1
Gunfire cracked out through the air.
El Hopper didn't react. Didn't flinch, didn't jump, didn't scream. She carried on scribbling down her Maths homework, pencil scratching across the paper. Once the gunfire stopped, she paused. El guessed it would be five minutes before she heard the ambulance, then returned to the work.
Ms Carrigan had set equations. Equations made El stressed, and if El was stressed, she obsessively chewed whatever she had in her hands. Teeth marks peppered the wood of her pencil, especially around the eraser.
`Expand and simplify brackets,' she read out quietly. `(x+3)(x-4).' Dear God, she was terrible at maths. `Dad!' El leaned back over her desk chair. `Dad, can I have some help?'
Chief Hopper appeared at the bedroom door, tightening his belt. `Sorry, kid. Have to go out.'
`The guns?'
`Yeah, sounded like a drive-by. I'll be back soon. And what are our Don't Be Stupid rules?' Hopper pulled on his fedora as El rolled her eyes. Sometimes her dad forgot she wasn't six anymore.
`Don't answer the door to anyone,' she said, counting them off on her fingers. `Any fighting starts, hide under the bed. Keep a phone with me at all times.' She pointed at the phone in her room. It was a fairly plain, dull, creamy colour, but El had decorated it with stickers of bands and skulls. `I'll be fine. What about you?'
`Yep, I know my rules.' Hopper quickly came over to her desk, peered at the maths problem. `Just draw lines like this to make it easier to multiply. And remember a positive number and a negative number makes a negative. Okay, I really gotta go.' Hopper ruffled her curly hair, and El watched him out of the door. Every time he left, she was so scared he wouldn't come back it was like a physical pain.
An ambulance's siren wailed out down the street. El checked her watch; yep, she'd been right.
Five minutes.
6:25. Monday morning. Mess was spread out across El's desk and room. She'd never been very tidy, but this was bad even by her standards- her origami stuff was pushed to one end of her desk, whilst pens, pencils and books were scattered across the rest of it. Her school books had somehow found their way onto the floor, so El was cramming as many as she could find into her satchel.
`Come on-' She filled her bag until it was almost bursting at the seams, then tugged the zip shut.
Time to get dressed and do her makeup… in ten minutes.
El's `wardrobe' was really a stack of shelves with a sheet thrown over it to act as a cover.
She yanked off the sheet, and grabbed her jeans, black sweater, and vest top before tugging on her jeans, doing little jumps to get her legs in. They were skinny jeans and El, while she wasn't fat, wasn't exactly skinny either- she was just sort of comfortable in the middle, and was perfectly fine with that. El slid on her vest and finally got on her sweater.
She'd be boiling, but it was either that or get dress coded.
The first time she'd got dress coded, her and Max had locked themselves in one of the classrooms and barricaded the doors as a form of protest, a stunt that had ended with the two of them in detention for a month.
Five minutes...
El flicked open her eyeshadow pallete and took out the make up brush. It was always a struggle not to get eyeshadow all over her fingers. El put her make-up on in a look she called `Punk-Goth Racoon.' Once that was done El blinked into her mirror, then for good measure rubbed a little eye shadow into her lips. There. That was good.
Hopper was still asleep from his long night. He hadn't got back until way after El had gone to bed. El quietly opened his door and checked round it, then blew him a quick kiss.
Two minutes.
El grabbed her breakfast from the kitchen. Chewing on her mouthful of cold Eggo, El let herself out of the apartment and locked the door. The key was safe on a little string around her neck.
Jim Hopper owned apartment 24B. The elevator had given up the ghost two years ago, but luckily the apartment was only three floors up. Maybe twenty, thirty feet above the pavement. By the time she was halfway down, her Eggo had dissapeared. El opened the glass door and walked out into the Chicago street. The walk to school was fifteen minutes long. El loved walking about Chicago in the early morning- street vendors were setting up their stalls, people were walking their dogs, TVs were already crackling out news headlines. It was the energy she adored. Healthy, human energy, not terrifying adrenaline.
`Hey, Ben!' El shouted, waving to the man who ran the hot dog stand. He waved back at her, still clutching a spatula. The grey-muzzled labrador that hung around the stall for scraps barked at her. Even if El knew it was silly, she still liked to imagine that the dog was barking specially for her.
El carried on her way. The June sky billowed with clouds, but it was still warm and sunny. Soon, she was at the school.
El joined the stream of students flowing in through the gates and broke off once inside, headed towards the outer reaches of the battlefield that was the playground before school started. At the edge of the gum-splotched recess yard was Max, slouched against the pebbledash wall in her yellow hoodie, waiting for El.
`Did you hear about Jess Landey?' Max said immediately, instead of hello.
`No. What's happened to Jess?'
`Drive-by. Not far from your apartment block.'
The gunshots. El's eyes almost popped out of her head. `Is she okay?'
A redundant sigh escaped Max's mouth as she shrugged. `She's alive, if that's what you're asking.'
The bell went. Both girls were grateful for the distraction. They grabbed their bags and ran to English, carried along with the stream of students.
`So- you did the English homework, right?' Max panted, her black rucksack bouncing on her shoulders. `You know what a git Mr Gruber is about homework.'
El stopped dead. `We had homework?!'
Panic pushed El's heartbeat up to about a trillion beats per second. Max shoved El in the direction of the library.
`Go! I'll cover for you with Gruber.'
There was no need to ask El twice- she shot off to the library, grey satchel banging her hip. She pushed her way through the current of students going in the opposite direction. Unfortunately El was only a lowly sophomore, meaning that all seniors and juniors had full permission to try and shove her in the opposite direction.
Eventually El managed to get to the library, after carving a path through the river of people with her elbows. Breaths heaved in and out of her lungs. After a couple of minutes her heart rate returned to normal, and El entered the high school's enormous library. She walked past the librarian at the desk, muttering a half baked excuse at her, and settled down at the furthest end of the library, in a dark, secluded corner almost no one went to.
El pulled her English book out of her satchel. The bottom of her bag was a clutter of food crumbs, books, hand-outs she'd completely forgotten to stick in her book, and wrapped sanitary towels. She blew food crumbs off of her English book and then opened it. Oh, yeah. Now she remembered the homework. They had to answer a few comprehension questions on To Kill A Mockingbird. The questions were in an English textbook that should be in her bag…
El buried her face in her hands. She'd left it in her mess of a room.
Don't panic, she told herself. The library would probably have a copy of the textbook in the Reference section. It was right ahead of her, so El got up, and started running her index finger over the glossy paperbacks. She found it right at the other end of the shelf. The To Kill A Mockingbird textbook was one of the thickest; it would take her forever to find the right page.
El pulled it out, and saw an eye staring back at her from the other side of the shelf. She almost dropped the book. El stepped back a little, and so did the person on the other side of the shelf, and El saw more than just his eye. Her lips parted slightly.
She didn't know this boy's name, but her heart started beating very, very fast. Her ability to breathe seemed suddenly restricted, and she clutched the book to her chest.
This boy's eyes were a dark, rich brown. El was completely transfixed by them. She could only see a sliver of his face- a vertical line of eye, cheekbone, freckles, and half a mouth. If anything, her heart started beating faster as she imagined the rest of him. The corner of the boy's mouth she could see turned into a slight smile. El was too shocked to smile back. All she could register was the sudden dizzy feeling behind her eyes.
Unwillingly, she turned away, hands clinging to the book even tighter, so tightly her knuckles turned white. It took her a moment to remember where her chair was. When she did remember El sat down, thumbed through the book, and got to the right page. Six questions, all fairly easy. She scribbled down the first one, then the second.
Something weird was happening. El found herself scanning beyond the bookshelf for whoever the boy had been. When her eyes found him on the other side of the library, heat flooded across her face. His sooty mop of hair fell forwards as his hands flashed across the page of his book. He must be clever; it looked like he was doing his homework at the speed of lightning.
She tried to concentrate on her own homework, but almost against her will, her eyes kept flicking up to catch a glimpse of him working at the opposite end of the library. At one point, their eyes met. El looked back down at the homework as fast as she could, hands trembling.
It was like the rest of the world had suddenly fallen away. Then El checked her watch.
`Oh, God-' El took a guess at the sixth question and then started shoving things back into her bag, including the reference book. She was late, she was so late…
El heaved her satchel onto her shoulder and sprinted out of the library and down the empty corridor, her entire concious begging her to stay in the library.
When she ran past the row of lockers, she saw that grafitti had been daubed all over them- stuff like Go home, Texas! or, Chicago Dogs, watch your back! and a few images of dead bodies.
El ignored it, skidded around the final corner, almost ran over a lost Freshman, and finally burst into her English lesson. Mr Gruber gave her a sickly smile, all bushy moustache and yellowing teeth.
`Miss Hopper, how nice for you to join us,' he oozed. `Care to explain where you were?'
`Oh, well, I was-'
`Miss Mayfield already filled me in. I just want to hear it from you.' A smug, self-satisfied expression took over Mr Gruber's face, like he had thrown a sausage roll into a bear trap, and was very sure El was about to go after it. El gulped, and glanced towards her friend. Max was seated behind Mr Gruber's back, and she seemed to be miming something. Max made the universal sign for a phone, and mouthed nonsensically. Nerves racking her chest, El took a wild stab.
`A teacher rang-' Max shook her head. `I mean, called me to-' Now Max was pointing to Mr Gruber's desk. Everyone in the class was struggling to keep a straight face. `Called me to the teach- to the front desk because-' Max kept on pressing her hands to her heart and pulling a weird face. `My dad is getting married?'
Max buried her face in her hands and flopped onto the desk. The entire class burst into peals of laughter. Embarrassment wormed about in the pit of El's stomach.
`Well, that's odd, Miss Hopper,' Mr Gruber smirked. `Because Maxine informed me that you were told to go to reception because your grandmother died.'
Oh. El accepted the detention slip with a resigned sigh and sat down next to Max, face burning.
`You looked like a lobster,' Max mumbled, still facedown on her desk. `You were going redder than I thought was humanly possible.'
`Well, thanks for trying.' El pocketed the detention note and retrieved her book and pen. Mr Gruber was writing on the board, and she needed to take notes.
But all she could think of was that boy in the library.
As usual, Max and El took up their post at the edge of the playground. The normal cacophany filled the air- a sultry blend of conversation, ball games, swear words, and bullying. From where they were, it was easy to see the split factions of the Chicago high school. The new kids from Texas were on one end of the playground, whilst the Chicago Dogs, led by Troy, were on the other. In between them was the sports kids, kicking about their soccer ball, the Bitch Queens that El and Max despised so much, and finally, the outcasts. Nerds, weirdos, the too fat, the too thin. They were the equivalent of the crippled orang-utans that hobbled along the forest floor.
Technically, El and Max would be in that number, with their refusal to conform to high school fashion and behaviour. The thing was, the two girls didn't interact with anyone on the playground, therefore, they were unplaceable.
El didn't know who had come up with the Laws of High School, but she guessed that they were on crack cocaine when they did.
Suddenly a clump of outcasts moved away, revealing four boys. El's breath caught in her throat. One of them was the boy she'd seen in the library, chatting and laughing to his friends.
`What're you looking at?' Max asked cheerfully, following El's line of sight.
`Nothing!'
`Hey, isn't that Mike Wheeler? He's the idiot who blew up that radio in Mrs Hartwell's face two weeks before she retired.'
His name's Mike. `I-I'm sure it was an accident,' El stammered. `And anyway, I don't know who Wheeler is, why would I know who he is? I-I mean, we're all just going to the same school, right?'
A soccer ball thumped into the ground next to them, bouncing loudly off the asphalt and landing in the grass. Max watched El shrewdly.
`You're going red again,' she informed her.
At that point, El wondered how hard it would be for the ground to swallow her up. It didn't even have to be a hole, it could just be a meteor or something that only hit her. The minute Max figured it out, her entire face lit up like she'd discovered the best thing since sliced bread.
`Oh my God, you like Wheeler!' Max started laughing so hard her entire body doubled over and then got stuck in that position. Everyone on the playground looked towards them, the jocks, the Bitch Queens, the gangs, and the outcasts.
Including Mike and his friends.
It was then El began to die inside.
Hi. This chapter is the first chapter of a full length fanfiction I'm planning. It will probably be about ten chapters long. If you could write a review telling me what you think of the premise, that would be very useful. As for the actual fanfiction, I'm going to start publishing the rest the minute I've written the whole thing. There might be a little wait, so apologies in advance. Thanks for reading!