Can We be Friends?

Today, Monday morning is harder than usual to get ready for. It’s not like I’m dreading anything, and yet I find it hard to convince myself to get anywhere or do anything. I glance out my window and see that the sky seems to share my sentiments, snow is falling quite heavily making the world seem like a dreary winter wonderland. Also making it difficult to see much farther in front of your own face. I can barely make out the houses across the road from me due to the white puff clouds.

But just like every other school day before this one, I get up and get ready to go. Just this time I pull on my thick knit scarf, my comfy down parka, and my almost knee-high winter boots.

It’s not super cold out, which is my first thought as I step out the door for my walk. I turn around and lock the door behind me before stepping out and then pausing as a dark black vehicle pulls up to the curb outside my house. My steps pause as my brows furrow, but then a face that is beginning to become very familiar steps out from behind the wheel.

“Zachary?” I ask the question hanging in the air between us, and he smiles at me while opening the back door of the car and revealing a grinning Rowan.

“Hey, Elle! We came to get you!”

I look at her curiously, but I don’t really want to disagree when it’s snowing like it is and the walk to school being over ten minutes long. But I also don’t want them to get any other ideas if I were to accept the ride.

Just then I feel a gust of wind blowing past me at breakneck speeds, snow swirling in the gust and smacking me in the face. Okay, so I’m just going to take them up on the offer. Screw misunderstandings.

“Thanks,” I smile as I hop into the car and sigh as the door is closed on the cold and windy air.

“No problem, we figured that you’d prefer this to walking.” Rowan grins at me and I just nod my head in response. I am grateful that they came and offered me a ride, even if it wasn’t exactly necessary. I don’t think I’ve done anything nice enough to deserve their kindness either.

I sit in comfortable silence, listening to the three of them as they talk among themselves for the short ride. They don’t seem to be perturbed by my silence, thankfully. It makes this whole situation a little more comfortable for me. Though I should have known what would happen when we got to the school.

Rowan and Caleb especially, but even Xander with his aloof and cold personality at school, were quite popular with the rest of the student body. Even with them having been here for almost two months now, they still seemed to be in that children's new toy level of things. Or maybe it was just because Rowan and Caleb were willing to talk with everyone, Xander just following along behind the two of them.

All eyes turn toward the car as it pulls into the laneway at the school and comes to a stop on the curb. After Zachary opens the door, Rowan and Caleb are the first two to jump down. I wait and watch as Rowan reaches in to help Xander out of the car, telling him how far from the door he is and that the curb is close enough to just step out onto.

Then it’s my turn. When I come out from the inside of the car I can hear the buzz of the rest of the student body gossiping, immediately.

‘Eleanora Hattoway came out of the Meier car’. That was going to have spread throughout the entire campus before the first bell even rang. I wanted to groan; I should have just walked. But at the same time, I feel the chilly wind blow against me again and I am a little glad that I decided against walking once again. Fine, I’ll take the gossip. Warmth is more important anyways.

Rowan follows behind me as I make my way toward the school building. Caleb, who is also leading Xander through the piles of white, went out to the trees in the yard, where their cousin and his friends were.

“You sure you don’t want to go with your brothers?” I ask her and she shakes her head.

“There are too many sex jokes for a nice morning,” Rowan tells me in a whisper, and I can’t help but laugh.

“You shouldn’t expect anything less from a large crowd of teenage boys.” We enter the door and the heat of the indoors hits us. I sigh in contentment and unzip my coat.

“Do you want to go to your locker first or mine?” Rowan asks and I shrug.

“Which one is closer?”

She contemplates it for a few moments before grabbing my wrist and taking me to where her locker seems to be. Not that I have ever been here before. I don’t normally walk with or talk to many people in school, so it feels weird to now be following behind Rowan to her locker.

She is quick to get out of her hefty coat and scarf, exchanging books for her morning classes, most of which are with me.

“Onto your locker now!” She doesn’t wait for my response as she turns on her heel and moves back to where my locker is.

I’m surprised that she seems to remember where it is since she has only ever accompanied me to it once. But she accurately heads there, even if she doesn’t know which exact one mine is in the short row.

I grin a little and move in front of her to open my lock and remove my own jacket and scarf.

“It’s going to be chilly running from the humanities building to the sciences building,” Rowan complains and I chuckle and shrug.

“At least it’s close, unlike the auditorium, or the gym.”

“Very true, I pity the poor saps who took those classes.”

We chat a little as we make our way out of the building, and scurry into the science one. Relieved when we enter the building again. It really was cold without our protective outer layer.

Making our way to the biology room is a bit of a hassle. Rowan is stopped by people several times because they want to talk to her. I would feel like a complete asshole if I just ditched her while she was chatting with her friends, so I just stand awkwardly off to the side, not engaging with the rest of them.

And they don’t engage with me either. If Rowan didn’t mention me, then it was like I was invisible. Which is okay with me, I don’t really want to talk to other people, I don’t feel the need to either. Heck, I barely talk to Rowan and her brothers, and we’re project partners.

After almost ten minutes, we finally make it to the room. At least driving to school gave us a little more time to saunter instead of needing to rush. Once we get to biology though, some of the other girls call Rowan over and I just make my way to my empty desk. William has not come into the room yet.

I sit down and pull out my phone doing nothing but scrolling through social media until I hear the chair beside me scrape its way across the floor.

“Morning,” I greet William, looking up briefly at his face and then looking back down. He acknowledges my greeting with a grunt, settling himself beside me in amicable silence.

I’d never considered how lucky I was to end up with William as my biology seat and lab partner. He was considerate, and never tried to talk to me more than necessary. He was already quiet, or so I had noticed in my brief observations of him when he was talking to his friends before class, but he respected the boundaries that I set up around me and it was something I should appreciate more.

Morning classes pass quickly, and lunch came, but I was surprised when I got to my locker.

“What are you doing here?”

Rowan is leaning against my locker, her books gone and a wallet in hand. She grins as she sees me and saunters over, dragging me back to where she was previously.

“Come get lunch with me.” She tells me, not leaving me much room to say anything otherwise.

“You want to have lunch with me?”

“Yes! Of course, I’d like to have lunch with my friend. Just accept it and have lunch with me.” She tells me firmly, not really leaving me much of a choice. I frown a little, wondering how my quiet lunch would be different while sitting with someone popular like Rowan. But I don’t say no, for some reason I don’t feel the need to.

I decide to save analyzing my weird actions later and grab my wallet, leaving my books in my locker and following behind Rowan as she leads me out the door.

We quickly make our way to the dining hall, trying to get out of the cold as fast as we can. Once we get to the hall and pay for the meal ticket, we go in and look around.

“We’ll meet at a table, okay?” Rowan tells me and then stalks off toward the Pizza area, seeing as it was Monday, they would be serving pizza as the main component of today's meal.

I decide to go to where the fruits are and then make myself a salad with bacon bits and little strips of chicken. The Caesar dressing is particularly good at the dining hall so I’m happy that they always have lots. It is the most popular flavor.

I also go to the crowded Pizza Island and grab a single slice of pepperoni before moving to the seating area of the dining hall. I look around a little, wondering if Rowan was already out of the buffet.

When I don’t see her anywhere, I decide to just sit down at an empty seat. There are several other seats around me, meaning that Rowan would be able to come to sit once she is done. Then I start to dig into my food.

Rowan wasn’t far behind me either. She had a whole tray, with two different drinks and two plates, one filled with dessert, the other filled with pizza, a salad, mashed potatoes, and some assorted pieces of fruit.

“Hungry?” I ask as I look at the plates and she grins at me as she slides the tray in front of her and sits down. She hands me a cup of orange water, keeping the other for herself. “Thanks.”

“No problem, I figured you’d need one. I didn’t see you grab a tray and just a plate.” I laugh at that.

“Yeah, I don’t need to eat as much as you do it seems.” I joke and she rolls her eyes.

“There’s a reason I have such a great figure. Cake is a girl’s best friend.”

I look her up and down and frown.

“Where the heck is all the weight? You should be round if this is how you eat all the time.” I tell her and she just sticks her tongue out at me, enjoying her cake first before she even eats the pizza.

I just leave her to it. She doesn’t need me nagging her choices. Besides, if she really did eat like this all the time, she could only praise the metabolism gods. Not that I had to worry too much about that myself, I never gained a lot of weight no matter how much I ate either.

We eat our food in relative silence. Every once in a while, one of us comments on something or asks a question. But otherwise, it’s peaceful. And I notice that with Rowan sitting with me, most of the people who would probably love to approach her, don’t. A few of them do, but most just stare from a distance and then give up on the idea of talking to her. Not that that is my problem at all.

Rowan was the one who chose to eat with me, not the other way around. I just didn’t deny her desire.

Once lunch is over, we go our separate ways. I’m not sure what class Rowan has after lunch and before English, but I don’t particularly feel the need to ask her either. She also doesn’t ask me where I am going. So, we part amicably.

Once English comes around, I am the first to get to our little desk group. I sit down in my seat at the far side of the table and get myself ready for the start of class.

Only a few minutes later there is a commotion. I see that my three desk mates were stuck in the middle of it.

The group is loud and slightly obnoxious, but I decide to just ignore it.

Once the three of them get to the desk though, Caleb and Xander sit in their regular seats, but Rowan comes over to my side of the desk group and sits down beside me. She grins at me as I look at her curiously. This action reminds me so much of Dana that it’s not even funny. No matter what I said, or how much I ignored her, Dana had insisted on sitting beside me and getting into my little closed-off world.

I didn’t hate it as much as I would have thought. Not with Dana, and now not with Rowan. Curious considering I put myself into this little self-isolation.

But nevertheless, I let people approach me, but I usually didn’t interact with them when they did. I couldn’t figure out what was different between them and other people. And I didn’t have any more time to think about it too deeply because then the teacher came into the room and started talking about how we would be playing our documentaries starting on Wednesday, and we would take as many days as needed to finish them all. And then we would be moving into our Socratic circles the week after.

I could probably guess that our teacher just didn’t want to teach for the next little while if we weren’t even doing class before and a documentary at the end or vice versa.

Well, I wasn’t going to complain about it.

“I will be choosing the order you present in. Therefore, you will all need to have your documentaries done by Wednesday’s class. And you’ll have to hand in your Socratic circle stuff for the next Monday's class.”

Thankfully, our group was done both already, so we had nothing to worry about on that front. But I saw more than one group seems to be panicking about the deadlines that we always knew were looming closer and closer.

The teacher noticed too, but he didn’t even comment. He probably figured that we were grade twelve students, most of us were seventeen already, we could figure it out ourselves.

About fifteen minutes to the end of class he let us go. Told us to use this time wisely to figure out our plans going forward. The noise level in the room went up several decibels once we’d finally been allowed to talk to our groups.

“So… what do we do?” Caleb asks while looking at the other three of us. I shrug and smile.

“We’re done, so does it matter?” I shoot back at him and pull out my phone. Of course, that’s the moment that the teacher wanders past our desk group.

“Should you be on your phone, Eleanora?”

“Sir, we’re done everything though,” I tell him, trying my best to look innocent.

“We can even hand it all in right now if you want us to.” Rowan pipes in when she sees his skeptical look at us.

He nods, daring us to be lying and so she pulls out the CD that they burned after I left with our documentary and our Socratic circle folder and hands it to him.

“The CD is the documentary, and the folder is all our Socratic circle stuff.” She grins at him proudly and he looks shocked for a moment before taking it.

“Alright, I guess you kids can leave early then if you would like.” I hear the groans of the other students, and another group that is also finished everything like us calls him over, hoping to be treated the same way.

“Lucky,” Caleb looks at the three of us and I also can’t help but smile. It’s nice to get let out early sometimes.

We all say goodbye to each other and then part ways. I feel a buzzing in my pocket, and I don’t want to look because it could very well be my father. I don’t really want to deal with that while I’m at school. But I sigh and look anyway.

I see a text from Dana saying that she and her parents would be home around midnight on Friday and that she would meet me at Barney’s Saturday. Insisting that we have a slumber party at hers Saturday night.

I sent her an affirmation, not entirely against the idea of her mother’s cooking. Tanya is a chef and I love when she would experiment with new recipes on us.

Tanya was Bryan and Bryan’s older brother Allan’s youngest sibling. She helps Allan out a lot with the business, but as a chef. Coming up with new recipes and menus and helping whip the kitchen staff into shape. Thus, she traveled a lot, and her husband Charles was a pilot, so he also traveled a lot for work. This led to Dana and I hanging out a lot together, me staying at her place when she would be home alone. Though Linda and Bryan help them out a lot by watching Dana and making sure she’s eating. She also helps out at Barney’s when it’s busy.

That’s really how Dana and I became friends. She met me through her aunt and uncle when I started to work at Barney’s. She then noticed that I went to the same school as she did, also on a scholarship. So, she decided to get to know me. Annoyingly so. But she was insistent until all my walls broke down.

She and her parents were the only people in town that knew the entire situation, and they never spread it around town like others would and do when they find out even the smallest bit of leaked information.

Thus, Dana became the only person I would consider a friend in this town. At least since everything fell apart.

But now, now I was starting to wonder if I would soon be considering the triplets friends as well. I thought about that hard. I didn’t know if I should expand my circle much more than it already was, even as small as it is. I didn’t plan to stay in this town come graduation. I also never planned to come back.

I guess I’ll let the chips fall where they may.