Free Eleanor by Jason Gurley

door with a bang, and a moment later Jack follows, holding the plastic bags that Eleanor had forgotten upstairs. She straddles her bicycle and watches as Jack quietly puts the bags into the blue can, then wheels it out to the curb. He goes back inside, emerges a moment later with the glass bin, and carries that to the curb as well. The dozen or so empty bottles inside clink like wind chimes.
    When he’s finished, Eleanor pedals away without waiting, without asking if Jack has locked the front door. He catches up with her, rides silently a few feet behind. He doesn’t say anything when she bypasses the turn that would take them to Piper Road, and when they arrive at the school fifteen minutes later, not having spoken a word, Eleanor drops her bike on the front lawn and goes inside.  
    Jack patiently picks up her bike and pushes it to the rack. He threads his chain lock through both front tires and around the gray metal tube of the rack, and then he goes into the school, too.

    The next time Eleanor sees Jack is during lunch. She’s angry at him for telling her what she already knows about her mother, but more than that, angry by what his comment—and her mother’s behavior the night before, and the bottles, and the crumpled photos—has reminded her: that her mother does not care for her, that her mother resents her, that her mother is selfish and would rather drink herself to death than spend one minute longer than necessary with her one surviving child.  
    Drink herself to death.
    She stands gloomily in the serving line for a few minutes, holding her wet plastic tray, waiting to reach the front, where the old women in the hairnets and the sauce-stained white aprons wait to spoon pasty mashed potatoes and undercooked peas onto the tray, and Eleanor’s stomach turns. She leaves the line and puts her tray back on the stack.  
    Jack and her other friend, Stacy, have already secured their usual shared table. They have spotted Eleanor leaving the line, and she can feel them staring at her. She steers wide around their table, refusing to meet their curious stares, and heads for the double doors. Posted at the door is Mrs. McDearmon, on lunch duty for the day, and she looks at Eleanor and opens her mouth to ask a question.
    “I need to visit the principal’s office,” Eleanor lies, feeling the same tension in her chest that she felt in her mother’s bathroom earlier that morning. She wants to escape the cafeteria and the prying eyes of her friends and the suspicious gaze of the teachers before she starts to cry again.  
    Mrs. McDearmon nods and says, “There and back, and hurry,” and allows Eleanor to pass, because what child would willingly visit the principal’s office who didn’t have a reason to?  
    Eleanor nods gratefully and lowers her head to hide her damp eyes. She wishes that her hair were long enough to fall over her face the way it did when she was a child, and then she wishes something more, something bigger—that she was still a child, that her father had never traveled to Florida, that her mother had never loaded the girls into the car on that stupid, foggy, rainy day—and then Eleanor passes through the cafeteria doors and everything changes, forever, just like that.

Her name is Mea.  
    It wasn’t always her name, but it is the name that was given to her—after.  
    She lives in the dark, in a world of vivid shadow. Her world reminds her of a fishbowl filled with black water. Most of the time, Mea is deep in the center of that bowl, but from time to time, she drifts up against the glass, and the black water parts, and she can see beyond her world and into others. The glass that separates her from those other worlds, though, is malleable. It is warm, and hums like music, and reminds her of a woman hanging sweet-smelling laundry on a line in a green yard beneath a blue sky, a woman who sings a song within her chest, wordless and soft.  
    Mea likes the sound of it, the feel of it. The boundary