Ellie twisted around in her seat to look over the pile of luggage and wave at her best friend, Maddie, one last time. This was it; she would probably never come here again. In her hands, she held the last minute present Maddie had given her right before she had climbed into the airport shuttle: a scrapbook with every picture of them that had ever been taken. Sitting on the moldy seat, Ellie remembered arriving here in the burning August heat in a similar car three years ago. It seemed so far away! Back then, she had been a little, French girl who barely spoke English, and now, she was a bilingual American teenager.
Absorbed in her thoughts, Ellie hadn’t seen her eight year old twin brothers, Nathan and Charles, inching slowly towards her bag of multicolored jelly beans. “Hey, El, you might want to watch out!” her sixteen year old sister, Meg, cried out. “Oh! Miss I Am Protesting This Move With Silence has finally said a word! Does this mean she agrees with the coaches’ decision? “ their dad teased triumphantly from the seat next to the shuttle driver, only to be answered by a mumbled “Watev…”.
Ellie agreed completely with Meg, but she wasn’t as… well as Megish as Meg. Silently though, she hated to move just as much as her sister. Because moving, even if it implied going back to her old village and back to the same old friends , also meant going to a new school, speaking French again, having new teachers, making new friends and tons of other annoying things. And quite frankly, Ellie liked it a lot better here in Scottsdale than in St.Martin, the small village where her family lived in France.
She stared out of the window for the rest of the one hour ride, taking in the cactuses, the sun and all the rest one last time. Ellie wasn’t kidding herself, she knew that she probably wouldn’t come back here for a while if not never. What was she going to do without Maddie, Sophia, Claire and all her friends? She had lived the most important years of her life here and was so not ready to let go.
Now, she was thinking of all the things she would never do: start high school with her friends, go to prom and homecoming, try out for a sport’s team and so many other things she had been looking forward to. She had always known this would end one day, but it hadn’t hit her that it would be so hard to leave until she actually had to.
Ellie plugged her headphones into her ears. She listened to Taylor Swift sing as silent tears began to trickle slowly down her face. This music made her remember so many happy memories: the first time she had heard of Taylor when Maddie had wanted them to sing one of her songs at the talent show, blasting out the lyrics to her best songs in their rooms, all those things they might never do again…
She looked up at the sky and saw a plane taking off. It was time for her to do the same; she couldn’t spend the rest of her life feeling sorry for herself. She was finally ready to go back to being Elisabeth Jonathan, but she would never forget Ellie Johns.