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Ethan’s eyes are tired but they don’t want to shut. Another night of watching the slow bleed of the sky through his window—blue to pinky-orange to not-quite-black to orangey-pink to blue again—and wishing that he could be a little kid, asleep in an instant after days of running around and never quite knowing how bad things really were.
There’s just so much to worry about now: it’s not just his problems he has to take care of (and even that would be enough to ensure that he’d never sleep again) but Lex and Hannah, whose situation is so far beyond ‘problem family’ that it would take years of therapy to even scrape through the first five years of Lex’s life.
Sometimes he asks himself, if he knew all the shit that Lex and Hannah would come with, if he knew that he was their only real support system (there had been that teacher—Mr. Houston?—once, but he’s practically a hermit since his wife died and so it’s back to just Ethan looking out for the Foster kids), if he knew that he would be giving up the tentative stability that a life in Hatchetfield might offer for him (it wouldn’t have been much, but he could have carried on being a mechanic like his dad, and if the big car companies had kept forgetting that Hatchetfield was a place, he might not even have lost the job) would he still have said yes when she asked him out?
(The answer is yes, every time, because the—rarer and rarer—occasions he can get Lex to smile, and every time he can watch Hannah jump around a room, fizzy with excitement, are the only good things that Hatchetfield has ever given him. His whole life is hinged on those moments, and everything he does goes into making the next one appear faster).
The nights when his eyes don’t shut—and he doesn’t remember exactly when but at some point in his early teens this became more nights than not and he’s never been able to go back—he plans. California seems sometimes—too often, but he can’t tell Lex this because she has nothing else to hope for—like a pipe dream. It’s the only way out, the way they’ll be saved, but it’s also so far away. They’re nowhere near to having the money for it. The best hope they have is Lex’s job at Toyzone. Not the wages (of course, not the wages. Frank Pricely, like every other store owner pays as little money as he can manage) but through selling some of the merchandise on their own: popular toys that are soon sold out, defects which they can push onto obsessive collectors, toys only produced in America that they can sell overseas.
So far they’ve never managed more than about $20 on any of these, and they’ve had to start keeping the money at Ethan’s house because Lex’s mom takes anything she can get her hands on. He hates hiding things from his dad. Sure he isn’t perfect, but Ethan knows that things could be a lot worse, and in a better world, he’d be able to let his dad in on it. But this is not a perfect world and no adult has ever seemed to understand that Lex and Hannah need to get away from their mom, need to get out of Hatchetfield, and he doesn’t want to chance his dad trying to stop them.
Tonight he counts up the money again, coin by coin, bill by bill. It’s always the same amount. It’s always not even close to enough. But still he counts it, as if some benevolent stranger, sensing their plight, might have broken into his house to add some money to the pile. He puts it away (in a locked box, in the back of his wardrobe, under a pile of old and intentionally awful-smelling t-shirts) and gets back into bed.
He’s so tired. But his eyes still won’t shut.
—
When they get the Wiggly doll, when they find a buyer who’s willing to pay $7,000 for it (for a fucking doll?), in those perfect few minutes, Ethan remembers what it is to feel awake. The constant dull pressure around his eyes lifts. Lex is grinning, Hannah is jumping around the room as if she’s eaten a bag of pure sugar.
California, its sunny beaches, its endless possibilities, its distance from all the shit they have to deal with here, is real. It’s real. They’ll be okay. Lex will be an actress, he’ll find a job doing… something (it doesn’t matter what he does, he’s never had an ambition for something the way Lex has, he just wants to survive) and Hannah can go to school (can you enroll someone in a school if you’re not their parent? It doesn’t matter, they can teach her themselves, Lex is smart). It’ll be okay.
The day seems to shine, even though it’s barely late enough for the sun to be up—maybe that’s California bleeding into even Hatchetfield—even when Lex is snapping at Hannah for pretending to smoke weed he can see that, for once, the smile doesn’t want to leave her face.
They only have to get through this—one day at the mall, then going home to sell the doll—and they’ll be done. Leaving. Fucking gone. Even Hannah’s assertion that it’ll be a bad day, her refusal to wear the backpack, annoying as it is (and it isn’t that annoying, not with the simple solution of making up a stupid story about his hat), can’t make this bad. (He ignores the fact that Hannah has been right before—not just that, he can’t think of a time when she’s been wrong—reservations can’t do anything in the face of hope like this).
He’s more awake than he’s been in months. He thinks this is what happiness feels like
—
Ethan’s eyes are tired. He thinks they might finally be closing. Hannah had been right again, of course, and he wishes that he’d been telling the truth about the magic hat because he doesn’t know if there’s anything else that can save her now.
The worst thing is that they were after the fucking doll. (Seriously, a group of grown adults driven to the point of murder over a fucking doll?) Even if Hannah and Lex do make it out of there alive (and Lex was working in the toy store so what chance does she have?) they won’t even be able to make it to California, the two of them. They’ll be stuck, with their mother, and not even Ethan will be there for them this time. They’ll be on their own again. In Hatchetfield.
His entire body aches, and with all the blood, he really doesn’t like his chances. Maybe it’d be better if he’d kept the doll with him, let them take it. Then they’d be less likely to go after Hannah. But then there’d be no hope either, no hope at all of a better life, and where would they be without that?
At least, he thinks, he’s managed to get Hannah a few extra seconds. If she hides in the playplace long enough, waits for whatever the hell is going on to die down, if she has the good sense to get rid of that fucking doll, maybe she’ll get out alive. Maybe. Hopefully.
The people who were beating him up—his murderers—have gone now—they checked him over for a doll, a doll they didn’t find, and it’s hard not to think that that means he’s dying (because that’s what’s happening, he’s sure at this point) for no fucking reason at all. Sure he died to protect Hannah, but these guys didn’t even get anything from killing him. It was pointless.
At some point, seconds or hours later, he sees two people standing over him. One, he’s pretty sure, is Lex’s shop class teacher, and the other might be that ginger nurse who was nice to him when he was 6 years old and dislocated his shoulder falling off his bike. And then his eyes close for a bit (a couple hours maybe?) and it’s Lex standing over him, and he has to tell her, he has to tell her that they’re going to get to California, because he can’t let her down, he can’t. He can’t be the reason she doesn’t smile again.
He’s so tired and, as his eyes close again, he thinks he might finally be allowed to sleep. He is, but it doesn’t last long.
Ethan’s eyes are so tired. But some monster using his image won’t let them close.