Chapter 14: Hey There Eliana

By Tuesday, Eliana had almost forgotten what it felt like for a week to be ordinary.

The steps were already full when she got there. Hannah had the third one. Vivian was holding her phone up to Melanie, showing her something with a lot of pink in it, and Emily was eating a granola bar in very small bites, like she was trying to make it last until lunch.

Eliana took her usual place, one step below and to the left. Hannah’s hand came back without her looking and passed down a paper cup.

“Have some marshmallows.”

Eliana took it. She looked at the lid, then up at Hannah.

Hannah looked back at her, completely straight-faced. “Spiritually,” she said.

“Spiritually,” Eliana agreed, and took a sip. Too much vanilla. It was perfect.

Tessa was sitting a step below Hannah with her phone in her lap. She looked up when Eliana sat down, and lit up the way she did when she had something.

“Oh my god, you were so chill yesterday,” Tessa said.

“What?”

“In the library. After school.” Tessa tilted her head. “You were just sitting at one of the tables by the window, reading. Like, totally calm. You didn’t click your pen once. I watched you for, like, five whole minutes.”

Eliana thought about it. She had been in the library yesterday. At lunch, for twenty minutes, returning a book.

“I was in the library,” she said.

“I know, that’s what I said.” Tessa narrowed her eyes. “Are you on something? Like, a supplement? Because whatever it is, I want it.”

“Tess,” Hannah said, without looking up.

“I’m asking for wellness reasons!”

“It’s probably just the latte,” Eliana said, and held it up. “It’s spiritual.”

Hannah snorted into her own cup.

Tessa looked between the two of them like she knew she was missing a joke and hated it. Then she shrugged and went back to her phone.

Eliana drank her latte. She didn’t think about the library again. She had been there. It made sense. If Tessa had the time a little wrong, Tessa usually had something a little wrong.

Her pen was in her pocket. She took it out and clicked the cap on and off, once, just to feel it, and put it back.

PE was third period, and the gym still smelled faintly of varnish.

Eliana noticed it the second she walked in. Two weeks of basketball sneakers had scuffed the new floor, and somebody had already dropped a sports drink near the bleachers and not cleaned it up properly. But under all of that, faint and sharp, the varnish was still there.

It was the same smell as the afternoon she and Lexie had run across this floor in the dark, with the fire coming up the stairwell behind them.

Her feet knew it before she did. She stopped just inside the locker room door, and for a second her legs wanted to run.

The hall doors on the far wall had been chained shut that day. The chains were gone now. Somebody had finally decided that a fire door shouldn’t be padlocked.

“Barker,” Ms. Johnson called from the middle of the floor. “You’re holding up the line.”

“Sorry.”

She made her legs move.

It was volleyball. Ms. Johnson split them into pairs for bumping drills first, counting off down the line, and when she got to Eliana she pointed her at the girl standing next to her without looking.

It was Lisa.

Lisa was in the gym clothes nobody liked, the gray shirt and the shorts that were too short and tight, with her hair scraped back and her eyes red at the edges like she had been up until three again. She looked at Eliana. Eliana looked at her.

Normally, this was the part where they would both be a little careful. A little polite. The way they were when other people were around.

“You any good at this?” Lisa asked.

“No,” Eliana said.

“Great. Me neither.”

They took a ball and found a spot by the wall. Lisa bumped it first, and it went sideways into the bleachers. Eliana got it back, bumped it to Lisa, and it hit Lisa in the face.

“Oh my god,” Eliana said. “I’m so sorry.”

Lisa held her nose and laughed so hard she had to bend over.

Eliana didn’t mean to laugh too, but it came out of her anyway, loud, in the middle of the gym. Over by the free-throw line, Melanie looked over at the sound and grinned and waved, and Eliana waved back without thinking about it.

Nobody else noticed. Nobody cared.

They kept at it. The ball went everywhere except where they wanted it to. In the middle of the fourth or fifth disaster, Lisa caught it against her chest and held it there a second.

“I didn’t bring a camera,” she said quietly. “You know. Like you said.”

Eliana looked at her.

“Good,” she said.

“I still want to know what they were.”

“I know.”

“Someday you’re going to tell me.”

Eliana didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no, either. Lisa seemed to understand that was the best she was going to get, and she bumped the ball back. It went straight up and came straight down on her head.

Eliana caught it this time.

On the far side of the gym, past the bleachers, was the door to the back stairwell. The yellow tape that had been across it for a week was gone. It looked like any other door again.

Eliana looked at it for a second longer than she meant to. Then Ms. Johnson blew the whistle, and she turned around.

Lexie’s voice had finally come back on Saturday, and by Tuesday it was nearly normal, just a little rough on the low notes. She was using it to tell Ajax to stop touching the butter.

“I’m not touching it,” Ajax said. “I’m communing with it.”

“You’re poking it.”

“Communing involves poking.”

Food Studies was fourth period, in the classroom at the end of the hall with six little kitchen stations and an oven that smelled permanently like burned sugar. Their station had the sink that dripped. Today they were making muffins, according to the recipe card Mika had taped to the cabinet door, and so far they had made a lot of mess.

“And here,” Narnia said in a low, hushed voice, in a terrible Australian accent, holding a wooden spoon like a microphone, “we observe the chef in her natural habitat. Crikey. Notice the scowl. The scowl is a warning to predators.”

“I will hit you with this whisk,” Lexie said.

“Danger! Danger! Danger!” Narnia backed away from the counter, spoon held up like a shield. “The chef is territorial.”

Mika was laughing so hard she had to hold on to the counter. She was measuring flour, badly, and getting most of it on her sleeves.

Lexie cracked the eggs one-handed into the bowl, the way her dad did. She had a latex glove on her left hand over the bandage, because it was Food Studies and the teacher had made a face the first day, and the glove made everything a little clumsy. But her dad cooked every night, and she’d grown up at the stove beside him, and her hands knew what to do.

Ajax watched the eggs go in with a solemn expression.

“You know what a muffin is, though,” he said.

“A muffin?”

“It’s a cake that’s ashamed of itself. It’s a cake that wanted to be breakfast so badly it gave up frosting.” He took the bowl from her and began to stir, slowly, like he was making a point. “Think about that. It gave up the best part of itself to be taken seriously.”

“Oh no,” Mika said, wiping her eyes. “Should we tell it we love it anyway? Even without the frosting?”

“That’s how they get you,” Ajax said gravely. “Unconditional love. The muffin feeds on it.”

They got them into the pan eventually. While the oven heated up, Narnia leaned against the counter beside Lexie and licked a bit of batter off the spoon.

“Speaking of sweet things,” they said. “Saw you on Sunday.”

“Saw me where?”

“The grocery store. By the plaza.” Narnia grinned. “You had a basket so full of candy you couldn’t close the lid. Like, three kinds of sour gummies. Those chocolate oranges you’re supposed to whack on the table. Literally half the candy aisle.” They pointed the spoon at her. “And you didn’t share.”

Lexie frowned. “Sunday?”

“Sunday afternoon.”

“I was home all day on Sunday,” Lexie said. “My dad made me help clean out the garage.”

Narnia looked at her. Then they smiled, slowly, like they were humoring her.

“Sure, babe,” they said, and licked the spoon again.

Lexie opened her mouth to argue, and closed it. She didn’t have a good reason to argue. It was candy. Narnia had probably seen someone who looked like her. She shrugged and turned to check the oven.

When she turned back around, Mika was looking at her.

Mika had stopped laughing. She was holding the measuring cup in both hands, flour on her sleeves, and she was watching Lexie with the same face she’d had on Saturday night with the camera in her lap. Like she was deciding something.

Then the oven beeped, and Mika put the cup down and smiled, bright again, and said, “Okay! Muffin time!”

Lexie was halfway down the hall after Food Studies, with a slightly lopsided muffin wrapped in a paper towel, when her phone buzzed.

She almost didn’t look. It had been a week of the group chat going quiet whenever she was in it, a week of Rodney sending memes nobody answered, a week of eating lunch in the yearbook room instead of on the crates.

That was all. No hello, no question mark of the angry kind, nothing else.

Lexie stopped in the middle of the hallway. Someone bumped her shoulder going past and said something, and she didn’t hear it.

She read it again. practice thurs? Two words. It didn’t say I’m sorry, and it didn’t say I forgive you, and it didn’t say anything about Saturday or Eliana or the front row. It was just a question about Thursday, the kind Meghan had sent her every week for two years.

That was how Meghan apologized. Lexie knew that the way she knew her own setlist.

She started typing. im sorry about

She deleted it.

i know it looked like

She deleted that too.

its not that i

She stood there a while longer, thumb hovering, and then she gave up on all of it and typed the only thing she could actually say.

She hit send before she could change her mind. Then she stood in the hallway with the muffin in one hand and the phone in the other, watching the screen.

It took almost a minute.

Lexie let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. It came out halfway to a laugh.

Eliana saw Emma on her way to civics, crouched in the hallway outside the science wing with a notebook on her knee.

She had a multimeter in one hand, the yellow kind with the two red and black leads, and she was holding the leads up to the outlet in the wall by the drinking fountain. She read the number on the screen, frowned, and wrote something down. Then she stood up, walked ten feet down the hall to the next outlet, crouched, and did it again.

A couple of freshmen walked a wide circle around her. Nobody asked what she was doing. Emma didn’t look like she would have told them.

Eliana kept walking. She didn’t slow down. She had gotten better at not slowing down.

Emma was crouched by the outlet across from the trophy case when Eliana passed her. Eliana was maybe three feet away when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the needle on the meter twitch.

It jumped hard to one side, the way Dylan’s had in the lab, and fell back.

Emma frowned at it. She tapped the side of the meter. She looked at the outlet, then up at the hallway, and her eyes landed on Eliana for half a second, the way you look at a car that went by too loud.

Then she looked back down, and wrote something in her notebook.

Eliana didn’t turn around. She kept her eyes on the end of the hall and her hands in her pockets, and she didn’t breathe normally again until she was through the door of the civics room.

Her pen was in her pocket. She held on to it the whole way to her seat.

Mr. Anderson had written a single question on the board before anyone came in.

WHO WRITES HISTORY?

He let them sit with it while the bell finished ringing. Then he leaned on the edge of his desk.

“Textbooks,” he said. “Museums. Statues. Street names. Somebody wrote every one of those. Somebody else got left out. So who writes history?”

Sean’s chair was already tipping back.

“Respectfully, the good guys,” Sean said. “History is a meritocracy. The righteous prevail, and the people who prevail write it down. That’s not bias. That’s a natural filtration system for truth.” He steepled his fingers. “Imagine, hypothetically, a man who invents a better shoelace…”

“Devil’s advocate here,” Leonard said. “Nobody has ever made a statue of a shoelace guy.”

“Which proves society has failed him.”

“The winners,” Thea said, without looking up. “Not the good guys. The winners. Those aren’t the same people, Sean. It’s whoever had the money and the power when the textbook got printed. Fix who gets to sit on the committee, and you fix who gets written down.”

“And who sits on the committee?” Leonard asked.

“People who are elected. With term limits. And the minutes are public.”

“Boring,” Sean said.

“Correct,” Thea said. “Good history should be boring to write.”

Mr. Anderson smiled at that. Then he looked across the room.

“Eliana,” he said. “What do you think?”

Eliana had been hoping he wouldn’t. She had her pen in her hand and she was clicking the cap, and she put it down on the desk before she answered, the way she always did.

She thought about the photo in the studio, Tommy on the arm of the couch with a bandage around his knuckles, grinning like he’d just gotten away with something. About her family calling him a bum at Thanksgiving. About every person who had walked out of that school alive almost three weeks ago without ever knowing why.

“Whoever’s left,” she said. “Not the people who actually did anything. Just whoever’s still around afterward.”

She meant to stop there. She didn’t.

“Some people spend their whole lives keeping everybody else safe,” she said. “Every single day. And nobody ever knows, because they never tell anyone, because who would believe them? And then they’re gone. And the only people left to tell the story are the ones who thought they were a joke.” Her voice caught on joke, and she pushed through it. “So they get remembered as a loser who couldn’t keep a job. Their own family laughs about them at Thanksgiving. And it’s not true. It was never true. But nobody who knows that is ever going to get asked.”

The room had gone completely quiet.

Eliana looked down at her desk. Her hands were flat on it, and she didn’t remember putting them there. She picked her pen back up, because she needed something to hold.

Sean looked like he was assembling a rebuttal and couldn’t find the parts.

At the front of the room, Thea looked up from her notes.

“So who should write it?” Mr. Anderson asked.

Eliana thought about Tommy’s notebook, sitting in her bag right now, full of things only she could read.

“Whoever was there,” she said. “Whoever knew them…”

Mr. Anderson looked at her for a moment. He didn’t say anything about it. He just nodded, slowly, and turned to the other side of the room.

“Lexie.”

Lexie had her arms crossed. She looked like she was going to say “not really,” the way she had the first week.

Then she didn’t.

“Whoever’s watching,” she said.

Mr. Anderson waited.

“Like, with famous people. Everybody writes their history. Millions of people.” Lexie was looking at the board, not at him. “Fans. The news. People who saw them on a screen once. They all decide who that person was, and they write it down, and that’s it. That’s the version.”

She stopped. Then, like Eliana, she didn’t.

“And they only ever saw the part on the stage,” she said. “They don’t know who that person was when she got home. What she was like in the car, with the radio up too loud. What she was actually doing with her nights.” Her jaw went tight. “Everybody knows her name. Nobody knew her. And now nobody ever will, because the only version anyone’s going to write down is the one with the spotlight on it.”

A couple of people turned to look at her. Somebody in the back whispered something. Lexie didn’t move.

Across the room, Eliana didn’t turn around. She looked down at her hands.

Mr. Anderson was quiet for a second longer than usual.

“That’s good,” he said. “Both of those are good.” He picked up the marker and drew a line under the question on the board. “Here’s the thing, though. History isn’t passive. Neither is forgetting. Every time something gets left out, somebody chose that. Somebody, somewhere, decided it was easier for everyone not to know.”

He capped the marker.

“Two pages. Due next week. Pick something history left out and tell me who did the leaving.”

The bell rang. Eliana packed her bag the way she always did, neatly. When she looked up, Lexie was already at the door. She didn’t look back.

But as she went out, her knuckles knocked twice, very lightly, against the edge of Eliana’s desk.

Lexie’s dad had made chicken and rice, the one with the lemon, which meant he was in a good mood. He talked through most of dinner about a guy at work who had backed his truck into a dumpster and then gotten out and apologized to it.

“To the dumpster,” he said. “He said sorry to the dumpster.”

“Maybe it had feelings,” Lexie said.

“That’s what he said!”

Her mom smiled a little at that. It was a real smile, small and tired, but real.

She wasn’t wearing the hoodie tonight. She was in her work cardigan, the beige one with the buttons, with her hair still pinned up from the office. Lexie looked at her sleeves and didn’t know why she was looking, or what it meant that the hoodie wasn’t there.

“How was school?” her dad asked.

“Fine. I made muffins.”

“Look at you. My daughter, the baker.” He pointed his fork at her. “You crack the eggs one-handed?”

“Obviously.”

“That’s my girl.”

Lexie ate. Across the table, her mom was cutting her chicken into very small, very even pieces, the way she did when her mind was somewhere else.

The outlet by the toaster was right there, behind her mom’s shoulder. Lexie had been not looking at it all through dinner.

She put her fork down.

“Mom,” she said.

Her mom looked up.

The words were right there. Last week, in the kitchen. You said Cece used to say something. About things that come in through the walls. What was it? What did she say? What did she tell you? They were all lined up in Lexie’s mouth, in order.

Her mom was looking at her, patient and polite and a little far away.

Her dad was reaching for more rice.

The outlet behind her mom’s shoulder was just an outlet.

“Can you pass the salt?” Lexie said.

Her mom passed it.

“Thanks.”

Lexie salted her chicken. It didn’t need it.

Eliana was at her desk at ten, with the guitars leaning against the wall beside her and a blank document open on her laptop.

Two pages. Pick something history left out and tell me who did the leaving.

She had typed a title three times and deleted it three times.

Her phone buzzed against the desk.

Eliana looked at it for a second. Then she picked it up.

Eliana thought about it, which she didn’t usually do before answering that question. Usually she just said fine.

Eliana read that twice.

The dots came up. Went away. Came back.

Eliana looked at the blank document, and the cursor blinking at the top of it.

There was a long pause.

Eliana put the phone down. She looked at the guitars for a while, the one with five strings and the one with six. Then she pulled the laptop closer and typed a title, and this time she didn’t delete it.

Thomas Barker: An Unsung Hero