The Inside Scoop

Keira Hulihan

Golan opened the freezer and stood on his tip-toes, delicately taking the carton of chocolate ice cream down from the top shelf. Anxiously, he checked the time, his fears confirmed. A quiet gasp escaped him. 4:03! He was late to meet Ella. His momentary panic subsided after a moment; he knew she would be far later than he was, anyway. She always was.

His thoughts settled, he took the ice cream over to the counter and carefully scooped two big dollops into his favorite mug, the one with the image of the solar system on it. He always used that mug, for ice cream or otherwise. He liked to look at each one of the planets and imagine what kind of creatures lived on them, what they looked like, what they ate. He grabbed himself a spoon and ran out the sliding glass door into the backyard. Immediately, his eyes fell on the trampoline dominating the yard space. His family had owned that big, red trampoline for as long as Golan could remember, though having someone to enjoy it with was new. In fact, having someone to do anything with at all was new for Golan.

Being homeschooled, he never really got the chance to interact with other kids, especially not kids his age. Before Ella and her family moved in six months ago, Golan didn’t have any friends besides himself, becoming comfortable in solitude at an unusually early age. He had been in need of a friend, especially one like Ella. Their ice cream trampoline meetings were her idea in the first place—Golan would never come up with something like that—and he looked forward to it every day. Ella always had fun, quirky stories for him about her family and other friends at school, about what she did on the weekends, what she wished she could do, what she dreamed about. She could go on forever, it seemed, every story she told seeming to be more fantastical than the last. Sometimes, he couldn’t tell if she was telling him something that really happened or if she was just telling stories. Though he never had too much to contribute himself, he loved to listen. He clambered up the mesh wall of the trampoline and sat with his legs crossed, patiently waiting for Ella and trying not to dip into his ice cream before she showed up, urging himself to think of anything else.

The sound of Ella’s back door slamming caused him to look up, a smile blossoming across his face as he watched the energetic, bubbly young girl he had befriended run towards him with her rainbow sherbet, which was carefully stacked up on a wafer cone. She always preferred cones to bowls; they were more fun.

“Hey, you’re late!” Golan cried to her in a mock-angry voice, but he was unable to suppress his smile. He was always excited to see her.

“Of course I am. What are you, new around here?” she retorted. Golan just laughed at her and shrugged. Her snappy remarks often left him unsure of how to respond, and he kind of liked that.

She carefully climbed up on the trampoline, holding her cone above her head for protection, and took a seat across from Golan, legs crossed. She didn’t leave much room between them, sitting only inches in front of him, causing their kneecaps to press together. They always sat this way, though neither one ever particularly noticed it.

“Boy, have I got a story for you today,” she said, relishing in the suspense she was building. Ella thought herself quite the storyteller and prided herself on it very much. Especially when Golan was her audience; he was the best she’d ever had. He raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, yeah?”

She knew he would answer with that. She smiled. “Absolutely. You remember my friend Anna, right?”

Golan nodded. He had never actually met any of Ella’s friends, but for each one she talked about, he turned them into characters in his head and liked to imagine the scenes. It was always fun to fill in the blanks in the places where experience couldn’t, and he liked having different stories from her that he could think about whenever he wanted.

“And you remember how Anna has had that crush on Benjamin for, like, ever, right?”

Golan nodded again earnestly. He heard stories of the Anna and Benjamin love affair since he and Ella first became friends, and was excited for the latest installment.

“Well today, at recess, we were playing tag, and Benjamin was playing too, he usually plays kickball with the other boys but today he didn’t, and Anna was it, and out of nowhere she caught him and kissed him right on the lips! Can you believe it?”

Golan got the sense this ought to have shocked him, but he was not particularly struck by this. He had seen his parents kiss each other often, and didn’t see the significance of it happening on the playground versus in the kitchen. He gave Ella an apologetic look. This was not the reaction she wanted. She let out a frustrated huff. “You had to be there, I guess.”

This phrase echoed in Golan’s cavernous mins, resonating in a way he didn’t expect and certainly didn’t like. You had to be there. Ella had relayed the whole story to him already in all its detail. How could having been there made any kind of difference? How much could he have missed by being absent? Would he have found the story more exciting if he had been there, if he knew Anna and Benjamin? Anna and Benjamin were just characters in Ella’s story. Maybe that was the problem; maybe he should be thinking of them as more than that. They weren’t just characters, they were people. For the first time, Golan realized there was a difference. He imagined how Anna’s heart must have been pounding, her clammy hands reaching out for Benjamin and grabbing his face, giving him the quickest kiss that ended before it even started. Was the kiss soft? Did she press her lips into his too hard and hurt him? Did she feel a spark? That was what people in love felt when they kissed for the first time, or at least, Golan imagined so. Oh God, were Anna and Benjamin in love? Had he been expecting this from Anna all along? Or, maybe Anna had been getting the wrong message from him, and he actually hated the kiss, running away from her afterwards and wiping his mouth in disgust.

Golan couldn’t be sure; he’d never be sure. He did not know either of them. He realized he didn’t even know what they actually looked like. All he had was the mental characters he had created in their image. A wave of melancholy washed over the boy, overwhelming him for a moment with its sudden onset.

“Golan, are you okay?”

His head snapped up, straightening the subconscious hunch in his spine. Ella’s knees were still pressed into his, and she was looking straight into his eyes with an expression of concern. Golan gave the biggest smile he could muster and nodded, trying to shrug away this unusual, heavy sadness. Trying to give her the response she’d been expecting, he did his best to feign interest and encouraged her to continue. Pleased that her friend had gone back to being the expert listener she knew him as, she began unloading the next story on him without missing a beat.

Not too much later, when he and Ella had finished their ice cream, bounced off the trampoline and went their separate ways home, Golan felt that unsettled feeling he’d had earlier still echoing through his bones. Tearing his eyes from their fixed gaze at the ceiling, he got up off his bed and ventured into the living room, where he asked his parents whether or not it might be possible for him to start going to school, in a big building with other kids, like Ella does.