al sneer, and shoves past me, heading toward a table.

“You might as wel leave,” he says to Eli as he passes him. “Last thing anyone wants to see is you doing your twitch thing while we’re trying to eat. Bad enough having to watch it in class.”

Ass. I shift, like I’m turning, and “accidental y” catch my elbow on the guy’s plate, sending everything on it flying into him.

“Great, you found a friend as fucked up as you,” the guy says, scowling, and then adds, “Retard,” in my direction.

I’m ready to match his bel igerence head-on, because I don’t like how he talked to Eli, to me, but Eli’s face has gone from fake calm to a kind of barely control ed rage/sorrow, and it’s the sorrow that gets to me. Stops me.

Rage I can handle. Bring it on, slam it into the big bal of anger that fil s me up. I can take that. I understand it.

But sorrow—that I have no defense against. Part of why I hated Jack so much the night I realized he was never going to love me was that he real y and truly was sorry. He could have kept screwing me and trying to get Tess to notice him, but he didn’t want to hurt me.

And that’s what broke my heart. Like Tess lying silent in her hospital bed, like the way my parents looked as they stared at the few, slight boxes of her things, the very stil ness of sorrow, the soul-deep endlessness of it—it scares me. There is nothing I can do to push it back, to keep it away.

Anger can try to break your heart, but sorrow is what wil . What can. What does.

I don’t know what to do, though. I don’t know how to fix things—Tess’s continued stil ness is proof of that. I don’t know how to make everything al right.

But I have to do something. I look around, see the sea of white shirts—nothing helpful there—and spot a door near a few windows looking out onto the picture-perfect lawn.

“Can we eat outside?” I ask Eli, who nods stiffly, hands stil white-knuckled around his plate, and I understand the look on his face.

He looks trapped, helpless and furious, and that’s a feeling I know too wel . Know how much it hurts. Know how it holds you down, how every day there are a thousand little ways to see there is nothing you can do to change who or what you are.

I walk toward the door, because it’s al I can think of to do, and when we’re outside, I see an empty table and head for it.

I get there at the same time a slight guy with deep ebony skin does.

“Hey,” he says to Eli, and then nods at me.

“Hey,” Eli says, and for a moment I think he’s not even going to sit down. But he does, and what fol ows is weird and tense and makes me wonder if maybe al those giddy feelings I’d let myself have before were premature and stupid.

Nobody talks. Eli doesn’t talk to me or the guy sitting with us. He just eats his food, one bite after another, with no pleasure on his face. No expression at al real y, except a sort of grim determination.

The other guy doesn’t talk either, just pul s out a book and starts reading.

I manage to choke down about half the sandwich I’d grabbed, and am wondering if I should bolt for the parking lot when I hear a cheerful voice exclaim, “And this is the Fennelson Building, where our students dine.”

I look up and see a bow-tie-wearing middle-aged man who is clearly the Saint Andrew’s equivalent of a guidance counselor, because even better clothes can’t disguise the “I help students! Real y, I do!” attitude that’s practical y quivering off him.

“Ah, and we have a guest today,” he says, smiling at me even as his eyes register dismay at my clearly not-from-Milford clothes. “We do offer our students the chance to bring off-campus guests to lunch, provided they’ve earned the right to do so via Saint points. It’s one of the many things that makes Saint Andrew’s so special.”

He moves closer to the table. “And, of course, in addition to our dedication to preserving the traditions of a rigorous education, we’re also committed to diversity.”

The other guy at the table looks up then, smiles fake and furiously at everyone on tour, al white people, I realize, al of whom are nodding like

“Oh, yes, of course that’s important,” as their gazes stray to the other buildings, the other students, or even their watches.

“Never mind that I’m a National Merit Scholar,” the guy mutters. “Notice me because I’m black!”

The tour guide/school cheerleader hears enough of that to clear his throat and say, “Al right, let’s move on to the next building—we’ve got an excel ent science lab here.”

“I hate that bul shit,” the guy says as the tour group walks away.

“Me too,” Eli says, the first thing he’s said the whole time we’ve been here, and I think Finally! with an amount of relief that’s embarrassing. But I’m stil glad he’s said something.

The guy doesn’t respond, though, just shrugs and swal ows the rest of his soda before getting up and walking away.

Eli closes his eyes, like he’s endlessly weary. When he doesn’t open them after a second, I dare to reach over and touch the edge of one of his hands.

“It’s my—it’s the OCD,” Eli says, his voice quiet. “That’s why everyone is—wel , you saw it.”

Maybe I should pretend I haven’t seen what I have, but if Eli feels like I do about his life—and seeing his closed eyes now, I believe he does—the last thing he wants is people bleating platitudes like “Oh, I know things wil work out!”

“It’s al they notice, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, and opens his eyes, truly looks at me for the first time since we stepped into the cafeteria. “So you can see why when you talk about how great things are for me, I—you can see why I don’t get it.”