Sometimes Ellie wonders if she forgot how to get along with people or if she just never knew how in the first place. Back in Boston, she understood how things worked. She wasn’t exactly popular, but she was mostly left alone except for the occasional Bethany. Especially once she met Riley. And things were easier there. She knew what her day was supposed to look like. Every day had the same routine, day in and day out.
She also hated it. So there’s that.
It wouldn’t be so bad if she was alone in Jackson like she was in Boston. She’d figure out where she fit and she wouldn’t really care if people liked her. She’s done it before when they made her switch schools.
But she’s not. She’s here with Joel, and she doesn’t want him to be embarrassed by her. She doesn’t want him to regret this. To regret her.
Things have already been a little rocky. Tommy didn’t want her walking around with a gun in Jackson. Kids don’t carry guns and all that sh*t. But then she almost had a panic attack at the idea of having it taken away again and Joel had to insist she be allowed to keep it and it turned into kind of a… thing.
A thing where they show up and the first thing that happens is she makes Joel fight with his brother. Maria finally intervened and said it was fine if she kept it unloaded and preferably in her bag. That’s usually where Joel wants her to keep it anyways, so that was okay.
After, Ellie caught Maria looking at her a little too closely. She used to put bad guys in jail, Ellie remembers, and she doesn’t like the idea of someone she barely knows seeing her that well.
Besides, she’s fine.
If she presses a little closer to Joel because she doesn’t trust people as much as she used to, that’s nobody’s business but hers. She’s fine.
Everything is just a little overwhelming. She knows Maria is just trying to help, and she appreciates it underneath her edginess, but having someone try to take care of her who isn’t Joel is weird. She’s trying not to be a dick about it, taking the clean clothes Maria gives her without complaining and humming vague agreements about all the things she says.
Then Maria says, “And you can start at the school next week, Ellie.”
Ellie scoffs. “I’m not going to school.”
“Kids here go to school.”
“She don’t have to if she don’t want to,” Joel says, but he’s frowning at Ellie. “We’ll talk about it later. I think maybe we could use a bit of a rest. It’s been a long day.”
It has － five hour hike and all － but Ellie knows that’s not why Joel is saying it. He knows her too well. It would be scary, having someone who knows what her silences and shortness means, if it wasn’t Joel.
They end up in the same house as the last time. Ellie pokes around a little more, which she didn’t really get to do last time. She’d been soangry at him that she didn’t care about the house.
“Did you like that room?” Joel asks.
“Hm?” She looks up from examining one of the shelves in the living room.
“The pink one upstairs. Is that the one you want?”
“Oh.” She didn’t really think about it. It was just somewhere to sleep for the night. Not that she really slept. She mostly pulled the blankets over her head and cried till morning. But Joel seems to want her to like it. Is that important? “I don’t know. It’s fine?”
Joel’s doing that thing with his hands that means he’s nervous. “Do you like this house? We don’t have to stay in it if you don’t.”
“No, it’s fine.” Damn it, she’s making it sound like she hates it. She doesn’t, she really doesn’t. It’ll be nice for Joel to live so close to his brother. It’s just… kind of hard to picture herselfliving there, in a real house. “The bedroom is… it’s really f*cking pink.”
Joel smiles and the knot in her stomach eases a little. “You can change the colour if you want, kiddo. I don’t think it’d be that hard to find some paint. Fix it up however you want.”
“I want to paint the ceiling,” she says immediately.
“With what?”
“Stars. Constellations.” There’s a book about them in her backpack. Joel found it for her a while ago, when it was still snowy and cold and they were both too hurt to travel much. She spent hours pouring over it and then showing him different ones. It was the first time she’d felt like herself since…
“Sure, if that’s what you want.” He sits down on the couch. “So why don’t you wanna go to school?”
She turns away, picking a dusty figurine off the shelf. “Some of this stuff is really stupid.”
“Ellie.”
He said he was a teacher. He said he was a teacher and he said he was going to keep her and teach her.
She closes her eyes. Her hands are shaking so badly she almost drops the knick-knack she’s holding. “I don’t need to. What’s even the f*cking point of me learning algebra or whatever? It’s not exactly useful.”
“I’m not gonna force you to go,” Joel says. “But you’re smart. Bet you could show up all those little sh*ts.”
She grins despite herself. Okay, that wasn’t what she was expecting to hear. “I’ll think about it.”
She’ll think about ways to get out of it.
But it’s enough that Joel drops it, at least for now.
Showering is really nice. There’s even still shampoo in the bathroom. And she gets to put on pajamas afterwards. She hasn’t worn sweatpants in months. Sleeping in jeans is possibly the worst thing about walking across the country.
Joel knocks on the doorframe of the bedroom. Her bedroom. It’s hers now. She’ll have to remember that. “Settling in okay?”
“Uh-huh.” She nudges the dusty jewelry box on the table next to the bed. “What do we do with all this… stuff?”
“We’ll ask Maria. People might want some of it. Maybe you can trade for stuff you like better.”
She nods, sitting on the side of the bed. “Is there anything you want?”
He leans against the doorframe. “I haven’t really thought about it much. Besides that guitar.”
“If I find a guitar, are you gonna sing something for me?”
“We’ll see,” Joel says, which pretty much means yes. “You should get some sleep.”
“Okay.”
She does try. She’s tired and the bed is really comfortable. The mattress is a lot nicer than the one she had at school and someone washed the sheets and remade the bed. They smell like soap and fresh air, like they were dried outside in the sun. And she knows it’s safe. There’s no infected in Jackson and no one’s going to burst in and try to kill them.
But she can’t sleep.
For almost the last year, she’s been sleeping no further than six or seven feet from Joel. She could always hear him breathing or mumbling or softly snoring, though he refuses to admit he snores. The room is so quiet.
She tosses and turns and gets tangled in the sheets until she’s sweaty and uncomfortable.
When she finally sits up, she tells herself she’s just going to get a drink of water. But instead of going into the bathroom, she tiptoes out of the bedroom and down the hallway. Joel’s door is open a crack, and there’s a bit of light around the edges.
She pushes it open and then realizes, belatedly, that she’s probably supposed to knock. He’s probably going to want, like, privacy or whatever, now that they’re going to be living in a house and that’s actually possible.
Joel’s still awake, though, sitting against the headboard with a book on his lap. It doesn’t look like he’s actually reading it.
He looks up when the door opens. “Hey. You okay?”
She twists her fingers together. “Yeah. I can’t sleep.”
“C’mon in.”
To tell the truth, since he got hurt, she’s been sleeping a lot closer than six feet away. After… after, she couldn’t sleep if she wasn’t touching him. She was so scared that she was going to wake up back in the restaurant or she’d wake up and Joel wouldn’t be breathing.
She knows it isn’t exactly normal, though. And isn’t she supposed to be trying to be normal here?
Just tonight, she promises herself. She’ll remember how to be normal tomorrow, when she stops feeling so goddamn lost.
At first she just curls up on the empty side of the mattress. But then Joel puts the book down on the nightstand and stretches out.
“There’s room for you over here, if you want,” he offers.
And that is exactlywhat she wants.
She scoots over and tucks herself up against his side, letting her head rest on his shoulder. She can hear him breathing and when she puts her hand on his chest, his heart pounds against her palm. Immediately, she feels the tension go out of her spine.
“You slept like this while I was hurt, didn’t you?” Joel says.
She goes still. “Um. Yeah. I didn’t think you remembered that.”
“Barely do,” he says. “Thought I dreamed it.” He sighs, softly. “Hated that I could tell how scared you were, but I couldn’t do anythin’ about it.”
“Oh,” she whispers.
His fingers brush against her cheek, barely there for a second behind his hand moves down to her back. She wishes she knew how to tell him she doesn’t mind it when he does things like that. Or that she likes it, even. After － after, he held her face in his hands to make her see him and while he cleaned the blood off her face and the first time she woke up not knowing where she was. She wishes she knew the right words to say that doesn’t have to be a thing they only do when she’s hurt.
How do you say, hey, I want to spend the rest of my life with you in it, and I think you want that too, and, you kinda said I healed your broken heart and I’m so f*cking glad you’re still here, and, you don’t have to worry that you’re gonna scare me off by touching my face.
It’s just kind of a lot to say, and she’s not that good with words.
Also he’s rubbing her back in slow circles and her head is starting to get all floaty and she’s too close to being asleep to figure it out.
* * *
Most of the time, the whole food thing has been fine. She knows that she can’t afford to be fussy about food. That type of thing especially didn’t get you very far in a FEDRA school. She used to know a boy who puked every time he had milk and all that meant was he got less food than the rest of them. Besides, most of the time it was either Joel or her hunting something or them finding cans in old houses.
If she shot it, she knows what it is.
Communal meals aren’t a requirement in Jackson or anything, but they’re available and a lot of the time, it’s easier, especially at first when they’re busy working on getting settled and they don’t really have a ton of their own food yet. They can take what they need from the communal stores, but the fridge wasn’t working when they moved in, so they were limited in options.
And that means that she isn’t really seeing the food she’s eating being made. Mostly that’s okay. It’s summer and there are a lot of beans and vegetables and a surprising amount of fish. Even chicken is fine. Chicken looks like chicken, most of the time. She can’t really do dark meat, but there’s enough food that it doesn’t matter.
Until one day she sits down and there’s a bowl of red, red meat in front of her and she realizes she has no way to know what it is.
“What is it?” she asks quietly. Her mouth tastes like metal.
“Just chilli,” Joel says.
Not unreasonably, because people are constantly explaining stuff to her, Tommy assumes she doesn’t know what chilli is and starts explaining it.
“It’s ground beef, beans, and tomatoes,” he says. “Might be a little more spicy than you’re used to. We’ve been working on growing hot peppers and making our own hot sauce. Kind of a pet project of mine, actually.”
That means something to Joel, she realizes vaguely, but all she thinks about is that if it wasn’t beef, no one would know. He said none of them knew. She wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t seen it herself.
Ellie stands up too fast and knocks her chair over.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, her face burning as she feels people staring at her. She ducks down to pick it up and almost knocks it over again because her hands are shaking so hard. “I gotta pee.”
She’s lying and it’s probably obvious, but she needs to not be in the building anymore. She ducks out the fire door next to the bathrooms at the back.
Almost before she makes it out of the door, she throws up in the alley outside the canteen.
A couple minutes later, she hears the door open. She’s expecting Joel, but she’s surprised at the hand that passes over her water bottle.
“Thanks,” she manages, rinsing out her mouth, and then, “Is Tommy pissed?”
A slightly pained look crosses Maria’s face. “My dear sweet idiotic husband thinks you have your period.”
Ellie’s not really sure that’s better.
“If it helps, he’ll never say a single word about anything you do if you even hint you might,” Maria says.
Old people are weird about periods. Other kids at school, even boys, weren’t weird like some of the teachers were. Which, like, if they wanted them to be all secret-secret about them, they also shouldn’t have made it so they had to ask every time they needed a pad. Like, duh, of course they started a secret tampon ring.
Ellie used to shoot rats with BBs and trade them to some of the civilians who worked in the kitchen or did janitorial stuff, then trade that sh*t for tampons so she wouldn’t have to use the awful FEDRA pads that felt like a mattress in your pants. And the person with the best connections was a dude a couple years older than her.
Joel’s not that weird about it, though. Like there was an awkward moment when she realized she didn’t really wantto boil the cup Maria gave her in the same pot she’d eaten macaroni out of like twenty minutes ago and explaining that was weird, but Joel found her another one and didn’t really say anything. And that was kind of how it went the whole time. He didn’t say much of anything, but he made sure she had what she needed.
“It isn’t that, just for the record.”
Maria smiles. “I didn’t think so. Come and sit on that bench with me for a minute. For the sake of my ankles,” she adds before Ellie can argue she’s fine.
She goes because Maria being like seventeen months pregnant kind of freaks her out. She’s really big. It looks like she could explode at any moment.
Maria groans as she eases herself down on the bench. “I swear this thing used to be taller. And you are making the funniest face right now.”
Oops. Riley used to call that forgetting to use her “inside face”.
She puts on her best blank expression. “Sorry.”
“Pregnancy is weird,” Maria says, laughing. “Especially at your age.”
Ellie hasn’t been rude, exactly, but she’s been a little… she’d say cold. Riley would have said bitchy. Joel keeps reminding her that this is their home now, too, and she doesn’t have to be so defensive, but it’s a hard habit to break. She can tell that Maria is making an effort to be nicer to Joel. She still might not trust him, but she’s trying.
Ellie should try and be nicer, too.
“I grew up in a FEDRA school,” she says. “So I’ve never really been around someone who was pregnant before. It… it is kinda weird.”
“It’s weird from this side, too,” Maria says. “It even feels different from last time.”
“It does?”
“Twenty-three years is a long time between pregnancies. Your body changes a lot.” She grins at Ellie. “God’s honest truth, I thought this one was menopause for the first couple months. That was definitely a big surprise.”
Ellie nods.
“Can we talk about what happened there for a moment?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Listen, then. I’m not going to ask you to tell me anything,” Maria says gently and the tension in Ellie’s shoulders releases a little. “You don’t trust me enough for that, and that’s okay. I just want you to know that no one here is going to force you to eat anything you don’t want to. Not ever. If there’s something you don’t want to eat, we can find you something else. It might not be fancy, but we’re not going to punish you for not eating.”
That’s definitely different from school.
Ellie hesitates. “It’s… it’s meat. Sometimes. Not all the time. When it’s ground up or － or in little pieces.”
Saying it out loud pushes nausea into her throat again and she has to swallow several times to keep it down.
“Okay,” is all Maria says, and Ellie is really grateful she doesn’t press for details. “So there are rolls and vegetables and apple crumble, and you can try again if you want. Or you can go home and I’ll tell Joel you weren’t feeling well.”
Ellie picks at her cuticles. “Could I maybe just… not eat… but still stay here?”
“Sure,” Maria agrees immediately. “I didn’t mean you hadto leave.”
“Okay.”
The bench is not a particularly big bench, and Maria kinda is particularly big, so Ellie’s arm has been sort of touching her for a while. It’s not really a big deal until something bumpsher arm.
She turns so fast she almost falls off the bench. “What the f*ck was that?”
Maria laughs. “A kick. Do you want to feel?”
“Uh… sure?”
It seems polite or something. So she lets Maria press her hand against her stomach. It’s harder than she expected and after a couple seconds, something smacks up against her palm.
“Whoa. That’s so damn weird.” She frowns. “How do you know it’s a foot?”
“I don’t, really.”
“But you said kick.”
“It’s just what you call it,” Maria explains. “I think that might be a knee. Maybe an elbow. Before, I could feel their head sometimes, but they’ve moved down now because they’re almost ready to be born.”
“Weird,” Ellie says softly.
Maria gives her hand a squeeze, then lets go, standing. “Well, I actually do need to pee. Again. I’ll see you inside when you’re ready?”
“Yeah,” she says. “In a minute.”
It takes more than a minute. But she goes back inside, and that’s what matters.
Her bowl has disappeared. There’s a plate of salad with two fluffy white rolls that Joel is pretending is his. Both rolls are split open and slathered in a thick layer of butter, which she did not realize was so f*cking good until they got here. Butter is not a thing they got at school. There’s also a gently steaming mug of peppermint tea where she was sitting.
She sips at it while Joel and Tommy argue about something －some project in the house Joel’s been working on that he asks Tommy for his opinion on and then immediately calls it stupid －and steals food off Joel’s plate.
She doesn’t eat a lot, but she eats enough that Joel looks a little less worried, so that’s enough.
* * *
Ellie agrees to go to school because Joel asks her to try. She’ll power through and it’ll be over in a couple years. And she’ll f*cking stab anyone who even looks at her funny, Jackson rules be damned.
Except it’s kinda cool?
The day before she starts, Joel takes her to meet the teacher. It’s Sunday, so there’s no one else there. It’s the smallest school she’s ever seen.
“Was this a school before the outbreak?” she asks.
“It used to be an elementary school,” the teacher says. Her name is Meredith and she said Ellie should call her that, which is really weird. She called her teachers by rank to their faces and last name behind their back. Or unflattering nicknames, if they could come up with a good one. Riley was really good at that.
“Means it was just for little kids,” Joel explains when she looks at him, uncertain.
She’s glad he’s here with her. The idea of walking into the school alone made her… well, nervous would be putting it lightly. She kept hearing his voice in her head. Math. Kids her age.Over and over.
Meredith doesn’t seem anything like him, though. She isn’t anything like one of the teachers Ellie had back in Boston, either. She’s got long, curly hair that’s completely grey, and she’s wearing a pair of green overalls.
There also aren’t any other teachers.
“So how does it work that you’re the only teacher?” Ellie asks.
“It’s a rotation,” Meredith explains. “You’ll be here three days a week. Two days it’s just you older kids, two days it’s the younger ones, and then on the last day everyone comes.”
“Sounds a bit hectic,” Joel says, looking concerned.
Meredith smiles. “It can be. But one of the ways we manage it is by having the older ones like Ellie spend time with the younger kids. Ellie, what do you like learning about?”
“Space… dinosaurs.”
“Wonderful,” she says. “So something I might have you do during the week is an independent research project about your favourite astronaut, then pair you up with one of the little ones and teach them what you learned. Maybe have you do a small project together.” She glances at Joel. “I can see you’re skeptical.”
“It’s different,” Joel admits. He crosses his arms over his chest. “It’s a nice idea, ma’am, but it seems like it might take away from her education teachin’ other kids.”
“Actually, I’ve found it does the opposite. You have to really understand something to teach it to someone else. And the goal is to learn together.”
Ellie sits up a little straighter. “What kind of projects?”
“Oh, all kinds of things. Making models, posters, maybe writing a story and having them illustrate the pictures. There are still tests and papers, but we try to be more hands-on. And you’ll be able to have more independence in your learning.”
“So like if I wanted to spend two days reading about Sally Ride and nothing else?”
Meredith smiles. “Get your math homework done first. She’s my favourite astronaut, too, by the way.”
Ellie looks at Joel. "Okay, I’ll go.”
He still looks doubtful. “You taught before the outbreak?”
“Yes, I had over twenty years of experience teaching. Ten in standard education and twelve in a Waldorf school. Then five in a FEDRA school and eight more here in Jackson.” She glances between them. “Ellie is your youngest, right?”
Ellie freezes without meaning to.
People have been assuming that a lot since they got to Jackson and she never knows what to say. She usually says Joel isn’t her father and then changes the subject as fast as possible before they ask more questions. She’s been hoping no one asked Joel about it when she isn’t around. He doesn’t really say anything the times it’s happened around him and she doesn’t know what that means. She knows Joel cares about her. More than that. Probably a lot more. But it’s still… it’s just kind of awkward.
It used to be easier, like when Henry assumed Joel was her dad, and they were both offended. But they’re long past that point. Plus they’re staying here now. Explaining it when he was just taking care of her for a while was easy. Trying to explain it now is complicated.
She’s staring at the desk when Joel’s hand covers her on the arm of her chair.
“My daughter Sarah died in the outbreak,” he says. His voice is flatter than when he talks to her about Sarah, but he doesn’t look like he’s about to punch Meredith, at least. Ellie wraps her fingers around his and squeezes.
“I’m sorry,” Meredith says. “I understand this is different from what you were used to. But we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t working.” She stands up and gestures for them to follow her. “Why don’t I show you some of the projects our students are working on?”
Ellie is convinced already, but seeing the classrooms convinces her even more. It isn’t just rows of desks. There’s tables, but there’s also couches and bean bag chairs and a big cozy chair that she immediately drops into and looks at the bookshelf next to while Joel and Meredith talk.
She’s twenty pages into a book by the time Joel calls her name.
Meredith lets her borrow it and she tells Joel about it all the way home.
* * *
They’ve had to re-learn how Joel can wake her up. She’s always had a tendency to come up swinging when woken abruptly, usually with the knife she wasn’t supposed to have at school. When they were on the road, Joel let her wake up on her own if he could. A lot of the time she’d roll out of her sleeping bag when she smelled breakfast cooking, but she settled into a pretty easy pattern of waking up not too long after the sun rose. The earlier she woke up, the more ground they could cover in a day, and she was already used to early mornings from school.
Then, After,as she’s starting to think of it as, she had a lot of trouble sleeping. For a lot of reasons. She was scared, all the time, and she kept having nightmares. Bad ones. Plus she was sort of concussed for a while. And it all made waking up confusing.
Joel accidentally scared her once really badly waking her up from a nightmare. She sorta started screaming when he touched her. She forgave him right away. Honestly, she wasn’t even mad, because it wasn’t his fault, but he felt guilty.
So they learned.
It’s different depending on where she’s sleeping, but since she’s in her room tonight, he knocks on her open door. It’s not enough to wake her fully, but it pulls her out of sleep enough that when he says her name, and then sits on the side of her bed, she’s awake enough to know it’s him.
“Huh?” she mumbles into her pillow.
He rubs her back. “Maria’s in labour.”
“Oh, sh*t.” She struggles up onto her elbow and squints at him against the light coming from the hallway. “Is everything okay?”
“Far as I know, yeah. I gotta head over to the stables, though.” Joel offered to take over Tommy’s morning shift for a while after the baby was born. “Just wanted to let you know I was leavin’.”
She yawns, sitting up. “Can I come?”
“Honey, it’s real early. You should go back to sleep.”
“I can help.”
She thinks, probably, she could fall asleep again alone in the house, if she knows where Joel is. She’s not entirely sure she wants to wake up without him in the house. She hasn’t done that, not since Before. Considering how waking up with him in another room goes sometimes, she doesn’t know how it would go.
Joel gives in without a fight. “Alright. Put somethin’ warm on, though. It’s chilly.”
She swaps her sleep shorts for a pair of jeans and throws a sweater over the long-sleeved t-shirt she was sleeping in. It’s possible it used to be Joel’s, but it went from the laundry basket to her dresser the last time it was her turn to do laundry and now it’s hers. Or at least it is until the next time it’s Joel’s turn to do laundry.
Joel hands her a travel mug when she comes into the kitchen.
“Thanks.” She sniffs at it. Peppermint tea. It’s not something she drank back at school, but mint grows like everywhere and Joel taught her how to make it when she was having a bad stomach day after. It helps sometimes when she’s having trouble eating, and now she just likes it. She still does not understand the appeal of coffee, but hot drinks are a thing she’s starting to get. “What’s yours?”
Joel holds his mug out and lets her smell it. “Chicory.”
She makes a face. “Smells gross. Is it like coffee?”
“Not really,” he says with a grin. “But it ain’t awful.”
Ellie thinks she should probably be bitching more about doing chores and working. The other kids at school do. They complain constantly about what their parents make them do at home and about having to help out with around town. Ellie, meanwhile, has never done less work in her life than she does living here. No one’s made her scrub a truck or a bathroom besides their own, and Joel’s not fussy enough to have her doing it with a brush and bucket.
Besides, she likes helping out. She’s been hanging out with Maria more lately, helping her with stuff around town, and she likes learning a little bit about everything in Jackson. Tommy took her and Joel out to the water plant a couple weeks ago when they were checking the lines and someone actually explained how the plant turns water into electricity. It was pretty cool.
She also likes working with Joel. She wouldn’t admit that to him, though. Gotta keep him on his toes.
They split up in the stable to do the morning chores. Ellie finishes first, and finds Joel in a stable with one of the horses.
“Whatcha doing?”
“C’mere.” He gestures her over.
She puts a hand on the horse’s shoulder, running it along her side the way Joel taught her.
“She’s favourin’ this leg a little,” Joel says. “Not puttin’ as much weight on it. Run your hand down her leg to see if there’s any swellin’ or warmth.”
She does as he says. “I don’t feel anything.”
“Me neither.” Joel shifts and picks the horse’s hoof up. He presses at the sole, which the horse doesn’t seem to like much, judging by the concerned noise she makes. “I know, I know.”
“What’s wrong?”
Joel lets the horse’s foot drop back down. “Bruised hoof, I think. Probably stepped on a rock wrong. Help me put down some extra bedding for her, and we’ll get Seth out here after breakfast to look at it.”
Seth’s the town vet. He’s a really nice guy who lets Ellie ask as many questions as she wants. Joel even likes him, which is saying a lot.
They finish up and head back to the house in the soft grey pre-sunrise light. Breakfast will be starting at the canteen soon, but Ellie is hoping to squeeze in a quick shower first.
“How do you and Tommy know so much sh*t about horses?” she asks.
“Our grandparents raised them,” Joel says. “They had a farm. We’d spend all summer with them.”
“Did a lot of kids do that?”
“Ah, no.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Some, but not too many. Our parents… well, they struggled. It was easier for them that way. When we got old enough, we worked like their farm hands and got paid for it. Even after Tommy moved in with me, he kept goin’ out there to work the summer, until he enlisted.”
“Moved in with you?”
“Oh, yeah. Never told you that?” When she shakes her head, he continues. “Our mother died when Tommy was seventeen. Sarah was only a year old. And my father, he was… not great to live with. Sarah’s mom had taken off by then so Tommy moved in with us to finish high school. He helped out a lot with her. And even after he got out of the army, he lived with us sometimes when he was between places.”
“You took care of him.”
“That’s what family does.”
She smiles slowly at him. He takes care of her.
“I bet Tommy’s glad you’re here,” she says as they reach the house.
Joel chuckles, opening the front door. “Most of the time I’d reckon you’re right. Why do you say that, though?”
“Well.” She takes her jacket off and hangs it up in the hallway. “If your dad kinda sucked, then Tommy needs someone around to help him figure out how to be a dad. And you’re a good person to learn from. I call the first shower!”
She bolts up the stairs before he has a chance to say anything.
Because, like. Joel’s not her dad. But she knows Joel is a good dad. Just Sarah isn’t around to tell him that. Ellie may not have known Sarah, but she knows enough to know Sarah would want Joel to know that.
* * *
The other kids in Jackson are… fine, mostly. Most of them are a little afraid of her. She hasn’t made any really close friends, but they’re nice to her. They invite her to hang out sometimes. Not when they’re doing something sneaky － they all think she’ll rat them out － but when they go to the movie or whatever, she usually gets invited.
She’s trying to get along with them. They’re not like kids from FEDRA schools, which kind of helps. They aren’t broken the way most kids in FEDRA schools are, the way she is. They’re softer, mostly. It makes it easier. No one tries to steal her sh*t or pick fights. She’s left alone when she wants to be. She tries not to want to be alone all the time.
The new kid at school is a problem.
And a dick.
She clocks him as an ex-FEDRA kid right away. She’s pretty sure he’s not telling anyone that, but she sees through him. His name is Caleb, he’s a little older than Ellie, and she hates him.
She keeps her distance and grits her teeth when he’s an asshole to Maria and Meredith and… honestly, he’s kind of an asshole to most of the women in town.
But she’s minding her business.
Until one day after lunch when she’s outside in the school yard and she sees him leaning over Bailey, Ellie’s buddy from the little kid class. She’s eight and shy. She really likes animals and she especially likes telling Ellie about her favourite animals.
And she’s crying silently.
Ellie stalks over to them. “Hey, you wanna f*ck off and leave her alone?”
“You wanna mind your own f*cking business?” he snaps back.
She’s been trying. She really has. But this is her business now.
“What happened?” she asks Bailey, leaning against the table so she isn’t towering over the kid. Not that she has much to tower with, but she is still taller than eight year olds.
Bailey sniffles. “He took my Walkman.”
Ellie straightens up. “Give it back.”
“She’s a little liar,” Caleb claims, like she can’t see the Walkman in his hands.
She eyes him over. He’s taller, but she’s fast. She darts in and yanks it from his hands, passing it back to Bailey. “And you’re a f*cking dick.”
She’s honestly sort of expecting the punch she ducks, which is why she put herself between him and Bailey. She’s notexpecting him to throw her into the f*cking wall. She hits hard enough to knock the air out of her, her cheek scraping against the brick. It stuns her for a second, gasping, and he shoves his forearm against her throat.
“You think because your daddy helps run things around here you’re some little princess?” Caleb spits in her face. “You think you’re just f*cking special?”
Or are you just that f*cking special?
The yard behind the school turns into a burning building for a second.
No.
She sinks her teeth into his arm, tasting blood, and when he shouts and yanks it away, she slams her forehead into his nose. It’s hard enough to hurt and the bone crunches. And then she shoves her knee into his balls, as hard as she can, and when he crumbles, she kicks his legs out from under him.
She’s got her knee on his chest and her knife against his throat almost before he hits the ground.
“Don’t you everf*ckingtouch me again.” She expects her hand to shake. It doesn’t. “Or the next timeI won’t stop.”
She shoves herself off of him and to her feet. Oh, sh*t. They’ve attracted a crowd.
Well, this is gonna be bad.
She stumbles away from him － he’s probably not getting up for a while, but she keeps him in her peripheral － and braces herself on one of the picnic tables. She’s starting to shake now and she’s breathing like she just ran away from a stalker.
She squeezes her eyes shut for a second. She’s still here, in Jackson, at school. She knows where she is. Nothing is on fire. There’s no blood on her hands. She stopped. She made herself stop.
There’s blood in her teeth.
Meredith is there a moment later, which doesn’t surprise her. “Ellie. My office. Now.”
Yeah, this is gonna suck.
At least she’s used to waiting in school offices, waiting to find out what her punishment is going to be. She slumps down in one of the chairs in front of Meredith’s desk. f*ck, Joel’s going to be pissed at her. She’s not supposed to do sh*t like this here.
And her hands won’t stop shaking.
A moment later, she hears the sound of the school door slamming. She counts down from twenty in her head, and Joel is shoving the office door open by the time she gets to five.
“Are you － Jesus Christ,” he cuts himself off when she turns to look at him. “What the hell happened to your face?”
“I’m fine,” she mutters, but Joel’s in front of her, holding her face in his hands and turning it so he can examine it. “Joel, I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
She rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t tell him to stop touching her face. Her heartbeat is finally starting to settle down, now that he’s here, and she doesn’t feel like she’s going to throw up anymore. “I got in a fight.”
Joel pauses. “Did you win?”
“Yeah. I think you’re probably not supposed to ask that.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t.” Joel’s thumb touches her cheek, gently. “You’re okay?”
She nods.
It’s true now.
Behind him, she sees Meredith walk into the office, close the door partway, and then pause. “When you fix the wall, maybe you could put in one of those stoppers that keep the knob from slamming into the wall.”
Joel actually looks embarrassed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Oh, sh*t. Joel put a hole in the wall with the door.
Well, she might be in trouble － though she’s starting to think she might be in less trouble than she thought she would be, judging by the way Joel’s sitting next to her and picking her hand up in his － but she has something to tease him about later.
“Ellie, here,” Meredith says, and hands her an ice pack. “I’m sorry I left you waiting for so long, but it took a bit to settle everyone else down. First of all, are you okay?”
“Uh.” Ellie looks down at where Joel is holding her hand. His hands always make hers look so small. There’s a cut across one of her knuckles she can’t remember getting, and his thumb is tracing it gently. “I’m okay.”
“Good. So what happened today?”
“Ugh.” She presses the ice pack against her cheek and tips her head back until she’s staring at the ceiling. She doesn’t want to talk about it. “Can we skip this part? I beat the sh*t out of him. Just tell me I’m suspended or whatever.”
“I want to hear your side.”
Ellie sighs. “He was picking on Bailey. You know her Walkman? She’s always listening to this tape her mom gave her before she died. He stole it and wouldn’t give it back. It’s hers. She doesn’t lie about sh*t like that. So I took it back and then he shoved me.”
“And then?” Meredith asks.
“I mean, like I bit him…”
“Well,” Meredith says. “I heard he slammed your face into a brick wall and then put his arm on your throat.”
Ellie shrugs.
“Excuse me?” Joel says and, oh, he’s not just worried now. That is definitely his pissed face, and barely restrained at that. “Now I know kids fight, especially these days, but that crosses a goddamn line.”
Ellie squeezes his hand. “Joel…”
“No, I’m sorry, but she shouldn’t be punished for defendin’ another kid or herself.”
“I agree,” Meredith says.
Ellie sits up straight. “Wait, what? You’re not kicking me out?”
“Look.” Meredith stands up, walks around the desk, and leans against the edge. “Maybe, twenty years ago, in a public school, I would have had to suspend you. But I don’t need to tell you two that the world has changed. The way people react change.”
Joel is slowly getting a little less tense in the shoulders.
It’s weird. Besides Riley, who didn’t really count since she wasn’t a grown-up, Ellie doesn’t think anyone has ever defended her when she got in trouble. She doesn’t hate it.
“Ellie is a joy to have in class,” Meredith says. “She’s hard-working, kind, funny as hell. She helps out with the little ones without being asked and they love having her around. And the other kids look up to her so much. They were all veryinsistent that I know Ellie didn’t start it.”
…this is getting embarrassing.
“What about the other kid?” Joel asks. “I don’t want that boy near her.”
Meredith sighs. “That’s complicated. I’m going to have to talk to Caleb’s uncle when he’s done at the clinic. I don’t love it, butCalebstudying independently may be better for everyone.”
“Uncle?” Ellie says, surprised. “He has family here? I thought he grew up in a FEDRA school.”
Meredith raises an eyebrow. “You aren’t supposed to know that. Who told you?”
“No one. I could tell,” she says, distracted. She’s never met anyone who had familyin one of the military schools. FEDRA people with families usually get housing away from the school. She’s pretty sure their kids went to a day school somewhere else in Boston, something still technically run by FEDRA but only the way everything else was.
Kind of a sh*tty situation, she thinks. It might be worse to have family that didn’t want you than it was to have no family at all.
“So,” Meredith says. “You can head home early for today and get some rest, but I expect to see you bright and early Monday morning.”
And that’s it. Joel stands, so she stands up, too, but she hesitates before heading towards the door.
“Like I know I just broke his nose a little,” Ellie says. “But if he leaves me and the others alone, I think you should let Caleb try school again.”
“You do?” Meredith asks, looking surprised. “That’s very fair of you.”
“Yeah. FEDRA schools are different. They don’t, um.” Ellie looks down, twisting her fingers together. “They don’t teach you how to be a good person.”
She doesn’t like Caleb, and she’d gladly break his nose a second time if she ever saw him picking on one of the little kids again. But things have changed a lot since Ellie was in a FEDRA school. She knows who she is. She knows Joel is going to be there when she goes home at night, wherever home is. She knows she doesn’t have to fight all the time just to try and eke out every little bit of happiness and security she has.
Caleb doesn’t.
She doesn’t need to be that way anymore.
Right as she’s walking out the door, Meredith says her name. “Ellie.”
She turns to look over her shoulder. “Hm?”
“That knife isn’t supposed to be at school.” Meredith raises an eyebrow. “Don’t let me see it again.”
Ellie grins. “Right.”
* * *
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Ellie asks skeptically.
“Him,” Joel says, sounding a little pained.
“Right, him. What am I supposed to do with him?”
Ellie likes kids. She likes helping with the younger kids at school, and playing with them and stuff. She’s always liked them.
Babies are different. Babies are tiny and squishy and they cry and poop and throw up and she has no idea what to do with a baby. In Boston, the babies are all in a different place until they’re four. So she hasn’t really seena baby since she was that age and left nursery.
Which is why it is very weird to have one staring at her from a little basket in Maria and Tommy’s living room.
“Well, you could hold him if you want,” Joel suggests.
“I don’t think so.” She looks down at her hands. “Have you noticed I drop things a lot? Like that mug and those cookies and my gun that one time?”
“I remember.” Joel winces. “You’re not gonna drop him. Here, sit back a little.”
Part of her wants to argue. But part of her is… curious. The kid’s only like a month old. They’ve visited since he was born, dropped off food and cleaned the place up a bit, because Joel said that was a nice thing to do when someone has a baby, but Ellie was too nervous to hold the baby. Joel did, for a couple minutes, and then gave him back to Tommy and Ellie asked a bunch of silly questions to distract them so he could slip out of the room for a little bit.
Now, he takes a breath before slipping his hands under the baby. He looks even smaller in Joel’s hands.
“Keep your arms a little closer to your body if you’re nervous,” Joel says, his voice low. “And you’re gonna make sure you put your hand or your arm under his head to support it. His neck ain’t strong enough yet to hold it up on his own.”
“Oh,” she says softly as Joel puts the baby in her arms.
He’s warmer than she thought he’d be, but lighter. She really didn’t realize how small babies were when they were new.
“Not so bad, huh?” Joel says. He strokes one finger over the baby’s head, gently smoothing down the tiny curls he’s already got.
“It’s kinda cool,” she admits.
She also thinks it’s pretty cool that the baby starts to fall asleep in just a few moments. It’s not anything she’s doing. She’s sitting very still, making sure she’s got a good hold on the kid. To be fair to him, she also falls asleep when Joel rubs her head like that.
“Did you have like… baby cousins or whatever when you were a kid?” Ellie asks.
“Nah, both our parents were only children,” Joel says.
“So how did you know what to do when Sarah was born?”
He chuckles softly. “Honestly, kiddo, I didn’t. I read a lot of books, but mostly I was flyin’ by the seat of my pants and hopin’ I was doin’ okay.”
She thinks he did more than okay. No offence to Tommy or other fathers, but Ellie’s pretty sure that Joel is the best dad.
“Is it weird?” she asks. “Being around him?”
“Sometimes it’s hard,” he admits. “He looks a little like Sarah did when she was a baby. Makes me think more about when she was little. But it ain’t －it’s nice, in a way. See the way he’s rubbin’ his face ‘cause he’s tired? She did the same thing. I’d forgotten that til I saw him doin’ it.”
Ellie nods.
Joel catches her gaze. “It ain’t just him that reminds me of things I forgot. That I’m glad to be reminded of.”
They don’t talk a lot about feelings. She’s not good at it, and Joel’s kinda f*cking terrible at it. But then sometimes he comes out with things like that, and she doesn’t know, exactly, how to respond, but they make her feel important. Not important the way being immune did, but a different kind of important.
It makes her feel a little guilty. Because those moments make her feel so f*cking jealous of Sarah that she got Joel as her dad.
* * *
“Hurry up!” Ellie calls. “I’m starving!”
Joel steps out the front door, yawning. “Hey, starvin’. Nice to meet you. I’m Joel.”
She stares at him. “And you say my jokes are bad.”
“Oh, they are.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She grabs his arm and hangs her weight off it, trying to drag him along. It doesn’t budge him. “Come on already. I’m gonna eat my arm.”
He starts walking suddenly and Ellie almost falls over. She cackles, using him to catch herself.
She’s been awake since early morning, helping out at the stables. She’s been doing that on days she doesn’t have school since Nicky was born, even after Tommy took over his normal stuff again. It helps with the noise in her head, spending time around the horses.
Joel took a night shift patrolling on the wall to cover for someone who was sick. There’s a nasty flu going through Jackson they’re trying to keep from spreading too much. He hasn’t slept yet and sometimes being tired makes him goofy. Ellie likes that a lot more than when he gets sad or extra worried.
On days she has school, Joel usually makes breakfast for them at home. Nothing fancy, usually just eggs and toast or oatmeal. Sometimes if she’s up first and hungry, she just eats cold leftovers out of the fridge and he shakes his head at her breakfast spaghetti. She finds it hard to be fussy about what food you’re supposed to eat when. It’s food. You eat it when you’re hungry. She’s just happy to have enough of it.
On days she doesn’t have school, they tend to eat breakfast in the canteen. Tommy and Maria eat a lot of meals there, since they’re so busy, and it’s nice to eat with them.
Today’s not a school day, which is why she spent the morning at the stables, and they’re heading to the canteen for breakfast. It already smells good when they walk in, and Ellie’s stomach rumbles audibly.
“Pancakes!” she exclaims, excited. She’s only had those once or two at school, but she loves them. She heard they made them for breakfast here, but she’s managed to miss the days they served them so far. “f*ck yeah.”
Joel freezes.
“Joel?”
“You eat,” he says. “I need to － you eat. Go sit with Tommy and Maria.”
Before she can say anything, he takes off.
She hasn’t heard him sound like that since he was bleeding out on a basem*nt floor and telling her to leave him.
Ellie puts her plate down and follows him. If she wasn’t more than a little worried, she’d find it darkly amusing that he did the same thing she does, heading towards the back exit of the canteen and going out the fire door.
He doesn’t look surprised when she sits on the bench next to him.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Go back inside.”
“Nah.” She glances at him. “It’s kinda hot in there.”
Then she waits.
After a moment, he sighs. “I made Sarah pancakes on her birthday every year. She wanted to do the same thing for me, for my birthday, but I forgot to buy pancake mix. She wasn’t angry at me or anything, but she was disappointed. And then that night everything… everything went to sh*t.”
Ellie goes still. “On your birthday?”
“I never told you?”
She shakes her head. But she knows when Outbreak Day is, and she knows the date on the memorial in Tommy and Maria’s house, the one Joel never looks at. Sarah died on his birthday?
“That…” She exhales. “f*ck.”
Joel only makes a little bit of a face at that.
She scoots closer on the bench, pressing her shoulder against his. “Maria gave me a speech the first time she found me puking out here. She said I could leave if I wanted to, or eat the other stuff, or stay and not eat. She said that no one is ever gonna make me eat something I don’t wanna eat here.”
“Maria’s a smart lady sometimes,” Joel says. “Stupid thing is I didn’t even like them that much in the first place.”
They sit quietly for a little bit. Eventually, they end up back inside. Ellie thinks it’s mostly because Joel wants her to eat breakfast and she doesn’t want to leave him.
He does not touch a single pancake.
After breakfast, he heads home to get some sleep. Silly tired is over. He just looks tired tired now. And a little sad tired.
Ellie thinks about hugging him before he leaves. Hugs tend to be more of a thing they do when one of them has nightmares or something. Mostly her. She wishes they happened more, and she’s been thinking more about just… doing it.
She wusses out, though, like she has every other time.
“Wake me up if you come home for lunch,” Joel says when she tells him she’s going to stay in town instead of going home. They spend probably too much time together, but she can keep herself busy if she wants to, and Joel looks like he could use the house being quiet.
Casual hugging might not be happening yet. But she has an idea.
She catches up to Tommy before he takes off.
“Hey, hey, hey.”
Tommy glances at her. “What’d you do?”
She thinks for a second. “Nothing you can prove. I got something to ask.”
“Sure, shoot.”
“I want chickens.”
“Is that a question?” Tommy asks, grinning.
Ellie tries again. “I want chickens?” She turns around and walks backwards, facing him. “Other people have them in their yards. With the little house things. I think me and Joel should, too.”
“And why exactly do you reckon that?”
It’s weird how much Tommy sounds like Joel sometimes.
“I think they’d annoy Joel and I like eggs,” she says, lying a little. Well, not really lying. Those are true. She thinks chickens will drive him nuts. And that’ll be fun. But Joel likes eggs more than she does. She appreciates them, the way she does most food, but she’ll eat almost anything that isn’t, you know, heavily meat-based. Whether she can eat at all is a different matter, but she’s not picky besides the meat thing.
Right now they’re just getting eggs from the town chickens or the communal stock that everyone puts their extras in. She thinks it would be nice to have a steady source. One that’s theirs first. Things like that make him feel better.
Tommy rubs the back of his neck. “You had to choose today for this, huh?”
“Bad day?”
“Busy one. Got a meeting to schedule a supply run next month, gotta pop into the orchard for an update on the mite situation, get some cows pregnant.”
“Ew.” Ellie makes a face. “I really didn’t need to know that.”
“That’s the reality of agriculture, kiddo,” Tommy says with a smile. “Cow’s gotta have babies to get that milk you drink every day.”
She sighs. She doeslike milk.
Tommy pats his pockets. “You got anything to write with?”
“Mm-hm.” She pulls the little notebook out of her inner jacket pocket. It’s smaller than a paperback book, with a nub of a pencil shoved into the spiral wire. She has a collection of them that Joel has found or traded for. It helps keep her head organized. She writes lists of things she’s supposed to do, things she hears that she wants to ask Joel about later, things she can’t stop thinking about. Lots of the pages are just doodles, too, especially when she gets bored.
She flips to a blank page and passes it to Tommy.
“Alright, here’s what we’ll do,” he says, writing something on the page. “You want chickens, you can do the work for them. You’re plenty old enough to start figurin’ this kind of thing out.”
Ellie raises an eyebrow. “Is this like a real thing I should be doing to be helpful or is this like a lime lesson thing?”
“Lifelesson.”
“What, really? I thought it was lime.”
“Why would it be lime?”
She shrugs. “Joel said once your first car was a lemon. I figured it was similar.”
Tommy shakes his head. “Fair enough. Well, call it both, if you want. Helpful and a life lesson. So, you’ll need to figure out who’s got a rooster and who’s willing to brood some eggs for you. If you find some, you’ll get on the delivery list for chicken feed.”
“And they also eat like your vegetable scraps and stuff,” Ellie adds.
“They do. You’ll need somewhere for them to live, and your yard ain’t fenced in. You’ll have to trade for material for that.” He finishes writing and hands back her notebook.
She nods, reading the list. “Uh. What do I trade? I kinda don’t really own… like, f*cking anything.”
“You have two good hands and plenty of time.”
“Right.” She starts to take off, then spins back around. “Don’t tell Joel, okay? It’s a surprise.”
Considering her history, she was surprised that she’s kind of doing well in school. It isn’t like FEDRA school, where everything is tests and writing papers and more tests. Even things like math homework are more tolerable when that’s not all she does.
Plus sometimes even that is fun. Like, she got to spend a day following Joel around asking him questions about measuring and angles and sh*t and writing down whatever he said, and then he took her pencil away away and showed her how to fix their broken porch stair. She did all the measuring and cutting and it might be silly, but every time she steps on it, she’s proud of herself.
Projects work for her.
The first thing she starts with is going to talk to Miss Lorraine. Miss Lorraine is like eighty years old and even more southern than Joel, and the only time Ellie called her by her first name alone, Joel looked like he was going to faint. She lives a couple houses down the road from them, and she’s always sitting on her porch when Ellie comes home from school. They talk when Ellie has time, and she’s pretty sure that when she’s late, Miss Lorraine tells Joel.
Miss Lorraine doesn’t have to do a lot around Jackson － she’s ancient－ but she has chickens. She says they keep her company.
“Ellie!” she says when she opens the door. “What brings you by?”
“Chickens.”
Miss Lorraine asks if she wants something to drink. She doesn’t really, but Joel says it’s one of those things that used to be polite and he’d appreciate if she’d try to do the manners thing sometimes. Besides, she likes Miss Lorraine.
“Here, I’ve got it,” Ellie says, picking up the kettle and filling it in the sink. “Do you need some wood brought in or anything, in case it gets cold tonight?”
“No, dear, that’s fine. Thank you. Where’s your dad today?”
That’s the other thing about Miss Lorraine. She is absolutely convinced Joel is Ellie’s father, and nothing Ellie says will convince her otherwise. She’s corrected it more than once, and Miss Lorraine never remembers by the next time they talk. Ellie’s kind of given up on it.
“Joel’s sleeping,” she says. She gets a couple mugs out of the cupboard. “He had to work last night.”
She makes the tea the way Miss Lorraine likes it, with extra milk and honey, and then takes both mugs to the table.
“So what about chickens are you looking to talk about?” Miss Lorraine asks.
“I want some. And Tommy said I need to find someone who has a rooster, which I know you don’t, but you might know someone who does?”
Miss Lorraine’s eyes light up. “I have some wonderful news.”
What Miss Lorraine has is a bathroom full of baby chickens.
“Oh my god.” Ellie crouches down in front of the little box of chicks. “How old are they?”
“Just a couple days.” The hen hops onto the bathroom counter, and Miss Lorraine reaches over and strokes its back. “I wasn’t planning on hatching any this year, but this little rebel escaped and took herself on an adventure over to the neighbour’s. Honestly, it’s taking a bit more out of me than I expected.”
“Hey, little guys,” Ellie says softly. “Hi, chick chicks.”
They peep at her, slightly alarmed, and she falls in love instantly.
She looks up at Miss Lorraine. “I don’t really have anything to trade for them.”
Miss Lorraine smiles. “You spend a little bit of time with me, have a nice cup of tea, and let me tell you about taking care of them, and we’ll call it even. How about that?”
Ellie drinks three cups of tea and eats about seven of the cookies that Miss Lorraine keeps giving her. She has a bit of a stomach ache by the time she leaves. She’s not used to eating a lot of sugar. They weren’t really given sweet stuff at school, and on the road last year, basically the only thing they ate that was sweet was fruit. It’s only since Jackson she’s had that kind of thing regularly, since they grow sugar beets and have bees.
She also has four more pages in her notebook filled with tips and advice, and a tentative plan.
The next thing she does is go to suck up to Maria. Not just because Maria likes her, and they’re like… sort of connected, through Joel and Tommy, but because there is a shed in their backyard that she’s got her eye on.
“Surprise chickens?” Maria asks, patting the baby on the back.
“Yes.”
“And you want our shed?”
Ellie nods. “You’ve been complaining about it looking like it’s gonna fall down. We could fix it up and make it into a chicken coop.”
“And how exactly do you plan to move it? I’m assuming you want your chicken coop in your own yard.”
Ellie picks up the crowbar she has leaning against the house. “I took this out of the garage.”
Maria cracks up. It takes her a moment to compose herself, and Ellie tries not to be offended. “While I believe you could tear down a shed with a crowbar, how about I call it an IOU and we can make it a project when Joel knows about it.”
“But I’m supposed to be trading,” Ellie says. “I was gonna offer to trade tearing it down for letting me keep the boards and sh*t.”
“Okay, so you give me an IOU for a day of baby-sitting instead. We’ll trade those.”
Ellie pulls her notebook out and flips to an empty page. “Okay, but you’re the one explaining it to Tommy ‘cause I’m pretty sure this isn’t what he meant for me to do.”
She doesn’t think tea and baby-sitting are exactly what he had in mind. But maybe she shouldn’t be complaining, because when she asks Oliver who does a lot of the maintenance at the orchards if she can trade doing something for the wire for her coop － apparently they use it on young trees to keep mice and stuff from eating the bark － he actually has a job for her.
They’re transferring trees from the tree nursery to the orchard and there are plenty of holes to be dug. It’s not exactly a good time, but she’s dug worse holes.
She’s covered in dirt, her shoulders ache, and she’s got a blister on one hand where the gloves she borrowed didn’t work well enough, but by the time she heads home for lunch, she’s struggling home with enough wire for a decent sized coop. She stashes it in the garage where Joel won’t see it right away, behind the old boxes of Christmas decorations the people who used to own the house had.
Then she goes upstairs and knocks on his bedroom door. “Joel?”
He makes a confused noise from the darkness of his room. “Hm?”
“It’s lunch. Do you want something?”
“Yeah.” Joel makes one of those stretching noises. “Yeah, honey, just give me five minutes.”
“Okay,” Ellie says and goes back downstairs to make lunch.
She’s not exactly used to that yet, when Joel calls her things like that. Most of the time it’s just her name, except when she’s had a nightmare. But lately there’s been more of those, especially in the morning when Joel’s tired.
She kinda really likes when it happens.
She warms up some leftovers out of the fridge for lunch, because despite Joel’s best efforts, she’s a terrible cook. She can cook meat when she shoots it, if it’s over a fire, and if “half-burnt” is an acceptable form of cooked. She wouldn’t starve if left to her own devices, but Joel’s food is a lot better, and he spends a lot of time pretending to enjoy what she’s made when she cooks.
He looks moderately awake by the time he comes downstairs.
“Sleep well?”
“Alright,” he says, taking the plate she hands him. “Thank you.”
Ellie’s pretty sure he sleeps a little worse when she’s not home. It doesn’t happen a lot, because their schedules usually line up, but he worries. He also tries not to let her see, but she can tell. She just didn’t want to keep him awake when he was so tired and she’s not always the quietest person.
When she sits down, he gives her a look over. “And what exactly have you been up to?”
“Helping out at the orchard,” she says with her mouth full. “They’re putting in some new trees.”
Joel nods. “You get caught doin’ something you shouldn’t?”
“No.” She rolls her eyes. “Sometimes I’m just nice, Joel.”
“Yeah, I know you are.”
Her face goes hot. “Shut up,” she says, but she’s grinning at her plate.
Joel scratches his beard. “You see Tommy at all today?”
Uh oh. She still has things she needs to do before telling Joel about the chickens. And if he goes to try and find Tommy, he might see her running around doing those things.
She puts as much attitude in her voice as possible. “Dude, you got like two f*cking hours of sleep. You know you can actually take an afternoon off. Jackson won’t fall apart without you. I mean, you are－” She clears her throat so she can put on the gruff voice she does to make fun of him. “Fifty-six years old.”
“Alright, alright. You wanna watch a movie, maybe?”
She stands up, putting her plate in the sink. “Can’t. Got some stuff to do.”
Disappointment flashes across his face, but he hides it. “Well, I’ll see you at dinner, then.”
She hesitates. Oh, f*ck it. She darts in quickly, and wraps her arms around Joel’s shoulders, leaning against his back for a second.
“See you at dinner,” she says, and runs before he can say anything.
She’s not freaking out, either. It was just a hug. Barely even a hug. More of a lean.
No, she’s not freaking out at all.
One of the things she thinks is super funny about Jackson is that they actually use horses and carts to haul stuff around. It’s useful, but it also reminds her of like pioneers and sh*t and she thinks that’s kind of awesome.
A few hours after lunch, she sneaks a cartful of supplies through the backyard with a horse. The garage is around the side of the house opposite the living room, with a bunch of trees around it. Plus, if she knows Joel, he’s dozing on the couch by now.
She piles everything up and pulls out the list Miss Lorraine gave her. She’s got plans for a coop, for when the chicks are big enough to be outside, wire for it, a bag of chicken feed that should last a good while, feeding and water dishes that she spent half an hour weeding Dolores’ garden for － and listening to her complain about her husband, which might have been the real trade － and Miss Lorraine is gonna let her borrow the heat lamp.
Ellie leaves everything in the garage and goes to track down Tommy.
She finds him at the stables, though thankfully she’s missed the whole cow impregnating thing. She really, really did not need to see that.
“And how’s your day been?”
“I need help moving a brood box into our garage,” she says. “I got chicks and food and supplies for a coop.”
Tommy stares at her. “You got chicks already?”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s been less than six hours.”
“Yeah, I’m good.” She flips through her notebook and shows him the IOU. “Look, Maria gave me this. We traded. But I need the chicks moved first and the box is too big for me to do it alone. And I don’t wanna put them in a cart and, like, shake them around a bunch.”
“God, you’re as stubborn as Joel,” Tommy mutters. “Alright, I’ve got a dolly in the shed at home. That should work. And where exactly did you get these chicks?”
“Miss Lorraine. She’s got a slu*tty chicken, apparently. What are we trading?”
Tommy puts a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t tense up, very deliberately. “This one we’ll call even.”
Maria comes out as they’re getting the dolly and offers to help. Which actually means Ellie takes the baby from her while she tells Tommy he’s doing everything wrong. They’re taking turns staying home with the baby, each of them taking a few days at a time, but Ellie’s pretty sure Maria’s getting bored out of her mind. The thing is just that they can’t vaccinate the baby against, like, smallpox or whatever, so he can’t be around a lot of people until he’s bigger.
It’s a thing Maria wants to try and trade with the military for, but they have to be careful about it. If FEDRA realizes they’re doing too well, they’ll try and take over. Ellie gets why people worry about the babies catching something, though. There was a measles outbreak in one of her old schools and a lot of kids got really sick. They had to be quarantined in their bedrooms for weeks until it ran its course.
Ellie offers to come back and help Miss Lorraine clean up, but she turns Ellie down, so when the chickens are set up in the garage under the heat lamp in their little box, Ellie’s pretty much done.
“You really get things done when you put your mind to it,” Tommy says, letting her pass Nicky over to him. “I’m proud of you.”
It’s nice to hear something like that.
And it was really nice having their help. But it’s also nice when they go home, because she wants to tell Joel about this by herself. It’s her surprise for him.
She was right, though. He is half-asleep on the couch.
“Hey, you,” she says from the doorway.
He sits up straighter. “Yeah. Hi.”
She hides a grin. “I have something to show you.”
“Do you?” Joel raises his eyebrows. “Did you break something?”
“No, oh my god. Come on, come see.”
When he doesn’t move fast enough, she goes over and grabs his hand, pulling him off the couch and towards the garage.
She flings the door open. “Ta-da!”
His face does a lot of things at once, and they’re all kind of funny. “Did you steal a bunch of baby chickens?”
Why does everyone think she’s up to no good today?
“I traded for them,” she says. “They’re ours. We’re gonna have chickens. For eggs, not for eating.”
Joel puts his hands on his hips. “You know, traditionally you’re supposed to ask before you bring home a pet. Or… five?”
“Seven,” Ellie corrects. She leans down and opens the top of the brood box, carefully scooping up a chick. It makes alarmed peeps, but she holds it up in front of Joel’s face and it calms down. “Look at her little face. Also, I asked Tommy.”
Joel raises an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”
“Mmhm.” She rocks the chick gently in her hands, stroking her thumb down its back.
“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” Joel mutters, but he’s starting to pretend he’s not smiling. “And why exactly did you wake up this morning and decide you wanted chickens?”
The chick has fallen asleep in her hands. Ellie leans down and gently sets it down in the brood box, closing the lid as the others cluster around it.
“Maybe I’ve been planning.” She rolls her eyes at the look Joel gives her. “Okay, yeah, I just thought of it today. But they’re not forme, dumbass. They’re… they’re like for you.”
“For me?”
“Yeah.” She fiddles with her fingers. “It’s a thing so you don’t have to worry about food so much. ‘Cause I know you do.”
She doesn’t mention pancakes. It’s not really about the pancakes. Or it’s partly about them, the way it’s also partly about when she can’t eat meat. It’s about them finding ways to take care of each other. That’s what they do. That’s what familydoes.
“Ellie.” And then Joel does that thing where he touches her face, holding it in both his hands. “Thank you.”
She can’t help the grin that spreads across her face. “So we can keep them?”
“Yeah. We can keep them.”
“Good. Oh, also, you have to make a coop for them.”
“What?”
* * *
They’ve been slowly cleaning the house out of all the old stuff they can’t use. A lot of it is stuff that isn’t very useful. It’s a little interesting, in the way a lot of old stuff is, but it’s theirhouse now. Ellie wants to make it theirs. Almost nothing gets thrown away in Jackson, but it goes into storage at one of the old stores if no one wants it.
She puts all of the girl’s posters and the boy pictures and her diaries in a box and puts it in the back of the garage. No one would want that stuff, and it is actually the kind of thing that might just be burned. Ellie feels guilty about that, so she puts it away. The girl who used to live in her room is probably dead now, and if she’s not, she’s all grown up, but it still feels wrong.
Sometimes she thinks about Sarah’s room, and wonders what it used to look like. And she thinks about how Joel would feel knowing someone burned her pictures and things because they weren’t useful. It isn’t a nice thought.
She picks one of the girl’s old decorations to keep, the giraffe poster that matches the stuffed giraffe toy that lives on the window seat, and sets both carefully aside with the other things she’s keeping, like the pillows and hangers and things. The rest of the room is stripped bare so they can paint it.
It took a while to find the paint, mostly because of the colour. She wanted it to be purple. She thinks that surprises Joel, but purple is secretly her favourite colour. Not eggplant, not that kind of purple. Soft purple, like the sky when the sun sets. And she thinks having a purple bedroom would be really f*cking cool.
And it looks great when they finish. They’re both covered in paint and Joel’s complaining about his back, but it looks so cool.
Paint kinda stinks, though, so after she’s showered, she just ends up sleeping in Joel’s room. Lately she’s been better at sleeping in her own bed, with fewer nightmares, but while her room is airing out, she doesn’t mind spending a night in his room. She’s exhausted anyways － who knew painting was such hard work － and passes out quickly.
She wakes up the next morning still a little achy, and goes to her room to grab her clothes out of the bathroom. All of them are in a laundry basket in there. Her closet had to be emptied and she was surprised how many clothes she has now. When she left Boston, she had the clothes on her back and a few spare pairs of underwear and socks, and that was it.
Maria and Joel sometimes talk about her clothes, which is… weird. Probably the only time they really get along is when they’re both fussing about her. It’s fall, almost the end of fall, and they’re both starting to make noise about her needing winter clothes. The last time they were talking, Joel said something about long underwear just as Ellie walked into the room and she immediately turned around and walked back out.
She opens her bedroom door and freezes in the doorway. Oh, sh*t.
“You like it?” Joel asks behind her.
Her ceiling, which was previously white with that weird textured stuff, has been scraped smooth and painted a deep, dark blue.
“It’s f*cking perfect,” she says. He must have been awake all night doing that. He scraped the gunk off it before they ripped down the old pink wallpaper, but when she went to bed, it was still just primed white.
“And I got you paint for the stars,” he says. “White and some dark grey. I was thinkin’ maybe you could put the moon up there, too. And here, these.”
He nudges past her to grab something off the plastic covering her bed, which they’ve pushed into the middle of the room.
“Thought you might like these.” He passes her a bag of little plastic stars. “You ever seen these before? They glow in the dark.”
She turns the bag over. “How? There’s no batteries.”
Batteries are almost impossible to come by now, but she knows that’s how most things that used to light up worked.
“It’s a chemical thing. You shine light on it, and then it glows when you turn off the lights. Usually lasts a few hours.”
“That’s f*cking sick.” She grins. “Wait, wait, don’t move.”
She runs back into his room, grabbing her space book off his nightstand, and runs back. He hasn’t moved. She grabs his hand.
“C’mon.”
She pulls him into her room and drops onto the floor, patting the floor next to her until he sighs and eases himself down next to her. She lies down and tugs on his shirt until he does the same.
“I’m gonna put the moon over my bed,” she says, flipping her book open to her favourite page. “So when I lie down, I can see it. And then…”
She holds the book closer to them both, pointing at where she’s going to put the constellations. Joel nods along, though she doesn’t think he cares about the details. Or, well, he cares that she cares. If she didn’t, he wouldn’t.
She ends up leaning her head on his shoulder and they talk until she has to go eat breakfast or she’s going to be late for school.
She can’t focus on much that day, besides sketching out her ideas. Meredith comes over to check on her, and shows her a way that will eventually make it easier to transfer it to her ceiling. It’s a thing with grids, using a grid to make a small picture bigger. During lunch, she runs to where Joel’s working today and makes him help her measure her room so everything will be to scale.
It’s a buddy day, so she spends the afternoon showing Bailey the grid thing and all the constellations she’s going to put on her ceiling while Bailey works on the solar system model she’s been building.
“Can I come over and see your chickens tomorrow?” Bailey asks.
“Sure,” Ellie agrees. Bailey lives just a couple streets over － most of Jackson is just a couple streets over － and for some reason, she really loves their chickens.
“You’re so lucky,” Bailey says with a sigh. “My dad says no pets.”
“Maybe when you’re older. The chickens mostly take care of themselves while we’re gone. Joel says dogs don’t really do that.”
“A cat would.”
Ellie can’t really argue with that. Also, she can’t relate that much. Usually if she asks long enough, Joel changes his mind about saying no to stuff, and she’s pretty sure Bailey’s dad won’t do that.
After school, she ends up painting until the sun goes down and she can’t see enough to paint. It’s turning out really well. She finishes the moon, making it way bigger than scale because she thinks it looks cool, and she’s been working slowly across the room, grid by grid.
Joel has dinner ready by the time she stumbles downstairs, cracking her neck to try and release some of the soreness from spending hours on a ladder staring at a roof.
“My neck is killing me,” she complains.
“I bet.” Joel frowns in that thinking way. “Ask Meredith about Michaelangelo on Monday. Sisteen Chapel, do you know it?”
“You know I don’t.”
“Thought you might have seen it in a book, smartass. It was a big ol’ church in Italy. It had a painted ceiling. I remember something about the rig the guy made up so he could lie on his back and paint.” Joel passes a bowl of fresh peas from their garden over to her, the last of the season. “Took him something like four, five years to do it.”
“Whoa.”
* * *
The first time it snows, Ellie goes outside, takes a breath that hurts her lungs, and turns around and goes back to bed, dropping her boots and jacket in a trail behind her.
Joel finds her a moment later, following her into his room. She’s got the covers pulled over her head and she’s not coming out until spring.
“Okay,” Joel says, sitting on the bed next to her. “Alright.”
She doesn’t move until it’s almost dark when she can’t put off peeing any longer. Joel tries to convince her to eat something, but she ignores him and crawls back under the blankets.
Eventually, she sleeps. She has nightmares.
She stops being able to sleep before the sun rises, and by the time it does, her head aches and her entire body is stiff.
“Ellie,” Joel says.
She doesn’t reply.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.” The mattress shifts and she feels a soft touch brush against the top of her head, a little scratchy.
She stays where she is. The sky is frozen and so is she.
The footsteps a few moments later have her tensing up. Those aren’t Joel. She doesn’t have her knife. It’s in her jacket pocket, she thinks, and she dropped that on the hallway floor or maybe the stairs. Joel keeps a pistol under the mattress, but it’s on the other side, the one closest to the door, and she’s not sure if she can get there in time.
“It’s just me,” a familiar voice says. Maria.
Ellie exhales. Maria’s safe. Maria isn’t Joel, but she’s safe.
A moment later, the bed dips. Maria touches her arm, the only part of her outside of the covers. Ellie starts to pull it back under, but Maria catches her hand and holds her still.
“Joel sent me,” she says. “He’s at our place watching Nicky. Are we trading kids today?”
Ellie doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve done this, you know,” Maria says. “After the outbreak, when they first set up the Omaha QZ, they put me in this absolute sh*thole. I think it was a cheap hotel at one point. I don’t even really remember. Do you know what a hotel is?”
“I’ve been in a hotel,” Ellie says under the covers. “A fancy one.”
It was also completely flooded, but she’s not going to say that right now.
“Ah, she speaks.” Maria is stroking her arm, from elbow to wrist. It’s nicer than Ellie cares to admit. “Well, this wasn’t fancy. Just a bedroom and a bathroom. They locked us in, dropped off food a couple times a day. Nothing to do except sleep and wait to die. So I did. Stopped eating, stopped getting out of bed.”
“What… what happened?”
“A bomb. Blew half the building up, started the other half on fire. FEDRA left it there to burn.” Maria inhales audibly. “And I didn’t care. Might as well happen then, right?”
“But you didn’t…”
“I heard someone screaming for help outside.” She rubs her thumb in circles on Ellie’s palm, soothing where her nails have left crescent moon imprints in her own skin. “I couldn’t ignore that. I got up and people were in the street, bleeding, burned. The blast had blown out the windows and I grabbed every sheet and towel I could and climbed down the fire escape.”
“You helped people.”
“Yes. And I kept helping people. And it kept me going until I could keep myself going.” She squeezes Ellie’s hand, and then lets go. “Remember that I’ve done this, too, please. Because I’m gonna give you a choice right now. You can get up and get in the shower and come to breakfast dry and in clean clothes, or I can go downstairs and get a bucket and drag you to breakfast soaking wet.”
Ellie goes very still. “You wouldn’t.”
“Sweetheart, if I have to put you in the shower and wash your hair myself, I will.” Maria stands up. “You have ten seconds to decide.”
“Bullsh*t.”
“Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.”
Ellie shoves the covers back and sits up, squinting as her eyes adjust to the light. “f*ck you.”
She gets up, wobbling a little and catching herself on the nightstand. Her knife is there, next to a glass of water. God, her mouth is so dry. She shoves the knife in her pocket and downs the water, then stalks off to her bathroom to take a shower.
Joel looks relieved to see her up and she can’t meet his eyes.
They go to breakfast. It’s an egg thing, one of those big casseroles where they bake a bunch of ingredients with eggs poured over them. It’s an easy one when they’re expecting to be busy, and a good way to use a bunch of odds and ends. Ellie eats, and it’s good until she hits a bite of meat.
Sausage, she tells herself, trying to swallow. She knows how it’s made. It’s just sausage.
She swallows, then goes to the bathroom and throws up every bite she ate.
When she gets back to the table, her plate’s been cleared and there’s a mug of peppermint tea and a plate of dry toast Joel is pretending is his.
f*ck. They haven’t had to do that in ages. She was doing well.
When she sits, she moves her chair closer to his, pressing in against him. He lifts his arm and lets it rest on the back of her chair, giving her room to lean in against his side.
She manages a few bites of toast. They stay down, at least, when she washes them down with enough peppermint tea that they stop sticking in her throat.
The town clock chimes and Ellie stands up.
"Hold on.” Maria passes Nicky over to Tommy. “You’re with me today, Ellie.”
“I have school,” she points out.
“I already talked to Meredith. You’re taking a day off.”
She looks at Joel for support, but he just shrugs.
Traitor.
Maria bends over to kiss Nicky on the forehead before they leave, and Ellie aches a little. It’s so easyfor them. She gets her winter gear on to avoid looking.
“Zip up your jacket,” Joel says, and pulls her hat down over her eyes.
“f*ck off,” she says, laughing despite herself. He’s always been the best at bringing her back, even just for a moment or two.
She could hug him, she thinks. She sees other kids do that kind of thing, hug their parents before they leave to go somewhere. It always looks so easy, a quick automatic thing. She could do that.
She doesn’t.
“Giving me extra chores won’t make me better,” she says outside.
“I’m not giving you extra chores,” Maria says. “And I’m not going to try and make you tell me what’s going on in your head, either, so you can lose that attitude before you find it.”
Ellie shoves her hands in her pockets. She doesn’t know, anyways. She just went outside yesterday and she couldn’t do it.
“Okay… what arewe doing then?”
“You’ll see.”
It’s a longer walk than she expects, and Maria makes her stop at the house first and grab her backpack. She’s got a similar one thrown over her shoulder when Ellie comes out of the house.
This is the new part of Jackson, Ellie realizes. They’ve been expanding the wall out a few more miles, as Jackson grows. Joel’s been working on it. He says he’s just helping build the wall, but there are so many blueprints and papers on their kitchen table at night. She made him explain what some of them were once, and they were houses and stores. The kind of stuff he used to make.
Maria stops in front of a building. The sign’s been torn off and Ellie can’t tell what it used to be.
“What is this place?”
“Something we’ve been working on getting set up for a bit now,” Maria says. “I think it was used as a shelter briefly, but we’ve got it cleaned up and hooked up to the power grid. Come on.”
It smells like rubber and floor wax, and it’s dark at first until Maria flicks a light switch.
She looks around. “Is this a gym?”
“Sort of. It’s an indoor track. Lanes for running, a rock climbing wall, basketball courts.”
“Rock climbing?” Ellie spins around. “Wait, can I climb it?”
“Not quite yet.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“You and I are going to test out that track.”
Ellie groans. “I hate running. And I’m in jeans. Running in jeans sucks.”
“That’s why I put your sneakers and some clothes in your backpack while you were in the shower.”
She runs out of arguments after that. At least Maria also put her Walkman in her backpack, and some tapes. She picks something fast and angry and turns it up loud. Joel hates this sh*t, but he brings her the tapes anyways.
It doesn’t help, exactly. She still hates running. Running with Maria also f*cking sucks, because Maria can tell when she’s lagging just to lag and pushes her faster. It’s actuallyrunning, not just the lazy jogging she used to do at school, hard enough to get her heart pounding and sweat pouring down her back, hard enough that by the end of it, she’s out of breath.
Maria passes her a bottle of water.
Ellie pulls her headphones off and gulps half of it down. “What are we doing?” she pants.
Maria goes and sits on one of the bleachers on the sidelines. After a moment, Ellie goes and sits with her. Her legs are like jelly.
“Joel asked me this morning to be mean to you,” Maria says.
Ellie sucks in air. “Well, good f*cking job.”
“He’d let you stay in bed for the rest of winter, you know.”
She knows. And he’d stay with her, until they both rotted away.
“We aren’t going to let you do that,” Maria says, and it’s simple and cruel and kind.
Ellie looks from her so she doesn’t see the tears.
“So I’ll pick you up before school and we’ll do this,” Maria says. “On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you do your normal shift at the stables. Then you can come with me, or Tommy, or Joel. You can help out with whatever we’re doing or help watch Nicky.”
Ellie nods. “Saturdays and Sundays?”
“You usually do things with Joel on Saturday, don’t you? And Sundays can be yours.”
She looks down at her fingers, picking at her cuticles. “What if I can’t... if I just can’t?”
“Then make it to Sunday.”
Ellie hates that she understands what Maria is doing. And whyJoel asked her to do it. He doesn’t like asking for help, especially not from Maria, but he did it for her.
After, she went… away, for a while. Joel found her, and he got her out of that awful f*cking town, and she was safe. She didn’t need to be there anymore. She didn’t need to think about the hands holding her wrists down, or the fingers against her stomach under her jeans or the way his brain looked when she split his head open with the cleaver. So she went away.
After, she kept going away. Not always, but often enough. Moments where she’d get lost in herself. And Joel kept trying to pull her back, but away was always there. It got better in Jackson, when there were things to do, and a routine to follow.
She walked outside yesterday morning, breathed in the cold winter air, and tasted blood in her mouth. And she wanted to go awayagain.
Awayis tempting. Awaycan be forever.
This isn’t about making her better. It’s making sure she isn’t alone. Because they think she might…
Ellie stares at the track. “How long is that?”
“Two hundred meters, I think?”
Ellie makes a face. She hates doing conversion math in her head. She doesn’t get why some sports are in metric. “So that’s like… eight times around for a mile? Sixteen for two?”
“I believe it is.”
Ellie nods. “We did ten today.” She stands up. “Twelve next time?”
“Sounds good to me.”
* * *
Ellie has learned she does well when she has a project. So she makes getting through winter a new project. She goes to school, she goes to the stables, she runs, and she lets Joel and Maria and Tommy drag her around town when she has free time. She learns they let her bail if she has plans with friends, so she makes friends.
Joel leaves tapes and movies and books, games and puzzles and sketchbooks on her bed. She doesn’t care about a single one of them, but he’s trying, so she tries. She makes herself do things, instead of what she wants to do, which is sit very still and not move until it’s warm again.
A couple weeks into the whole thing, she can’t get out of bed. Maria comes over, because that’s the deal they made, and Ellie ends up sobbing in her lap.
It’s embarrassing later.
Maria is strict. She’s not actuallymean. She braids Ellie’s hair, makes her put on clean pajamas, and then leaves her with Joel.
She gets out of bed for dinner on her own, and Joel’s proud of her. He doesn’t say it, but she sees it in his face.
It’s awful, the weight of that. It’s not his fault. He’s not the only one, either. Him, Maria, Tommy, even Meredith at school, who notices when Ellie can’t make it or bails early, they all want her to be okay so badly.
And she’s not okay.
The thing that gets her is that if she wasn’t so empty, she’d probably be pissed as hell at how not okay she is.
It’s not over yet,Ellie thinks one morning, sitting on the edge of her bed and trying to convince herself to get dressed instead of going back to bed. That’s the point of this. That’s the point of being here at all. She’s not giving that up because some f*cking creep tried to get in her pants and got in her head instead. If she has to make living a project to keep doing it, she’ll f*cking do it do it.
She killed David once. She can kill him again.
She makes herself get up.
* * *
Ellie yawns and looks out the window. “sh*t, when did that happen?”
“Last night.”
Yesterday was kind of a rough day for her. She went running with Maria and she made it to school, but she came home at lunch and went to bed. She slept some, though, and only woke up from nightmares twice, so it could be worse. And she’s up now, even though it took her late in the morning to get moving.
It does mean, though, that she hasn’t really looked out a window in almost a full day. There’s about three more feet of snow since she last did.
She makes a face. “I’m not going out in that.”
Joel frowns at her.
“Because it’s cold and f*cking gross,” she clarifies. “Not… the other thing.”
Joel finishes his mug of weird hot root water and puts it in the sink. “Right. No.”
She huffs. “Come on, you have to admit this weather sucks. Tommy said Texas was warm. Don’t you hate this?”
“Hm,” Joel says.
And then he f*cking grabs her.
And hauls her over his shoulder like a sack of flour.
Ellie screeches. “What the f*ck?”
Holy sh*tJoel is tall she is not used to being this high up oh god what the f*ck.
She hears － because all she can see is the f*cking floor－ the door open, and then they’re outside.
She flails, but it all it does is make Joel tighten his arm around her stomach. “Put me down, you asshole!”
“Okay,” Joel says, and throws her into a snowbank.
She screams in surprise, loud enough that it echoes down the street, and when she lands all she can do is stare at him.
He tosses her boots into the snow next to her and throws her jacket at her, then waves across the street. “Mornin’, Maria.”
“Cold cold cold cold,” Ellie mumbles and yanks her boots on. “I’m gonna kill you, Joel. I’m gonna kill you so dead.”
“Gloves in the pocket,” he says.
Right as she’s pulling them on, a snowball hits her in the face.
“Dead!” she yells.
She’s already packing a snowball as she scrambles to her feet.
Ellie will go to her grave claiming she won the snowball fight. When Tommy comes outside and joins Joel’s side, she recruits reinforcements in the form of her friends, and Joel eventually gives up, but not before shoving snow down the back of her shirt. So maybe it’s more of a tie.
“I’m headin’ home,” he says, brushing snow off her shoulders like it isn’t still dripping down her back.
“Can I stay out for a while?” she asks. Usually Saturdays are the day they do things together, but she doesn’t want to go inside yet.
“’Course you can.” He rubs his hands together. They ache a little in the cold. Or, he says it’s only a little. “Just head inside at some point so you don’t freeze your ass off.”
“Okay,” she agrees, and then she hugs him.
Joel’s breath catches. He squeezes her back and for a moment she lets her head rest on his shoulder. Yeah. They should do more casual hugging. This is good.
“Have fun, baby,” he says, then clears his throat and lets her pull away. “Be home by dinner.”
She spends a few hours doing winter sh*t with her friends. It’s nice, honestly. They harass Tommy for a while － they’re trying to convince him they should have a skating rink in Jackson －and then eventually end up in the canteen when they run out of stuff to do outside. It’s between meals, but Ellie grabs some peppermint tea to warm up with. Ginny, the woman who works most of the afternoon shifts in the canteen, sneaks her a handful of cookies with a wink.
The wind and snow are picking up again and it’s nice to be inside in the warmth.
Or it is until the power cuts out.
Ginny comes over to the table. “Head home, kids. Straight home. The storm looks like it’s getting bad again.”
The others bitch and moan about it, but Ellie grabs her jacket and pulls it on, shoving her hands into the pockets to hide their shaking.
Five things she can see, she reminds herself. That’s a thing that Maria suggested she try when she feels like she’s going away. It works sometimes. The guitar on the wall. The ugly yellow mug that she always takes if she can because she likes it the best. That one deer head that stares into your f*cking soul. The fridges with the old soda labels on them. The twinkle lights, even though they’re off. That was five, right?
Four things she can feel －her jacket, too warm in the heat of the canteen. The dampness of her jeans chafing slightly against the back of her knees. Her hair against her neck under her hat. Her knife in her pocket.
Three she can hear. Ginny talking, footsteps as people leave, the wind outside. Two she can smell. The mint of her tea, her own panic sweat.
A thing she can taste… no, maybe not that one right now.
Ellie downs the remains of her tea to wash the phantom taste of blood out of her mouth. “See you guys.”
When she gets home, Joel’s sitting in the kitchen with his boots on.
“You going somewhere?” she asks, hanging her jacket by the door.
“No.” He follows her gaze to his boots. “I just brought in a stack of wood.”
Ellie grins. Yeah, that was it. He totally wasn’t thinking about coming to get her or anything.
But she hesitates before taking her own boots off. “Do you think the chickens are gonna be okay out there?”
“I checked on them. They’re all cozied up to each other. They’ll be fine.” Joel looks a little closer at her. “You need to change into something warm and dry.”
Joel’s bad at asking for help with things. She’d be a hypocrite if she said she wasn’t, too.
But now is not a good time for her to go away.
She glances at the stairs. “Could you…”
“Yeah, I’ve got you.”
She doesn’t, like, need him in the room while she changes or anything weird like that. She very much does not wanthim in the room when she changes. But she’s nervous that if she’s alone for too long, she’ll get lost in her own mind.
So right now Joel is going to stand in the hallway outside her almost-closed bedroom door and talk to her.
“How long do you think the power’s gonna be out?” she asks, changing into sweatpants. God, she loves pajamas. That’s still something she appreciates since getting here, not having to wear jeans all the time anymore.
“Couple days, probably,” Joel says. “At least until things clear up enough to make it out to the dam. I was thinkin’ it might be best if we just camped out in the living room.”
“Sure.” She pulls on a long-sleeved t-shirt and a sweater. The shirt’s soft and too big on her. It’s been in Joel’s closet recently enough that it still smells like him. She wonders sometimes if it’s weird that she notices things like that. It’s not just Joel. Nicky’s little blankets smell like him too, that milk and soap and strangely sweet smell babies have. Maria usually smells a little like roses. She makes stuff for her hair out of goat milk, honey, and rosewater, and the rose scent lingers.
Joel’s shirts smell like wood and gunpowder and that not-coffee stuff he drinks and the way she feels when they hug and she presses her face into his shoulder and breathes.
When she’s changed, she helps him haul his mattress down into the living room. There’s a fireplace in the living room, and without the furnace, upstairs will get cold.
Being realistic, Ellie was never gonna sleep in her room tonight anyways. She’s been doing pretty well with it the last couple weeks, but she’s walking a fine line today, and she knows it. It stormed that day. She remembers the snow biting into her cheeks, how sharp it felt. It was the only thing she really noticed for a while. She was too far awayto feel anything else.
Awaypulls at the edges of her brain now. Awayis easier. Awayis quiet.
But awayscares Joel. Just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s good.
She grabs her pillow and a couple blankets, tosses what she thinks she’ll need for a few days into a spare laundry basket, and drags it all downstairs into the living room.
“Did you close your bedroom door?” Joel asks. He’s crouching next to the fireplace, adding a log onto the fire.
“Yep. Also I’m starving.”
“Did you eat lunch?”
She scrunches her nose up. “I ate a sandwich standing in the stables trying to get Tommy to set up a rink. Does that count?”
“Barely. You want a rink?” Joel stands up with a bit of a grown. He says he doesn’t hate this weather, but his bad knee does. On the coldest winter nights, she sneaks into his room just so she can steal the warmth from the hot water bottle he hogs. “Do you even know how to skate? Do any of you even haveskates?”
She follows him into the kitchen. “Not yet, but I think there might be some in the warehouse on Oak. Maria says there’s some old sports stuff in there, but it’s super full of old crap.”
“Hm. Gonna be a weird dinner, kiddo,” Joel says, pulling things from the fridge. “Gotta use some of this stuff up.”
Luckily, they don’t keep a ton of perishable food in the house, so nothing much should go bad. Food waste bugs Joel. He never gets mad at her or anything, but she thinks he gets angry at himself, like if a bottle of milk goes bad it means they won’t have enough to eat some day. Most of their produce is canned, dried, or otherwise preserved and they only keep a couple days’ worth of meat in the freezer. The big communal freezer in the canteen runs on a solar generator with a gas backup and even if that goes out, they spent all of late summer and autumn preserving food.
Once or twice, especially while she was dirty and tired and nursing blisters from digging weeds out of a crop field, Ellie wondered how f*cking stupid David’s group had to be to resort to what they did. But that kind of thinking isn’t good for her, so she tries not to let herself do it too often.
“Have you ever been skating?” she asks, taking the stack of food Joel passes her.
“Couple times,” he says, pulling a couple pans from the cupboard. “Sarah got invited to a birthday party at an indoor rink once, and she was real nervous about not knowin’ what to do.”
“Wait, you could put them inside?”
“Yeah. So we went a couple times so she could get used to it.”
“That’s so f*cking cool.” She grabs some plates from the cupboard. “Was it a fun party?”
Joel chuckles. “She got chickenpox and couldn’t go. We watched a lot of movies and I duct-taped oven mitts to her pajamas so she couldn’t scratch.”
Ellie can’t help snorting.
Sometimes she likes hearing those stories, where things didn’t go the way they wanted. It’s not like she wants Sarah to have had a sh*tty life or something. The end of her life was sh*tty enough to kind of balance it out. But it can get hard to think about Joel’s life with her being perfect. Their life in Jackson is basically everything Ellie always pretended she didn’t dream of, but it’s not perfect. It’s hard and messy and still dangerous.
She wonders, sometimes, if he compares.
Joel pauses next to the fireplace to look at her. “Did you get those?”
“Chickenpox? Yeah, they ran out of the vaccine for that before I was born. I got most of the other shots. Measles and mumps and that sh*t.”
“I meant birthday parties.” He frowns. “Though remind me to ask the doctor if you need a tetanus booster.”
“Oh. Not really.”
“Maybe you should,” Joel says. “Now how about you actually sit down and warm up a bit?”
She is cold, though the house is still warm. Joel spent the summer making sure it was as well-insulated and cozy as possible. It holds the heat well, even with the furnace off. She remembers, after, being so cold that she thought she would never feel warm again. They were always cold that winter, but she felt safe in it before. Joel found her so many layers, sweatshirts and thick socks and gloves and hats, and they almost always had a fire. But, after, the cold soaked into her bones and became a part of her, no matter how many layers she had on or how close she sat to the fire.
No matter how warm her body was, she could still feel the cold fingers against her stomach.
Joel made this house warm for her, like a promise.
And she’s okay with the cold for maybe the first time all winter. She’d almost forgotten what fun cold felt like.
“You’re the one who threw me in a f*cking snow bank,” she says, sitting next to him. “In my socks.”
Even so, she’s not letting up on that.
Joel makes dinner and she bothers him. It reminds her of those endless nights travelling, because that’s what they spent so much time doing. She helped sometimes, but she isn’t a great cook. She’s better with a stove, but she gets distracted really easily. Things have burned. Things may have been set on fire, even.
After they eat, they move the furniture closer to the fire and Ellie flops on the couch reading a comic while Joel whittles.
Because Joel has hobbies now.
When she gets bored, she wanders over and sits on the arm of his chair. “What are you making?”
He holds up the half-finished carving.
“Oh, cool dog.”
“It’s a giraffe.”
She laughs. “For Nicky’s zoo?”
He’s making a set of carved figures for Nicky. Most of them are a little chunkier than this, though, designed for fat little baby hands.
“Thought this one might be for you,” Joel says. “Though if you don’t like it…”
“It’s a good giraffe,” she admits. It makes her feel warm inside in a completely different way from the fire or the peppermint tea she’s been drinking. “Hey, can you teach me how to do that?”
“Sure, if you want.” He passes her over a block and a spare knife. “There you go.”
Joel’s a good teacher. She likes when he tells her something new. She likes the way he explains things, the way he touches her hands to show her how exactly to do things.
She’s not very good at it. She starts thinking she’ll make an owl, and then quickly realizes that’s too much for the first one she ever does, and decides maybe a heart would be safer. She’s pretty sure it’s turning into an egg. A lopsided egg.
After a while, her hands get sore, so she sets her abomination on the side table and just watches Joel carve his giraffe. Slowly, she slumps down on the arm of his chair until her head can lean against his shoulder.
Ellie doesn’t notice she’s falling asleep until she wakes up.
Oh, she thinks blearily, lifting her head enough to figure out where she is. She is definitely a lot more in the recliner than she was a couple hours ago. And kind of a lot more in Joel’s lap than she was a couple hours ago, curled up with her knees against the arm of the chair.
She should probably move. They don’t really do this, normally.
But Joel’s arm is around her back and when she puts her head back on his chest, she feels him hold her tighter in his sleep.
Nah, this is good.
* * *
Running helps and it pisses her off it helps. Joel finds her more of the tapes she likes. He also keeps telling her not to turn the volume too high or she’ll end up with ears like his. Sometimes she listens to him.
Ellie runs. She goes to school and she pushes herself into long, involved projects so she has a reason to keep going to school. She learns more about horses than she ever expected to learn, as she spends a lot of her days with Tommy. He also tells her a lot of embarrassing stories about Joel, which is even better.
She learns she hates jigsaw puzzles. Joel plays a lot of games with her, then ropes Tommy and Maria into them. Once a week, they go over and have dinner and play board games. They try something called Monopoly and Joel gets so frustrated that Ellie keeps sneaking sips from his beer and ends up a little tipsy before he notices. She wins anyways and the others all refuse to play that one again. Cowards.
Jackson celebrates Christmas, some. They put a tree up in the middle of town and some people decorate. Ellie gives away the decorations in their garage. It never really meant anything to her, and Joel… it’s a lot of memories for him. They have dinner with Tommy and Maria that day, and give Nicky a gift, but she can tell he’s glad to go home.
Ellie decides, instead, she’s going to celebrate the solstice. She read a book that said some people used to do that. She asks Miss Lorraine to help her make cookies, cut into star shapes, and only burns some of them. Then she packs a picnic basket full of snacks, as many of them cut into stars or moons as possible, and two thermoses, one of Joel’s chicory sh*t and one of her peppermint tea. She drags him out into the backyard as soon as the sun sets.
They bundle up and start a fire and it’s another of those nice cold times.
“It’s the longest night of the year,” she says as the sun rises.
“Oh, you hadn’t mentioned.”
“That means,” she says, ignoring the teasing, “That we’re halfway through the dark.”
She keeps going. Winter fights and she fights back with bloody teeth and broken nails until she claws her way through it.
The first day she steps outside and it’s warm, it surprises her so much she can’t move.
She won.
Ellie lifts her face to the sun and lets it wash over her.
Winter will come again, and she has a feeling it’ll continue to be hard for her. But she wonand she knows she can keep winning.
“f*ck you,” she says, very quietly, and goes back inside to take her jacket off. She’ll need something lighter for this weather.
* * *
It’s like waking up. Like she’s been walking around half-asleep for months. She isn’t fixedor anything, but it’s better. A lot better. They start letting her be alone again, a little bit at a time. Joel tries to play it cool, but she knows him too well and she can tell it makes him nervous. Maybe she should be insulted － she’s fifteen, she should be able to stay home alone － but. Well.
Joel never took her knife away. She knows he thought about it. Sometimes when he thought she was asleep, she’d feel his fingers brush under the edges of her sleeves, like he was checking for something.
So. Them not leaving her alone was more of a compromise.
But, slowly, they start to let her be alone again. Joel starts it, going across the street and staying for thirty minutes, then an hour.
And Ellie realizes while she was fighting her brain all winter, she’s let some stuff slide. Nothing huge, but she looks around and realizes her room is a f*cking disaster. And, okay, she’s not usually the tidiest person in the world. She spent a lifetime being told exactly how she was allowed to have her room, getting in sh*t if there was so much as a sock out of place. Joel will be sarcastic about not being able to see her floor, but he mostly leaves her to it.
This is pretty bad, though.
The one good thing about growing up in military school is that she does actually know how to clean. She throws on her headphones, puts on something bouncy, and starts grabbing dirty laundry off the floor.
Huh. This would explain why she’s been rotating through two sweatshirts, a couple t-shirts, and a few of Joel’s shirts. There are also a lotof his shirts on her floor. No wonder he’s been complaining.
Funny, though, to think of how things have changed. In school, she had three uniform sets and a handful of pajamas. When they got on the road, she rotated through two or three outfits for months. Joel was even worse. Now they had two full closets of clothes, enough that half of it can disappear onto her floor and they both still have stuff to wear.
She throws it all into her hamper － which only had a few pairs of socks and a single pair of pants in it －and drags everything downstairs. While she’s there, she figures she’ll just get the load going. She throws in Joel’s hamper, too. Might as well, when basically half her laundry is actually his, anyways.
After that, it’s mostly just a matter of picking sh*t off the floor. She’s not going for miracles here.
She does realize where like all of their cups and way too many of their plates are, too. Oops. She kept telling Joel he was being over dramatic when he said all their dishes were in her room, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. She doesn’t even eat in her room that often, besides late night snacks.
She puts it all in the sink, turns around, and screams.
“Jesus f*cking Christ!” She yanks her headphones off. “Where the f*ck did you come from?”
“I do in fact live here,” Joel says dryly from back door.
“I thought you were gone!”
“Just got home. I said your name, but you didn’t hear me.” He glances towards the laundry room. “Are you doin’ laundry?”
She turns off her tape, setting her Walkman on the counter. “Yeah.”
“Thanks, kiddo.”
She shrugs. “What are you doing now?”
“Absolutely nothin’,” he says, sitting on the bench next to the back door with a groan. He starts unlacing his boots. “How ‘bout you?”
“Not much.” She leans against the counter. “Actually, could you help me with something?”
“Depends what it is.”
She reaches up and pulls the elastic out of her hair. “It’s like super long. Do you think you could cut it?”
He hesitates, slowly dropping his boots onto the tray. “Wouldn’t you rather have Maria do that?”
She’s offered a couple times, but Ellie’s said no. It’s not that she didn’t think Maria did a fine job that one time － or that she even cares what her hair looks like, really －or that she doesn’t trust Maria. She likes when Maria braids it, but she just didn’t f*cking care all winter whether it was cut or not.
She really does trust Maria.
But she hasn’t had someone cut her hair since that last time. Things have happened since then and she’s… she’s different. And if she freaks out because of a blade being so close to her throat, she would rather only Joel saw that.
“Please?” she asks.
“Alright,” Joel says. “Go get it wet and get what you need.”
She soaks her hair quickly in the bathroom sink, then grabs a comb and the haircutting scissors Maria gave her, saying if Ellie was gonna do it herself, she should at least have better scissors than whatever they had in the kitchen.
Ellie didn’t tell her that when they were travelling, she sometimes just cut pieces off with her knife until it was shorter.
She does get it, why Maria keeps asking. She helped Maria one day when she was making the stuff she uses in her hair, and Maria told her stories about her mom and older sister, and the time they spent together taking care of their hair. It’s different for her, but when she offers stuff like that, she’s just trying to make Ellie feel cared for.
Joel’s pulled a chair away from the table. She sits in it, pulling the towel she’s been using to keep her hair from dripping everywhere around her shoulders.
He lifts her hair free and begins to comb carefully through it. “How much do you want cut?”
She gestures to the spot. “Like around my shoulders.”
“If you don’t like it long, you can go shorter, if you want,” Joel offers.
She grins. “No, I tried that once. If I can’t put it up in a ponytail, it tickles my neck and drives me nuts.”
“Got it.”
Joel’s careful with the knots, working them out first with his fingers before using the comb. Ellie’s usually not that patient herself.
“Did you ever cut Sarah’s hair?”
Joel lets out one of those soft, barely audible laughs. “Couple times, when she was real little. But it was so curly that I was scared I’d mess up. Sit straight or it’ll be crooked.”
Snip, snip, go the scissors and Ellie thinks she might have been lying to herself a little. Not a lot. Because worrying about freaking out was part of it. But also maybe she just likes it better when Joel does stuff like this for her. She likes him taking care of her.
“Don’t think I’ve seen it this long before,” Joel says. “You usually hack it off way before this.”
“Hey,” she protests. “I don’t hackit off, you dick. I just kinda… didn’t notice. Maria’s been braiding it for me a lot, so I didn’t really realize how long it was getting. It gets really heavy when it gets long.”
“Yeah, your hair’s pretty thick.”
It doesn’t take that long, but she’s almost sad when it’s done.
“Think that’s the best I can do,” Joel says, setting the scissors down on the table. “You’re free.”
He ruffles her hair, then drops a kiss onto the top of her head before walking over to the laundry room where they keep the broom.
Ellie freezes for a second.
“Go on and shake out that towel on the porch, alright?” he calls from the laundry room. “And try not to track hair everywhere.”
He’s never done that before. That’s something that Tommy does to Nicky, kissing the top of the baby’s head when he says goodbye.
It warms her inside, like a glowing ember tucked into her ribcage. It reminds her of that winter, after, when her cracked ribs hurt like a bitch, and Joel found her a hot water bottle. She kept it tucked into her shirt and the warmth radiating off it soothed the ache there.
An ache she didn’t know existed eases inside her.
* * *
Ellie also realizes she’s been kind of a sh*tty buddy at school. She’s been on autopilot a lot, scraping by with the bare minimum. She spent a lot of winter fixated on space stuff, with Meredith having to step in to make sure she actually did math and stuff. A lot of the time she had to make it space-related somehow for Ellie to be able to do it. She spent like a month working with Bailey on recreating the painting from her ceiling on a huge sheet of paper, this time as accurately as they could make it. Meredith hung it over the blackboard which was f*cking cool.
She had to make sure she only worked on it with Bailey, or she’d spent all her time painting and nothing else and that wasn’t good. That way, it was only an hour or two a week, and she didn’t get lost.
“I think you should pick what our next project is,” she tells Bailey. “It’s your turn.”
“I want a garden,” Bailey says. “With flowers and vegetables. But my dad keeps saying he doesn’t have time.”
Ellie thinks Bailey’s dad isn’t busyso much as he is sad, but she also gets that isn’t really her business. Bailey’s mom died less than two years ago, and they’ve been having a hard time. It wasn’t even infected or an injury or anything, which is the part Ellie thinks is really bullsh*t. She just got sick, the kind of sick they can’t fix anymore.
“You know, you can come over and weed our garden whenever you want.”
“That’s not the same.”
Ellie sighs. “This is gonna be a thing where I have to talk to people, isn’t it?”
Meredith likes the idea. “We’ve got plenty of green space for a garden here. I think that’s a lovely idea. So, what will you need?”
Ellie flops out of the beanbag chair. “I’m gonna need my notebook.”
A moment later, Bailey hands her a sparkly pink notebook and a purple coloured pencil.
Alright, that’ll work. Not exactly Ellie’s usual style, but they can work with it.
“Um,” Bailey says, scrunching her nose up as she thinks. “First we need seeds.”
Garden supplies, Ellie writes at the top of the page and underlines it. “So I’m gonna bet after we make this list, you’re gonna tell us to either find a book or go ask someone to teach us?”
Meredith smiles. “You know the drill. What else?”
“They’ll let us borrow shovels and shi － stuff because it’s for the school. Probably help us dig things up, too.”
They won’t even have to trade, most likely. People in town really care about the school and keeping it running smoothly. Joel says it makes Jackson feel normal for a lot of people. There also just aren’t that many kids in Jackson. They get a little special treatment here and there. Ellie gets it when it’s the little kids. It still feels weird when it’s her.
Ellie taps the pencil against the page. “Is there a compost barrel here?”
Meredith’s smiles grows. “There is not. But that’s a good idea, too.”
f*ck. Ellie’s pretty sure she’s just come up with a new set of school chores for them. At home, they share a compost barrel with Maria and Tommy and Ellie hates when it’s her day to rotate it. They don’t have one of the ones that spins itself so they just roll it around to mix it up and she feels like an idiot chasing a barrel around their yard.
“Vegetables and flowers,” Bailey insists.
Ellie jots notes. Flowers were something she didn’t think about in Boston. Sometimes along the edge of a fence there’d be a wilted dandelion or maybe a raggedy daisy, but that type of thing didn’t last long.
That first night out of the QZ, when she slept in the old hair salon they holed up in, she saw more flowers than she had her whole life. She remembers them, the little yellow and white wildflowers. She was surprised anything that delicate could still grow.
There are useful flowers, of course. Chamomile, lavender, the wild roses that grow in Tommy and Maria’s yard. Maria told Ellie once that Tommy found them in the woods before they were married and brought them back to Jackson for her. Ellie’s chickens love dandelions and they can be made into wine, plus the roots are pretty tasty. And all flowers are good for the bees that pollinate the crops.
But flowers can just be pretty, too.
“Fence,” Ellie adds. “Like a wire one, for animals.”
The wall keeps out big animals like bear or deer or whatever. It doesn’t keep out the smaller ones. Tommy’s fighting a losing war over his tomatoes to a particularly stubborn raccoon.
Bailey has a lot of ideas, and she has grown up in Jackson, so the list is pretty thorough. Ellie agrees to take it home for Tommy and Maria to look at, but it shouldn’t be too complicated.
Meredith goes over to one of the bookshelves and pulls down a stack of books. “I’d also like to see what you two come up with about historical agriculture.”
“Like before Outbreak Day?” Bailey asks.
“Or like pioneer times?” Ellie adds.
“Pioneer times,” Meredith confirms. “What did the indigenous people of this area cultivate before it was colonized? What did the colonizers grow? Compare and contrast. Bailey, two pages. Ellie, three to five.”
This’ll be how it goes for a few weeks. A little bit of history, more science stuff, probably a bunch of math. If Ellie ropes Joel into helping build anything － and to be realistic, she probably will － she’ll end up doing a lotof math for it.
It’s more fun than she admits.
Sometimes, especially this winter, Joel picks her up from school. When he was worried about her, it happened more. She didn’t mind too much, because a lot of the time he’d let her drag him inside so she could show him what she was doing. More than once, they’d end up staying for like an hour while he talked to Meredith.
Ellie kinda likes those times. They talked a lot about how things used to be in schools. Apparently, there used to be even more tests than in FEDRA school. Meredith talks frankly with her, like about the fact that there are things that were taught before that she’s only going to teach if someone requests it. Ellie gets that, and she thinks Joel does, too. She isn’t entirely sure what she’s going to do when she’s done school, but she knows it won’t involve physics or memorizing every president America used to have.
The adults in Jackson don’t like the idea of them only learning useful things, but it’s definitely more heavily slanted in that direction.
Ellie likes that a lot better than sitting in classes memorizing things out of old textbooks with half the pages ripped out, or the flimsy booklets printed after the outbreak that were basically nothing but FEDRA propaganda.
Bailey steals the beanbag chair with one of her books. “This is gonna be so fun. I’m glad you’re not sick anymore.”
Ellie looks up. “Is… who told you I was sick?”
“My daddy,” Bailey says, flipping through the pages. “He said you didn’t feel good so that was why you needed to sleep more and you didn’t always come to school. He said you were doing your best to get better so I just had to wait. And I did.”
Ellie breathes, slowly. She’s not － she knew people noticed. Especially in a small town like Jackson, people noticed. Miss Lorraine kept bringing over soup every time Ellie missed school. And people almost certainly noticed she was suddenly spending a lot more time with Tommy and Maria. She’d assume they noticed how clingy she was with Joel, but she suspects thatwasn’t that different.
She also knows that Miss Lorraine keeps a loaded shotgun under her bed. Seth, the town vet, is one of the nicest guys Ellie’s ever met and also told her where to aim if she ever had to cut a person’s throat. Tommy handles a gun better than almost anyone she knows, but unexpected loud bangs put him on edge. Joel says that’s from when he was in the war.
And Joel… Joel has his own sh*t.
So she knows she’s not unique in having something to notice.
She doesn’t really know Bailey’s dad very well － he keeps to himself － but that’s… well, it’s one of the nicer ways to explain it. And she appreciates that.
“You did,” she agrees after a moment. “Thanks. I’m glad to feel better, too.”
* * *
“Oh, f*ck, it stinks in here.”
“Ellie,” Maria says, shooting her a look. “It’s just dust.”
“And old lady perfume.”
“Ellie.”
Maria’s using her “mom” voice, the one that means “cut it out”.
Ellie cuts it out.
This has been one of the things she really liked doing this winter. When she asked Maria what she could do with all the stuff that had been in their house, Maria took her over to this warehouse. It used to be a grocery store, one of those really huge ones. They put like everything that isn’t immediately useful, but might be, in there. The problem is just that it’s a mess. Completely unsorted, just piles of crap.
When Ellie has free time and needed a project, she’s been helping to sort through it. It’s slow, but they have time. She’s still hoping to find those skates by next winter. Tommy agreed to the rink, eventually, but they never found any skates so it sorta fizzled out.
“So what are you looking for again?” she asks the guy Maria introduced her to this morning when she showed up. Ray, she said his name was. He’s new to Jackson and Ellie’s never met him before.
“Dishes, maybe some furniture. Basically everything,” he answers. “My place is completely empty.”
“Cool.”
“Grab a box and start grabbing stuff,” Maria says to both of them.
They split up and Ellie goes over to where she knows where’s some kitchen stuff. She remembers seeing some pots and pans in a corner of the warehouse, and she’s right when she gets there. She throws a few into her box and then sees a really f*cking nice lamp on the top shelf.
Okay, if Ray doesn’t want that, she’s stealing it. It’d look good in Joel’s room. His is kind of beat up, with a big dent in the shade that won’t come out. It works, but it’d be nice to replace it. And she knows he doesn’t care enough about that kind of thing to do it himself.
There are ladders in the warehouse, but she doesn’t bother going to grab one. It isn’t that much more work to climb up the shelves to grab it.
It’s getting down that’s the problem.
Especially holding a lamp.
She’s so close to being okay when she slips and comes crashing to the ground. Incredibly loudly, because she knocks down several metal bowls, too.
“Ahhh, f*ck,” she groans.
Saved the lamp, though.
“You good?” a voice asks.
“Yup,” she says tightly. Her hip is throbbing, but she rolled when she fell so she didn’t come crashing down on her back, at least.
Ray chuckles and reaches a hand out to her. “Heard that from halfway across the building.”
“Great,” she mutters, but lets him pull him to her feet.
“You shouldn’t climb things like that,” he says.
“Yeah, yeah.” She starts to pull her hand away, but he tightens his grip.
“No, I’m serious. I knew a guy who cracked his head open like that.”
She looks down at her hand and the grip he has on her wrist. She’s not － she’s not overly big on people touching her who aren’t Joel or sometimes Maria. “Let go of me now.”
“I’m just giving you some advice.”
“Let go of my arm or I’m gonna cut your balls off. How’s that for advice?”
He releases her and she backs up two quick steps, bumping into a shelf. Her wrist is burning like it’s on fire and she barely manages not to scrub at it with her sleeve.
“I’m just being friendly,” he says, raising both hands.
“I’m not your f*cking friend.”
“Look, I think some wires got crossed here,” he says, stepping closer. “We’re just having a conversation.”
He steps even closer. Too close, towering over her.
Ellie shoves her hand in her pocket for her knife and he grabs her wrist again, squeezing so hard her bones creak in protest. She gasps in surprise at the hot flare of pain, then clenches her teeth together to keep anymore sound from coming out.
“Ah, ah, no you don’t.”
“Let go,” she grits out. She fumbles on the shelf, grabbing something that feels heavy.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Ray turns, surprised.
And Ellie smashes a vase over his head.
That makes him let go, and stumble back, and she bolts towards Maria, who immediately steps between them, putting Ellie behind her.
“What the hell?” Ray groans, touching his head. He’s bleeding. Ellie doesn’t look at her hands to see if it’s on her, too. “What is f*cking wrong with you?”
She can feel the blood on her hands, hot and slick and coating them so she can barely keep a grip on her knife. No, no, no. It’s not real. She isn’t looking to see if it’s real.
“Ellie.” Maria turns towards her. “Ellie, look at me. Are you okay?”
She gasps in a ragged breath, her knife open at her side. She wants to leave. She wants to be anywhere but here. She wants Joel. “I…”
“We were just talking and she freaked out,” Ray says.
“That how you talk to fifteen year olds?” Maria snaps, glaring at him over her shoulder. She turns back to Ellie, and her voice softens. “Ellie, honey, go wait in the back. In that old office. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ellie’s legs have forgotten how to be legs. She stumbles as she walks, unsteady and shaking. The roof is on fire and there’s blood on her hands and there’s blood in her teeth. She blinks and it’s gone, blinks again and it’s back.
The office door has a lock and she turns it with shaking hands, then collapses into the desk chair, pulling her legs up onto the seat and wrapping her arms around them. She can’t stop trembling.
He’s dead, she reminds herself. He’s nothing but bone now － less, since she left his body in the fire. Ash and bone shards. Ray is just a garden variety creep. There were guys like that at her school, guys the older kids taught them to avoid. Soldiers who liked the power of being in charge of kids a little too much. Ellie’s not dumb. She knows guys like that are out there.
But she wasn’t expecting it in Jackson. She wasn’t expecting it on a day like this, where she was just doing some boring chore.
“f*ck,” she whispers into her jeans.
She wants Joel.
There’s a knock on the door some amount of time later. It might be a minute, but Ellie isn’t sure. She’s fighting, very hard, not to go away. If she lets herself leave right now, she isn’t sure she’ll be able to bring herself back.
“It’s just me,” Maria calls through the door.
She gets up and unlocks it, backing away before it’s open. She doesn’t want Maria to touch her just yet.
“He’s gone,” Maria says. “Do you think you’d feel okay putting the knife away now?”
Oh, sh*t. She hadn’t even noticed it was still out. She closes it and shoves it in her pocket, then leans against the desk. Without it, she feels strangely exposed so she crosses her arms over her chest. She’s not breathing well, she notices, but it’s muffled, like she isn’t really there. Awaywhispers her name and she tries to remember the counting thing, but all she can think of is the taste of blood in her mouth. It won’t go away.
“I had someone come get him,” Maria says, stopping before she gets too close. “He’s going to be in the bank for a while.”
The bank? Oh. Oh, sh*t, that’s the jail they’ve never used.
“He didn’t － he didn’t actually do anything,” Ellie manages. “He was just like… hitting on me, or whatever. He wouldn’t let go of my hand and I freaked out.”
“Ellie, I saw enough to know that’s not all that happened, and I know enough to know that’s not all that could have happened. And you’re fifteen. Thirty year old men shouldn’t hitting on you at all.”
“I think he thought I was older.” She doesn’t know why she’s making excuses. Or… she kind of does. If he was just hitting on her, if he thought she was older, then something bad wasn’t going to happen. If it was just in her head, that’s better. Boys have tried to flirt with her. Ones her age. Awkwardly, but that’s normal. She’s not interested, but it’s normal. It doesn’t mean something bad.
“You don’t look older. At all.” Maria holds up the radio she always has clipped to her jeans. “Now do you want me to walk you home, or do you want me to get someone to send Joel here?”
Ellie’s knees go weak, and she sinks into the chair again. “He’s working today. He’s not at home.”
“On that house over on Elm?”
She nods.
“So I can get someone to go over there. Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” Ellie says brokenly.
Maria has to step out to radio, and Ellie sits and tries not to cry. It’s working, mostly, by the time she gets back.
“Ten minutes tops,” Maria says, leaning against the desk. She still doesn’t get too close. “Probably closer to five, knowing Joel.”
Ellie snorts wetly. “Half the time I think he’s got a sixth sense that tells him when I’m in trouble.”
“Hey, no.” Maria catches her eye, like she’s trying to make sure Ellie’s really listening. “You are not in trouble. This was not your fault.”
“But it wasn’t the first time,” she says, and the words are like knives in her mouth. They leave the taste of blood behind them, hot and metallic and so thick she might drown. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at Maria. “Someone… this guy, before, tried to… do stuff to me.”
It sounds wrong to say it like that, but she’s not sure how else to say it. She knows the word. She knows what David tried to do. She knows that wasn’tlove. But it’s a word she’s not entirely ready to say, at least not to other people. To herself, maybe, sometimes. Especially when she’s angry about it. But not to other people, not yet.
Maria sighs. “I know. And I’m sorry.”
She jerks upright. “Did Joel tell you?”
He promised not to. He promised he wouldn’t tell.
“It was part of my job to know that kind of thing,” Maria says gently. “Things like that happen to a lot of people, especially women. Most women have stories about it. Before the outbreak, too. That, unfortunately, wasn’t different then.”
Ellie takes a moment to absorb that. “But before, people like… went to jail for it?”
“Sometimes,” Maria agrees. “Not most of the time. There was a lot of stigma about reporting something like that, and it could be hard to prosecute. To prove,” she explains. Ellie must have looked confused. “Even if they did, people didn’t always believe it.”
“That’s really sh*tty,” Ellie says. “You never said anything. About me.”
She used to have a feeling that Maria knew somethinghad happened, but she’d convinced herself it was paranoia.
“It’s your story to tell. You get to decide if and when to talk about it.”
“I don’t really wanna talk about it,” Ellie admits. She doesn’t really want people to know. She’s not ashamed, but she knows it would make people look at her different. Maria doesn’t, but some people would.
She thought, for one awful moment, that Joel might when he realized. He saw her unbuttoned jeans and his face did something, and she was so scared he wouldn’t want to be around her anymore if he realized what had happened to her. And he was careful with her, after, when she was confused and concussed and half-unsure where she was, but he never once looked at her like there was something wrong with her.
Or, worse. He never looked at her like it was her fault. Even when she thought it was.
Maria nods. “Then you don’t have to.”
They both go quiet for a bit after that. Ellie’s breathing, and she’s doing a decent job of it, all things considered. She also slowly realizes something’s weird about Maria.
“What’s wrong with your hand?”
Maria starts guiltily. “Nothing.”
That’s bullsh*t. She’s doing the same thing Joel does when his hand aches. And his hand aches from too many poorly set fractures, more than one of which came from beating someone to death… for her.
Ellie’s eyes go wide. “You said he was alive right?”
Maria snorts. “I don’t know whether I should be insulted or complimented by that question. Yes, he’s alive. At worst he’ll lose a tooth… maybe two.”
Oh.
That’s… unexpected. Maria is practical and pragmatic, and she’s by far no stranger to violence to protect Jackson, but Ellie’s never seen her just haul off and punch someone.
She’s a little more settled when Joel gets there, but she only feels okaywhen she launches herself into his arms. When he catches her and pulls her in tight, she knows without a doubt she’s safe now.
“What happened?” he asks, cradling the back of her head. “Are you hurt?”
She presses her face into his shirt and inhales the smell of him. Soap and sweat and sawdust, a hint of gunpowder underneath. “No.”
“We had an incident,” Maria says, but Ellie isn’t taking her face out of Joel’s shirt to look at her. “When Ellie’s ready, can we talk alone for a moment?”
She’s not ready for a couple minutes. Joel’s getting progressively more worried, she can tell, even though she said she wasn’t hurt. His hands give it away. He keeps touching her back, her head, her ribs, like he’s checking for injuries.
Eventually, she lets him talk to Maria. The door’s too thick to hear more than the vaguest sound of their voices, and Ellie doesn’t mind.
Maria said this used to be her job, putting bad guys in jail and helping people who were hurt by them. She must have been good at it. Ellie is okay right now with letting her explain what happened, even if it means Joel and Maria talk about her for a while. She’s starting to get used to that, anyways.
Joel hugs her again when they’re done.
“I’m okay,” she says.
“You’re okay,” he repeats into her hair, and it feels true when he says it. “I’m gonna kill him.”
His voice is nearly calm. She can hear it underneath, the rage that makes him capable of taking people apart for her. She leans into it, breathes it into her bones.
“He’s in the bank,” she mumbles.
“Wouldn’t stop me.”
She knows he’s telling the truth. She also knows Jackson isn’t exactly a place where he can just murder someone on the street and everyone would be fine with that.
Ellie pulls away, but she twists her fingers in his sleeve. “Don’t go.”
“I’m handling it,” Maria says behind him.
“One chance,” Joel says, a little too calm.
Ellie expects an argument. She knows Joel wants to go and beat him to a pulp. She doesn’t talk about what happened a lot in Silver Lake, but when she does or when she’s struggling, she sees the tension in Joel’s jaw, in his hands.
But she is struggling not to go away, and she just wants to go home.
And thank god Joel realizes that.
He takes her lead, and they act mostly normal. She’s a little shaky, and she sticks a little too close to him all evening. In return, he babies her a little more than usual. Not that he’s exactly strict most of the time, but they eat dinner at home, on the couch, watching her favourite movie.
When her hand stiffens up and she can’t move her fingers without it hurting, he doesn’t say anything, just gets her an ice pack for the bruises circling her wrist.
Neither of them, though, pretend she’s even going to attempt to sleep in her own bed.
Sleep is hard enough that night. She only manages it because her ear is directly over Joel’s heart, listening to its steady beat.
She wakes up confused. Not panicking, like a lot of nights, or confused about where she is, which happened a lot the first few months Afterand still happens sometimes. No, she’s confused about why she’s awake. She doesn’t remember a nightmare, and her heart isn’t racing the way it usually is when one wakes her up.
Then Joel mumbles something and she realizes.
She’s not the one having nightmares tonight.
She rolls over to face him, touching his shoulder. “Joel. Joel.”
He inhales sharply. “What? Are you okay?”
“I can’t sleep,” she fibs.
“Oh.” He yawns. “Okay, sweet girl, come here.”
She tucks her head under his chin and cuddles up to him. They can pretend this is solely for her benefit. That’s okay. Joel doesn’t really let her take care of him, not very often. She has to be sneaky about it.
Like tomorrow. Maria said tomorrow, the council would decide what to do with Ray.
Ellie thinks she might need to distract Joel tomorrow.
“Tell me something,” she says sleepily. When she has nightmares, sometimes he tells her stories. It helps her calm down and get back to sleep. Maybe it’ll help him, too.
“What kind of somethin’?” he asks, his fingers stroking through her hair.
“Hm.” She rubs her cheek against his shirt. “Penguins. Were they actually a thing? Because they seem like bullsh*t.”
She knows the answer, of course, but it leads into a story and she sinks into it as his heartbeat slows under her ear.
* * *
Maria tells her about the council meeting when it’s done and over. She slips and calls it a trial once. Ellie suspects that might be more accurate.
She won’t tell Ellie a lot of details, but as they walk around the track to warm up, she says that they decided he wouldn’t be allowed to stay in Jackson, and that he was escorted out.
Ellie remembers what they heard last year, from the old couple in the woods, about the bodies Jackson left behind. She remembers Maria talking about people who “tried” them.
She doesn’t ask questions.
She runs four miles, throws up in the shower, and meets Joel at the canteen for breakfast.
She eats every bite on her plate and goes back for seconds.
* * *
Ellie is considering turning the hose on herself. It’s only early summer, but it’s already so hot she wants to take her skin off. They’re basically only doing half-days at school, in the mornings before it gets super hot. After lunch, they stay outside and work there for an hour or two. Meredith does lessons outside when she can, but they’re all pretty wilted by the time she sets them loose.
“Hurry up,” she calls to Bailey, who’s pulling weeds from the school garden. She’s worried about them crowding out her flowers. “It’s too hot for this.”
“I’m almost done!”
When Bailey’s finally done, they walk home together. Bailey lives like two blocks away from them and Ellie still thinks it’s kinda weird how much the little kids are allowed to walk around alone in Jackson. They weren’t allowed to go anywherealone in Boston. She still snuck out, obviously, but they weren’t supposed to.
“Can I come see your chickens tomorrow?” Bailey asks when they get to her house.
“Sure. I’ll find some lettuce or something for you to feed them. It’s fun watching them go crunch.”
Bailey high fives her, and then runs off into her house.
Ellie spends the afternoon watching Nicky while Tommy and Maria totally both work and don’t go off and find a quiet place to spend a couple hours together. She’s not entertaining a single thought about them maybe wanting Nicky to have a little sibling, because ew. She’s just going to enjoy hanging out with her favourite potato person.
They left her alone with Nicky before they left her alone with herself, and Ellie would be lying if she didn’t understand why. She loves him a stupid amount, much more than she loves herself.
He’s got this little baby pool in the backyard that she fills up with cold water and plonks him in. If it was slightly bigger, she’d consider joining him in there, but instead she drags over a lawn chair and sits with her feet in it, occasionally splashing him so he giggles at her.
It’s in the shade, at least, and she’s slightly cooler.
She’s so glad that she isn’t stuck in long sleeves all summer. Last year, she got so frustrated by it that Joel agreed to let her try other things. She usually just goes with some bandages. She wraps them up to her hand and told people she had a break that never healed right so it hurts sometimes. They all know it took a long trip to get here from Boston, and assume it’s from that.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than the long sleeve all year life. She’s not ready to do something more permanent yet.
Permanent seems like it’ll hurt.
And she thinks if she does something permanent that hurts, right now, no one would understand it was just about the scar. She needs to have been betterfor longer before she does something like that, or she’ll scare them.
So, the bandage will have to do for now.
Nicky’s all floppy and tired by the time she gives him back and so is she.
Ellie likes having electricity, and being able to cook on a stove. She also is reallyglad when Joel agrees to grill dinner, because the idea of turning the oven on in this heat seems like torture and walking to the canteen feels actually impossible.
She stops halfway through f*cking a steak up. She’s good with a knife until it comes to eating and then all her food comes out absolutely mangled. Probably the fact that they never got meat they had to cut up at school. If they had, she probably would have just torn chunks off it with her teeth anyways. They didn’t get knifes with meals at school. Joel’s tried to teach her, but that just turns into him doing it for her and, really, that’s just a little embarrassing.
“sh*t,” she says, remembering. “Do we have any lettuce? I told Bailey I’d get some so she could feed it to the chickens tomorrow.”
“Mm, I don’t think so,” Joel says. He winces when her knife scrapes against the plate and she sighs and lets him take it. “You can grab some at breakfast tomorrow.”
“Don’t let me forget.”
It’s a great plan until she convinces Joel to watch a movie after dinner, and forces herself to stay awake through it because he teases her that she always falls asleep halfway through. Which means by the time she stumbles upstairs and flops into bed, she’s exhausted. Worse, she has a nightmare that wakes her, shaking and crying, in the middle of the night.
She wakes up slightly confused. The light stretching Joel’s room is too bright for when she normally wakes up, and when she fumbles onto her elbows enough to peer blearily at his alarm clock, she realizes how much he let her sleep in.
What a sap.
She goes and brushes her teeth in her bathroom, then finds some clean clothes.
Eventually, she wanders downstairs and finds Joel washing dishes in the kitchen.
“Sleep okay?”
“Mm.” She goes over and leans against him for a minute. She hasn’t fully gotten the hang of spontaneous hugs yet, though she keeps trying, but this is a thing she’s better at, leaning her weight on him while they’re standing next to each other. Sometimes it makes him put his arm around her shoulders and squeeze so they hug anyways, but sometimes it’s just that, a moment of contact that grounds them both. “Oh, man, the chick chicks must be starving. I better go feed them.”
“Already did,” Joel says.
She finally focuses enough to realize what’s sitting on the counter. “Dude, did you go and get lettuce for them?”
“Nah, I asked Tommy to grab one. I just ate here.”
“Thank you,” she says and she means it.
Joel doesn’t like asking Tommy for stuff. Even small stuff is hard for him. The idea that he isn’t doing enough to take care of her bothers him. She thinks that’s bullsh*t. Joel takes care of her better than anyone ever has. He cares so much about taking care of her that he tried to leave her with Tommy, because he thought that’d be better for her.
And that hurt like hell, but she understands it better now. He was scared, yeah, but it was also about trying to do what was best for her. He thought he was going to fail her so badly that he had to protect her from himself.
“Has Bailey come by yet?” she asks.
“Not yet. Breakfast’s keepin’ warm in the oven for you.”
“Oh, good. I’m f*cking starving.”
“You always are.” Joel flicks water at her. “Go on and eat, then. Practically lunch already.”
Saturdays are the day she normally does stuff with Joel, which sometimes means going hunting or out on a trip, but sometimes just means hanging around town. Or staying at home just bothering him, which is still one of her favourite things to do. The last month or so, she’s had a lot fewer Sundays where all she could do was hide in bed, so sometimes they hang out on those days, too.
And sometimes she goes and spends time with her friends, going to the movies or f*cking around or whatever, but she likes spending time with Joel more than other people.
Most of the day, though, she just hangs out in her room reading and drawing, with Joel occasionally checking on her. She’s okay, but he drops off her laundry once, a bottle of water another time. He still worries about her when she goes still for too long. She wanders downstairs and into the kitchen to bug him when she decides she’s hungry again.
She stops when she sees the head of lettuce on the counter. “Wait, did Bailey not come by?”
Bailey’s not the most patient kid. Usually when she wants to see the chickens, she’s there right after breakfast.
“Not yet,” Joel says.
Ellie frowns. “Weird. You know what, I’m gonna go over to Tommy and Maria’s real quick. I’ll be back in like ten.”
She shoves her shoes on, laces them quickly, and jogs across the street. She knocks, waits a moment, then lets herself in. She’s not fully used to that, and sometimes she still waits for them to open the door, but they both say she can just come in as long as she knocks first.
Tommy does that to their house. The first time, she almost shot him, and he looked up like he didn’t know where he was, then mumbled something and left. Joel explained it later, that he used to do that in Texas, before.
“Hey,” she calls, then follows the replies into the kitchen. They’re both home for once. Tommy’s feeding Nicky a bottle at the kitchen table.
“Nice to see you today,” Maria says warmly. “Did you eat lunch yet?”
“Uh, no, but I think Joel’s making something.” She leans her hands on an empty kitchen chair. “You guys ate breakfast at the canteen this morning, right?”
“We did,” Tommy affirms.
“Did either of you see Bailey this morning? She usually has breakfast with her dad.”
“Mitchell?” Maria frowns. “He’s on patrol today, I think.”
“Wait, but it’s Saturday.” Ellie is confused. “There’s no school. Who’s looking out for her?”
Joel only ever has patrol on days Ellie has school. Even before the whole winter thing, she’d usually end up going to whatever repair job he had that day when she didn’t have school, or he’d come home at lunch to check on her. He still does that now if she’s spending a day alone, which is more rare now than it used to be, but more common than it was all winter. She knows things are different for her and Joel is overprotective, but Bailey’s only eight.
“I think their neighbour keeps an eye on her,” Maria says. “Why are you asking?”
She chews on her lip. “She asked to come see the chickens. She’s usually here right after breakfast. Like sometimes she walks home withus.”
“Are you worried?” Maria asks.
“I － I have a weird feeling.”
“You have good instincts,” she corrects. “I’ll head over and check at their house.”
Ellie nods. “I think I’m gonna check the canteen and see if she’s there.”
“Take a radio,” Maria instructs.
She fills Joel in quickly on her way by. He looks worried. More than usual, and it doesn’t help the knot in her stomach. He almost follows her, but she asks him to stay in case Bailey comes by.
There’s no Bailey in the canteen, but she does spot Meredith at a table and goes over to talk to her. She explains things quickly, but Meredith hasn’t seen her either.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Meredith says.
“Yeah,” Ellie agrees, but she doesn’t believe it.
Adults have to say that kind of thing.
Her radio crackles outside the canteen and she stops to listen to it. Maria reports that Bailey’s not home, and the neighbour who usually watches her didn’t know her dad even had patrol today. She hasn’t seen Bailey.
“sh*t,” Ellie whispers.
“Go home and tell Joel code amber,” Maria says. “And you stay at home with him.”
“Okay.”
She clips the radio back onto her waistband and starts to head towards home.
“Miller,” someone says behind her.
It takes her a moment － a moment of looking around for Tommy or Joel － before she realizes she’s the one being spoken to. It also takes her that long for her to realize who it is.
Then she groans before turning around. “What the f*ck do you want, Caleb?”
He shifts uncertainly. “I overheard you talking. Your little buddy’s missing?”
“I… maybe,” she admits. “I hope not.”
It slips out without her meaning it to. She’s too worried about Bailey to worry about saving face in front of him.
“I think I might know where she is.”
She steps forward. “Where?”
“There’s a barn a couple miles outside of town. Some idiots have been sneaking out there to drink or smoke or whatever. I think some of them are growing pot out there.”
She ignores the idiots part. She kinda agrees with the idiots part, if she’s honest with herself. She’s never once snuck out of Jackson. She knows what’s out there and she has no desire to face it alone or with only kids her age around. The others don’t.
“Why would Bailey go out there? She’s too young for that sh*t.”
“Barn cat,” Caleb says. “It had kittens a couple weeks ago.”
“Oh, f*ck.” Ellie glances over her shoulder. She should radio Maria and tell her that. She should go get Joel. But he’d try to make her stay home and she’d argue and… “How far is it?”
“Couple miles.”
It’s a stupid idea, she realizes. But if other kids have been sneaking out there, then there’s a way the adults don’t know about. And if they can have Bailey home before anyone realizes she’s really gone, isn’t that better? Plus if she tells someone, it’ll take longer and Bailey will be out there, alone, longer.
The bad feeling in her gut grows. She doesn’t believe in fate. She doesn’t believe everything happens for a reason.
But she is trying to trust herself. Sometimes the alarm bells in her head go off a little too easily. Once she trusted someone who took advantage of that trust. But she is not stupid and Maria was right. Her instincts are good.
“Okay.” She makes up her mind. “Show me where.”
They sneak out of a gap in the wall － okay, Ellie might have to tell Maria about that, even if it makes everyone hate her, because holy sh*t that’s a bad idea － and take off in the direction Caleb points towards. He’s tall, taking two steps for each of hers, but she’s always been quick and she’s spent all winter running from her demons.
“Why’d you tell Meredith not to kick me out of school?” Caleb blurts.
Ugh, she was hoping to avoid this conversation forever.
“I grew up in a FEDRA school,” she says shortly. “I know what it’s like.”
He shoots a look at her, that she ignores. “Where was your dad?”
“Joel’s not my dad,” she says automatically.
“Bullsh*t.”
“Believe what you want,” she says. She spots a dilapidated barn in the distance. “Is that it?”
Yeah, there’s definitely weed growing behind the building. Geniuses.
“Stay quiet,” she tells Caleb in a low voice. She doesn’t seeany sign of infected, and there isn’t usually any this close to Jackson, but there wasn’t supposed to be infected in Boston, either, and look how that turned out. So she’s careful easing the barn door open. Half the barn roof is gone, filling it with light.
And in the middle of the barn is Bailey, with a pile of kittens in her lap.
“Oh my f*cking god.” Ellie gives up on the quiet thing and stalks over to Bailey. “Dude, what the f*ck? What the hell were you thinking? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
Bailey looks up at her, eyes huge. “I just wanted to see the kittens.”
“We have cats in Jackson!” Ellie exclaims, gesturing at nothing. She ignores the vague thought she’s starting to sound like Joel. “What would you do if there was an infected in here? Have you ever even seen one?”
Bailey shakes her head.
“Good!” Ellie says, and it sounds stupid how angry the word is. “Keep it that way!”
She’s going home and she’s going to apologize to Joel. Kids are the worst. If she’s anything close to this stupid, it’s amazing she hasn’t given him a f*cking heart attack.
“Something killed their mom,” Bailey says in a tiny voice. “An animal or something. I found her outside.”
Oh god.
Ellie’s anger abruptly vanishes.
She crouches down in front of Bailey, reaching over and petting one of the kittens. They’re really f*cking fluffy. Their eyes are open, but they’re still wobbly and tiny.
Now that she isn’t so angry, she sees the stuff surrounding them. There’s one of the glass bottles they put milk in, empty, and a strange-looking baby bottle. It doesn’t look like one of the one Maria uses for the milk she pumps for Nicky. It’s smaller, and a different kind of plastic.
“Where’d you get the bottle?”
“It’s a doll bottle from when I was little,” Bailey admits. “I stole the milk. It’s goat milk, because cow milk can make them sick.”
“Yeah?” Ellie sighs. “Did you bring a box or something to carry them in?”
Bailey nods.
“Well, let’s get all of you back home.”
The kid even brought an old towel. She tucks it carefully into the cardboard box and starts piling kittens into it.
Ellie picks one up, grinning when it hisses at her. “Yeah, you’re an angry baby, I know. How long have you been coming out here?”
“For like a week.”
Okay, yeah, Ellie definitelyhas to tell Maria about that hole. The others might be pissed at her, but if the little kids can sneak out for that long with no one noticing, that’s a f*cking problem. They do more education about infected than in the FEDRA schools, but they’re still kids. They don’t know what the world is like.
Bailey sneaks a glance at her when she puts the last kitten in the box. “Am I in trouble?”
“Big trouble,” Ellie says frankly.
She’s thinking about lecturing Bailey a little more － thanks to Joel, she thinks she could definitely come up with a good lecture － when Caleb says her name.
“Ellie,” he says, almost in a whisper.
The hair on her arms stands up. “What?” she asks, keeping her voice on the same level.
He gestures for her to come where he’s standing near a missing board in the wall. When she’s close, he says, “Someone’s coming.”
“sh*t,” she hisses. She didn’t bring her gun. She went straight from home to Tommy and Maria’s house to the canteen. She didn’t even think to grab it. All she has is her knife. “Maybe they’re just passing by.”
“Maybe.”
“Keep watching,” she says, and goes back over to Bailey. She grabs Bailey’s backpack and her arm. “C’mon, kiddo, come over here. It’s okay. Stay quiet.”
There’s a table against one of the walls and she gets Bailey to tuck herself under it, passing her backpack down.
“Do you have your Walkman in there?” When Bailey nods, she continues. “Okay, put your headphones on and keep your eyes shut. Don’t come out until one of us comes and gets you.”
“Okay,” Bailey whispers.
“It’s okay,” Ellie repeats. She grabs a tattered tarp off the ground and covers the table with it, then leans a nearby wooden pallet against the table, trying to make it look like it’s been like that for a while.
Then she takes her knife out of her pocket and goes back to the gap in the wall.
“You have anything?” she whispers.
Caleb shakes his head. “The rest of us aren’t allowed to carry any weapons in town.”
Technically, Ellie thinks she isn’t supposedto carry them either. At least not the gun. Knives are useful, and no one really cares about them, but guns are different. Technicallyno one is supposed to carry a gun in Jackson. Ellie also knows that almost everyone does anyways. Tommy and Maria do. Joel certainly does. Meredith, who is what Joel calls “a real hippy”, whatever that means, carries one when she’s not in school. School is the only place that is really a no-weapons zone.
But then winter happened, and they were worried about her being alone, and Ellie thought maybe it was better if her gun stayed in her room for a while. And then it became a habit. A stupid f*cking habit.
“Okay. Crap.” She looks around, spotting a hunk of wood on the ground. She grabs it － four by four, she thinks absently, probably from a support beam from the roof － and tosses it towards him. Then she finds herself another spot on the wall to watch from.
The guy outside is closer. Like really close.
sh*t.
She presses her back against the barn wall so he doesn’t see her. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots the shape of him passing her spot. He’s coming inside.
She eases over to stand by the door and a moment later, Caleb follows and stands on the opposite side.
She takes a breath.
And the door opens.
The guy immediately points a gun in her face. “Hand over your sh*t and maybe I’ll let you live.”
“I literally have nothing on me,” Ellie says, a little hopelessly. She knows how this goes. “Please just go. We don’t have to do this.”
She hopes he will. For a single, shining moment, she thinks he will.
Then his eyes drop. And she realizes he’s seeing her as more than a person to rob. His gun lowers, just a little.
She takes an involuntary step back.
Then Caleb slams the plank into the guy’s hand, knocking the gun out of it. The guy curses, spinning and landing a sloppy punch right at Caleb’s jaw. Ellie jumps at him, stabbing her knife into his shoulder.
He shoves her back and punches her in the stomach. It knocks the wind out of her and she falls, but the gun he dropped is there and she sees it a second before he does.
She grabs it, aims it at his chest, and pulls the trigger. Once, twice. She doesn’t need more.
Then everything is quiet.
“f*ck,” Caleb groans, shoving himself on his hands and knees. Then for some reason, he freezes. “Ellie.”
“What?” she asks, panting.
He points at the guy and she follows the direction of his hand.
The guy has a screwdriver in his hand, and it’s covered in blood.
“Oh.” She looks down. The pain hits then, and when she touches her stomach, her hand comes away slick and red. “Oh, f*ck.”
“Okay, you’re gonna have to move.” Caleb stands up. “Give me your arm.”
He drags her to her feet and then over to the table Bailey’s hiding under. She leans against it because she doesn’t have a choice. Her body isn’t moving the way she wants it to. f*ck, why didn’t she tell anyone where they were going? They’re out of radio range, too － the radios they use have a shorter range so people outside of Jackson won’t pick up on it. They only reach about a mile away and they’re past that.
“Don’t let Bailey see the body,” Ellie says tightly. “Don’t let her see.”
“Okay, okay.” Caleb yanks the flannel shirt he’s wearing over his t-shirt off and passes it to her. “Pressure. Don’t move.”
“Where would I f*cking move?” she hisses. “Motherf*cker.”
Pressure hurts, like a f*ckton. She closes her eyes against the pain. She wants to cry. She wants Joel. He knows how to make things like this better. She wants him to be here, telling her it’s going to be okay.
“Don’t pass out,” Caleb says and she jumps, hissing in pain. She didn’t even notice him coming back. He grabs the pallet and starts to move it.
“No, don’t.”
“You need someone to put pressure on that.”
“No,” Ellie repeats, putting as much force into her voice as possible and trying not to let it shake. “I don’t want her to see. Go back to Jackson and get help.”
Caleb hesitates, then sets the gun on the table next to her. “There’s four bullets in it. Try not to use them.”
“Please go get Joel.” She presses his shirt harder against her stomach. “Please get him.”
“I will. Don’t die, okay? I’ll get in more sh*t for it.”
She manages a laugh, weak and thready.
Then he’s gone, and the barn is quiet besides for her heartbeat, too loud in her ears. Very faintly, she realizes she can just barely hear the sound of Bailey’s music leaking through her headphones.
“We’re gonna be okay,” she whispers. She can see the kittens from here. The little bastards are asleep in their box.
When Joel got stabbed, he bled for a while. They rode on Callus far enough to get away from the university before he passed out, and then there was how long it took her to get him on the sleeping bag and drag him to the house.
The thing is, Ellie thinks she might have less blood than Joel. That’s a little alarming because she also thinks she’s bleeding at about the same rate.
She’s sort of proud of herself that she’s still standing when she hears horses outside. She grabs the gun just in case, but she’s not surprised when Joel throws the barn door open.
“Hi,” she says pathetically.
“Ellie. Oh, Jesus.” A moment later he’s there, pressing his hand over hers on her stomach. It hurts and she cries out. “Sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”
“I f*cked up,” she says and puts her arms around his neck. His hand is pressing hard against her stomach, still hurting, but she doesn’t care. She’s so f*cking glad he’s here. “I should have told you. Bailey’s under the table. Don’t let her see. Don’t let her see. Don’t let her.”
“Shh, okay, it’s okay. Tommy!”
She turns her head enough to see Tommy come through the barn door. He freezes when he sees her.
“Tommy,” Joel says. “Little girl’s under the table.”
Tommy nods.
“Don’t let her see,” Ellie repeats. Her lips feel weirdly cold. She needs them to understand. “Don’t let her see.”
Joel takes her hand and replaces it against her stomach. “Can you press on that so I can pick you up?”
She nods.
“Okay. Okay.” Joel exhales. “It’s gonna be okay, baby. Stay with me.”
Joel has to basically lift her onto the horse, and help her get her leg over to the other side. Then he climbs behind her and grabs the reins with one hand, pressing the other against her stomach again. He’s stronger than she is and it hurts.
She groans and grabs his arm. “Joel. Joel, I didn’t let her see anything.”
“Shh, I know. I know.”
“I thought it’d be faster and we’d be home by now. I didn’t want her to－” The horse jolts and she gasps, bracing herself against the edge of the saddle. Joel’s arms are basically the only thing keeping her upright. “I didn’t want her to be scared.”
“Breathe,” Joel says. “Don’t fuss about any of that now.”
Her ears are ringing and she can’t remember when that started. Definitely right around the time the stars started dancing in front of her eyes.
“Ellie? Ellie, baby girl, stay with me.”
She really wants to. He sounds really freaked out and she doesn’t want to go away from him. She’s never wanted that. But she doesn’t think she’s getting a choice here.
* * *
There are hands on her wrists holding her down and it hurts so bad she wants to scream.
She thinks she is screaming.
“Hey, hey, hey.” It isn’t until Joel is holding her face, leaning right down into her space, that she realizes her eyes are open. “I know, baby, I’m sorry, but you can’t touch. I know it hurts. Tommy,let go of her hands.”
The hands release her wrists. The screaming in her head stops. She’s not sure about the screaming out loud, but it stops in her head.
“We’ll give her a little more,” another voice says. Ellie recognizes it, vaguely, but she can’t place it right now. “Ellie, I’m sorry you felt that.”
“Joel…”
Joel grabs her hand, interlacing their fingers together. “Hold onto me.”
She wants to say something － really f*cking wants to make whatever is making her stomach hurt so much go away － but there’s darkness pulling at her edges and she can’t fight it anymore.
* * *
Cage, she thinks when she wakes up. Everything hurts and her thoughts feel thick, like they’re taking longer than usual to travel through her brain. No, not the cage. Not that, never that, never again. Joel promised. The truck? No. She’s lying on something soft, but she’s not moving.
Someone is holding her hand. She knows that hand, the calluses and scars and the way the thumb is stroking her knuckles. Joel.
If Joel is there, she’s safe. She doesn’t know anything else, but she knows that.
The darkness slips over her again, thick and syrupy like molasses.
* * *
When she wakes up again, someone is touching her face. Gently, fingertips stroking over her cheek and her forehead. She tries to bat the hand away and misses, makes a disgruntled noise.
“There’s my girl.” Joel? “Come on, sweetheart, you gotta wake up for a little bit.”
“No,” she manages. Joel is here, so she’s safe, and she just wants to sleep.
“Yes, baby, for a bit. Open your eyes for me.”
Joel is calling her a lot of endearments right now. He sounds worried, so Ellie forces her eyes open.
And immediately regrets it. It’s really f*cking bright. And…
“Where’m I?”
“Clinic,” Joel says. Someone else is touching her, and it’s not Joel, and she makes a confused noise. She’s about to figure out how her arms work again and punch them until he touches her cheek again. “Look at me. You’re with me. You’re okay. Don’t hit the doctor.”
“What…”
Joel glances away from her. She doesn’t care enough to make herself turn away from his face. “Your, uh. Your blood pressure tanked a bit there. Don’t worry about it. We just need you to try and stay awake for a little bit.”
She manages to look down. Her shirt is shoved up and there’s a lot of white bandages on her stomach, and she’s in a hospital bed. She’s really confused. The last thing she remembers is… something where it hurt, but Joel was there… and then, before that, bleeding in a barn.
“Did I get f*cking stabbed?” she asks. “I got － I got f*cking stabbed, didn’t I? That’s such bullsh*t.”
She’s alarmed to realize she’s almost crying.
“Shh, I know.” Joel picks her hand up and interlaces their fingers. “You’re gonna be okay.”
“Bullsh*t,” she repeats. She frowns. She remembers… “Bailey was with me. Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. She’s home with her dad.”
“Good.” She exhales. “Okay. Did you guys get the kittens? She was － she was worried about them. That’s why. That’s why she was out there.”
“Yeah, she insisted,” Joel says. “She’s almost as stubborn as you.”
Ellie would probably react more to that remark if she didn’t feel so goddamn bad. Things hurt, even with the thick weight of whatever drugs they’ve given her pressing it down, and she’s scared Joel is going to be mad at her for getting hurt.
“And I thought it would be faster if we just went instead of trying to find you or Tommy or Maria and then waiting for horses and stuff and － Joel, that guy would have found her alone if we weren’t there. He would have hurt her.” She tears up, breathing too fast. Her chest hurts, f*ck.
“Breathe,” Joel says. “No one’s mad at you.”
That’s worse though and tearing up becomes full on crying. “Oh, god, am I f*cking dying?”
Like a total asshole, Joel chuckles softly. “Okay, no one is mad at you right now.”
“But people are gonna be mad at me later?”
“Sure, honey,” he agrees. “We’ll be mad at you later.”
“Okay,” she says wetly. “That’s good.”
* * *
The doctor switches her to a different painkiller after a day, and things hurt more, but everything stops having that blurry, dizzying edge that makes her embarrassingly hysterical. It does leave her unfortunately awareof how emotional she’s been, and that’s kind of humiliating, but at least it was just the doctor and Joel there for that.
She trusts him more than anyone, and they’ve seen each other in a lot of inelegant situations, to say the least. But Ellie isn’t going to lie that she’s really grateful when Maria comes when she’s allowed to get out of bed and offers to help her change into clean clothes.
“Can you make them let me go home?”
“That’s not up to me,” Maria replies. “Put your hands on my shoulders and lean on me. If they say you need to be here, you need to be here.”
She steps into the sweatpants Maria brought. It is reallynice to get out of her jeans. There was a lot of blood on them, and they pressed into her stomach too much, but leaving them undone was not… not good. They offered her a hospital gown, but no.
“I’d be better at home. Joel’s literally been f*cking stabbed before. He can take care of me.”
Ellie realizes it doesn’t help her case when she has to sit down because she’s out of breath from talking while standing up.
“Sorry, kid,” Maria says, picking a shirt up off the bed. “Arms up.”
Ellie sighs.
She tries Joel next, because, well, Joel usually doesn’t say no to her. Or he does, but then she keeps asking, and he eventually gives up. It’s a thing she’s noticed. She tries not to take advantage of it too much.
“Absolutely not,” Joel says immediately. “And don’t you argue.”
She gapes at him. “But－”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he interrupts. “Take your meds.”
She huffs, but her stomach is really starting to hurt, so she takes the pills the doctor left on her lunch tray. And then she has to lie down because they make her drowsy, and Joel cheats and closes the blinds so the room is all dark and starts rubbing her back until she takes a nap without meaning to.
Ellie decides to try a third time when Tommy comes for a visit.
She points at him when he walks through her door. “Tommy. Convince Joel to convince the doctor to let me go home.”
Tommy crosses to the foot of her bed and leans on it. “You’re makin’ a big demand for someone as incredibly grounded as you are, little miss.”
She’s flustered. “I am?”
“She is?” Joel echoes.
“You’re so grounded, you’re underground,” Tommy says, and it’d be funny if he wasn’t so serious. “When the doctor says you’re ready to go home, you go there and you stay there. When she says you’re ready to go to school, you go home and to school and nowhere else. No movies. No horses. No huntin’ or trips outside the wall. Nothing.”
“I don’t think you get to ground me,” Ellie argues. She doesn’t really know much about how that’s supposed to work, but she’s pretty sure it’s not supposed to be like a communalthing, not even in Jackson. “I think that’s kind of…”
She just gestures at Joel.
Tommy raises his eyebrows and, wow, he really looks like Joel when he makes that face. “Watch me. You sneak out, get yourself stabbed, nearly b-bleed to death…”
He stumbles on the word and oh. Oh, sh*t.
Ellie thinks she gets it. She’s never asked, exactly, how Sarah died. It seemed cruel. She assumed an infected, from the date on the memorial downstairs, but... well, maybe not.
She’s surprised. She kinda didn’t really think Tommy cared about her that much. He’s always nice to her, and even the first time they were here, he offered her a place in Jackson, but she thought maybe he was just putting up with her because Joel wanted her here and Tommy wanted his brother here.
She thinks she might have been wrong.
“Hey, uh…” She twists her fingers in her lap. “You know, usually when I do something stupid and almost die, Joel hugs me after he yells at me. Like that time I almost fell off the roof.”
“Oh, is that what usually happens?” Joel asks, raising his eyebrows. Yep, definitely the same face.
“Well, kinda, yeah.”
For some reason, she’s still a little surprised when Tommy hugs her. They never have, and it’s a little weird. It’s not like she’s hugged a lot of people in her life in general. Sam, Riley, Joel, that’s kind of it. She’s starting to think maybe this is a thing people should be doing more, though, because it’s nice.
“You’re still grounded,” Tommy says gruffly.
“Can I be grounded at home, though?”
“No.”
* * *
Tommy’s actually kind of bad at sticking to any kind of punishment. Ellie’s too tired for movies for a while. When they watch them at home, because she can’t do much else, she falls asleep halfway through and wakes up in bed the next morning. But when she gets cabin fever and asks to just go visit the horses and see Shimmer, who’s her favourite, Tommy gives in right away.
When she tells him she’s going to the stables, Joel snorts. “Always did like being the fun uncle,” he mutters, turning a piece of wood in his hands. It’s supposed to be an elephant, Ellie thinks, but it looks more like an dog to her and she tells him that. “Wear a sweater. It looks like rain.”
“I’m fine!”
Joel lowers the knife and looks at her.
Tommy might not be able to ground her, but Joel can. As he keeps reminding her. Ellie’s pretty sure she’s only not grounded on the technicality of being too worn out by the whole stabbed thing to really go anywhere. Joel did, in fact, get mad about that, when she wasn’t half-dead. It was a very long lecture. With a lot of hugging.
“I’ll wear a sweater,” she says.
“And your boots, not your sneakers.”
“O-kay, Joel.” She pauses by the back door to pull her stuff on, shoving her feet into the new rubber boots that Joel brought her a few days ago. They don’t have laces so it’s easier for her to put them on by herself. He’s been tying her shoes, because she couldn’t bend forward enough to do it herself.
It isn’t the first time.
After, when her ribs were f*cked up, he had to put her boots on for her. And then she tied his, because stab wound. She made a joke about it, something weak and not really funny that she doesn’t even remember, probably called him old, but she was glad he let her. Even after the antibiotics, he was in so much pain for so long.
Ellie hasn’t really seen the scar on Joel’s stomach since it healed. She knows it still hurts, sometimes, the way his bad knee does. A few nights ago, when he was asleep, she snuck her hand onto his stomach and felt the shape of it through his shirt, curious. So she knows it didn’t heal particularly well. It wasn’t clean to start with, since it was a f*cking broken baseball bat, and her less-than-stellar stitching abilities and the infection didn’t help.
The wound in her stomach is smaller, cleaner. Deep, though. She wasn’t really therefor the fixing part on herself, especially not after they gave her drugs, but after the doctor told her that if it hadn’t gone in where it did, she could have lost a kidney. So there were stitches insideher, which will apparently dissolve, and tidy, sterile stitches on the outside. She got antibiotics right away, and painkillers, both scarce even in Jackson.
Her scar is going to be different from Joel’s and she kinda hates it. She wishes, still, that she could have fixed him like that, so that he hadn’t gotten so sick and so that he wasn’t still hurting with it.
Ellie hesitates a moment before leaving, her fingers on the doorknob. It feels like there should be something they say when they leave. Not just, See you, but something better. She knows what she wantsto say, but she chickens out.
“I won’t be long,” she says instead, and slips out the door.
It’s late enough in the morning that the barn’s somewhat quiet. It won’t be for long, but things in Jackson have a loose schedule. It’s not like in in the QZ in Boston where everything was scheduled down to the minute, but the structure is there. It just makes everything easier.
She’s not super surprised to see Tommy there. She issurprised to see another familiar face.
“Ellie!” Bailey cries and runs at her.
Ellie braces herself, but the hug that follows is a lot more gentle than she was expecting, carefully angled so Bailey doesn’t touch her stomach in the wrong spot.
“Hey,” she says, totally not choking up a little. “What are you doing here?”
Bailey pulls back. “Tommy said the kittens could come live here when they’re big enough.”
Ellie grins. “Did he?”
Tommy’s lucky, she thinks, that Nicky’s a boy. He might have a chance at saying no to him sometimes. His track record with girls isn’t so good, but maybe he’ll have a shot with a boy. Though, thinking about the way Tommy looks at his kid, maybe he’s just f*cked.
He shrugs. “Can’t go wrong with a good barn cat. Or four.”
“Four?” Ellie gasps theatrically. “Bailey, is your dad letting you keep one?”
“Yes! The little grey one!”
“f*ck yeah!” Ellie holds up her hand for a high five.
She hasn’t been able to see Bailey since she got hurt. School ended for summer break, and it doesn’t start again until late fall, after the harvest. Ellie’s FEDRA school never had breaks, and she was actually excited about it until she got f*cking stabbed and missed the end of the year. There was supposed to be a party on the last day. Meredith brought her a slice of cake and some books, but she wasn’t keeping food down great yet so it was kind of a waste.
Bailey wanted to visit, but Ellie was afraid she’d get scared. She looked like sh*t for weeks. And the doctor said she wasn’t really supposed to have visitors besides Tommy and Maria. Just family, the doctor said.
“Do you want one?” Bailey asks.
Ellie starts to answer, then stops herself. “I mean, yes, but when I brought home the chick chicks, Joel said I had to ask first before getting more pets.”
“Okay,” Bailey agrees. “Does your stomach still hurt?”
She didn’t seeanything, thank god. Ellie made sure of it. But they had to tell her that Ellie was hurt. She’d hear about it one way or another. Little kids find out stuff they aren’t supposed to and they make sh*t up to try to explain what they don’t understand. She would have scared herself worse.
“Yeah,” Ellie says. “A little bit. But I’m feeling a lot better now. Do you want to come pet Shimmer with me for a bit?”
“Yes!”
Bailey chatters her ears off for a solid ten minutes. Ellie gets her a cup of oats to feed Shimmer, who’s very patient with the little fingers that touch her nose. Someone’s getting a carrot later.
Ellie makes herself stay cheerful until Tommy finds them.
“Bailey, your dad will be wantin’ you home,” he says.
Bailey rolls her eyes. “I’m stillgrounded.”
Ellie snorts. “Same here. See you soon.”
When she races out of the barn, Ellie lets out her breath and slumps against the stable door. Shimmer noses curiously at her shoulder.
“You need to sit down for a bit?” Tommy asks.
“Mm-hm.”
Tommy walks her over to an overturned crate.
“Don’t tell Joel,” she says, a little pitifully. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”
She’s doing a lot better, really, but she was trying too hard to pretend to be okay for Bailey. She’s not back to normal yet, but she didn’t want Bailey to see that.
“Just this once,” Tommy says, his hand still on her back.
She leans into him, just a little. He’s pretty good at the comforting thing, too. Joel’s better, obviously, but Tommy isn’t bad. When she was in the clinic, he stayed with her while Joel went home to shower and stuff －which was the only way Joel would agree to leave. Not like she wouldn’t have been fine for a couple hours. But it was nice having someone there.
He apologized for holding her hands down when she was out of it. She didn’t even really remember and had to ask what he meant － apparently she kept trying to stop the doctor from touching her stomach, which was not particularly helpful considering she was actively bleeding out － but it seemed like it really bothered him. She thinks maybe she freaked out a bit. It’s not like that was his fault.
“How are you doin’ anyways?” Tommy asks, passing her a bottle of water.
It’s his, and maybe that should be weird. But she drinks out of Joel’s cups and bottles all the time, and Joel and Tommy are made of the same stuff, so it’s less weird.
Also she thinks she might be wearing Tommy’s shirt. She thoughtit was Joel’s when she put it on, but he looked at her funny and asked her where she got it. She assumed he was being sarcastic and made fun of him for being old and forgetful, but now she’s not sure. Some of her stuff got mixed up with Maria’s on their last run before she got hurt and she thinks she might have grabbed the shirt by mistake then. She’s pretty sure she remembers seeing Tommy wear it before.
“I’m okay.” She draws lines on the floor with the tip of her boot. “Do you think you could make Joel go on patrol again soon?”
“You sick of him already?”
“You f*cking know it.” She shakes her head. “I just want things to start being normal again. I can be at home alone. Or at your place.”
“He’s not gonna go while you’re still healin’. He worries about you.”
“I know,” she says, a little desperately. “But I’m starting to be a bitch. I f*cking hate being stuck in the house all the time and I feel like I’m about to start eating the paint off the walls. Make him go to work or hunting or something, please.”
Tommy shifts, frowning at her. “Why are you so stuck on makin’ him leave?”
She gestures at herself. “I can barely go anywhere. I’m already sick of myself. He’s gonna…”
She realizes what she’s saying and stops, flushing hot.
“Ellie, Joel ain’t ever gonna get sick of you.”
She looks up at the roof to avoid his eyes. “Look, I know I’m easy to not like. It’s fine.”
“Who told you that?”
“Fourteen years of having exactly one friend?” she counters. “The many, many fights? That one teacher who straight up told me I was hard to like? I mean, Joel didn’t even like me at first. Youdidn’t like me at first.”
Tommy takes a step closer. “Hey, now, where on earth did you get that idea?”
She shrugs.
“Joel liked you from the start, for the record. He just didn’t let youknow that.” Tommy moves a little closer and crouches down in front of her. “And so did I. But for one thing, I thought you hated my guts when you first showed up. And then… you didn’t like it when I got too close. I’m not askin’ why, it ain’t my business. But you didn’t.”
She thought she’d hidden that better.
“The only thing I don’t like about you is that you took so long to show up in our lives,” Tommy says, grinning at up her. “But you’re always late.”
“Dick,” she says, but she’s smiling.
Tommy frowns suddenly. “Hey, is that my shirt?”
She scrambles off the crate. “Uh, I should get home. Joel’s gonna miss me if I’m gone too long.”
* * *
Her space grows slowly. She’s allowed to go to the stables on her usual days, but only to sit and talk to Tommy and make kissy noises at Shimmer. Uh, to check on Shimmer. She doesn’t do the kissy noises thing. Then for slow, slightly painful longer walks through town with Joel. Then, eventually, as it stops hurting to sit, the canteen for meals again.
This morning, though, they head over to Maria and Tommy’s for breakfast.
Ellie kinda feels like sh*t. It’s weird. She was okay yesterday. Today, though, her head hurts and her stomach is achy, but it doesn’t feel like where she was stabbed though. It’s lower, almost more in her hips. She isn’t telling Joel yet. He’s going to worry she’s got some kind of infection, like she didn’t spend weeks on preventative antibiotics.
She slumps at the kitchen table almost as soon as she gets there, dropping her head on her arms.
“You up all night reading comics again?” Maria asks, amused.
“Mmmmgh,” Ellie manages.
“She was out before I was,” Joel says behind her. She feels his hands on her hair, lightly tugging the elastic out and smoothing her sloppy ponytail back into tidiness. “And I had to wake her up this morning.”
“You feelin’ okay, honey?” Tommy asks.
“Euugh.”
Joel finishes fixing her hair. “Let’s try and get some food in you.”
She hears dishes being set on the table and sits up.
The smell of eggs and sausage hits her and she bolts for the downstairs bathroom, barely managing to make it to the toilet before losing the contents of her stomach.
She cleans herself up, washing her mouth out in the sink. Ugh.
Things feel weird, and two minutes later, today makes a lot more sense. She hasn’t had a period in… a while. It’s never been super regular and it got even less after leaving Boston. She stopped getting it before Joel got hurt, when it got cold and there wasn’t enough to eat for a couple months. It came back when it warmed up and food was easier to find, but she lost weight again this winter. Technically she’s still underweight and some months it doesn’t happen. She hasn’t been running, though, and she has been able to eat more, and apparently that’s enough for this bullsh*t to start again.
And she bled through her pants. Wonderful.
God, she hopes she didn’t leave a mark on the chair she was sitting on. That happened once at school and it was humiliating.
She shrugs off the flannel shirt she had on, grateful she still has long sleeves under it, and ties it around her waist.
Joel is not hovering outside the bathroom door. He is, however, hovering in the hallway. “You okay, baby?”
She makes a face, stepping past him into the kitchen. “Hey, sorry about breakfast. I’m just gonna go home.”
Maria’s eyes drop to her waist. “No worries.”
She shoots Maria a grateful smile. On her way towards the door, she squeezes Joel’s arm. “You can stay. I’m fine.”
He tries, at least. She gets home and is filling the kettle before he slips in the back door.
“I’m fine,” she repeats, putting the kettle on the stove. “Go have breakfast.”
“Ellie…”
She heads towards the stairs, and he’s Joel so he follows.
She stops and turns around, and almost laughs because for a moment, she’s taller than him. That’s so f*cking weird. “Joel. I didn’t want to announce to the entire room that I bled through my f*cking pants, okay? I’m gonna put on clean ones and then I’m gonna lie on the couch with the hot water bottle and groan a bunch. Go eat breakfast with Tommy and Maria.”
Joel flounders a little. He isn’t weird about them, but she can tell it’s not what he was expecting. He was in Emergency Joel mode, not Mild Inconvenience Joel mode.
She takes a couple steps back down and leans in for a quick hug. “I’m fine.”
She’s getting better at this casual hugging thing. Joel sort of isn’t. He gives really good hugs, that’s not it. It’s more than it still seems to surprise him each time.
But that’s okay. She can keep hugging him until he gets used to it.
...but like later, when she’s not quickly bleeding through the wad of toilet paper in her underwear.
“You need anything?” Joel asks as she climbs the stairs.
“Peroxide,” she calls back over her shoulder. “Or new jeans.”
The cramps get worse and she ends up spending most of the day on the bathroom floor with the hot water bottle, suddenly grateful they have a nice bath mat. Joel finds her there and is a little less concerned than she expects, just refills the water bottle and gives her a towel to put under her head.
And ibuprofen. He also brings ibuprofen.
“You rock,” she groans and curls up around the hot water bottle.
The first day is always the worst, but she makes it to bed eventually.
When she wakes up, her laundry basket is sitting on her bedroom floor. On the top of the stack are her jeans, clean and stain free.
It should probably be weird to think about him washing that kind of laundry. But, well, they have sat around a campfire and watched her period cup boil in a pot for lack of anything better to do so maybe they’re past that. Besides, before her there was Tess and Ellie can’t see Tess putting up with squeamishness. And before that there was Sarah, who didn’t have a mom to take care of that kind of thing. Joel’s not the kind of dad who would make her deal with it alone.
So. It’s not weird.
* * *
Joel has been fighting with a bundle of rope and fabric for a solid twenty minutes while Ellie watches from the porch with a muffin and a mug of tea. She finishes the last bite, and wanders over to him.
“What the f*ck are you doing?”
“Grab － grab that rope and tighten it around the tree,” Joel says, then mutters a curse under his breath.
“You setting up a tent or something?” she mocks, but she goes and does what he says anyways. “You know we have a whole house over there.”
“I am aware, smartass. It ain’t a tent.”
She still doesn’t understand what it is, even once the fabric is stretched out between the two trees.
“What is it then?”
“It’s called a hammock. C’mere.” He catches her arm and pulls her over, then shoves her down into the hammock thing.
Ellie makes some indignant noise, as is her role at times like this. Secretly, though, she likes it when he does things like this. She likes when he throws her into snow banks or shoves her into lakes or that time he flung her onto the couch and she almost bounced right back off, laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. They haven’t been able to do things like that since she got hurt. He’s been so careful with her, like she was made of glass.
The hammock sways and she has to grab onto it to keep from tipping right off.
“Holy sh*t.”
“I got you,” Joel says, and he’s still holding onto her arms. “Put your legs up. Lean back.”
It takes a while for her to figure it out, how to lie in the thing without rolling herself out. Joel hovers, a hand on her arm, her shoulder, her ankle, until she settles into it.
“What is it for?”
Joel catches the side and pulls on it, making it rock back and forth. Ellie clutches the sides.
“Don’t!”
“It’s like a swing,” he explains, chuckling. “You lay in it. You relax. You think you remember what that word means?”
“It’d be easier to relax if I wasn’t about to fall on my ass, Joel!”
“You’re not going to fall on your ass. Relax. I’ll bring you that book you’re reading.”
She glares at him suspiciously the entire time, but accepts the book he hands her. And the bowl of strawberries. And the cat.
“I was gonna do stuff today,” she complains.
“Were you?” Joel says, a little too innocently.
The problem is, she’s realizing, is that she doesn’t know how to get outof the hammock without ending up on the ground and she would rather avoid that. She’s healed up a lot, but her stomach can still be kind of tender, and there’s just sort of a general achiness to being stabbed, apparently. It’s been kinda bad today.
He thinks she’s pushing herself too hard. Maybe he’s right.
It wouldn’t be the worst way to spend a day, reading in the shade in a weird ass swing thing.
Damn it.
She’s gonna have to admit Joel was right about something. He’s gonna gloat for days.
* * *
They don’t talk about what happened at the Firefly hospital and it’s her choice. She could ask. She could push him. It wouldn’t be hard to get him to talk.
She remembers more than she lets him think.
She tried to stab someone when they took her away from Joel and they chained her up again. She pulled on it until her wrist split open and blood ran down her hand, screamed herself hoarse, threw anything she could get her hands on, and then they put something in her arm and she went away.
She woke up in a truck with Joel without her clothes and she didn’t ask questions.
Not all questions have good answers.
* * *
Ellie doesn’t have the strongest grasp of time. She’s best when she’s using the sun to track how the day passes, but that works a little less in Jackson where they have actual clocks. She was constantly getting in trouble back in Boston for being late to class. Time is slippery and weird in her head. It took her longer than everyone else to learn how to read a clock with hands and sometimes when she’s tired she still blanks.
Months are weirder, though. Months don’t feel real sometimes. Time feels like it passes in the way her stomach stops hurting so much, besides the occasional twinge now and then, the long lazy afternoons in her hammock that fade away as the summer heat does, the harvest she insists on helping out with even though it’s pushing her limits.
Which is why it’s not until she goes back to school that she realizes she hasn’t been in a fight in a whole year. Not since she kicked Caleb’s ass. The other kids in Jackson kind of… like her, or something, and she and Caleb have come to an agreement. They’re not friends, and they don’t hang out or anything, but they have a truce. Killing someone together will do that, apparently.
She didn’t expect to realize how long it’s been sitting in Maria’s office in town hall. Next to Joel. Who has a black eye, because hegot in a fight.
Maria sighs and opens the bottom drawer of her desk. “Ellie, honey, could you grab those cups from next to the water jug? Three of them, please.”
“Sure.”
When she does, Maria lifts out the bottle of whiskey and pours it into them. She hands one to Joel and then one to Ellie.
Joel frowns. “No.”
“If you’re getting into bar fights, we’re all drinking,” Maria says firmly.
She also gave Ellie significantly less than the both of them, less than a shot, probably, but Ellie will take it. Since she turned sixteen, Joel sometimes pretends he doesn’t notice her stealing sips of his beer here and there, but he doesn’t like her drinking harder stuff.
Honestly, it’s pretty gross anyways.
“You’re a bad influence,” Ellie teases.
“It wasn’t a bar fight,” Joel grumbles.
Maria gives him a long look. “You got into a fight. In a bar.”
“I was fixin’ those broken tables, not drinkin’ in the middle of the day.”
Ellie snickers. “Until now.”
“You quit enjoyin’ this so much.”
“No f*cking way.” Ellie sits back in her chair, swirling the liquid around in her glass the way she’s seen Joel and Tommy do. It looks cool, though she’s not sure what it actually does, if anything.
“It wasn’t even a fight,” Joel says. “One lucky punch on his end.”
“You two,” Maria says flatly, “Make me have to do so much f*cking paperwork.”
Ellie giggles into her glass and takes a sip. Yep. Still gross. “This is really fun when I’m not the one in trouble.”
She doesn’t actually think Joel’s in trouble. Mostly because, well, dude deserved it. She wasn’t there, but when Joel ended up in Maria’s office with a shiner, she made him tell her what happened immediately.
Joel takes a long drink out of his own glass. Cup? It’s probably a cup, because it’s plastic and green. “He had the chance to apologize.”
“Look, I appreciate the sentiment, but you can’t punch people for calling me a bitch,” Maria says. “Do you know how often I get called a bitch in a day?”
“That ain’t the part I punched him for,” Joel mutters.
Ellie doesn’t really know what the guy at the bar said. Joel just said it was something rude, but it must have been really bad for Joel to hit him. She might be teasing him about it － because f*cking of course she is － but Joel doesn’t do things like that in Jackson.
Tommy tells her stories about Joel from before the outbreak. He’s different now. More sad, obviously. More brutal. But the Joel from before the outbreak did not have to make the same choices as the Joel she knows. She doesn’t need him to be that Joel. She likes the one she has. But she thinks he’s a lot closer to that person here than he was in Boston. She thinks he’s happy.
He doesn’t just go around punching people for fun.
Maria sighs. “You Millers are going to be the death of me. Please try to avoid getting into any more bar fights this week. Get out of my office.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Joel finishes his glass and sets it lightly on Maria’s desk. He gets up and Ellie follows him to the door, poking him in the ribs while he bats her hands away.
“Oh, Joel.” Maria turns to them. “Bring my casserole dish back when you come over for dinner tonight. I want to make a shepherd’s pie soon.”
Ellie waits till they’re outside to start teasing Joel again. She grins up at him. “Yougot in trouble,” she says, sing-song. “Are you grounded now? Do you have to go to to bed without dinner?”
“I’m gonna throw you in the lake.”
“That was a better threat before you taught me to swim.”
“I see my mistake,” Joel mutters, but he’s smiling. “Are you done for the day?”
“I think Maria could use some alone time,” Ellie says.
That’s probably true, but Ellie doesn’t care as much about that. She washelping Maria out today. She doesn’t really have to anymore. She’s doing well enough now that they aren’t afraid of her being home alone. But she still likes the routine. She likes spending time with Tommy and Maria. Maria’s work is always interesting, and Tommy tells her stories about Joel. Embarrassing ones. They both made space for her, in a lot of ways.
But she likes hanging out with Joel better. Joel is always who she picks on days where she doesn’t feel safe. She likes him the best of anyone on earth, and she didn’t really have anything else important to do. She’d rather hang out with him than find something.
“Why?” she asks. “Got plans?”
He sighs. “I didn’t, but now I’m making a shepherd’s pie.”
“Oh,” Ellie says. “Apology pie.”
“I’ll let you eat as many mashed potatoes as you want if you help me carry the stuff home to make it.”
“Deal.”
They stop at the pantry to grab a few things, and Joel doesn’t actually make her carry much. Mostly they’re just out of milk and shepherd’s pie does need meat. They have some stuff at home, but no ground beef. She still can’t usually handle it, so they don’t keep it in the house.
Joel holds the pack up for her to read. She recognizes the writing on it. Because it’s hers.
“Give it a shot?” he asks softly.
Watching a cow get butchered isn’t exactly a pretty sight. Joel didn’t love the idea when Tommy suggested it. They had a Talk while Ellie took Nicky for a really long walk. They were both kinda pissy when she got home, but they must have come to an agreement because Joel took her out into the woods and finally showed her how to dress a rabbit.
She puked.
Not her finest moment.
But she did it, and then a week later, she did it again, without throwing up. And then a month later, when it was time to slaughter a cow, Tommy brought her with him and she watched and helped pack the meat. It wasn’t pretty, still, but she’s glad she helped.
Partly because it would be pretty impossible for someone in Jackson to murder someone, butcher them, and then rewrap them in the exact same paper that has her own writing on it. Even the forever freaked out part of her brain can’t make that one work.
But, more, it makes it a little easier to trust it when she’s seen the work they’re doing to provide enough food to their community that no one would ever have to do something like that. No one is hungry in Jackson. It’s not always enough, but it helps, a little, and a little is more than nothing.
Joel will never admit Tommy was right, though.
“I’ll try,” she says, and that’s all he ever expects of her.
Maria tries to pretend to be unaffected when she sees the dish that night. “I didn’t mean you had to fill it when you gave it back, Joel.”
He shrugs. “You ask Tommy what our mother would have thought about returnin’ an empty dish. Put it in the freezer for a busy night, yeah?”
She shakes her head, but Ellie can tell she’s touched.
Maria drops the pie off in the kitchen with Tommy, then wanders into the living room with Joel. They’re talking about Ellie’s clothes again. She’s gained weight, which is good and also kind of weird. Some of her clothes don’t fit anymore. Her jeans kept getting tighter and then she woke up one morning, put them on, and they wouldn’t zip. She’s still in the same size shirt － the answer on the boobs question seems to be a firm no－but she’s gone up a size in jeans since Boston.
Considering she’d also had to go downa size after that winter, it’s still kind of strange. Joel’s started calling her scrawny recently, and she thinks it’s only because she isn’t as painfully thin as she was for a while.
“Hey, Ellie, honey,” Tommy says from where he’s stirring something at the stove. “Could you get the table set for me?”
“Sure.”
She knows where everything is without asking, and goes straight to the cupboard with the plates. She spends almost as much time here as she does at home.
“I’ve got somethin’ to ask you, by the way,” Tommy says as she finishes setting the table.
She goes over and boosts herself up onto the counter next to him. It drives Joel nuts, but Tommy lets her get away with it － probably becauseit drives Joel nuts. “What?”
“It’s just a thought right now,” he says. “But it’s just about comin’ up on deer season, you know.”
“Like… like apple season?” she asks, confused.
He chuckles. “No, it means when you’re supposed to hunt them. There are old guidelines we still follow. Helps them stay healthy. We send out huntin’ parties in the autumn, remember?”
Joel kept her mostly away from that stuff, but she nods.
“Would you want to go on a trip?” Tommy asks.
She goes hunting with Joel sometimes. She doesn’t think she’s technically supposed to, but people like her enough to let her get away with some stuff. They stick to smaller stuff, though. Rabbits, birds. Fishing, too. She eats a lot of fish.
“With you and Joel?”
“Well,” Tommy says. “If you want. Or without. Right now I’m set to go out with Seth and Ginny. There’s room for both of you. Or you could try goin’ on your own.”
She hesitates. “Joel wouldn’t let me.”
“I’m askin’ you first so I know if I need to convince him,” Tommy says, grinning at her. “You can say no. But you’re old enough if you want to try.”
She chews on the inside of her lip. The other kids start training for patrol when they’re sixteen. She hasn’t been doing that. No one has said anything, and she doesn’t think they will. Not everyone has to patrol, even if they’re physically capable of it.
She’s more comfortable with being outside of the wall than any of the Jackson kids will ever be, but they didn’t trust her to try any of that, after how she was last winter. Maybe they shouldn’t.
“Why?” she asks finally.
Tommy gets that faraway look in his eyes for a moment. “There were a lot of things I wanted to do with Sarah when she grew up. I wanted to take her on a road trip when she turned sixteen and got her licence. I hadn’t decided if I was gonna tell Joel yet or just surprise them both.”
“Oh, that would have gone well,” Ellie says dryly.
“It would have been funny,” Tommy counters. “Look, you can take your time growin’ up. Lord knows you’ve earned it. Be a kid as long as you want. But you’re no less capable than any of those little f*ckers you go to school with.”
That makes her grin, remembering Joel saying something similar when they first got to Jackson.
And makes her think.
She’s sixteen. Back in Boston, she’d already be in the military. According to FEDRA, she’d already be a grown up.
Sometimes she thinks she wasn’t ever really a kid according to FEDRA. None of them were. The kids here are sheltered, protected, cherished. Ellie aches sometimes when she sees the little kids in Jackson, for herself and how she grew up, but there were so many other kids just like her.
Why were they so disposable in Boston?
People treat her like a kid here and not in a condescending way. She asked Joel once how long she was allowed to go to school and he said she had to go until she was seventeen. She had to ask again for him to get what she meant. Until you’re done, he said. She works more than the other kids her age, but that’s her choice. Joel and Maria and Tommy all gently chase her away at the first sign of a friend asking her to do something.
She still gets to play.
The people who staff the canteen sneak the kids extra treats. Cookies between meals, strawberry syrup swirled into cups of milk, snacks handed out the back door of the canteen so they don’t have to stop playing to come in to eat. And Ellie is still treated like a kid by them. There’s always a mug of peppermint tea when she needs it. They give her extra butter and cheese on her food, because Ginny thinks she’s too thin, and has noticed she isn’t exactly big on meat.
She likes the way she can be a kid in Jackson, and she thinks she likes the way she’s going to be allowed to finish growing up slowly.
“Joel’s gonna hate it,” she says.
Tommy laughs. “Oh, yeah. You’re gonna have to look extra cute to talk him into this one, kid.”
“I’m always cute,” she mutters.
* * *
As predicted, Joel hates the idea.
Unexpectedly, he doesn’t actually take much convincing. He says no at first, and they drop it at first. She lets Tommy have Joel Time so that they can talk － she’s gotten better at that, too － and then butters him up by asking if he wants to watch a movie. She even lets him pick, which she rarely does because he has terrible taste.
“I got popcorn,” she calls over her shoulder as she sets it up. “And they gave me extra butter.”
“They always give you extra butter.”
That’s probably why she can’t see her ribcage anymore.
He brings the bowl in and she settles onto the couch next to him. There’s enough room to stretch out, but she likes her spot here against his side better.
“Here,” he says, and hands her a bottle.
A beer bottle.
“Wait, really?”
“Just one,” he says. “And this ain’t gonna be an all the time thing. But you’re sixteen. My dad started letting me have one sometimes when I was sixteen.” He laughs, one of those real soft ones. “I pretended I didn’t notice Tommy stealin’ ‘em out of the fridge when he moved in if it was only one or two.”
“Cool,” she says, grinning and not even bothering to hide it.
He drinks some of his while the beginning of the movie plays. She sips very slowly to not abuse this privilege.
“Do you wanna go?” he asks suddenly. “On this huntin’ trip Tommy’s got cooked up? Alone, I mean.”
She rolls the bottle between her palms. “I think so. I think I can do it.”
“I think you could do any damn thing you put your mind to.”
“Sap,” she says, but she shoves herself down under his arm. “What’d Tommy say?”
Joel sighs. “Lot of stuff that I didn’t think he was smart enough to say. Sometimes,” he says, his hand stroking her hair, “I forget you’re sixteen and not the same fourteen year old you used to be. I don’t know how to dosixteen. Or seventeen or eighteen.”
It clicks, then. Sarah never turned fifteen, let alone sixteen. She’s older than Sarah will ever be. There are a lot of things that Sarah and Joel did together that she’ll never get to do with him. He saw her be born, watched her take her first step, took her to her first day of school. But Ellie gets to do things with Joel that Sarah never got to do, too. He taught her how to hunt, which Sarah definitely never did, and how to hold a gun so no one could take it away from her, and how to find safe food to eat in the woods. They’ve been learning new board games together, ones that Joel has never even played.
That makes her inexplicably sad, for both Sarah and Joel.
“Hey,” she says, giving him a nudge. “I haven’t been sixteen before either, you know. I’m kinda just winging it.”
“Hm. Well. Maybe we can figure it out together, yeah?”
“Yeah. We can do that.” She shoots a glance at him. “So can I go?”
“Alright.”
* * *
Ellie isn’t sure who’s more nervous about this whole thing. Herself, Joel, or Tommy. She expected to be nervous. It’s the first time she’s been away from Joel for more than the length of a patrol shift since she was taken away from him by cannibals. A lot of other adults go on hunting trips for a few days, or scavenging for supplies, but Joel’s always stuck close to town. There was some talk at first about him joining in on one, but then winter hit and she had her breakdown and that stopped.
So, she knows why she’s nervous.
And Joel being nervous isn’t hard to figure out. He’s a worrier. And she’s already given him plenty to worry about. If he had his way, she’d never go more than ten feet from him. And she’d probably be wearing a helmet at all times. But he also wants what’s best for her, so he pushes her, gently, towards Maria and Tommy and towards her friends and towards the world.
She hated him for that, for a while, but she’s better now.
Tommy being nervous is weird and a little funny. Last winter, she still barely trusted him. When the whole no alone time rule started, she mostly stuck with Joel and sometimes Maria. But then Joel covered a patrol for someone and Maria had a council meeting and there was no one for her to hang out with but Tommy.
She was kind of pissed about it. And then she was more pissed when he was nice to her because she still thought he didn’t even really like her. It was a whole thing.
But the more that happened, and she suspects now that she can think again that sometimes Maria and Joel did it on purpose, the more she began to realize Tommy is maybe worse at saying no to her than Joel is, and that’s saying something. He’s told her so many stories from before the outbreak, especially when she asks for embarrassing ones about Joel. He let her go and hang out in the stables when she started getting cabin fever when she was healing even though she was supposed to be grounded. By him.
And Joel tells her stories, usually at night when she can’t sleep, and the stories that are about Tommy often include him letting Sarah get away with something Joel would have said no to. Ice cream for breakfast, a goldfish Joel had no idea about until he got home from work － that one made her smile, big, because apparently she was holding up a fine tradition with her surprise chickens － sneaking her out of school once to go to the circus.
She just kinda thought he’d be having a little more fun with this, since they did convince Joel to do something he said no to at first. She debates asking Maria about it, but she decides to wait instead. Maybe they can talk about it on the trip.
The night before they’re going to leave, she sneaks into Joel’s room. She’s been a lot better about sleeping in her own bed. She’s just been sleeping a lot better lately in general. But he’s still her safe place.
“You okay?” Joel asks. He doesn’t sound like he was asleep.
“Yeah.” She didn’t have a nightmare or anything. She just wanted to be with him.
Sometimes she wonders if Sarah did this, sneaking into his bedroom in the middle of the night. She wonders, too, if Sarah would still be doing it at sixteen. But sixteen for Sarah would have been different, so she tries not to compare. It isn’t really fair to either of them.
Maybe Sarah would have been doing it at sixteen if she went through the same things Ellie had, but she wouldn’t wantSarah to have done that. She’s glad that Sarah had Joel her entire life. She’s really, really f*cking glad Sarah never had her best friend die and that no one ever held her down and tried to hurt her. Even when she’s jealous because Sarah’s life seems too perfect, she wishes for like, cavities or something petty. Not that. It’s not fair to Sarah and she tries to be fair to Sarah.
She tries to be fair to herself, too.
“You nervous?” Joel shifts slightly so she can tuck her head under his chin.
“No,” she fibs.
She can almost hear the smile in his voice. “Okay.”
By the time morning comes, she’s calmed down. Joel has not.
Ellie lets him fuss. She eats the breakfast he cooks even though she’s not really hungry, since it’s so much earlier than she normally eats breakfast and takes the thermos of peppermint tea he makes her.
Then he walks her to the gate where the others are waiting for her.
“You sure you have everything you need?” he asks again on the way.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Extra clothes? It might get cold.”
“Joel.” She turns around a few feet from the group. “You watched me pack.”
“He watched mepack,” Tommy says with a grin, coming over to them. “Didn’t you two cross half the country on foot?”
“Yeah, you know, just the one time,” she says.
“I never should have introduced you two,” Joel mutters. “Shoulda known you’d team up against me.”
They kinda do. Ellie can’t really argue with that one.
Joel’s face goes serious. “You keep an eye on her,” he says to Tommy. “Don’t let her get into trouble.”
Tommy looks just as solemn. He steps closer to Joel. “I’ll keep your kid safe. You keep an eye on mine, alright?”
Ellie goes hot all over. She’s gotten a little more used to people thinking she’s Joel’s daughter. She still corrects people, sometimes, but sometimes she’s given up on it, like with Miss Lorraine. Most of the time she just dances around it.
It’s different from Tommy. He knows the truth.
She waits for Joel to say something.
But instead, the two of them just do one of those big hugs that used to make her jealous.
“Give you a minute,” Tommy says, a little hoarsely, and steps over to the horses.
The cool thing is she’s not jealous of them hugging anymore because now she gets Joel hugs, too. And sometimes Tommy hugs, which are almost as good. But Joel hugs are the best hugs in the world.
“Get over here,” Joel says and she happily obliges.
They linger in the hug a little longer than usual. To be fair, usually when they hug, one of them is leaving for like two hours, not two days. Unusual circ*mstances, so Ellie thinks it’s okay that she spends a little longer with her nose pressed into his shoulder.
When they pull apart finally, Joel cups her face in both his hands.
“Be safe,” he says, then, almost reluctantly, “And have fun.”
Then he ducks down slightly and presses a kiss to her temple.
Ellie inhales slightly. That’s only happened once before, and she kinda thought he didn’t realize he’d done it. That maybe he hadn’t meant to do it at all.
It’s hard to do something accidentally twice.
She smiles up at him so big it almost hurts. “I will.”
Joel helps her up onto her horse. She doesn’t really need the help anymore, but she lets him.
He rests his hand on her knee as she nudges the horse towards the gate. “Listen to what Tommy says. No wandering off on your own. Don’t stay up too late reading those comics you think I don’t know are in your bag.”
“Joel.”
“What?”
She nods at the gate, which is open and everyone else is waiting for her just outside of.
“Right.” He takes a step back. “Okay. I will see you soon.”
“See you soon,” she echoes, then hesitates one more second. “Love you,” she adds, and kicks her horse into a trot through the gates before he has the chance to say anything.
She’s too nervous to look back.
* * *
For a little bit, Ellie is afraid she’s going to completely f*ck up and make herself look like a stupid kid who doesn’t know anything. She’s spent most of the last year doing not much of anything, especially during winter. What if she’s forgotten how to do everything?
But, eventually, she realizes that the others are used to the Jackson kids who actually don’t know anything and none of them are really expecting her to know much of anything, besides Tommy. She mights be a little out of practice, but she still knows what she’s doing.
They make their camp up first. Seth starts building a firepit while Ginny sets up their shelter, and Ellie goes to help Tommy.
“Do you know how to tie the knots for this?” Tommy asks, nodding at the bundle of tarps he’s got in front of him.
“Yeah, Joel showed me.”
They used this kind of set up sometimes, when it was snowing or raining but they couldn’t find somewhere sheltered to sleep. She helps Tommy run a line of paracord between two trees and get a tarp strung up between them. It doesn’t keep the wind off, but if it rains, it’ll keep them mostly dry.
“Now,” Tommy says, tying off the last stake. “Do you want me to set up in a spot a little ways a way or would you be okay sharin’ a tarp?”
She has to think about it. With Joel, they could only carry one, so there wasn’t an option. She felt safer sleeping close to him, anyways, when he actually slept and didn’t just stay up keeping watch. But then she got bad at being close to people who weren’t Joel. She’s better, though, and she trusts Tommy.
“We can share,” Ellie decides. There’s enough room.
Also, it’s kind of chilly already and every Miller guy she knows is a f*cking furnace. Joel, Tommy, even Nicky is one. When he was first born, Maria would put him in one of those baby sling things and zip her jacket over him. She said he was like a little hot water bottle.
Hunting is a lot of waiting, and not a lot of talking because it might scare the deer off. She sees one pretty quick, but it’s small. Tommy explains, in a whisper, that unless they’re desperate, they try not to shoot the younger or female deer.
She thinks she can be forgiven for the one she shot. It was probably young, but she was definitely desperate.
She wants a buck, anyways. A big one.
They don’t shoot anything the first day, but Tommy says that’s normal. Seth and Ginny are back at camp, too, when they get there. Ginny’s unpacking some of their supplies while Seth chops up wood.
It’s starting to rain again as they settle in.
“I’ll get this under a tarp,” Tommy offers, grabbing an armload of split logs. “Gonna be fun getting the fire started with everything so damp.”
It’s been drizzling on and off all day. The wood’s dry on the inside though. Ellie picks up one of the logs that’s been split in quarters and holds it out to Seth. “Could you split a couple of these another time?”
He gives her a slightly curious look, but does and she takes them under the tarp Tommy set up and settles down on her sleeping bag. Then she pulls out the knife Joel gave her before she left. She likes her knife better, but he said a blade that doesn’t fold is better for camping stuff, and it’d save on her blade.
It’s kind of nice, anyways, having something he gave her. Like he’s taking care of her even when he’s not there, the same way her mom is.
She runs the knife lightly down the inside of the split log and shaves off the first few pieces, because that’s always how these f*ckers go. Slowly, though, she remembers how much pressure to use and ends up with a bunch of wood curls at the bottom of the stick.
“Now where did you learn to do that?” Tommy asks.
She grins up at him. “I’ll give you three guesses. It’s called a featherstick.”
“That it is.”
“They usually burn pretty good.”
She makes another one, just in case, but it’s not raining that hard. Maybe just a little she’s showing off. She is good at this. She’d forgotten that, some. Joel’s gonna be pissed when she tells him Tommy was right and this was a good idea.
After the fire has been going a while, Ellie goes over to help Ginny with dinner. The adults are going to take turns cooking. Ellie offered to make a couple meals, too, but Tommy winced slightly and said she didn’t have to. A little insulting, honestly. So she’s just helping where needed.
“Here,” Ginny says quietly, winking as she slips Ellie a few dried apricots. They’re her favourite snack.
“Thanks.”
Ginny sits back when the food is cooking. “That fire feels nice. It’s starting to get cold already. I swear, ten years here and I’m still not used to these winters.”
“Where were you from before?”
Ginny doesn’t have a strong accent like Joel and Tommy, so Ellie isn’t sure where she’s from.
“Florida,” Ginny says. “Originally. But I was in college in Missouri when everything happened and I never really made it back. I ended up in Kansas City for a bit, but things started getting weird there and some friends and I got out.”
Ellie winces. “Yeah, we were there at… the end. It was bad.”
“I heard. I’m glad I wasn’t there anymore. And I’m sure one day I’ll get used to the cold.”
“You won’t,” Tommy says, bringing over a few split logs.
Ginny snickers. “Well, Ellie, what do you think? It was cold in Boston, too, right? Has your dad gotten used to it yet?”
“Oh,” Ellie says. “Um. I didn’t really know Joel in Boston.”
“Sorry?”
“Joel adopted her a couple years ago,” Tommy says to Ginny. Then he grins at Ellie. “He has notgotten used to the cold, and if he claims he has, you call him out on his bullsh*t.”
They eat by the fire, sitting on dead logs dragged close to it. Ginny cooking means it’s delicious. Ellie’s happy to actually be hungry. After, the adults tell stories about Jackson. Mostly ones from before they got there, but a few she just missed from when she was trying to not want to die.
They also pass a flask around, tipping it over tin mugs of herbal tea.
“Can I have some?” Ellie asks Tommy. She doesn’t actually think whatever is in that flask will taste very good in peppermint tea, but she has to ask.
“No way,” he says, snorting. “Not til you’re at least eighteen. I like livin’.”
“Aw, come on,” she says. “Maria let me.”
Tommy stares at her. “She did not.”
“Did too.”
“Well, Maria isn’t afraid of Joel,” Tommy argues. “And I am.”
Ellie laughs. “Chickensh*t.”
Tommy shoves her off her log.
Later, after she throws dead leaves in his hair and he threatens to sit on her and she steals his cookie, they all turn in for the night.
She sits on her sleeping bag, and takes off her jacket and boots. She doesn’t love taking her shoes off in the woods in general, but her boots and socks are a little damp, and spending a night in a sleeping bag wouldn’t help. Dry feet are important. Joel drilled that into her head a long time ago.
Her sleeping bag is really warm, so she won’t need the jacket in it, but she digs in her bag to find another shirt to layer over hers.
If the spare shirt she packed happens to be Joel’s, and if it happens to have been in his hamper so it smells like him still… well, that’s between her and the hamper.
“You all good?” Tommy asks.
“Mm-hm,” she says, then pauses. “Um. Actually. If I － sometimes I have bad dreams. If I have one, don’t touch me.”
“No problem.”
From how little he’s surprised, Ellie thinks Joel may have already had this talk with him. Joel wouldn’t have said anything too detailed, or told Tommy anything that she wouldn’t want him to tell, but he would definitely have lectured Tommy about how to take care of her. Probably for a while.
She sits on her open sleeping bag for a moment, looking out at the woods. It’s dark, so dark she can only see a couple feet beyond their camp. She knows she’s safe, though. Tommy wouldn’t let anything happen to her. He promised Joel.
“Somethin’ on your mind?” Tommy asks, copying the way she’s sitting.
She starts to say no automatically, but there is something… not exactly bothering her, but something she’s been thinking about.
It’s always easier for her to talk in the dark, for some reason.
“Um.” She fidgets with the button on the cuff of Joel’s shirt. “Joel didn’t adopt me.”
“Well, honey, if you want it to be official, we could come up with some paperwork.”
“But why would he? Joel doesn’t have a baby or anything.”
Tommy is quiet for a moment. She thinks they’re both confused. “I think I need you to tell me what adoption means to you.”
“You know,” she says, but he doesn’t say anything. She sits forward. “Like, you have a baby, so you go to a FEDRA school and get an orphan to take care of it. Some people came to my school wanting to adopt a kid when I was like ten and I pretended to be really clumsy and sh*t so they wouldn’t pick me.”
No one wants a kid that drops things to take care of their baby.
“Jesus,” Tommy says, and he really sounds like Joel for a moment. She’s not sure what she said to make him sound like that. “Ellie, no. Adoption is when someone decides to become a parent to a kid they didn’t make themselves.”
“Oh.”
She doesn’t know exactly what to say to that, so she gets into her sleeping bag and snuggles down into it. It’s a really nice one that Joel got for her the first time he took her for an overnight trip out of Jackson, and she’s cozy, especially when she curls her arms up by her face and breathes in the scent of the flannel shirt she’s wearing.
She falls asleep more gently than she expects, drifting off listening to the soft snoring beside her.
It’s still dark when she wakes up and she’s a little cold. Probably most because she’s thrown her sleeping bag open in the middle of the night. Goddamnit, she hates it when she does that.
Ellie zips it up without opening her eyes. Still cold. She wiggles her way over to Joel, to press up against his back and steal his warmth.
She inhales and － not Joel. Right. Horse, pine oil, a hint of roses. Tommy.
Well, she’s already here and he’s just as warm. He’s not as good as Joel, but he’ll do.
* * *
“How do you even know there are deer out here?” Ellie complains.
“You saw one.”
“Coulda been a fluke.”
Tommy chuckles. “We scouted this area out last week. There’s tracks, fur tufts caught on things, all the signs. Maybe next time you should come for that, too.”
She grins, just a little. “Maybe.”
At this rate, though, no one’s gonna want her to come on the next hunting trip. They spent another full day in the bluff and nothing.
There are multiple ways to hunt, either carefully moving through the woods looking for animals or waiting for them to come to a specific spot. Ellie’s used to the first one, but here, the second is safer. They know the area and it’s less likely for them to stumble across people unexpectedly.
But it’s also boringand there have been like two deer the entire two days and one was little and the other was a doe.
She groans dramatically. “This is the worst.”
Tommy chuckles. “You’re the worst.”
“I’m the f*cking best.”
“Well, you can be the best at helpin’ me make dinner tonight, then.”
Most of the time, Ellie thinks stoves are better. But she won’t deny that everything tastes better cooked over an open fire. Seth did some fishing this afternoon and she cleans the fish he brought in and helps Tommy roast them until they’re crispy and golden. Fish is still easier for her, but she’s been better with food lately. When Maria cooked the shepherd’s pie Joel gave her, Ellie actually managed to eat more than half of the serving she took. And it stayed down, too.
They all pretended not to notice, but she also ended up with an extra-large serving of dessert.
After dinner, she stares into the fire until Tommy throws something at her.
She jolts, then looks down to realize it’s a bag of dried apple slices.
“Stop poutin’,” he says. “You just gotta be a little patient.”
“Your first deer is exciting,” Ginny says, smiling across the fire.
Ellie debates lying. She’s thought about this kind of thing sometimes.
Mostly not about deer. In dark moments, usually one of those times where she can’t get out of bed, she’s wondered sickly if David counted as her first anything. She’s never said anything to anyone about that, but she thought a lot about what Maria would say if she did, and she’s decided, no, he doesn’t get to be anything, first or otherwise.
But this is different.
“I shot one before,” she says. “A pretty good sized one. It was really heavy.”
They look impressed, and she lets herself enjoy that. She did good with that first deer, even if things went bad after. That’s hers, and she’s keeping it.
“Told you,” Tommy says to the others, and he sounds proud. “And you’re gonna bag us another tomorrow.”
She grins. “Damn straight I am.”
The adults drink, a little. Tommy still won’t let her, which Ellie thinks is highly unfair.
Ellie also thinks that if she asked a couple more times, Tommy would probably change his mind. He’s kind of soft. But she’s gonna let him pretend to be strict about it this time. She doesn’t totally want to ruin his reputation.
When Seth and Ginny head to bed, Tommy gets up to put another log on the fire and grabs her jacket off the ground. “Here, Ellie, honey, you put that on.”
“Thanks.” She got hot earlier making dinner and took it off, but she’s cooling down now. She is also very full of food, and didn’t feel like moving.
“I should probably send you to bed, too.”
“I’m good for a while,” she says. “How about you?”
“I’m taking first watch.”
“When’s mine?”
Tommy reaches over and ruffles her hair. “Don’t worry about that.”
“I’ve done watch shifts before.”
Mostly when Joel passed out from sheer exhaustion, but he taught her what to do. She finds that funny now, that he taught her how to keep watch and then told her she wasn’t allowed to.
“Be a kid,” Tommy says gently.
Tommy taught her how to use a f*cking sniper rifle. He lied to Joel a little. He said he was just going to give Ellie a refresher lesson with a hunting rifle. But he surprised her with the 700 and taught her how to use it. He said it was for infected, for the future if she wanted to patrol. She knows it’s not just for infected.
Miller men show a lot of affection through firearms, she’s realized.
She’s capable of keeping watch. But she doesn’t have to.
It’s dark, but it’s not super late, so she decides to f*ck with Tommy for a bit.
“You know,” she says. “You’re a lot nicer to me than you used to be.”
Tommy immediately takes the bait. “Nicer to you? I’ve always been nice to you.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“You tried to bite me the first time we had a meal together.”
“Did not,” she says quickly. “If I’d tried to bite you, I would have. I threatenedto bite you.”
The second day they were in Jackson, when they had breakfast together for the first time, Tommy jokingly pretended to try to steal some of the bacon off her plate. She not-particularly-jokingly snapped her teeth at him. Joel kinda looked like he was going to die of embarrassment.
“How was I not nice to you?” he demands.
“You took my gun away. You called me short. You told me I was gonna eat a worm burger.”
Tommy actually winces, which isn’t what she meant to happen. “You’re not supposed to need the gun in Jackson. And I didn’t realize that would bother you. It’s an old joke. Worm burgers and bug juice, it’s a joke kids make at summer camp.”
“And you called me short,” she repeats. This is supposed to be funny, not making him actually feel bad.
His shoulders drop, and he grins at her. “I think I called you shortstack, specifically.”
“Yeah, so, you’re a lot less of a dick now,” she says.
“Maybe you should give it a try.”
She pretends to think about it. “Nah.”
“You’re a goddamn gremlin,” Tommy says, but he’s looking at her more seriously. “Ellie… I am so goddamn grateful you came into our lives.”
Okay, f*cking with Tommy has suddenly gotten a lot more sappy.
Her throat is a little tight, but she nods.
“You saved my brother,” he says. “And I’m just － I’m real glad you decided to be his kid, and to let us be family.”
Ellie’s stupid eyes are leaking, and it’s totally the smoke from the camp fire and not her crying a little. She swipes at them, sniffing a little. “I’m glad, too.”
Tommy lets out a small laugh. “Okay, now you really should go to bed. Early morning tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She stands up, and hesitates. Before she goes to bed, she steps closer to him and puts her hand on his shoulder, leaning her weight on him. “I’m glad you’re around, too.”
It’s true, too. And not just because Joel likes him or whatever.
She’s gonna have to practice the casual hugging thing some more.
Back under the tarp, Ellie sits on her sleeping bag, takes her boots and jacket off, and curls up in her sleeping bag. She’s wearing Joel’s shirt again. Not really for warmth.
She asked him once if it would help if they could find a tent. He said absolutely not, because that’d be a good way to get them killed, not being able to see anyone coming up on them. She’d kinda figured that out already, but she saw a picture and it made her wonder. Really, she’d more wanted to ask Joel if he’d gone camping before, for real, back when it was a hobby, but that was right outside of Boston and he was pretty prickly then still.
It could be safe now, maybe, with four of them and one of the adults changing who’s on watch every few hours. But she likes this better. If she angles her head right, she can still see the stars, and sleeping under the stars is something she’ll never get used to. They’re so bright out here. They’re good in Jackson, too, way more visible than Boston, but in the woods it’s amazing.
She dozes lightly, stirring when Tommy unzips his sleeping bag.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “Go back to sleep.”
She yawns. “S’okay. Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“What?”
“Do you miss Nicky?”
Tommy stretches out on his sleeping bag with a yawn. “Like crazy. Almost cried leaving him.”
She nods, mostly to herself. “When he’s big, you should take him out like this.”
“I’m lookin’ forward to it. Now go back to sleep, honey.”
* * *
Ellie’s grateful that something in her subconscious has enough self-preservation instincts that she doesn’t wake up screaming when she’s sleeping outside. Probably she doesn’t sleep quite deeply enough for that.
She doeswake up gasping and shaking and crying, which is, you know, not great either. But at least she’s not screaming.
She pulls Joel’s shirt tighter around her, pressing her face into the sleeves. She’s fine. Everything’s okay. Even though just for a moment she really wishes Joel was here. It wasn’t one of the really bad ones, but it still f*cking sucks.
She hesitates for a moment. Oh, f*ck it.
She worms her way over to Tommy and grabs onto the back of his shirt.
He wakes up when she touches him, exhaling. “You okay?”
She presses her face into his back and nods.
Tommy reaches back and pats her arm, just for a second before letting go. “Okay.”
He still isn’t Joel. But he isJoel’s, and she thinks that makes him kinda hers, too. And even though she’s doing a lot better, and she’s learning to be more okay on her own, it’s still okay to lean on people when she needs it.
* * *
The next morning is chilly and a little foggy. Ginny passes over her thermos, filled again with peppermint tea, almost as soon as she’s upright. They eat quietly before splitting up again.
She sits a little closer to Tommy than the day before, not quite touching, but stealing his body heat again. It’s surprisingly cozy, all things considered. Honestly, she’s almost asleep when she sees movement through her scope. She moves it just a little to get a better view, and freezes in place.
That is not a deer.
“Tommy?” she whispers, barely audible. “What the f*ck is that thing?”
He looks through the scope of his own rifle. “Oh, sh*t, that’s a moose.”
“Can I shoot that?”
“Not with that.” He takes her rifle, carefully settling it on the ground next to them, and hands over the one he’s been using. “This is a bigger caliber. It’s gonna kick more, so I’m gonna keep my hand on your shoulder.”
She nods. “Okay. Shut up now so I can focus.”
Tommy presses a hand into her shoulder. He’s firm enough to brace her against the kick, but he doesn’t press in too close otherwise. She’s glad for that. It’s still distracting to have people touch her who aren’t Joel and she doesn’t want to be distracted right now.
She takes a deep breath in. Steady hands, steady breath. She lines the shot up in the scope, remembering Tommy’s lessons on where to shoot. She doesn’t want this thing to be able to run off on her because she was a sh*tty shot.
Slow breath out, and she squeezes the trigger.
She doesn’t flinch.
The rifle does kick more than she’s used to, and she’s glad to have Tommy’s steadying hand against her shoulder.
She stares through the scope, panting. The moose thing has dropped and she doesn’t think it’s moving.
“Well, shee-it,” Tommy says, not whispering anymore. “Will you look at that?”
She looks over at him. “That’s thing’s kind of big.”
He laughs. “Ellie, honey, that’s an easy thousand pounds of moose right there.”
“How much do deer weigh?”
“Couple hundred, usually.”
Oh. Okay, that’s pretty f*cking good then.
“Great job,” Tommy says and gives her a quick, squeezing hug around the shoulders. It surprises her, but she doesn’t mind it. “C’mon, let’s go check him out.”
It’s even bigger up close, and it’s definitely dead. There’s barely a blood trail, too.
“Right through the lungs and the heart,” Tommy says, examining it. “Really good shot, kid.”
She knows that’s the best way to shoot an animal, because it’s the most likely to kill them fast. It’s not her favourite thing, but they’re not doing it to be cruel or something. There are bears around Jackson, and wolves, and she knows both of those would eat her. And they wouldn’t try to make sure it didn’t hurt.
She’s glad that she got a good shot so it didn’t suffer, but she’s also going to enjoy eating this thing, and she’s okay with both those things being true.
Turns out, Ginny shot a buck, too. Ellie’s happy for her, but her moose is way cooler. Both will be really good for Jackson, but especially the giant ass moose. She’ll get to claim a good amount for their own freezer, since she hunted it, but a lot of it will go to the communal kitchen, and it’ll make a lotof meals. It’ll go a long way to keeping everyone fed over winter.
She bitched, like a whole lot, when Maria made her help out more this year with harvest and canning － though seeing Joel in an apron made it worth it － but that and helping that cow be butchered helped. It isn’t magic or anything, but nothing is hidden here. She could go work a shift at the canteen if she wanted, even, at any time. She doesn’t want, because that sounds awful, but she could. She could follow her moose from bullet to butcher to stove to table.
That helps, somehow.
She’s impatient on the ride home. It’s a little slower than the trip out, since the horses are dragging both animals behind them, all wrapped up.
The closer they get to the gate, the more antsy she gets. They radioed ahead to let the guards know they were coming, but she’s probably going to have to wait to see Joel, she tells herself. He’s busy, so he probably isn’t waiting for her to come back. He has work and stuff, and it’s not like he even knew exactly when they were coming back.
As soon as the gate opens, she sees him.
Ellie laughs happily and jumps off her horse, passing the reins off to the first person who takes them. She doesn’t even notice who. She runs towards Joel and jumps at him, throwing her arms around his neck. She f*cking missedhim.
Joel wraps her up in probably the biggest hug she’s ever had in her life. “Hey,” he says, and presses a kiss to her forehead, his hand gently cradling the back of her head. “Hey. I love you, too.”
He says it kind of in a rush, but Ellie doesn’t care. It’s the best thing she’s ever heard. She never expected to hear it. Not the real words. She didn’t say it expecting something from him. She just wanted him to know how she felt. If he couldn’t say it back, that was okay because… well.
She knew already.
He tells her in other ways. Tea made from plants he spent ages finding in the woods when she couldn’t eat. Food on his plate that he didn’t even like, so she could steal it when her own food didn’t feel safe. Once in the middle of winter when she was having a bad week and she hadn’t really eaten in days, he left her with Maria and went out to the lake to ice fish. He came home half-frozen, dragged her into the kitchen, cleaned a fish in front of her and then cooked it and sat with her until she ate.
The way he’s surprised when she hugs him, but then he hugs her back like he never wants to let go, the way he lets her fall asleep on him when they watch movies, the way he lets her invade his space over and over and over. It’s the hand on her back when she has a nightmare, the hand gently nudging her away to encourage her to go off with her friends, the hand holding hers tight when she feels like she could float away.
Her bedroom ceiling, sanded smooth and painted so she’d have a fresh canvas to paint the sky. Seven chickens in their backyard that he never even thought to say no to. Embarrassing conversations with Maria about her clothes because he found the one other person in the world who cares about Ellie wearing warm enough clothes. The kitten she barely had to ask for. The tapes and the books and the movies, the things he brings her that he knows she’ll like because he knows her so well.
It wasn’t time that did it.
She knew. But sometimes her brain is a liar. So it’s good to hear.
“Did you shoot a deer?” Joel asks into her hair.
A giggle bubbles up in her throat, but she bites it back. “No.”
“Well, there’s always next time, kiddo.”
She hears the noise at the gate and pulls back just as her moose is dragged through. “I shot that, though.”
It’s a toss-up if he’s more surprised by the whole love thing, or the moose.
There’s a bunch of talking after that. Tommy comes over to talk to Joel and reaches to hug him. Ellie starts to move away to give them room for it, but Tommy ducks in too fast, squishing her between the two of them while she makes outraged noises and pretends it secretly isn’t kind of fun.
He moves before she starts to feel overwhelmed.
Tommy’s kind of good at the uncle thing.
She stays close to Joel while they talk, his arm around her shoulders while she leans against him. She did really f*cking good this week. Almost three days apart. She could do it again. She’s pretty sure she could do longer.
She doesn’t want to, just yet, so she knows she won’t have to. Eventually, when she’s older, when the dark places in her head have retreated a little more, but not for now. But she’d like to go on more hunting trips with Tommy. And she thinks she’s going to ask to start doing patrol training, too. She isn’t quite ready for that, but Joel will freak out anyways and it’ll take a while to convince him, so by the time she does, she’ll probably be ready. He’ll probably insist on being the one to take her anyways.
She feels safe. And that’ll make it easier to be brave.
“Alright,” Tommy says eventually. “Got your kid home safe and sound. I’m gonna head home and see mine.”
The vast majority of the time, Maria is the most sensible person Ellie has ever met. She’s logical and practical and blunt and that’s why Ellie likes her. There’s no bullsh*t with her.
But she has a single superstition, and it’s that when Tommy leaves town, she will not meet him at the gate. The only time she’s ever snapped at Ellie was when he was late and Ellie asked if she wanted to go wait for him there. She said she wouldn’t be able to handle seeing him be carried in if something happened.
Ellie doesn’t judge. Everyone’s got a thing.
“He’s good,” Joel says. “Taught him to smoke cigars and shoot pool while you were gone.”
Ellie cackles at the surprised look on Tommy’s face. She loves when Joel comes out with a stupid joke like that.
“’Bout my turn to be the fun uncle who doesn’t say no, isn’t it?” Joel asks, grinning. He pulls Ellie in a little tighter and she tries not to visibly melt. “Thanks for lookin’ out for her. For real.”
“Always will,” Tommy says and does one of those weird dude shoulder pats.
Ellie says goodbye to him, and then to Seth and Ginny, who promises to make her favourite dinner the next day. She won’t lie and say she doesn’t enjoy the praise. It’s a really f*cking good moose.
“Alright,” Joel says eventually. “Time to head home, I think. You stink.”
“Youstink,” she replies, like she hasn’t been sleeping in one of his shirts because it smells like him.
She presses in against his side as they walk home, leaning her head on his shoulder. She yawns.
“Tired?” he asks. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Not bad,” she says. “A little rough here and there. Tommy snores worse than you do.” She shrugs. “Just got up early.”
“Well, take a shower, then maybe you can catch a couple more hours of sleep.”
“I’m barely even tired.”
“Mhm.”
The hot shower she takes is really f*cking nice. Especially washing the smell of smoke out of her hair. And all the dirt off. She’s honestly not sure how she got so filthy.
By the time she’s clean and the hot water is almost gone, she’s wrung out and about ready for that nap. And her bed looks nice. There’s clean sheets on it, which there definitely weren’t before she left. She also noticed all the dishes are clean, the living room has been vacuumed, and the kitchen is freshly mopped.
But there’s another bed that sounds nicer.
Joel’s in his room, puttering around and trying to look like he has things to do.
“How’d you sleep?” she asks, crawling over to her side. His sheets and blankets are suspiciously tidy. Not freshly washed, like the ones on her bed, but like he straightened them out so evidence of tossing and turning wouldn’t show.
“Alright,” he says, which means not very well.
You missed me, motherf*cker,she thinks, grinning to herself. Just like Tommy missed Nicky.
“Want me to stay for a bit?” Joel asks, like he already isn’t sitting on the side of the mattress.
“Yes, please,” she says.
They both know that means he’ll stay until she wakes up. It also means that he lets her push him around until he’s lying down so she can put her head on his shoulder.
“Did you have a good time?”
She nods, tilting her head into his hand as he starts stroking her hair.
“Good. I’m real proud of you, baby,” Joel says.
“’Cause of the moose?”
“No, you little sh*t, because… because I know that it was hard. To leave.”
To be alone, he doesn’t say.
“Well. Someone had to keep an eye on Tommy.”
Joel chuckles. “Yeah. So, tell me all about it.”
* * *
The first time it snows is a cold, sunny day.
Ellie walks out of the house to go to school, and her first response is to go back to bed. She sits down on the front steps instead.
“Lee!”
Nicky yells her name from across the yard. He’s bundled up in a fluffy snowsuit and chunky little boots. He’s struggling to walk in them. He doesn’t walk too good yet to begin with and it’s honestly pretty funny to watch.
“Hi, little guy,” Ellie says, reaching her hands out to him.
He grabs onto her with wet little mittens.
“Lee, ‘now.”
“Yeah, I see the snow.”
Maria follows him over, a little slower. “Hey, kid. How are you doing?”
Ellie shrugs. She isn’t fully sure.
“No school today,” Maria says.
“I can go.”
“Not just for you.” Maria brushes a bit of snow off the railing and flicks it at her. “You missed it last year. It’s called a snow day. It’s a thing from before. Lots of snow means no school. First real snow is always one.”
“Oh. Huh.” Ellie holds out her hands and Nicky dumps a pile of snow into them. She should probably find some gloves soon. That’s f*cking cold. “What happens?”
Maria grins. “You get the day off. Play. Have fun.”
Ellie brushes the snow from her hands, then tickles Nicky under the chin with her cold fingers. He giggles and ducks away from her, running over to Maria’s side and grabbing her leg.
“I can take you for a run instead if you need it,” Maria offers. “Tommy will be home pretty soon. Or Joel can watch Nicky.”
Ellie inhales. “No. Not today.”
They eased down on that since she got stabbed and all, but she has a feeling they’ll have to increase it again. As much it pisses her off to admit it, because running is the f*cking worst, it does help.
Today, she feels… shaky. Part of her wants to hide in Joel’s bed until spring. Part of her also really wants to spend Nicky’s first snowy day playing with him. She wants to pull the covers over her head and cry for a while. She wants to find Tommy and bother him about the rink thing again, because Joel spent two days with her combing the warehouse until they finallyfound those f*cking skates.
“I think I just need a couple minutes,” she says.
“Take your time.”
A few minutes later, Joel comes out and sits on the steps next to her. He hands her a mug of tea and wraps his arm around her shoulders.
“Hey, sweet girl,” he says, brushing a kiss against her temple. “How’s this morning treatin’ you?”
“Do you have the day off, too?” Ellie asks instead of answering.
“That I do.”
He might not, actually. Or he might not have been supposed to, even with the snow, but he’s not gonna leave her alone today. People let him get out of stuff when Ellie isn’t doing well. Of course, Joel is the kind of person who covers patrols when others are sick or gets out of bed in the middle of the night to board up a broken window because a tree branch smashed through it, or the dozen other little things he does to take care of people.
Joel takes care of her first, then Tommy and Nicky and Maria, but taking care of people is what he does.
Sometimes taking care of people means blood and bullets and broken bones. It might not have before, but Ellie’s never lived in a world like that. She’s not gonna sit here expecting everyone else to try to live up to some standard from when people didn’t eat each other.
She leans against Joel, soaking in his warmth. Furnaces, all of them. “I’m not going back to bed.”
“Good.” He gives her a gentle squeeze. “Why don’t you go put another layer on, and then we could teach Nicky how to build a snowman?”
“What’s a snowman?”
“Pretty much what it says on the tin, kiddo. You make a person out of snow. Button eyes, carrot nose, that kind of thing.”
“Oh, like that song. The one about the weird guy who kidnaps a bunch of kids.”
Joel makes a slightly choked noise. “Frosty the Snowman?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“You’re a such a weird kid.”
“You love it.”
Joel smiles into her hair. She can’t see it, but she can feel it the same way she can feel him warm against her side. “Yeah, I do.”
“Me too,” she says, and it doesn’t really make sense, but they both know what she means.
They’ve been saying it a little more. It still makes her nervous. She still tends to blurt it out right before she leaves. But whenever she comes home, Joel makes sure to catch her and say it back. He whispers it at night, sometimes, when she’s almost asleep, a brush of words like the brush of a kiss against her head, soft and warm.
“Okay,” Ellie says. She finishes her mug of tea with one last drink. “I’m gonna get some gloves and maybe another layer of pants, and then you and me are gonna teach Nicky how to make the best f*cking snowman Jackson has ever seen.”
“I’ll be here,” Joel agrees. “Put a hat on, too.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
She heads inside and drops her mug into the sink, taking a moment to breathe where no one can see her.
It’s hard. Winter f*cking sucks sometimes. And the snow makes her want to go awayagain. She thinks, maybe, that feeling won’t ever really leave her. But she’s not going to let it win. It’ll come with the snow, and her family will help her fight it because she has one of those now and they love her as much as she loves them.
She’ll never get used to that. In the good way. Riley was right about it feeling special, but she was wrong about what made a family. She was wrong about what a family should want from you.
Ellie exhales, feeling some of the tightness in her chest loosen. She’s better than she was last year, but she does a quick five-things just to center herself anyways.
The half-carved bear on the kitchen table that Joel was working on last night, alongside the ugliest fish to ever exist. She’s still not very good at whittling. Her sketches on the fridge next to Nicky’s crayon scribbles. She’s gonna teach him how to draw when he gets older. The cannister of mint tea on the counter, for her bad stomach days. The basket of eggs next to it, for Joel’s bad stomach days. The stack of long underwear on the counter she didn’t notice this morning.
She snorts. Maria and Joel have been scheming again, apparently. She grabs a pair and heads into the laundry room to change into them. They’re softer than a lot of the ones she’s worn, like they’ve been washed a lot. It’ll be nice not to itch all winter. When she pulls her jeans on over them, they press at her stomach a little and she has to adjust them so the waistband doesn’t irritate her scar. She adds another pair of socks, warm and thick, and digs out a hat.
Through the cracked window of the laundry room, she can hear Nicky giggling. Maria and Joel are talking about something, but she can’t make out the words. Probably more about her. She doesn’t mind so much. It’s nice they agree about something, if only that she’s never wearing enough layers. There are also very concerned chicken noises going on outside. She should probably go make sure Nicky isn’t trying to get one of them to let him hug it again, the little menace.
The air smells like snow, sharp and cold. She tucks her nose into the collar of the shirt she’s wearing, one of Joel’s she’s stolen, and inhales the smell of home.
There is no taste of blood in her teeth.
