Blue Violet

Blue Violet - By Abigail Owen

Chapter 1

The first day was always the worst. Ellie Aubrey stood in the administrative office, as she had many times before, and shifted from foot to foot. She waited with growing boredom for one of the counselors to give her the usual “new student” spiel. Ellie would tolerate it. Just one last time she would tolerate it for what she had to do. Even though she risked her life just being there.

So far, her experience at this school was pretty much the same as all the other times before… Same generic brick buildings, very institutional looking and obviously not updated in fifty-some-odd years. Same teenagers hanging out in random patches around the school waiting for the starting bell to ring. Same secretary wearing a heavily decorated sweater, this one winter -themed in keeping with the season. It was mid-January and Ellie was the new girl. Again.

Ellie glanced out the window. A least the locale seemed a little different than her previous residences. Estes Park nestled into a valley in Colorado, just outside the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. In the distance you could see the beaver-shaped notches of Long’s Peak. At this time of year, Estes Park appeared to be a typical sleepy little mountain town, blanketed in white snow. Although Ellie had the impression that, come summer, it would fill with tourists out to enjoy the many entertainments the beautiful surroundings could offer.

“Ellinore?” a voice asked from the doorway behind her.

“Ellie,” she corrected the counselor automatically, as she turned and offered a polite smile. Her full name could be considered very old-fashioned having not been popular in decades, if not centuries. Ellie held in a sigh as the counselor, Miss Langston, introduced herself. She epitomized the usual counselor-type who wanted to connect with the students and thought she was up on the latest fashions and fads, but probably mentally used words like hip.

As she followed Miss Langston through the hallways to the counselor’s office, Ellie made sure to make eye contact with each person she passed, always with a pleasant expression. She’d discovered the best way to handle the first week or so in a new school was to look confident and generically nice, not cocky. It also helped to try to blend in as much as possible. A fine line to walk, especially for someone like her.

The students in this school appeared to be no different than those in all her other schools. The girls sported long, straight hair. And most of the boys had shaggy hair, although Ellie happily noticed the clean cut look had started to infiltrate this particular high school. She hadn’t really enjoyed those styles the first time around.

“So I understand that you’ve just moved here from Texas,” Miss Langston said, consulting her files after they had seated themselves in her tiny office. She looked up over her black-rimmed glasses at Ellie.

Ellie nodded. She knew exactly what that folder contained. School records were still notoriously easy to alter.

“Estes Park High School is quite a bit smaller than your previous school,” Miss Langston continued.

Ellie kept herself from shifting in her seat and proceeded to nod at appropriate intervals as Miss Langston droned on and on. A full half hour later, armed with school rules, a map, and her schedule, Ellie finally made her way to her first class.

She resisted the urge to cringe as she felt the gazes of the other students follow her. In smaller schools like this, the students recognized when a new face appeared among them. They already knew everyone else there and had known them since kindergarten in many cases.

She wondered briefly what exactly they saw when they looked at her. She guessed they’d see a petite, almost pixie-like girl with gleaming, long, black hair that hung in waves down her back, and blue eyes so deep in color they appeared to be almost violet. Not beautiful exactly, more girl-next-door with a slightly exotic coloring. She actually had tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose that almost made her cute.

Ellie had deliberately dressed down a bit, sticking to her tried and true rule of blending in. She wore the uniform skinny jeans, flats, and a fairly plain blue top that was flattering, but nothing special. Today she’d pulled her long hair into a straight ponytail hanging down to the middle of her back. She couldn’t do much to downplay her striking eyes but hadn’t bothered to highlight them either. Experience had taught her if she wanted to make any girlfriends on the first day, the best way was to avoid being seen as competition.

Ellie didn’t necessarily have a problem with being the center of attention. She just didn’t love the “new girl” attention -- a combination of curious and strangely hostile.

With another inward sigh, Ellie reminded herself that she had an extremely good reason for doing this. She took a deep breath and entered her first period classroom, senior-level English—one of her favorite subjects. She walked up to the teacher’s desk and handed over a slip of paper to be signed.

“Hi, I’m Ellie.”

The lovely, blonde woman nodded. “I am Mrs. Cavender and this is AP English. Were you in the advanced class in your previous school?”

“Yes.” The counselor had already asked her that.

“What books had you made it through when you’d left?”

“We’d finished Canterbury Tales and Hamlet.”

Mrs. Cavender nodded again as she got up from her desk. Pulling a book off the shelves behind her, she said, “We’re in the middle of To Kill a Mockingbird, so you’ll have some catching up to do.”

Ellie nodded. She’d already read it more than once. In fact, she’d read it when it had been first published in 1960. But of course she couldn’t tell the teacher that.

Mrs. Cavender pointed. “You can sit behind Jill over there.”

“Thanks,” Ellie muttered and made her way to her seat, resisting the urge to see if one of her targets happened to be in this class. She plopped down at the small desk, dropped her backpack on the floor, and gave a shy smile to the girl seated in front of her. She received a sweet, curiosity-filled one in return.

English went about how Ellie expected. They had a vocabulary quiz. She aced it. They discussed a few chapters of the book. She pretended to listen as if she hadn’t already read it. They wrote a timed essay comparing and contrasting two different marriage proposals from pieces of literature that Ellie already knew well. Good times.

So far so good, Ellie thought. No one put themselves out to be particularly nice, but at the same time no one had been remotely nasty, either. If she could get through lunch--the worst part of the first day--she could make it through anything. And then start all over tomorrow.

“Lather. Rinse. Repeat,” she muttered under her breath.

The bell rang signaling the end of class and the start of the early lunch period. Ellie held back, trying to time her entry into the lunchroom to be after the bulk of the students were settled, but not so late that her appearance in the room was too obvious, a trick she’d learned at previous schools - give most of the students a chance to sit down so that Ellie didn’t make the mistake of sitting at an already claimed table.

Ellie sat alone at a table in the far back corner of the cafeteria. She desperately wanted to lift her head and look around for the three students she had come here to find. But she couldn’t do that without risking attracting their attention. Pretty quickly the curiosity surrounding her arrival in the school would fade. And then she could finally focus on the true reason she’d moved here. A moment that had been such a long time in coming, Ellie could barely contain herself.