Free Eleanor by Jason Gurley Page B

darkness is. It knows nothing else. It fills crevices, pushing into the finest, narrowest corners, ascribing no meaning to the events that it carries, but birthing and then swallowing them again as they expire.  
    Mea cannot escape this troubling story that she has discovered. The darkness embraces her, pushing her deeper and deeper into the story, until a flicker of something catches Mea’s notice, and she finds herself at that precarious membrane again, pressed against it while the darkness rushes up against her, holding her there. Through the membrane she sees movement, and realizes that she is peering into the story that she has discovered—that the story has expanded until it is world-sized itself, and Mea lingers at its boundaries, staring into it, drinking in the things that she sees.
    Like the red-haired girl who is walking toward her.
    She is darkly familiar, but Mea cannot understand why.  
    Mea pushes against the membrane, unaware that she is doing so, and the thin wall stretches and becomes taffy-like, until it seems that Mea will burst through and escape into the world that she can see on the other side. But this doesn’t happen, for the membrane cannot be broken. Mea feels something welling up inside her, a sensation of yearning that she has never felt before, and she reaches for the red-haired girl.
    If Mea cannot escape, she will pull the girl into the darkness with her.

“There and back, and hurry,” says Mrs. McDearmon.  
    Eleanor hides her eyes, feeling them begin to spill over with the ache of everything. She is humiliated by her breakdown in front of Jack, and embarrassed by the way she has treated him since that moment. He is, after all, only concerned for her. It isn’t as if Jack is inexperienced in these matters. Hasn’t he told Eleanor often of his mother’s departure, of his father’s depression and alcoholism? Isn’t it funny that their lives should be so similar now? Except in Eleanor’s case, the genders are reversed. It is her father who has left, and her mother who has caved inward like a black hole.
    She can hear Jack’s voice through the din of the cafeteria, just one voice among the hundreds of gossiping, chattering teenagers, and she tucks a strand of short red hair behind her ear not because it is loose but because it will project a certain appearance; it is something to do, and if Eleanor is in the act of doing something— anything , even tucking hair behind her ear—then she can be forgiven for not hearing Jack, and for leaving the cafeteria without acknowledging him.
    She will have to apologize, of course. But she will wait until later, when she doesn’t feel like such a jerk.
    This is not a new problem for her, and she understands why it keeps happening. Every time she feels Jack close to her, she allows herself to feel him, to submerge herself in that closeness. And every time that happens, she recoils from it, not because she doesn’t long for Jack in that strange and unfamiliar and non-platonic way, but because she knows nothing of such closeness, and Jack is the closest thing that she has to a true and lifelong friend, and risking that for some romantic construct that probably wouldn’t last anyway—that’s too great a risk for her.  
    Eleanor is fourteen, but she is an old and lonely spinster in her heart.  
    So she ignores Jack’s voice now, and she walks through the cafeteria doors, and at the very last moment before she enters that doorway, she feels something subtle and strange, as if she has become a magnet and something is tugging her toward it. She feels the tiny hairs on her arms and neck lift up, and there is a sharp smell and a sizzle in the air, but it is almost instantaneous, and before she has a moment to truly consider what she feels, she steps through the doorway—is frankly almost yanked through it—and then Eleanor is no longer in the cafeteria, no longer in her high school, no longer even in Oregon at all.  
    Back in the world, Jack