Robbers

two

// two //

             Needless to say, Ella found it difficult to sleep that night.

            It didn’t help that she’d been so busy thinking about what Ryan Hunter had been doing in her basement that she hadn’t been able to focus on studying, either. Ella had stared at the psychology notes without truly seeing them for well over three hours, replaying the events from the basement over in her head as though she could somehow make sense of them. Her family had returned home around ten o’clock, and Ella had to pretend that the evening had been far from exciting and she’d merely studied while she had the house to herself.

            As both her parents and Rosie went to bed, Ella couldn’t quite understand why she hadn’t just told them someone had broken into their home. There was nothing to gain from keeping it hidden from her family, but something inside Ella kept her lips pressed together when her mother came into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight. Her family went to bed that night without knowing a teenage boy from Ella’s school had tried to steal their safe only hours earlier.

            A boy that Ella had known for three years, yet never spoken to.

            She finally gave up her attempt at studying around 2 a.m., but even after the notebooks had been stuffed inside her brown leather backpack and the lights switched off, Ella still couldn’t stop herself from thinking about Ryan Hunter. The darkness of her bedroom and the silence of her house that came with nighttime were soothing, but she continued to turn the event over and over in her head despite her need for sleep. She’d been thinking about it for several hours, and yet she still couldn’t understand why.

            Even when she managed to drift off into unconsciousness, Ella’s dreams were haunted by an icy pair of blue eyes, always staring up at her from the bottom of a staircase.

            Ella woke to the blaring sound of her alarm at 6:30 the next morning, taking great effort in prying open her eyelids and blinking several times just to focus her vision. The murky light of dawn filtered through the clouds outside her windowpane, her entire room filled with a dull sort of lighting that made it even more difficult to keep her eyes open. Ella rolled over on the mattress to face the alarm clock that continued to beep painfully in her ear, and she removed her arm from the warm depths of her blankets to switch it off.

            Under the new silence of the bedroom, Ella flipped onto her back and stared at the off-white popcorn paint. Her eyelids felt heavy and her entire body ached from lack of sleep, but with the blurry fog of morning, she couldn’t recall why she felt as though she’d only gotten two hours of sleep.

            Then she remembered that she had, in fact, only slept for two hours, and the memories from the previous night suddenly came flooding back in a rush of cold realization. All at once, she remembered catching Ryan sneaking through her basement, chasing after him down the steps and watching him sprint off into the night. Her stomach lurked with nerves as she thought of what might happen when she saw him at school in just a few hours.

            The clock on her bedside table glowed green with numbers that only continued to change, and Ella knew she needed to get up before it was too late. She could hear her father downstairs starting the coffee, the sound of spoon against ceramic resonating up the stairs and under the crack of her door; her mother was probably getting ready for work across the hallway, and Rosie was certainly still sleeping at this hour. Her school didn’t start until later in the morning.

            Filled with a sharp envy towards her sister, Ella forced herself to throw the duvet cover back, and the cool air of the bedroom washed over her bare legs as she struggled to sit up. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, finally pulling herself off the mattress and rubbing her eyes hard in an attempt to wake herself up only a little more. It was going to be a very long day, considering how long it was taking her just to get out of bed.