Blue Violet - By Abigail Owen Page 0,1

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.

Chapter 2

“Hi.” The soft voice caused Ellie to jump a bit in her seat.

Glancing up, she almost jumped again—this time in shock. She immediately recognized the girl standing next to her as Adelaide Jenner, one of the three students she’d just been thinking about…The reason why she’d decided to risk her life to come here.

“Um, hi.” Ellie took in the girl’s appearance. Adelaide had pretty green eyes and honey blonde hair worn in a short, chin-length cap. Despite the fact that she’d approached Ellie, she seemed shy and soft spoken. She dressed casually like the other students, but on the girl’s superb figure, she looked more like a high fashion model than a high school kid.

“You’re new here, right?” the girl asked softly. At Ellie’s nod she continued, “I’m Adelaide Jenner.”

“Ellie Aubrey,” she responded

Adelaide gave Ellie a strangely intent look.

Uh-oh, Ellie thought, her heart pounding a little harder. She knows.

At that exact moment, another voice echoed in her mind. “Do you need me to say I told you so?”

“Griffin?” she thought back.

“Now who else would be in your head, Sis’?” the voice teased.

“But I thought you weren’t going to get involved?”

“I’m not,” came the emphatic response. “I’ll see you when you get home.”

“Ookkaayyy.”

“Oh,