hearts big and stupid

Her parents asked her what was wrong, but she didn't answer. She just slid past them like a ghost. She didn't answer them much these days. One day they would stop asking, but there was time yet. Her mother sighed sadly, and her father turned his attention back to the pot roast. Eleanor slipped into the cool dark of her room. The air inside had grown heavy and dank; she kept the shades drawn, the blinds shut tight. She didn't mind. If she closed her eyes it was almost dark enough.

Some nights she would hear the murmur of voices, like the sound of water running in another room, and she would look up to see shadows crosshatching the thin seam of light beneath her door. Some nights there would come a gentle tapping, the splitting rush of light as the door eased open, the backlit and tired shapes of her parents revealed. But not tonight.

For the hundredth time since the accident she locked herself away in her room and tucked her knees to her chest and rested her face there. She looked like a punctuation device, an apostrophe tumbled from great height, its sleek curves buckled slightly by the landing. Eleanor closed her eyes and thought immediately about the letter, and felt a rise of panic in her chest. She had written it to a boy who had looked at her just once, and it had shaken her; she had written it in a daze over the course of a week, and today had carefully fed it into his locker through one of the ventilation slots. As the last corner disappeared and she heard the hollow thump of the tightly-folded note drop to the floor of the locker, she felt utterly and immediately foolish, and tried to open the locker in vain. An hour later, at final bell, she had watched from an alcove far down E hall, her heart big and stupid in her chest, as he appeared and spun the combination dial and threw open the locker door with a bang. She watched as the note toppled out of his locker, unnoticed, to the dirty white linoleum; she scrambled for it and felt herself coming apart as she watched the note kicked away by the shuffling bristles of feet. When the hall had cleared, the square of tucked paper was missing, and he of course had gone.

She had missed her bus, and when she stepped outside, her legs tired from the ordeal, Jack was waiting for her on the bicycle rack. She was limping now, and she felt the pins in her legs like rusty hinges. He looked up when she exited the school, saw her gait immediately, and said, "I can go home and get my Radio Flyer," and she laughed and burst into tears like an idiot. One day she would realize just what it meant to be loved the way that Jack loved her, and for a sliver of a moment she saw it now, though she pushed it back. He looked at her with such concern that he seemed about to cry himself. She was loved; and she loved so desperately another who was ignorant of her.

Thinking of love always brought her back around to the shimmering colors, the patient voice, neither of which she had seen or heard for months, both of which still radiated through her like the sudden burst of heat of an ignited bonfire. Even Jack's love, even her adolescent infatuation, so confusing and explosive and consuming, was a passing thought in such light. Eleanor tried every night to bring it all back, sitting small and alone in her room, whispering unanswered hellos and questions into the dark. Months would pass before she would forget for the first time. One day she would give up altogether. But not yet.

She thought again of the letter, kicked down the hallway like a foosball, now probably riding home in somebody's backpack, tomorrow probably Xeroxed and taped to a hundred walls. She pulled her body into the shape of a period, something more final, and rolled on her axis until she fell sideways onto the bed. "Shit," she whispered. Leave it to the stupid voice to be listening this time, she thought. And slept.