gone ✧*｡ luke a.u.

14: may 27th 2011

ELLIE

TUESDAY, MAY 27th, 2011

Ellie had turned her music up as loud as she could without deafening herself, as though she could drown out her thoughts, but she couldn't. She was all too aware of Luke at her side, his legs stretched out endlessly in front of him and his fingers tapping against his desk to the beat of the music in his ears.

She wasn't sure what she was drawing, just letting her pen take her where it would, but the fact that Luke had seen it made her feel strange, like he'd looked at some sort of personal part of her. Other than her art teacher, Miss Kingsley, no one had ever really paid attention to what Ellie drew. The lines and pressure that she pressed into paper were her own; her escape, her temporary respite from harsh realities.

Luke tapped her on the shoulder again and she turned around, raising her eyebrows, just as he pushed the notepad towards her. The left side was almost full now, but there was an empty space on the bottom corner below a new sentence, scrawled in his messy handwriting. He looked at it expectantly.

It was the first note that he'd written after she had thanked him earlier. She leaned back over onto his desk to read it, trying not to be conscious of how close they were, or how he was shaking a hand through his hair, or how his legs barely even fit under the desk.

what are you listening to?

She pulled her lip between her teeth. The thrum of her music still pulsed loudly in her ears.

mr brightside, she responded.

the killers?

who else?

He smiled and nudged her in the arm, almost pushing her off the desk entirely. Ellie just rolled her eyes and wrote another message.

what are you listening to? she asked him.

jesus of suburbia

green day?

who else?

She wasn't surprised by his choice of music. you seem like a green day person, she wrote.

He ran a hand through his hair again. He seemed almost nervous. what's a green day person supposed to look like?

She hesitated before she responded. like you, she wrote.

Luke bent over the paper to scrawl something back, the side of his arm almost brushing against Ellie's, when Mrs Ling glanced over.

"You two!" she called, glaring at them. "Passing notes?"

Luke looked up and blinked at her innocently, while Ellie moved back to her desk, putting a hand over her mouth to hide her grin. "No, Mrs Ling," he said sweetly. "Ellie was just showing me how to do an equation I've been stuck on. Factorising. You know how it is."

Mrs Ling glared at them shrewdly -- that was all she ever seemed to do, really -- before looking back down at the papers on her desk.

Now that the attention had been called to them, Ellie could feel more than one curious gaze on her. She kept her eyes firmly trained on the notepad in front of her and focused on drawing, pretending that she wasn't aware of Allie Roberts, who had turned around in the seat in front of them to look, or Michael Clifford, burning daggers through the side of her head.

~:~

"I didn't peg you for an Arctic Monkeys type of person," Luke mused, walking with Ellie to her locker. "All Time Low, The Killers, and . . . the Arctic Monkeys. Nice."