Page 1 of Shelter
Part I
Chapter 1
ELISE
When I first met Cole Whitehurst, he had blood dripping from his nose. The collar of his light blue shirt was ripped and hung limp like a banana peel. The skin over his knuckles was split and angry. Everything about him looked angry.
He was the scariest looking eight-year-old I’d ever seen.
I wasn’t supposed to be at the Whitehursts’, but I’d come down with an earache and a fever in Mrs. Sonnier’s kindergarten class, and since Mama couldn’t afford to miss a day of work, I could either lie down on the Whitehursts’ back porch swing or sit at the kitchen table while Mama folded laundry and cooked their supper.
I chose the porch swing.
Mama had given me two Tylenol and set me up with a blanket that smelled like lemons. She’d rolled up a bath towel and put it under my head as a pillow, and every twenty minutes or so, she’d come out and take away the damp kitchen towel I had pressed to my ear and pop it back in the microwave. And while I waited, I held my palm to my ear and counted to a hundred.
It hurt a lot.
After the third time she got me settled and went inside, she was back out again not five minutes later, carrying a Ziploc bag of sliced onions and peeled garlic.
“What’s that for?” I asked, frowning at the see-through bag. I hoped I wasn’t supposed to eat it. Raw onions burned my tongue.
“It’s for your feet, Elise,” she said. “It’ll draw out the fever.”
I didn’t want onions and garlic on my feet, but my ear hurt too much to argue, so when Mama untucked me and peeled off my socks, I just whimpered my protest until raw vegetables actually touched my skin.
“That’scold,”I whined.
“I know, baby,” Mama said, arranging sliced onion wedges over and under my feet with one hand and patting my blanketed knee with the other.
“Ugh! And it stinks!”
I watched her smother a laugh. “I know it does, Elise, but until I can get you to the clinic for some ear drops, it’s the best I can do.”
I clamped my mouth shut. Even at five, I knew we didn’t have much. We didn’t live in a house anywhere near as big as the Whitehursts’. We had an old, brown car that ran most of the time. We had food in the pantry, though sometimes it came from FoodNet, and we had clothes, though usually they came from Goodwill.
But I loved my mama, and I knew it made her sad when I wanted or needed something we didn’t have enough money to buy. So, I tried not to want anything. I tried very hard. I didn’t want an earache, so I thought it was just plain mean of God or the devil or whoever gave little girls earaches that I now needed medicine. Medicine that would cost money we didn’t have.
So, with my mouth shut, a hot towel on my ear, and a bag of onions around my feet, I closed my eyes on the Whitehursts’ back porch swing and fell asleep.
* * *
“Whatareyou doing?”
I lifted my eyelids to see a scowling boy with a bloody nose. A scowling boy who was a lot bigger than me. And the way he looked at me combined with the way he stressed the second word in his question made me feel exactly like a girl with a bag of onions on her feet, lying on someone else’s porch swing. Weird. Ugly. Small.
Like I’d swallowed a bowl of worms. My stomach turned sour, and my eyes stung.
Before I could say anything back, his lip — bearing a dripping trail of blood — curled even higher, and his frown deepened. “Ugh! Youstink.”
He stepped away from me, thrusting his hand down and away as though officially putting the likes of me behind him. And that was when the sour in my stomach turned to gasoline, and I sat up.
My ear hurt, and sitting up so fast made it hurt even worse, but the boy I’d already guessed was Cole Whitehurst had lit a fuse inside me. My movement caught his eye, and he paused in his exit to stare.
“And you just lost a fight,” I fired back, trying to match his ugly look the best I could.
Something like surprise flickered in his frosty blue eyes before he narrowed them in fury. His nostrils flared. Not being a hundred percent sure that dragons weren’t real, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had opened his mouth and breathed fire.
“You’re as dumb as you look.” The words came out low. Like the rumble of thunder that let everyone know a storm was on the way.
