ELLIE WALDING WAS A TRAGIC MISCONCEPTION. You could take one look at her and think you had her all figured out. That’s how she was: an easy read, another duplication of society’s “good girl.” She had the look of a girl trying to fit in: blonde hair tied back, makeup on, clothes a little too tight with decent grades and a knack for staying under the radar.
But that wasn’t who she was.
She was a girl who desperately wanted to be somebody else, anybody else. She wanted to be able to say anything she wanted, whenever she wanted to and not be slapped under the table by her mother. She wanted to wear jean shorts with leather jackets and black, spiked boots. She wanted blue hair that she didn’t have to brush and sneak out of the house in the early hours of the morning. She wanted to be everything she wasn’t with every fiber of her being.
A boy had told her once: “People are like coins. There’s heads: the side of society. Those people are people with societal beliefs embedded deep in their minds and their curiosities stifled to the point that they’re all just a basic shape instead of a free flowing cloud. Then there’s tails: the face of freedom. We’re the kind of people who do whatever we want to make us happy and forget that the rest of the world exists. Our curiosities refuse to be stifled.” His words were too slurred after that to even attempt to comprehend what he was saying. (They were drowning in liquor and tasteless beer, all leftovers from their failed party the previous night.)
At the time, Ellie Walding’s coin was on heads and stuck there, glued to the ground by gum and society’s judgemental tendencies. She was utterly trapped in a cage made by the people around her, all of them prison guards in her metaphorical reality.
She paced around her bedroom, waiting for a call that would either make or break her entire schooling career. If she made it, she’d get the scholarship and be able to go off to university, something she’d never be able to do otherwise. If she didn’t, university would be out of the question and her entire senior year of high school would be unbearable, simply because she’d have to deal with her mother nagging her about it the whole year. She’d been told the call would be made just after two o’clock, which it was, but before 2:30, which it was. In fact, it was 2:07 pm.
When her phone rang precisely a minute later, she didn’t hesitate to jump at it. She fumbled with the buttons for a moment before she accepted the call and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?” she said in her most professional, but still excited voice.
An almost deafening “EL!” was screamed through the phone, causing her to drop her phone on the floor. She scrambled to pick it up, and when she put it back to her ear, the person on the other end was rambling on. “-and I didn’t know what to do because-”
“Alex?” she questioned, recognizing the rambling, mumbling, and screaming voice of her best friend.
“Yes?” he said, shutting up immediately. She could imagine him sitting in his room with his feet propped on the end of his bed, all leaned back in his desk chair as he talked.
She groaned loudly into the phone. “You know I’m expecting that call literally right now.”
“Is that today?” He tried to play innocent. Tried.
“Yes, now leave me alone,” she said, hanging up without letting him respond. That boy could only stay quiet for .02 seconds before he started another rant of some kind that had little or nothing to do with the previous rant he had stopped in the middle of. Ellie knew this, and she also knew that to keep him quiet she had to deny him the opportunity to talk (e.g. hanging up on him).
She put her phone back down in the same spot that she had it in seconds earlier and wiped her palms on her jeans. Anxiety was rolling through her body and made her feel like she could pass out at any given moment. She has before and she’s sure it’ll happen again.
The phone went off seven minutes later.
She made sure it wasn’t Alex before accepting the call. “Hello?”
“Ellie Walding?” a woman asked. The accent sounded like that of her sophomore history teacher, Mrs. Daum.
“Speaking.” Professionalism was Ellie’s specialty, since her mother was the district attorney and always dragged her along to everything from rallies to court to banquets, so being well put together was crucial. But Ellie hated every second of it.
“I’m sorry to inform you that you lost to the other opponent. I would've loved-” the rest of the sentence drowned in the excitement that rang in Ellie’s ears. She was smiling ear to ear, hardly able to contain her squeals of joy as Mrs. Daum continued to spit out the rehearsed, prewritten rejection speech. Ellie knew it was prewritten, because she had written it.
Ellie hung up and redialed Alex’s number, struggling to hold her scream in until he answered.
“El?”
“ALEX!” she yelled, screaming and spinning around in a happy dance. “I lost! I lost, I lost, I lost, I lost!” Ellie screamed into the phone again, making him hold the phone away from his ear. He could still hear her loud voice even with the phone extended fully out from his body.
“I’m sorry?” Alex questioned, understandably confused as to Ellie’s reaction to not winning.
“Alex, I’m free,” she tried to explain. “Sure, I’m probably not going to be able to go to college, but I’m free.”
“You’re not making any sense El,” he said, running his fingers through his hair.
“I’m not Class President. I don’t have to go to stupidly long meetings or dress like librarian who hasn’t had any action in years or act like I have my mess together when I don’t. I’m free, Alex Wahlburger.”
He stayed quiet for a few seconds, which was rare. “You know what this means, Ellie Walding? This means we need to party.”
She smiled. “Absolutely.”
Ellie Walding refused to have her curiosity stifled. She was done with the addictive cycle of staying within the lines, never taking a risk, being another coin in society’s extensive collection. She called Alex back two seconds after he hung up.
“Al.”
“El.”
“My curiosity refuses to be stifled.”
“Now, you’re thinking like a tails.”
***
This was so cool to write and honestly I love El and Al (they're rhyming nick names was completely unintentional until my sister pointed it out to me) so much bc they're just really rad. P.S. school just started and I decided to finish the last several paragraphs of this chapter instead of doing my homework. (Homework on the first week of school should be illegal and I'm starting a petition.)
-Darla
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Flipped Coin
Short Story[finished] Ellie Walding wanted to be everything she wasn't with every fiber of her being.
