Dancing with Eloise

Chapter five

The way back was twice as awful as the way up. Not only did I have to ride with Ellie and hear her complain about how her love life was lacking, but we ran out of gas. We were stuck. Together. On the highway. Ellie immediately began to panick, her shrill voice piercing through the noise of the passing cars, "What are we going to do? Margie I have to be home in ten minutes or my mom is going to kill me!" She made a gesture of an imaginary knife cutting her throat.

"Just like that," I said sarcastically.

"Yeah. Like no joke, she'll do it. She hates me..." She launched into a dramatic story about her tragic life story and I immediately tuned her out and started thinking of ways to get myself out of this horrendous situation as soon as humanly possible. Maybe now that we're stuck Dad will be conviced to give me my cell phone back. One can only hope.

"Ellie do you have your cell phone on you?"

"What? No I literally just said my mom never got me one because she doesn't trust me. Have you been listening at all? Gosh."

"No. I haven't been listening. I've been trying to find a way to get us back home so I can find my phone, talk to Dan, make sure he knows I'm interested, and get away from you. I'm sorry but now's not the best time for your life story. We have bigger problems."

At this she started to tear up and give my the most pathetic look I've ever seen. I've seen those puppy dog eyes enough on her to know she was hurt. What did I care? She's too senstive anyway. She needs to learn to suck it up and be her own person.

"You hate me."

"I don't hate you I just..."

"No. You hate me. You always have. Why are you even pretending to be my friend? Why don't you tell me how you really feel instead of talking about me behind my back and pretending to like me to my face. Grace would never do that to me."

"For your information, Grace does do it. She doesn't like you any more than I do. You're needy, stuck up, annoying, loud, and you don't know when to just shut up. You're the one who got us into this mess, you need to help find a way to get us out instead of telling me your sob story I've heard a thousand times."

She looked at me, stunned. "I... I had no idea you thought of me like that." She became very quiet. That was the quietest I'd ever seen her and quite frankly, it scared me. "I'll just go see if I can flag someone down and call a tow truck. Or my parents. Whichever." She opened the car door and stepped out into the road, closing the door behind her.

I breathed a sigh of relief as she got a car to stop and used the person inside's phone to call her parents or whoever. I didn't care as long as we got home. The man checked to make sure we were both alright and then drove off to wherever he was going. I hoped he didn't run out of gas too. This was awful. The silence was almost as deafening as Ellie's talking was and soon I couldn't take it anymore. I tried to strike up a conversation about One Direction, her favorite band. She only made a few quiet comments and then muttered, "You don't even like them, why are you talking about them? Don't try to be friends with me."

The rest of the wait happened in silence.

The tow truck came and towed the car away. I looked out the window of the truck and silently watched the world pass by. What had I done? I had broken Eloise Martin.