Page 19 of Eleanor & Grey

“Okay, awesome. You want to meet me at my place? I’ll plan something for us to do.”

I shrugged, trying to play it cool. “All right.” Note to self: knees can sweat, too. “Well, I have to get to Molly.”

“All right. I’ll see you Tuesday!”

He headed off, and for a few seconds, I wondered if I was stuck in a dream. I was too afraid to pinch myself, though, because I worried I’d wake up. If this were a dream, I wanted to live in it a little bit longer.

“I like a boy,” I blurted out Sunday afternoon as Mom and I sat in our hidden location at Laurie Lake. We’d been going there as long as I could remember, even sometimes all bundled up in our winter gear to be near the water. If Mom loved one thing, it was the water. She said it was because the water healed her. Her dream was to someday place her feet in the ocean and stand with her arms wide open, but since we were in Illinois and there was no ocean to be found nearby, that dream had to wait a little bit longer.

For the time being, small lakes and ponds worked fine for us. We always made it our mission to go sit by our hidden pond and watch the dragonflies pass around us. Laurie Lake was normally packed with people during the summer, but, one day during our exploring, she and I found a smaller body of water hidden between the trees, and we’d always go there to sit and chat.

After feeling a bit off, she was finally well enough to get out of the house, and I was happy to get back to our regular scheduled mama-daughter dates. She still looked tired, but not sick-tired. It seemed like the kind of tired people got when they overslept.

Still, in the back of my mind, I worried. Couldn’t help it. That worry would probably always linger.

Mom tilted her head toward me, and her blue eyes lit up with joy at my words. There were two things we never really talked about with each other: sports and boys. I’d never had any interest in either one, but that afternoon, I knew I had to tell her, because she was my person. I told my mother everything. We were a regular Lorelai and Rory Gilmore.

“Oh, my gosh, who? How? From where?!”

“His name is Greyson East. We talked at the party you and Dad forced me to go to a few weeks ago.”

She tossed her hands in the air with excitement. “I knew I was being a good parent forcing you to go to a party with drugs and alcohol!”

I snickered. “Something like that.”

“So, tell me everything. What is he into? What does he look like? If he were to be an animal, which animal would he be?” She placed her chin in her hands and stared at me with eyes wide and filled with wonder.

I told her everything—everything I knew, at least.

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that why you’ve been wearing my makeup lately?”

“You noticed?”

“Honey, I’m sick, not dead. Plus, we really need to have a makeup lesson because the way you curled your eyelashes was a bit wild.”

I laughed. “I just wanted to, I don’t know, girly-up a little.”

“Wearing makeup doesn’t make you a girl. Were you wearing makeup when you first met him?”

“No…”

“Then there’s no need to wear it now, unless you want to. Do things for you, Ellie, never for others. He obviously liked you just the way you were.”

My stomach flipped as I fiddled with my thumbs. “He’s the complete opposite of what I thought my first crush would be like.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. I thought I’d go for a nerdy type, or an artist, or a musician. Greyson is popular.”

“You say it like he has an STD,” Mom joked. “People like him—so what? That’s not a bad thing.”

“Yeah, but it’s not just people, it’s everyone. He could have any girl he wanted, so it’s hard to think he’d want—”

“No.” Mom placed her hand on my knee. “We don’t do that. We don’t put ourselves down.” She combed my hair behind my ear and placed her hands on my cheeks. “Not only are you beautiful on the outside, Eleanor Rose, you are stunning on the inside. You are creative. You have the best laugh I’ve ever heard. You are kind, giving, and brave. Don’t ever think you aren’t good enough based on what the magazines define as beauty. You. Are. Beautiful.”

Mom always did this whenever I slipped into my random teenage doubts.

It was easy for me to not feel beautiful in a world of prom queens, yet my mother was always reminding me of how worthy I was.

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