Trapped. That’s what I was. It had taken me a long time to come up with the perfect word but it worked its way into my head and now its presence was constant and I could always hear it. I tried writing it out on paper over and over again because I thought that it would transfer from my head into the notebook and then it would just be gone. I was wrong. It’s strange, though. I thought I would be happy to finally define what I was feeling since that would mean I could figure out a way to escape it. Instead, I just felt guilty.

I grew up in a small town. When I say small, I don’t mean small compared to New York or something, I mean actually small. Three hundred people small. I lived with my mom and just my mom because my dad wasn’t there anymore and my sister lived all the way across the country in California. My town was called Hooky and it’s situated right smack in the middle of Pennsylvania. People joked around about the name because so many kids at school played hooky almost every day of the year and even if people weren’t playing hooky it seemed like lots of people were missing. That’s how small it was.

I had a best friend named Ella Jackson who I used to see every day of the year. I practically lived at her house. My mom would send me over there if she was suddenly struck with a wave of creativity and needed me to be gone. She was a writer. She wrote everything from poems to novels and nothing much of hers had been published. I think maybe a short story got published in some magazine once but since then, nothing. She had a day job at a little shop that sells souvenirs but she kept threatening to quit because she said it got in the way of her “creative flow”.

Anyway, she used to send me over to Ella’s all the time. I was so glad when she did that. Ella’s mom and dad both lived at home and so did her little brother, Skyler. I hadn’t seen too many actual happy families but I thought the Jacksons were as close as you could get. They were always really happy to see me, too. I would knock on the door and Mrs. Jackson would come open it with her floral apron on and she would say,

“Oh, Magnolia, it is so good to see you today! Come in and try some of this pie that I just baked.”

I would nod and come in, wiping my feet on the doormat because, unlike mine, their house was actually clean. Ella would come running out from the playroom where she entertained Skyler while her mom was cooking. She would smile so big and say,

“Magnolia, I am so glad you’re here, I have so much to tell you!”

Then she would hook her arm in mine and drag me up the stairs to her room before I could even try any pie. The great thing about Ella was that she always made you feel like you were part of something special or like you knew something that nobody else did. When we got to her room, she would close the door and tell me about the latest thing she read in a book or what her mom’s friend had said when she was over earlier that day. She would say,
“You know Magnolia, we are fifteen years old and there is so much we haven’t seen or smelled or known yet and I am so excited to figure out what all that stuff is.”

Then I felt excited, too. I didn’t really have that many books at home, despite the fact that my mom wrote all the time. She had sold every last one of her books in an attempt to earn a little extra money when I was still young. She earned it, all right, because she had every book you can imagine. I remember being excited because I thought she might fix up the house or take us on a trip somewhere. Instead, she bought herself a whole new wardrobe because she thought she needed to “dress like a writer”. I mentioned that a real writer probably wouldn’t sell all their books but she just ignored me.

Anyway, Ella had so many books. Piles and piles and piles of books. She read about different countries and dragons and people with broken hearts. Then, when she finished, she would lend them to me. I loved books more than anything in the world. They were the only things that didn’t make me feel so… trapped. I liked to read memoirs the best. They were always really bizarre and funny and interesting and sometimes scary, but I liked them because my life was none of those things and it was good to know that maybe somewhere, sometime, life could be more.

My favorite book was A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Ella gave it to me and said that she had only read half and that it was too boring but I read it and I loved it more than anything. He wrote so nicely and I loved that he lived in Paris and met all these interesting people and went to all these interesting places. It made the world seem bigger and it made things seem more possible. I asked her if I could keep it because she didn’t like it anyways and she said yes. That was the only book I had to call mine. I kept it right next to my bed and whenever I felt lonely or I couldn’t sleep, I would read it.

Anyway, I loved Ella. She was my best friend, and kind of my only friend because no one else understood books and wanting to see the rest of the world like Ella did. I would say,

“Ella, I just want to go everywhere. I want to see every state and then I want to see every country. I think I would like that. I think I would like that a lot.”

“Well, why don’t you just go?” She would ask, as if it was that simple.

“I don’t have the money and I can’t leave school and my mom wouldn’t let me. It’s just not possible.”

“Anything is possible, Magnolia. I guarantee that one day we are going to travel the whole world together and we will never be stuck or lonely because there will always be more people and there will always be more places.”

I believed her. We both started to set aside any money we could find so that we would be ready for our trip. We searched our houses for extra bills and coins and we would work doing any odd jobs that people needed us to do because we had to get that money. I wasn’t really sure when we would go and I don’t think Ella was either but I just liked to know that we were going. I would lie in bed at night and picture us driving down long roads that never really ended, knowing that something was out there and we were going to see what it was.

Then it happened. When Ella and I were both sixteen, Ella got her driver’s license. I couldn’t get mine because we didn’t have a working car. Ella would drive us around Hooky and we would pretend we were actually going away. I felt really free until she had to drop me off at home again.

“Where did you guys drive to?” My mom would ask.

“Nowhere.”

But then my mom woke me up at 2:37 in the morning and she was crying and I didn’t know why and I thought maybe she was hurt but she didn’t look hurt.

“Why are you crying?”

“Something bad happened, and I need to tell you, okay?”

“What is it? Please tell me what it is. I’m scared.”

She told me that Ella couldn’t sleep and so she went on a drive and I guess it was really dark and sometimes when it’s really dark it’s hard to see where you’re going or if another car is there. There was an accident and Ella didn’t make it. She didn’t make it through the crash and she didn’t make it to every country in the world and she didn’t make it back to me. I cried so hard because Ella wanted to do everything and she wanted to see everything and now she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

The time right after her death was the worst time of my life and my life hasn’t been that good. No one was happy, not one person. I saw the Jackson family the next day and it was weird because her mother wasn’t wearing her floral apron and offering me pie, she was crying and she looked like she wanted to die, too. Mr. Jackson tried to comfort her but you could tell that he was having trouble because maybe he wanted to die just like her. Skyler was the most sad to look at, though, because he didn’t even really understand what had happened. At one point, he walked right up to me and said,

“Ella is going to be gone for a while, huh? I think I’ll miss her a lot while she is gone but then I will be happy when I see her again.”

I cried again after he said that. He didn’t understand that death was a permanent thing and I dreaded the day he would discover that his sister was gone for good.

There was an abundance of teary eyes and tissues but there was also an abundance of hugging. Everyone I saw hugged me-Ella’s family, my mom, people from school that I had never even spoken to before. At first, I didn’t hug back because I was kind of scared since a lot of the people were basically strangers. Eventually, though, I realized that hugging made everyone feel better, including me because it was like a little piece of your pain transferred into them and for just a moment, your burden didn’t seem so heavy.

I realized how strange it was that death brought more people together than anything else. I had never seen Ella’s extended family before. I had never seen so many of my classmates talking to, and embracing, each other. My mom had never been so kind to me. I wondered why all of life wasn’t like this. I wondered why the only thing that could bring so much love and kindness to one place was death. It just didn’t really make sense, I guess.

As fast as the whole thing happened, it was gone. Soon, the extra people left with their extra cars and their extra hugs. I thought I would be glad to see them go because they had brought so much chaos with them, but when they left I was sadder than ever. Nothing was left to distract me from my thoughts of Ella. I could remember everything she said to me. Sometimes, at night, I would lie in my bed and I could just hear her voice telling me all of the things we were going to do someday. That someday was gone now… at least for her.