"Ellie?" Joel called, as the girl rushed past him, her hoodie a multi-colored blur. "Ellie?"
"I'm fine!" she called in a strange voice, thundering up the stairs, and shutting the door. Joel stood from where he had been kneeling on the floor, examining a pair of sights he had removed from the barrel of Tommy's rifle, and took a deep breath, going to the bottom of the staircase and pausing. Footsteps thudded across the floor, then he heard the hollow reverberation of her guitar being bumped. A sentence full of swearing, and an angry discordant sweep of the strings.
"Ellie?"
"What!"
"Can I come up?"
"I dunno, your legs working?" she called back, and Joel chuckled in spite of himself, mounting the stairs. Her door was open.
"What's goin' on?"
"Nothing." She shrugged.
"Your face looks like a thundercloud."
"Your face looks like a grizzly bear."
"Hey." He crossed his arms. "What is goin' on?"
"I said nothing, I just can't get this stupid F chord."
Ellie twisted her mouth sideways and contorted her fingers over the frets, her knuckles white as she gripped the neck of the instrument, and strummed a haphazard combination of notes. Cursing again, she strummed it harder.
"It won't work." She looked up, her face pale.
Joel knew the guitar was not the problem, but he was familiar enough with the feeling of venting somehow to let her be.
"Here, lemme see what you're doin'." Joel sat on the chair and hitched it up closer, meeting her eyes. "Make sure that you get this one out of the way, so your pinky can reach clear to here. Lean 'em a little this way. Now try it again."
Ellie allowed her fingers to be manipulated over the strings, and a wavering, but generally-F- chord filled the room.
"Cool," she murmured. "I've been needing this one for forever."
"Better?"
"Lots," she said, plucking the strings one by one, and adjusting her fingers, her tongue making a bump in her cheek as she concentrated. Joel opened his mouth to begin to say something, when he heard a knock on the door downstairs, and then a hesitant:
"Hello?"
"Anna!" Ellie jumped to her feet, thrusting the guitar at Joel, but suddenly stumbled, losing her balance and lurching into the doorframe. The palms of her hands hit the wood with a dull thud, and she cursed.
"Careful, grace," Joel scolded, twisting around in his chair.
"Holy moly," she breathed. "My head felt weird there for a minute."
"Sit down," Joel said. "Did you eat somethin' today?"
"No," Ellie said hurriedly, recovering and clattering down the stairs. He heard the sound of the door open, and hurried excited voices, and descended the stairs slowly.
The girls stood just in the doorway, and Ellie had her hands jammed into the pockets of her hoodie, rocking forward and backward on her feet in excitement as her friend talked.
"Hi, Joel," Anna said, breaking off, and giving him a grin. "How're you?"
"Fine, fine," he said a bit gruffly, bending, and picking up his project from the floor. "Just fixin' to reattach those sights."
Anna nodded, and said, "Mind if I steal Ellie?"
"Long as you bring her back," Joel said, and Ellie waved a hand.
"He doesn't care that much. Keep me as long as you like."
"Matt said you ran off all upset, and probably needed cheering up," Anna began, and Ellie sobered a little. Joel did his best to feel like he was not eavesdropping, but it wasn't exactly working.
"Yeah?" Her voice was cheerful – falsely so. "Well, I'm better now, I just remembered something I wanted to do and didn't want to, you know, like forget."
"What did he do to his hair, do you know?"
"I cut it for him," Ellie deadpanned, and Anna covered her mouth in a snicker.
"What!" Ellie glared. "Does it look dumb?"
"Come on," Anna said simply, dragging Ellie out the door. Matt was across the courtyard, lending a hand to Tommy, his father, and Earl in pitching new hay into the stables – the hay being long grasses that grew on the western-side of the river, in a meadow – and waved when he sighted the two. Gestures explained his request for absence, and momentarily he jogged toward them.
"Ellie – I'm really sorry," he began, his eyes earnest. "Did I upset you somehow?"
"It's nothing, I just – forgot something I needed to grab," Ellie said. "Anna came and got me."
"Yeah, we've missed you! So." Anna looked back and fourth between the two, eyes alight. "Let's do something crazy."
"I don't know what to do," Ellie complained, shrugging, and sticking her hands back into her pockets. "I was enjoying a nice quiet day of –"
"What?"
"Cutting Matt's hair and playing my guitar."
"Okay, well, you can't cut his hair anymore or else he won't have any left –"
"-Hey!"
"It's true!" Anna protested. "He looks like a gladiator!"
"Seriously?" Ellie groaned. "Did everybody in the world know what that was except me?"
"Go get your guitar, Ellie. Matt, what were you doing – aside from shoveling the barns?"
"I was going to write..." he admitted.
"What?"
"It's a secret."
"You totally were going to write a sequel to Savage Starlight, you said you loved it," Ellie began, her lips pursed.
"True, but not that much."
"It's good!"
"Ellie, get your guitar, Matt, find your notebook and meet me back here. We are going to do something amazing," Anna ordered in a dramatic voice. Ellie watched her eagerly, like a dog watches his master.
"What are we going to do?"
"I'll tell you when I'm done finding my part! I'm looking for some crates, meet me back here as soon as you can!"
Laughing confusedly, the three split up, and Ellie hurried into the house, almost falling up the stairs in an attempt to hurry.
Something about Anna. Whatever it was, it made Ellie's heart stop whenever she was in the room with her. Whenever she talked, Ellie listened. Wherever she went, Ellie wanted to follow. Her glances were like drops of cool sweet rain and her smiles pure gold. Ellie's heart felt warmed that her existence was even acknowledged by such an amazing creature.
Barging back into the sunlight, Ellie's feet hit the ground in an uneven pattern as she loped up to where Anna was dragging crates and other debris from where it lay against the outside of the houses into a ramshackle pile.
"What the heck are you doing?" Ellie laughed. "Tommy's going to kill you, we just got all that crap cleaned up."
Anna stood back, and surveyed her work, hands on her hips, a lock of dark hair falling into her eyes. She blew it away with a strategic puff of her breath.
"What does it look like to you?"
"A pile of junk," Ellie replied, shrugging.
Anna grabbed her by the shoulders and shook the girl until she laughed, saying, "Use your imagination, you idiot!"
"Okay, okay!" Ellie gasped, pulling herself free, and squinting at the mess. "A... spaceship. That's the cockpit, and those are the wings." She bounded forward enthusiastically, and tugged a few boards into place. "And this – this is the teleportation device!"
Anna beamed. "Let's do Savage Starlight."
Matt's voice interrupted. "Do Savage Starlight?"
"Yes." Anna's was determined. "Ellie, give us an intro. Matt, you write what to say, and I'll say it, I swear. And I'll say it –" she took an unsteady step up onto a crate, "-epicly!" She spread her arms and struck a pose. Ellie laughed out loud.
"You're such a dork. Let's do this."
Matt grinned appreciatively, and whispered, "Do you think she's insane?"
"Yeah, but I don't care, I love her," Ellie replied hurriedly, grunting as she sat on the ground and pulled her guitar into position. She strummed an off-key chord, and then drummed on the side of the wood dramatically.
"Endure and survive – that was their mandate," Matt began in a deep, ominous voice, scribbling furiously in his notebook. "But endurance... was a matter of wit – and survival... a matter of time."
A few passersby in the compound cast strange glances at the teenagers, but no one said a word, and they resumed their business with an eye on the commotion from afar.
Ellie plucked a few single notes in a quick succession and polished them off with a quick chord as Anna settled herself in her craft, brow lowered, jaw set. Ellie began to do her best to pick a furious flying-at-the-speed-of-light kind of song on her guitar, but she had the feeling that it was sounding more like a crow pulling on the wires of a dismembered robot... the image was vivid in her head, and she squinted, focusing on the frets and sliding her fingers up and down, emitting robot-like noises, or what she imagined robot-like noises sounded like...
"Ellie!" Matt nudged her with the toe of his boot. "Hello? Background music?"
"Hm? Oh!" Ellie looked up to see Anna doing her best to fight an imaginary Traveler, and she twanged a succession of notes on the same string.
"For crying out loud, Ellie, get in the mood!" Anna exclaimed, jumping down from the crate fort, and taking the guitar from her.
"Watch it!" Ellie yelped. "Be nice to it!"
"Let's switch. You be Daniella, and I'll play the music –"
"What if I want to play the music?" Matt's eyebrows lifted. "I used to know a song or two on guitar."
"Okay then," Anna passed the instrument to the writer and taking his notebook in hand. "And I'll do the narrating." She squinted at the paper, bringing it close to her face. "How can you even read this?"
"It's shorthand," Matt said quickly, taking it back and flipping to blank page. "It's like a code. There you go." He passed the notebook back and a strange look passed between the two. Anna took a deep breath.
"Okay, Ellie, you're facing a band of one hundred Travelers – singlehandedly." She dropped her voice to add to the melodrama, and began to scribble on the paper.
"I got this," Ellie muttered, a determined look on her face as she mounted the pile of rubble, and scrambled to the top.
"Listen, you Traveler –" Ellie began to shout her opinions of the evil alien race with every colorful word she knew when she felt the world shift beneath her – not just the pile of debris – and her vision wavered. She blinked rapidly, and felt her legs sway, her friends' voices calling out from behind a buzzing in her ears.
"Ellie? Ellie, are you okay?" Anna said loudly, the grip on her arm almost painful as she escorted her down from the junk heap. "Ellie?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," she mumbled, "just almost... it's like everything went all fuzzy and blackish for a second."
"Just... take it easy," Matt said, grabbing her around the waist and helping her to the steps of Tommy and Maria's house. "How do you feel?"
"Great," Ellie breathed, as she passed clean out.