Robbers

one

// one //

Ella Jane was the type of girl who had a reputation for being unconditionally average. She didn't have a single protruding quality or trait that made people remember her, and the people who met her would never remark later on, "Ella? She's different, for sure." Because she wasn't. She never stood out in a crowd, and she certainly wasn't unique in such a way that boys would turn their heads just to get a second look. With wavy, golden-brown hair that just reached her elbows and plain, hazel eyes, Ella was more of a girl who melted into the background.

But make no mistake - this wasn't something that Ella prided herself on. In fact, she detested her inevitable quality to disappear even in the least crowded of places. She hated how average and plain she was, and she especially despised how completely un-extraordinary her life had always been. Ella moved through each day focused solely on schoolwork, dedicating hours on end to her classes only to receive grades that were 'just okay'. At sixteen years old, she was beginning to believe that she would always be anything but special.

Ella Jane, to put it simply, was quite normal. She had two parents and a slightly-snotty-at-times little sister named Rosie, and she lived in a middle-class sized home where money wasn't usually hard to come by. Ella always felt that she fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum for everything, not residing under extremes of any kind. She was completely average, and she couldn't have hated it more.

Which is quite possibly why, when the opportunity to not be normal presented itself, she took it.

It was 7:19 on a particularly dismal Thursday evening. Ella had finally decided to start her homework, the chemistry notes sprawled out on the white duvet cover of her bed. The light splatter of rain against window glass resonated through the humid air, the dying summer heat that accompanied mid-September causing a sticky feeling to cling onto anything it touched. The sun was sunk low in the sky, the fading rays of sunlight broken by the tree branches just outside her bedroom window as they splayed in an orange glow across her notebooks.

The eraser end of Ella's pencil was wedged between the top and bottom rows of her front teeth, a slight frown tugging at the corners of her lips as she stared down the eclectic array of ionic bonds and element names. The chemistry lesson during third period earlier that morning was proving to be useless, and now Ella needed to read through the entirety of chapter five from the textbook just to even attempt the questions her teacher had assigned. With a blank notebook sheet and the title page of the 5th chapter staring up at her, Ella inwardly cursed herself for not starting sooner. This was going to take hours, and she hadn't even glanced at her psychology notes for tomorrow's impending exam.

It was going to be a long night.

The lead tip of her pencil had barely scratched the page before her sister was bursting inside her cluttered bedroom, leaping through the doorway and nearly tripping over the nearest pile of dirty t-shirts. "Ella!" she screeched indignantly, tossing the maroon shirt with a chocolate stain away with a flick of her bare foot. "You never clean your room, Mom's going to -"

"Haven't you heard of knocking?" Ella interrupted angrily, picking up the pencil she'd dropped at the sudden intrusion. Rosie side-stepped the piles of laundry scattered across the barely visible blue carpet, jumping towards the bedspread covered in notes. "Hey, don't touch anything."

"Don't tell me what to do," Rosie replied easily, something that had been her response for nearly everything during the past month and a half. Ella rolled her eyes as her sister crawled onto the bed anyway, the pages of her notes from yesterday's class crumpling slightly under her sister's knees.