Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Going back to school goes from being something they talk about to something Ellie’s doing. 

There’s a laundry list of reasons why it’s too soon, why she doesn’t want to do it, why it feels like a bad idea. She presses her lips together and nods once when Joel tells her that’s the plan. 

As it is, she’s already behind. Now it’s been a whole year after her abysmal performance the first go-round in the eighth grade. She was usually a halfway decent student, at least in most subjects, so it was going to be fine. Everything would be fine.

And Joel said, “You gotta get back to school, kiddo,” and she wasn’t going to fight with him. It still took him twice as long to get up and down the stairs, and he winced in pain when he stretched his arms out to fold the sheets, and she heard him up late at night on the phone with Maria or Marlene or whoever else talking about custody and forms and fees. Joel was still doing so much. The least Ellie could do was go the fuck to school for seven hours a day and get out of his hair. 

It starts with a supply run at the local Walmart. Mid-November means they’ve long since missed the time of year when the back right corner of shops was dedicated to 10 cent folders and one dollar black and white composition notebooks. They’ve missed two for one graphic T’s and overpriced, trendy water bottles for 10% off. 

Ellie walks down the first aisle that looks promising and forgets all the other shit. She stands and stares at lines of colored pencils, black Bic pens, and three-to-a-pack-pink erasers. She moves to grab absolutely nothing.

Instead, she’s stuck in the memory of a pink eraser on the edge of her desk during a test. The teacher walking by knocks it off. He bends down, makes a point to stop and rub his thumb along the blunted edge of the PaperMate eraser. He holds Ellie’s gaze the whole time he’s doing it. He smiles when he places it back on her desk. He walks past her and trails his thumb over the jutting edge of Ellie’s shoulder blade as he goes.

Her right hand is numb. It itches. It shakes. She can’t feel it. She can’t stop not feeling it. 

Fingers flexing and extending, the press of her nails against her palms. She can’t feel it. Sometimes she can’t feel anything at all. Right now…right now, she’s feeling too much, and she doesn’t know what it is, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she’s got to go back to school because it’s the only thing Joel’s asked of her this whole damn time and she just-

“Hey.” His voice is hard, demanding her attention. That usually means he’s been trying for a little while. 

That brings her back to herself, just a bit. She’s returned enough to feel how minimal the oxygen she’s getting into her lungs is and how there’s a jackhammer in her chest and how it’s not just her right hand that’s shaking; it’s her whole fucking body.

“Ellie. It’s okay, baby. Look at me. It’s okay.”

The lights are too bright, that’s all she can think when she tries to look at Joel like he asked. Joel’s smart enough not to reach for her, not right now. But she can’t hold herself up anymore, not with the trembling and the not breathing starting to go to her head. The world is tilting, dark and swirling and uneven. There are spots in her vision. It’s like snow, falling before her eyes as sand shifted beneath the soles of her shoes, and the whole world was dark—so, so dark. Nothing before her, nothing behind. Just a body at her feet. Just blood gathering by the toes of her shoes. And then Joel. Joel’s voice. Joel’s hands. Joel’s promises. 

She’s sitting on the floor of a Walmart at 3pm on a Saturday. There are tears that have not fallen from her eyes. There are pins and needles that have taken up permanent residence in her right hand. Her airway is tight, closing. She has school on Monday morning. 

Joel’s kneeling there in front of her. He waits, waits until she sees him there even though he’s probably been down on the floor as long as she has. He says, “There you are,” when their eyes meet. He says, “It’s okay, kiddo,” as he brushes the hair back from her face. He says, “I’m right here, baby girl,” as she launches herself at him and holds tight, holds hard enough that he couldn’t possibly let her go.

//

It was a warning; that’s what Ellie thinks when Joel walks her home before noon on the following Monday. They should have taken the fucking warning. 

Three hours was all she fucking made it. She’d managed better in Boston, for fuck’s sake. But in Boston, she was hardly ever in her body, never quite inhabiting her mind. It’s different here, different with Joel fighting so hard to bring her back to herself. 

She’s had three therapy sessions with her new therapist, Loretta, so far. They talked about dissociation. They talked about panic attacks. They talked about control and fear and PTSD and how sometimes her brain was protecting itself because it had gotten so used to there just always, always being danger. 

Three hours into the school day and the nameless, faceless kid sitting next to her was saying, “I think there’s something wrong with the new girl,” while it felt like her whole head was slipping underwater.

Three hours until the teacher tried to place a hand on Ellie’s back to lead her to the nurse’s office, and Ellie had freaked out, screaming, howling, for everyone to get the fuck away from her.

Three hours until she sat on a paper-lined table and sniffled into the phone line as Joel swore he was on his way; he’d be right there; it would be okay. She barely heard him. She held onto what little she could decipher. 

Once they make it home, Joel prepares her hot chocolate and washes her face for her, like she was a baby, an invalid, a traumatized girl in a near stranger’s powder room with blood stained to her face—they sit at the kitchen table. There’s a blanket around her shoulders that she knows she hasn’t wrapped around herself. 

Her hair is braided down her back.

“I can’t do it,” she says even though it peels away something protective, even though it leaves her exposed and aching. Joel asked her to do one thing, and she’d only made it three fucking hours.

The house around them is still hazy, fuzzy. There’s a dull pounding just behind her eyes. There’s no sensation in her right hand. 

Joel’s face is in her direct line of vision. He doesn’t say anything, and Ellie is sure he’s going to make her go anyway. He’s going to tell her he can’t take having her around every damn day anymore. He’s going to pick up the phone, call Marlene, and say deal’s off. She wasn’t supposed to be this much damn work. She wasn’t supposed to need so much or be so horribly, irreparably broken. She was-

“Okay.”

Ellie blinks. The world becomes a little bit clearer. 

Joel’s hands are wiping at her cheeks. Did she cry again? She doesn’t remember crying again. “If that’s what you need, then that’s what we’ll do.”

And a part of her wants to take it back, stuff it all deep down, shove it somewhere cavernous and dark and obscured from the light of day. Because Joel’s done so much. He does so damn much every single fucking day. All he asks is that she goes the fuck to school. But she can’t. 

She’s so stupid.

Right now, though, she just feels cared for. 

Joel cradles her against him. Somehow they’ve ended up on the couch. Ellie doesn’t remember going to the couch. He shouldn’t be holding her like this. It has to be hurting his still healing body. 

Ellie turns into his chest and sobs, never quite getting out the apology that is just building and building inside of her.

//

It’s all fine and well for a little while after that. Joel makes her play a round of the 5 through 1 exercise with him. He makes her dinner and waits at the table while she pushes stuffed peppers around on her plate. He must have cut them up for her. Ellie doesn’t remember cutting them up.

But she eats, and that helps. She drinks a glass of water, and that really helps. They sit on the couch, and Joel knows now that when she’s like this, it’s better to put on something she’s seen before, and there’s Lilo and Stitch still in the DVD player from last night. Once Ellie remembers again that she has a body and it moves when she tells it to, she scrambles as close to Joel as she can. With her cheek pressed against his chest, she feels the building of a laugh in her chest when Stitch plays Elvis songs like a record player. 

Ellie plays the game again all by herself, just in her head. 

Five things she can see: The brightly colored television, her blue speckled mug on the coffee table, her shoes that Joel had carried downstairs for her, her backpack with duct tape still around the straps, a guitar just sitting in the corner, waiting for her to learn how to play it.

Four things she can touch: The rise and fall of Joel’s chest beneath her cheek, the soft fleece of the forest green blanket wrapped around her body, the buttons of Joel’s shirt that twisted against her fingers when she reached up to fiddle with them, the arms that tightened against her without question.

Three things she can hear: Joel’s quiet laughter at the funny parts, the deep rumble of Jumba’s voice as he talks about rather improbable cartoon alien science, the beating of her heart still lingering in her ears.

Two things she can smell: Hot chocolate that had probably dried on her upper lip and Joel’s scent, which was somehow sanded down wood even though he hadn’t worked a single day since she’s met him, coupled with stale coffee and lemony laundry detergent and a hint of freshly cooked ground beef. 

One thing she can taste: The apology that clings to the edge of her tongue, begging to be said aloud.

//

They go to bed. Ellie sleeps in Joel’s bed right now. It’s stupid, just like everything else she does. But she can’t sleep alone, no matter how much she tells herself that she should. She needs to. Night comes, and she can’t. 

Joel says he doesn’t mind. Ellie knows she’s fucked up his sleep schedule almost every night since she’d climbed into the back of his pickup truck. It’s no secret that he’s exhausted, and it’s no surprise because Ellie is exhausting. 

She can’t sleep, having dozed off on the couch earlier into the deep kind of sleep only a freshly resolved panic attack can drag her into; she’s wide awake now. The thoughts are threatening to overtake her mind even as her earlier conversation with Joel comes back to her bit by bit. She had apologized. She had told him how stupid she knew that she was. She had insisted she didn’t mean to be like this.

Joel had promised her over and over that it was okay; it wasn’t her fault.

Of course, he said other stuff too. Ellie just couldn’t remember those parts right now. But she remembers the first bits, so that’s what she holds onto as she’s lying there beside him feeling so, so stupid.

And to think, a month and a half ago, Ellie was swearing up and down to Marlene that she really wasn’t that much work. She would take care of things herself, be no burden whatsoever. And now here she was with Joel, not even able to take her own shoes off or wash her own face clean or make it through a whole school day without going total psycho.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. The words are getting louder in her head, more demanding, and no repetition of Joel’s assurances is loud enough to block them out.

She’s such an idiot, not able to get through one fucking day without spiraling out from nothing at all. Why hadn’t she done her 5 through 1 exercise then? Why hadn’t she pinched the inside of her arm or done the breathing and counting thing Loretta had gone over with her just three days before? Why did she have to totally lose her shit and ruin everything? Why would Joel want her when she was like this?

And better yet, why wouldn’t Joel punish her for her gross incompetence? He was all gentle hands and soothing words, and Ellie was never going to learn a single damn lesson if he kept it up. Why would she bother to hold herself together if she knew there was always someone to pick her back up?

No, it wasn’t right. She slips from the bed, knowing she’s never going to sleep, never going to get better, never going to learn if she doesn’t do something about this. 

Joel’s fast asleep, not at all disturbed by her weight leaving the mattress beside him. Of course not. She’s worn him down until he was absolutely drained every waking moment of his long, endless days of trying to take care of her. A job that was advertised as being effortless. 

Marlene wasn’t even going to know Ellie was there, not unless she wanted to. And that had been Ellie’s hope, that she could make herself scarce enough, mature enough, important enough, that Marlene might decide she wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe she would like to hear a pun today. Maybe she would like to sit down to dinner together. Maybe she would like to enjoy a weekend star-gazing in the backyard. 

Obviously, that plan hadn’t really panned out. But that didn’t mean Ellie had ever intended to go from being virtually unheard, unseen, unnoticed, to taking over every single aspect of Joel Miller’s life. Helping her eat and sleep and breathe and stay inside of her own body. She’s more effort than a fucking newborn. 

And he kept saying it was okay. He kept insisting he didn’t mind. He just kept reassuring her that it wasn’t anything he hadn’t signed up for. Ellie thinks back on those early days, though, and she’s pretty sure that was downright false advertising. 

Today was supposed to be her first day of school.

Today had been nothing but a disaster.

Standing in the bathroom, Ellie stares at herself in the harsh light hanging over the mirror. She looks tired, pale. There’s snot crusted under her nose, which is downright disgusting, and her eyes are all bloodshot. She’s less skinny than she’d been a couple months ago. Eating wasn’t always easy, but it was easier when someone made you three square meals a day and always kept the best snacks on hand. It was easier now that she’d learned what it meant to be starving and how it felt different from just being hungry. 

One thing. Joel had asked Ellie to do one measly thing. She was supposed to go to school. Pass the fucking eighth grade. It wasn’t that much to ask. Write a shitty book report, diagram a sentence, spout some dates about the Revolutionary War, talk about a few laws of physics, and take out some Algebraic equations. 

All it took was the sound of chalk tripping across the board in her science classroom, the one class Ellie liked the most even, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. 

Stupid.

And Joel’s walking her home when he’s still got a boot on his foot because it was broken after trying to drive her dumb ass to Yellowstone because she’d been as stupid and broken and out of it in those days as she had been today. She had to get her act together already.

There’s always been one way Ellie’s been taught a lesson. Sure, there were the foster parents that liked time outs and the group homes that punished through extra hours of counseling or confiscation of “privileges.” 

But Ellie knew how she learned best, what was most efficient. And Joel wasn’t going to do it, at least not over something like this.

It feels demented, the thing that she used to fear so badly now being the thing that she needs, but the knowledge of it being fucked up doesn’t shake the feeling from her bones. Besides, it wasn’t the worst punishment. It became one of the better ones once she was living with the Suttons. 

Right now, Ellie’s caught somewhere between an errant, frantic onslaught of remorse and fear and guilt followed by a rushing calm of how this was the right thing. This was how she would learn.

Standing in front of the mirror, staring eye to eye with the dumb, needy, useless girl in front of her, Ellie slaps herself across the face hard enough she might just leave a mark, leave a ringing in her ears, leave a memory yawning awake in the back of her mind. And, finally, something feels a little bit closer to right. 

She does it a few more times. She does it until her neck aches as badly as her face stings. She does it until she thinks maybe she’s learned a goddamn lesson.

//

It doesn’t happen again until three weeks later. 

Mid-December, Joel’s got a bootless foot and a new, used truck in the driveway, and he restarted work last Thursday. He only goes for half days. 

Ellie hasn’t been alone much since they first came to Austin together. 

She has therapy on Thursdays. Joel comes home to take her. He sits in on these days, and she wants to talk about how his leaving her at home this morning stirred up this undeserved but familiar panic. She wants to talk about how she knows he can’t never leave her again, but she doesn’t know how to be a person if he’s not next to her. She wants to talk about how she knows she’s a fucking idiot because she’s fourteen fucking years old, and she’d spent most of those years wishing she could just be alone, could just be by herself, could just be somewhere that no one else was around to hurt her. And now she maybe, just a little bit, hurt herself.

Instead, they discuss adjustments and change and talk around the issue without Ellie ever saying what was the issue. She feels a little better, but not really. 

A week later, Joel works in the afternoon instead of the morning. Ellie’s getting a little better about him leaving. There’s a speaker in the kitchen and a family Spotify account logged into on her phone. She plays music the whole time Joel is gone, carrying the speaker from room to room so the quiet can’t ever envelope her and tuck her away from the rest of the world she’s supposed to be living in.

She’s theoretically doing her school work. A lot of evenings, she ends up doing it on the couch in front of the TV. It’s just so hard to decipher a fucking worksheet when she’s trying to convince her brain that no one was going to come break down the door and take her away while simultaneously reassuring herself that Joel would twist the key in the lock and come home, exactly how he was supposed to. 

Before the whole going back to work thing, Ellie was really considering sleeping in her own damn bedroom. She’s put that on hold momentarily. She takes her speakers and her school books and her favorite blanket draped over the back of the couch and carts everything up to the bedroom she really just does not spend enough time in.

It’s a nice room. They’d spent time cleaning it out, fixing it up. Like everything else, it was kind of slow going, with Joel being injured and Ellie being kind of useless. But still, she liked the new coat of mint green paint, and she liked the band posters and Mortal Kombat artwork and the Savage Starlight covers they’d nailed to her walls. She liked the shelves that were built in where Joel had propped a framed picture up and a 2 for 1 coupon at the milkshake place down the street that still wouldn’t open until April. A promise, he said when he put it there.

And there was her dresser. Joel had worked on it in the shed even when he probably wasn’t supposed to be. He sanded the whole thing down and did some woodwork with this fancy little tool to put swirls into the edges. He’d painted it a deep, deep blue, and then he gave her tiny little paintbrushes and stencils and little vials of white and golden yellow paint. He told her to go to town. She had. For two weeks, Ellie went out to that shed for hours every day and just sat and painted careful, meticulous constellations.

Her right hand was still wonky. It bothered her, sometimes more than others, but she swapped over to her left and just made it work. Joel told her that was “Mighty impressive,” but Ellie rolled her eyes ‘cause all it really was, is a necessity. 

Together, they’d carried the thing up all fourteen stairs. Joel situated it against her wall. All those drawers were left open and waiting for her to fill. Up until that point, she’d spent most of her life with everything she owned in a single backpack. Half of the clothes she’d been given weren’t ever even hers to claim. They were loaners, worn by the girls who had been there before and meant for the ones who would come after.

Joel took her clothes shopping shortly after she’d moved in. It had been a disaster. Ellie didn’t know what to do. Joel didn’t really, either.

They’d walked around half a dozen stores until Joel stopped, picking up a green shirt with skateboarding T-rexes and said, “How ‘bout this?” They’re standing in the boys’ children section of Target. The extra large size would probably technically be too big on her. It’s not tight or fitted or cropped. Just a button down with a collar and everything. It would work with jeans. 

“Perfect.” 

Shopping got a little easier after that. Ellie stopped going to the “juniors” department she was supposed to be shopping in for anything besides jeans and shorts. They hit some thrift stores. Ellie helps herself to Joel’s closet. Slowly, her wardrobe fills out into something that feels like her and the drawers of her specially sanded, painted, and designed dresser begin to fill. 

It’s nice.

It’s expensive.

Ellie knows she’s not cheap. She knows Joel’s dumping loads on shit like therapy and art lessons and her cell phone and probably the legal fees of adopting her. She’s not cheap, not unobtrusive, not really helpful in any way.

She lays on the floor of her bedroom, the one she never sleeps in, and stares at the ceiling and just kind of gets lost in her mind.

It’s different than dissociating; she’d talked to Loretta about it. Her thoughts were frequently jumbled, often just darting all over the place in an unorganized, frantic fashion. Sometimes it helped to just…let them run wild. It’s not unheard of that they take her someplace ugly, which is when she’s supposed to redirect. Because she’s in control of her mind, her mind is not in control of her. She has the power to take her power back, blah blah blah.

Ellie stares at the ceiling, listens to her music, and contemplates how she’s nothing but a nuisance and a really shitty roommate.

It just makes sense, she’s not doing her homework anyway, and Joel would be getting home later than usual. The least she could do was make him dinner. The least she could do is something helpful instead of piling on more work and more expenses and more trouble for him to deal with.

Downstairs she hunts through the fridge and cabinets. Hamburger Helper. Any old idiot could make Hamburger fucking Helper.

Joel’s stove is different from what she’s used to, but Ellie figures it out. She’s not that stupid. Besides, they’ve been watching a lot of Chopped. She’s pretty much a culinary genius by association at this point.

It won’t take long to make, but he’ll be home soon. She turns the heat high, wanting to be done before he walks in the door. If he gets home before she’s finished, he’ll try and jump in. He’ll take over and do it for her when she’s perfectly capable of doing something for him.

It’s all going fine until the ground beef goes from lightly browned to black in the time it takes her to locate the kitchen scissors and open the spice packet that just won’t fucking rip. 

“No, no, no,” Ellie pleads with the minced dead cow in her pan. “Shit. Don’t fucking do this.” She turns the heat down and takes a spatula to move the meat around like she was probably supposed to be doing way more than she had been. Some of the pieces are so burnt they won’t budge at all, cooked right into the pan. “Fuck!” 

It’s manageable. It was all going to be okay. She could still fix this. Sure, they were out of ground beef, but maybe there was something else she could use. Just start over. Joel probably wouldn’t even miss the hamburger meat. And she could scrub the pan until it came clean. Everything always came clean eventually. Everything except the blood stains that still lived in her sweatshirt buried beneath her bed upstairs and the memory of blood leaking out all over her hands and the ragged fear of what was going to happen to her, what she had absolutely no control over because control had been wrestled out of her grip by a man with a gun and a threat and a record that she knew. 

But frying pans, frying pans came fucking clean.

It’s all going to be just fine until the damn fire alarm starts going off. And then nothing is fine at all. 

There’s just enough presence of mind left to turn the burner off, but then all Ellie can do is put her hands over her ears and sink to the ground and rock her body back and forth, back and forth. All she can do is live somewhere bad and ugly and cold in the past while she’s sweating through her T-shirt in the present. The fire alarm rings loud enough to jolt her bones, and she’s fucked up. She’s fucked up. She’s fucked up. And it’s so loud it makes her fuck up feel like the end of the world because she’s done it again.

Ellie rocks her body, and then she slams the back of her head, over and over, into the kitchen cabinet.

The fire alarm keeps ringing. 

“-lie! Ellie, look at me. Shit, Ellie, baby.”

The fire alarm isn’t ringing anymore. It’s still in her ears. It’s still in her head. It’s still in her hand.

Joel. Joel is in front of her. Joel is not touching her except for the palm of his hand now sandwiched between the cabinet and the back of her head. She’s no longer making contact with anything but soft, forgiving flesh.

Fuck. 

“Ellie? Baby, are you okay?” 

The house smells like smoke.

Ellie has just enough forethought to turn her head to the side and vomit all over the kitchen tile.

“Okay. It’s okay.” Joel’s there next to her. Somehow he’s gotten a damp towel. He’s wiping her face. “Come on. Come here. Let’s get you out of here.”

The doors are open, front and back. Joel’s picking her up, something he’s still probably not supposed to be doing, and Ellie catches a disemboweled smoke alarm lying on their kitchen table. 

Outside he lowers them both to the steps on the back porch. There’s no furniture out here. Ellie always wondered why so much of this house didn’t have any furniture. But now there was a white bed frame and a newly built nightstand and a sanded-down dresser painted a dark blue with the patterns of constellations. Now there was a blanket over the back of the couch. Now there was a speaker that could go anywhere in the house at all. 

They should get furniture for the porch. Joel should use his porch. He seems like a porch sort of guy. Probably because he’s old. Old men love porches.

“Ellie?”

Right. Joel.

“Hm?”

It’d be much easier right now to tuck her face away and confront none of this. Not the fact that she can’t so much as cook the world’s most basic dinner, not the fact that she falls apart at the sound of smoke alarms, not the fact that her head was pounding because she’d been smacking the shit out of it for who knows how long because she’d fucked up so bad that she just had to. Not that she kind of wishes she still was.

“Are you okay?”

Joel liked that question. He asked it a lot. He asked it when she used to go weird and quiet in the truck. He asked it after that night when she’d been all bruised up and everything hurt, and she just kept wincing every time she moved. He asked it when he brought her home, and Joel was still hurt way worse than Ellie was, but she was all fucked up in her hand and her head, and he was too good at reading her. 

“I’m sorry.” It comes out like a croak. “I was s-so stupid. I didn’t mean-”

“Shh, baby,” he hushes her. She realizes absently that Joel is rocking her on the porch steps. She realizes too late that it feels like a small child being soothed by their parent. She realizes she’s never quite had this before.

It makes her cry. Useless, stupid, pointless tears. 

“It’s okay, Ellie.” There he goes again. “I ain’t mad, baby. Do you hear me?”

She’s hiccuping, wanting to talk but not sure how the fuck she’s going to get any words out. “B-but dinner is ruined.”

“Jesus, Ellie.”

“I think actually it’s Jesus Christ,” she tries to joke because it’s either that or think about the fact that she one hundred percent just vomited on Joel’s kitchen floor.

There’s a sigh that ruffles the loose hairs by her temple. She thinks Joel’s kissing her there. She closes her eyes, soaks up all the gentleness, the warmth, the goddamn tenderness. He’s still rocking her. “I don’t care ‘bout the food, Ellie.”

Tears prick her eyes. Goddamit, man. She had just moved past the sobbing stage. But she knows what that means. Joel doesn’t care about the food because he cares about her. “So when you said you weren’t mad, you meant…”

“About you banging the shit outta your head, yeah.” He sighs. He kisses her head probably ten times over. It feels funny enough to make Ellie giggle. He does it again. “You can’t do that, Ellie. Do you understand me? I need you to promise me.”

Which makes her burn hot with shame. She thinks about a few weeks earlier when she’d stood in the bathroom and slapped herself around like a fool. She thinks about how the only thing that she could possibly do while that alarm was going off was make sure she was hurting in the exact right kind of way. She thinks about all of the ways she’s just going to fuck up moving forward. 

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she mumbles real miserably against Joel’s chest. She doesn’t want to play the 5 through 1 game because every single category would include something to do with vomit, and that just makes her want to vomit again. So fucking gross.

“Okay, Ellie.” Joel’s kissing her head again. Distantly, Ellie wonders if he’s trying to kiss something better. She tilts her head so he can get it exactly where it hurts the most. “Okay.”

//

She tries to clean up her own puke, but Joel won’t let her. 

Instead, he palpates all around her skull and makes her watch his finger and say the alphabet backward and- “What the fuck are you doing?”

He sighs. “Making sure you don’t have a concussion.” There’s an again hanging in the air. 

Now that Ellie has shown Joel the beauty of Google, she finds him looking up shit all the time. Probably way more than he should. Sometimes, he starts scrolling and then goes upstairs, where she just knows he’s popping one of his PRN anti-anxiety meds. Now tonight, he won’t want to do that, too worried about not being available for her in case her brain starts like, bleeding out or whatever ‘cause she’d scrambled it too hard.

“I’m fine,” she insists at once, pushing up from the kitchen chair he’s got her sitting in. It all feels way too familiar to that night. And, quite frankly, Ellie will go as far out of her way as possible to avoid ever remembering that night at all. 

Joel’s looking at her, and Ellie’s looking at the now clean tile she’d puked all over earlier and then she’s looking at the reconstructed smoke alarm that was hanging back where it was before, and she doesn’t remember when any of it happened.

“Seriously. I’m not concussed. I’m just…” She fades off, not wanting to see the way his face will contort when she says, “fucked up beyond repair.”

But instead, he crosses the room and folds her up in a hug. Except everything’s too raw and aching right now, and Ellie doesn’t want to remember being rocked gently on the porch step. She shrugs out of the embrace. 

“I’m going to bed.”

“Ellie, hold up.”

It’s annoying, how her feet freeze the minute he’s spitting out an instruction at her. But she stops, waits.  Already she’s dreading her next therapy session. This whole incident is sure to be trotted out and put on display for them to work through. Always so much fucking shit to slog through every fucking day. 

It’d be worse if Joel wasn’t doing the same thing that Ellie’s doing. She knows he’s going through it with her. She knows he’s got his own shit that leaves him shaking and horrified and fucked up, just like her. And she doesn’t blame him for it even though he’s always trying to blame himself. It makes her want to burrow further into him. It makes her want to lay her head upon his chest, right over his heart, and insist, we may not be made of the same stuff, but we’re the same sort of people. It’s one more fucked up thing about her mind, how she craves to see her brokenness reflected back at her.

“We gotta talk for a minute.”

Pulling a face, Ellie is only slightly ashamed that she knows exactly what to say to delay this conversation. “Can’t we talk about it tomorrow, Joel? I just…I’m so tired.” Her head hangs. She’s not lying, but she is playing it up. There’s a slight touch of guilt, but not enough to make her back off. 

His hands land on her shoulders. His eyes are boring into the top of her head. Ellie looks up and meets Joel’s gaze. Some random lady at the grocery store told Ellie that she “Had her daddy’s eyes,” which was objectively just a big fucking guess because Ellie had never seen her dad’s eyes, so that lady sure as shit hadn’t either. But still, once Ellie understood it was in reference to Joel, she liked it way more. It was nice, that they looked nothing alike but people would just see them as related anyway. It was nice that there was one part of her that was a little like him that didn’t include psychiatric diagnoses. 

“Are you hurtin’ yourself?” 

And god, Ellie feels a whole different sort of guilty hearing the downright anguish leaking out around those words. She can tell Joel’s trying to cover it up, snuff it out, but that just the idea hurts him so bad that he can’t bite it back. 

Licking her lips, Ellie tries to think how she wants to answer his question. “I didn’t…I wasn’t in my head when I was doing that,” is what she goes with, omitting that one measly night a few weeks ago. Twice does not a habit make. She was not hurting herself. She was getting dealt a little hurt when she deserved it. That was different. “It’s not like that,” she assures him, not really knowing what she means.

“Like…what?”

The question makes her feel all cracked open and exposed, and Ellie hates it. She hates that Joel’s seen her in more states of disrepair than composed. She hates that he knows how to rub her back to get her to sleep after a nightmare and clean her vomit off his kitchen floor and knows not to touch her when she isn’t in her own body but to hold her extra tight once she comes back to it. She hates that she feels more like a collection of broken pieces smashed back together to simulate a whole, actual person instead of getting to be one.

“I don’t fucking know, man.” There’s half of the kitchen between them. The smoke alarm is back on the ceiling. The remnants of burned dinner have been tossed along with the previous contents of Ellie’s stomach. They’re talking about her hurting herself and about how she doesn’t hurt herself, and all she wants to do right now is hurt herself. “It’s nothing.”

Ellie can’t tell Joel that when she fucks up, she needs to hurt to even things back out. She can’t explain that it’s what she knows and what she trusts, and he’s given her so much, but he can’t take this away. 

“I just want to go to bed.”

He’s looking for something in her eyes. Ellie isn’t going to give it to him. 

“My room,” he says. Some nights Ellie likes to pretend. She starts in hers before moving to his. She waits until the thoughts circle her common sense down the drain or pure exhaustion drags her down, only to be woken by nightmares, by memories. It’s a game that she’s playing, waiting it out to see how long she can make it. 

Loretta says it’s okay for Ellie to need that extra security right now. Loretta says Ellie shouldn’t be afraid to ask for what she needs. Loretta says it’s a good sign that Ellie trusts Joel that way.

Ellie doesn’t tell Loretta that Joel’s the only person she trusts in the entire fucking world. ‘Cause she’s pretty sure that wouldn’t be well-received. Also, it might be kind of a character assassination on Loretta. Her whole profession was getting people to trust her.

“Fine.”

Ellie stomps up the stairs, unrightfully angry and inexplicably frustrated. 

Stupid Joel with his stupid perception and coming home right when Ellie was beating her stupid skull against the stupid cabinets. 

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Brushing her teeth turns into a bloodbath, gums bleeding with the force she goes at them. She puts on pajamas, pulls the ponytail holder out of her hair, and stomps her way into Joel’s room. 

He’s watching her with a raised eyebrow and what almost looks like fucking amusement. She’ll be really pissed off if now is when that motherfucker thinks she’s funny. Dick. 

Scrambling onto the bed, Ellie pulls her side of the blankets down and slams her head onto her pillow, huffing out a breath of frustration.

“I don’t need to be watched,” she shoots at him, and if she wants, she could keep going. Say that she’s not like him. Tell him that she’s not going to put a fucking gun to her fucking head and blow out her fucking brains. She bites that one back, knowing it would be too far. She knows if she says something like that, she’d have no choice but to go beat her head in a little bit more.

The blankets are tugged up around her shoulders. Ellie’s facing away from Joel. She hates that she knows he’s tucking her in. She hates that she wants him to. 

“I ain’t tryin’ to make you feel watched, Ellie.” Joel sighs. She’s exhausting him. And being a bitch about it in the process.

Good going, Ellie. 

“I’m out of my element here, kiddo.” A large hand covers her head, runs softly over her tangled hair. There’s a pain radiating in her skull, down her neck. She was going to cause brain damage one of these days. Maybe that’s what’s been wrong with her all along. She got smacked around too much as a kid. They fucked up her brain for good. Now she’s just got to live with it. “But I can’t let you hurt yourself.”

Flopping over onto her back, Joel’s hand pulls back. “I’m not hurting myself, Joel. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, man.” The blankets twist in her fingers, clasping and twirling until her right hand makes some weird spasming motion. She drops the sheets back down to the mattress. “It’s just…fire alarms and I don’t get along.”

Joel’s still sitting there, leaning back against the headboard. Joel’s still watching her. Joel’s still trying to decipher if Ellie’s a big fat liar or not.

God, he probably never had to do with Sarah. He’s probably so ‘out of his element’ because his actual kid wasn’t this fucked. Of course she wasn’t. Sarah grew up with a Joel Miller from the day she was fucking born. Distantly, Ellie wonders if he ever hit her. Immediately, she knows the answer is no. 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” The word snaps out of her mouth, and it’s in regards to smoke detectors, and it’s about hurting herself without hurting herself, and it’s a little bit concerning his daughter who he didn’t hit and the replacement almost one Ellie sometimes wishes he would. “I went somewhere bad in my head. That’s all. It’s over.”

The mattress dips as Joel draws nearer. “You know you can talk to me, right? ‘Bout anything.”

Ellie snorts through her nose. “Yes, Joel. I know.” 

It takes a long time to fall asleep that night. Ellie knows Joel waits up with her until she does.

//

Late January, two in the morning. Ellie’s been more committed to the whole sleeping in her own damn room bit. It was hit or miss. Thank fuck she forced herself to sleep in her own room tonight.

She knows as soon as she wakes up. 

The nightmare had been bad. It had been the kind that clamped her mouth shut and held her body still and heavy, and when she woke up, nothing quite worked again yet, but the terror was pulsing through her with animalistic fury to be felt. 

It had been bad, but it wasn’t real. No one was here. No one was hurting her. No one was hurting Riley. 

Well, no one could hurt Riley anymore at all, but that’s not what Ellie’s going to focus on at this exact moment.

When she can move, she feels it. Cool wetness between her legs. Not sticky like her period.

No. Fucking great. She’s wet the fucking goddamn bed. 

Like a toddler. Like a dumb, stupid, smelly baby. 

For fuck’s sake. She pulls herself out of bed and takes three steps to shut her door the whole way before stripping her gross, wet sleep shorts off of her legs along with her underwear. 

Squinting against the brightness, Ellie throws the overhead light on to help determine the damage done. There’s a very obvious wet spot on her sheets. God, she needs a shower, but she needs to do a load of laundry, but she needs to get dressed to leave her room, but she needs to not wet the fucking bed like a fucking child. 

Half-naked and swallowing back angry, rage-filled tears, Ellie strips the sheets off of her bed. She hasn’t done this in years. Because she’s fourteen years old. And fourteen year olds don’t fucking do this. God, what is wrong with her? What is always so, so wrong with her? Why doesn’t it go away? Why can’t she just get something the fuck right?

It was already bad enough that this week alone, she’d had two different panic attacks, one of which just came out of fucking nowhere, and she’d totally lost her shit on Joel two nights ago, just screaming at him over nothing like an idiot. And then she’d flunked the history test that should have been an easy A. For fuck’s sake, she’s homeschooled! She can cheat whenever she wants! 

And there had been a flurry today. It was nothing. Some snow mixed in with the rain that Ellie only caught ‘cause she was staring out the kitchen window instead of doing her school shit at two pm on a Friday. But it brought something out of her. Something volatile. And it had come on so strong, the need to get out of her own skin, escape from her own body.

It brought her back to that night. So many things kept taking her back there, no matter how much she spat and kicked and screamed, “I DON’T WANT TO GO!” Like she’d wanted to do the night David stood outside the truck window and said, “Get out or I’ll kill him.”

She’d been silent over dinner and went straight up to bed, citing a desire to get up early tomorrow and seize the day or some dumb shit. Joel knew something was up, but he tried to give her space when he could. Which wasn’t always easy, probably. And they’ve moved past that whole “Don’t hurt yourself, Ellie” kick he was on for a while. Because she hadn’t. And when she’d thought about how she should, just a little, she waited until it passed. 

But now…now she’s a murderer, and she’s a victim, and she’s a fucking bed wetter. Now she wants to take these wet, disgusting sheets and choke herself, just long enough to learn her lesson. Now she wants to feel someone pulling her ponytail hard enough that hairs begin to rip away. Now she wants a blossoming, beautiful bruise to bloom across her cheek, for the ache to be carried plain across her face for weeks to come. 

Ellie wants to hurt. 

But if Joel sees the mess she’s made, he isn’t going to hurt her. No, she’ll have to stand in the shame of it, the vulnerability she’s always living in when it comes to him, and he’ll tell her it’s okay. He’ll say, ‘These things happen,’ or ‘It ain’t nothing we can’t clean.’ And then he’d wash her sheets and, while standing in the closet that held their washer and dryer, Google what the fuck is wrong with the fourteen-year-old he’s just made the mistake of adopting that she’s wetting the bed at night. Hell, maybe he’ll Google how big Pull-Ups come. 

Grabbing her bathrobe, Ellie wraps herself up as she bundles the sheets to be carried down the hall and shoved into hot soapy water. She’ll probably have to put a towel on the mattress so the new sheets don’t immediately get soaked. And then what if Joel notices? What if he sees? What if another person knows how fucked up and wrong and childish Ellie really is?

“Ellie?”

“Jesus! C’mon, man.” Her hand flies to her heart, the beating in her chest out of rhythm with its urgency in response. Fight or flight came on fast when it was a well-utilized muscle. 

Hands held up in surrender, Joel takes a single step forward. “What’s wrong?”

“For fuck’s sake, dude.” She’s doing it again, getting all angry and nasty and biting toward the only hand that’s ever bothered to feed her. She’s too stupid to even be a dog. “I got my fucking period, okay? Can I have like, one ounce of privacy around here?”

Joel takes a step back. “I can take care of it. If you want to go back to bed.”

“I can deal with my own bleeding fucking uterus, Joel.”

He’s just trying to help; some part of her brain is reminding her. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. He just needs to get the fuck away and let her deal with this on her own. And sure, she’ll feel like a big fat dick later for being so nasty to him, but she’s got to learn one lesson tonight already. Might as well just really beat the shit out of herself until she figures it all out.

“Baby, I-”

“Just go away!” she’s practically screeching now, but she’s shoving pee-stained sheets into the washing machine, and her legs are damp and prickling with goose bumps and she’s covered by nothing but her bathrobe, and some part of her still can’t believe this is happening again, and she’s fourteen years old. She can’t be this stupid.

“Okay, Ellie.” His voice is cautious. He doesn’t move to leave. “As long as you’re…okay.”

Before she has the chance to stop herself, an irritated huff of laughter comes slipping out. “I’m just dandy, man.”

There’s something in his eyes that lets her know he’s not buying it. 

There must be something in her own that causes him to back down.

“Come get me if you need me.”

“Not fucking likely,” Ellie mumbles as Joel walks away, not sure why there’s the hot sting of tears.

The laundry starts. The new sheets fit over top of the towel she lays out. The girl staring back at her from the steam-smeared mirror with wet tangles of hair and hollowed-out eyes doesn’t even look like someone Ellie knows. 

She stares back at her, that stupid, idiotic, ruined girl. She stares back and figures out exactly how to best make her learn, make her hurt, make her suffer. Ellie would have to figure out how to ensure she got exactly what she deserved.

//

Early March, there’s a county fair in Austin. Joel comes home from work Friday night and tells Ellie to get her shoes. They’re going to the goddamn fair.

The smile that splits her face is instant. She hops into her Converses from the center of the living room, eyes jumping to the adoption certificate that has hung on the wall for almost two months now. She made a point not to just stare at it all the time like a fucking weirdo, but it was nice that when she wanted to, she could just look over and see the form in all of its legally binding glory. 

Some nights she crept down the stairs, pulled it off of the nail it hung on, and ran her fingers over the plain, simple text that was pressed beneath a glass frame. It held permanence. It held promises. It held a past Ellie would no longer have to live and a future she could now cling to. 

It was embarrassing, sitting in the dark holding a framed legal document. Hell, it was embarrassing enough when she’d agreed it would be good to hang up in the first place, so it was only late at night when Joel was in a deep enough sleep to be snoring. No matter what he says, he snores. Only when he’s really tired, though. For a while, Joel was snoring almost every night.

It is getting better now. Ellie was in a good place, or as good as it got up in her addled, fucked up brain. 

They’d both been improving, steadily and slowly, on talking about shit. There was once this concept that trust would sit heavy, invasive and expecting, but instead, Ellie finds it makes things lighter. When she’s going someplace bad, when she’s vanishing to somewhere she’s not sure how to get out of, she knows she’s got a lifeline now. When the anxiety threatens to choke her out, she knows she’s not going to be left alone to remember how to breathe again.

So yeah, she’s pretty fucking happy shoving her feet into her tied Converse sneaker and throwing her hair up into a ponytail as she trots to where Joel waits by the front door for her. 

“Don’t forget your phone.”

Ellie rolls her eyes. She kept trying to inform him that when they are together, she does not need  her phone. It’s just a nuisance box that doesn’t properly fit in her back pocket, and he’s the only person she talks to anyway. But that gets him all worked up about the fact that she’s “isolated” and would “become a hermit.” So she just gets her phone.

They go to a fucking fair. 

Joel buys her cotton candy and funnel cake and sweet, artificial slushies. There’s a full-on sugar high happening by the time the sun’s gone down. There’s “no chance in hell” she’s getting him on the Zipper, but she makes a very convincing argument for a roller coaster that’s “practically made for children, Joel,” and they play over-priced fair games. Ellie actually wins at the water shooting race thing and, when presented with a kind of wonky bean-stuffed frog, hands it proudly over to Joel. “For you.”

He takes it, holding it directly in front of his face and lamenting, “Gee, thanks. Just what I always wanted.”

She tells him you have to wait until dark to ride the Ferris Wheel, as close to when the fireworks are supposed to start as possible. Odds are the timing won’t quite be right, but Ellie figures it’s the intention that counts.

She sits beside Joel, stuffed frog perched on his head where she plops it for ten solid seconds until it slips off and hits the, probably disgusting, floor. 

Giggling, Ellie scoops down to pick it up. The edge of that stupid phone is digging into her buttcheek when she moves, so she plucks it out and deposits it on the seat next to them.

Both of them prop their feet up as they begin to move slowly upwards, pausing to allow for more loading and unloading. Ellie looks out at the lights of the fair, flashing and gleaming and advertising in all of their commercial glory. She tilts her head back and looks at the sky, speckled with stars. They’re dimmer here, hard to see. She keeps telling Joel he has to take her to bumfuck Texas for some fine ass star-gazing one of these days. He promised he would.

It’s nice, knowing that when Joel says he’ll do something, she can count on him to do it.

The Ferris Wheel begins to move in honest. Ellie wraps herself around Joel’s arm and lays her cheek against his bicep. 

“What should we name him?” Ellie asks, holding the frog up in front of their faces as they spin in lazy circles, swaying the higher they go. “Freddy? Frank? Freduardo?”

“That ain’t a name,” Joel says exactly as she knew he would. 

Ellie giggles, liking the idea of knowing someone well enough that you can anticipate their improper use of the English language.  “Freduardo it is. Has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”

With a shake of his head, Joel plops Freduardo on the side of Ellie’s face. “Baby name of the year for 2019. I’m callin’ it now.”

She just keeps laughing; it comes loose and easy from within her chest. There seems little point in fighting it. “You know what his middle name is?”

There’s a pause in the movement; already, people have begun to unboard. They’re hanging at the very top, staring down at the shimmering, endless lights of a mid-spring carnival in Austin, Texas. There aren’t many stars here, but looking down, Ellie could almost begin to believe all those sparkling, flashing lights are constellations of their own. “Do I wanna?”

“Freduardo Joel Miller. Has a ring to it, don’t you think?”

He angles away from her just enough that she can see his glare in earnest. “Isn’t he my frog?”

“Adopted. You gotta keep the name, or he’ll get confused.”

Joel rolls his eyes. “Shoulda renamed you. You’re already confused.” His arm bounces, bopping her head along with it and drawing out more laughter from her. 

“That’s you, old man,” and the words are barely out before he reaches out to poke at her side, right where she’s ticklish. This man does not fight fair. She bats his hand away and slides across the bench. “You’re senile!”

They’re rocking the whole cart when they slot into place to disembark, Joel still reaching to attack Ellie, and Ellie fighting him off desperately. Poor Freduardo is dangerously close to falling onto the nasty floor again.

The first bang of intentional explosion sets off, and Ellie’s rehoned her focus in an instant. “Come on, Joel!” She’s grabbing his hand, the other scooping up her prized frog and dragging Joel to a better viewing point. He’s making all of his old man grumblings about slowing down and not dislocating his shoulder as she drags him forward, but she’s never seen fireworks before, and she isn’t about to miss her opportunity now.

“Shut up and look, dude.”

The next three come in quick succession. The loud bangs are like close cracks of thunder rumbling in Ellie’s chest and the sky is briefly illuminated by pink, green, and orange, the lights flickering out as they drift back to earth, burnt out and spent from their momentary display.

Joel’s followed her directions, head craned toward the sky and protests silenced. He turns to look at her; she almost knows he’s going to before it happens. It’s nice, knowing how much someone loves you, that you can guess what moments they’ll want to share with you.

The next round starts. Ellie flings her arms around Joel’s neck, halfway hopping onto his back and holding herself to him for no other reason in the world other than the fact that she wants to. She’s got no other reason to go off of besides the fact that they’re at a fair in Austin, Texas, and she knows exactly where she’ll go to sleep tonight and exactly what they’ll have for breakfast together in the morning and exactly how many hugs she can sneak in before it gets to the point of being a few too many for a Saturday morning.

Joel grunts when she launches onto him, but he doesn’t tell her to cut it out or get down or take pity on his back. Instead, he hefts her up a little higher so that her chin can slot right against his shoulder. She rests it there.

They watch the fireworks.

//

The truck ride home lulls her to sleep despite her best efforts to stay awake. The sugar crash gets her good and no amount of turning the music up allows her to win the losing battle she’s currently fighting. 

She wakes up to Joel unbuckling her seatbelt. If she was another kid in another world with another life leading up to now, maybe she’d sleep through it and wake up in the morning tucked gently within the confines of her bed. But Ellie was used to being on guard, even when she slept, so even as she works to unlearn hard-earned habits, she still jolts awake. 

“Jus’ me,” Joel says, voice barely above a whisper. “We’re home, baby.”

When she was tired and loose and sleepy like this, he was always a little extra soft with her. It made her think of those commercials with the dryer softener that’s a big teddy bear. Sometimes she thinks of telling Joel that, but Ellie still hasn’t decided if that would equal out to more mocking for him or her, so she keeps it to herself. 

She hops out of the truck, but Joel carries the leftover bag of cotton candy and Freduardo and the popcorn she’d begged him to get on their way towards the gates to leave. 

Inside, Joel dumps her winnings on a kitchen counter while Ellie yawns and rubs at her eyes, flipping on the living room light. 

“Uh-uh, bedtime,” he says as she moves to the couch. “You’ll be hard enough to get up in the morning as it is already.”

Tomorrow was the rodeo which was very yee-haw if you ask Ellie, but there were horses and barrel racing and actual cool shit, so she was pretty excited. “I’ll get up,” she argues though the yawn she’s fighting off is doing her exactly zero favors. 

Joel rolls her eyes. “Don’t forget to set an alarm.”

The stairs creak under his weight as Ellie’s eyes fly wide open. All at once, she’s very awake. Because she sets alarms on her cell phone, and her cell phone had been annoyingly prodding her in the ass from her back pocket all night long until…

“Shit.” Her hands fly to her back pockets, her front ones, the back again. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” She goes to the kitchen counter where the rest of her stuff is, sloppily paws through overpriced snacks and a frog with a dumb name, and absolutely nothing else. “No, no, no, please. Fuck. Shit. Motherfucking, too small pockets. Fucking fuck.” Ellie’s just muttering to herself as her heart rate outpaces that of a fucking hummingbird’s, and her hands start to shake, and she has to cope with the dawning knowledge that she has ruined everything after this terrific night that Joel had put so much effort into for her. 

“What’s going on?” He looks helpless standing in the open archway to the kitchen, eyebrows all furrowed and hands shoved into his pockets. 

All Ellie can think as she looks up at him, patting at her pockets again and praying a rectangular one-pound electronic device will appear, is that he’s going to be so mad. 

Her mouth opens, closes. She doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Because he won’t hit her. Ellie knows that. No matter how much she deserves it, Joel doesn’t use his hands to impart punishment. But then what is he going to do? It’d be so much easier if he could just smack her around a bit, and then it could be over. She wouldn’t have to worry about him hating her for days or weeks or whatever. Silently angry and pissed off and not able to do anything but harbor it against her until the end of time itself. 

Or worse. 

“You have to hit me.” It’s out there before Ellie can think much more about it. Because those stupid cell phones are eight hundred dollars, and she’d just left it on a fucking Ferris Wheel bench because she’d been too wrapped up in exploding lights in the sky and some dumb frog that was probably sold at the Dollar fucking General. 

And it’s not like she expected it to be well received, but Joel looks like she’s just hit him, so Ellie launches into her explanation before this can spiral out. Before she can. “I lost it. I’m so fucking stupid, and I didn’t mean to, and I’ll do whatever you want me to to make up for it, but first you have to hit me.”

“Jesus.”

And he’s not going to do it, Ellie can tell just by the look in his eyes, but she’s not ever going to learn, and she’s not ever going to get better, and he’s never going to forgive her and-and… “I’ll get a job. Yeah, I-I’ll get a job, and I’ll pay you back, and then I’ll make enough to buy another one, and I won’t ever lose it again, and I’ll keep it with me all the time like you want me to and-”

“Are you talkin’ ‘bout your cell phone?”

“Of course I’m talking about my cell phone!” She throws her hands in the air, somehow frustrated with him when really she wants to throttle herself. But she knows it won’t be enough; she can’t elicit the sort of punishment that she needs on her own. The marks never stay, and the bruise only ever barely forms, and she feels a rush of shame and stupidity after the fact that she’s smacking herself around like an idiot instead of just doubling down and committing to it with a blade and some blood, but that wouldn’t work. 

“I’m so fucking sorry, Joel.” God, he’s going to hate her, and she’ll just deserve it. He’ll hate her, but he won’t hit her, but he won’t leave her. She’ll just end up in this house with him resenting her because she’s too stupid not to do dumb as hell shit like wet her bed or burn dinner or lose her goddamn fucking cell phone at the goddamn fucking fair. “Y-you just need to hit me, okay? And then it’ll be better.”

“I am not going to do that, Ellie.” His voice comes out strained and controlled, a pure contradiction to the rambling, unhinged turn Ellie’s speech keeps taking.

Approaching him, getting right into arm’s swinging length, Ellie insists, “No, Joel, no. You have to, okay? Just enough to make it better. You gotta make it better.” There are tears swimming in her vision, and her breathing is coming too fast, which is no good because if she slips into a full-blown panic attack, then there’s no way she’ll convince Joel to just fucking punish her once and for all here. “It won’t go away until you do.”

“What won’t?” he asks, and he neither moves away or towards her, and Ellie is all but preparing to lift his hand so he knows it’s time to bring it across her cheek as fast and as hard as he can manage. He’s big, strong, a man. It’ll hurt. It’ll leave a mark. It’ll be a start. 

Head shaking, maybe her whole body is. How could she be so stupid? “I don’t-I can’t explain it. But you’ve got to just-”

“Breathe, Ellie.” His teeth are clenched. Ellie looks into his eyes, and it’s plain as day. She’s scaring him.

“I’m okay,” the assurance comes out urgent, a little desperate to her ears even as she pushes herself to calm the fuck down. Joel can’t even get mad at her because she’s spiraling like an idiot right now. Just like after Marlene, after the woman who was supposed to take her, supposed to want her, had instead left her feeling like a splayed open, rejected shell of a person. 

She’d hurt herself then, not enough because Joel had grabbed her shoulders and made her stop. And he hadn’t hurt her at all. And he hadn’t left her for a second, even though he’d said before that after Salt Lake, he was done. 

Looking at her now, she wonders if he’s regretting keeping her close, bringing her back. 

There’s an adoption certificate hanging on the living room wall. That has to mean something. He won’t give her up, won’t take her back to the pound like a dog who hasn’t figured out not to fucking bite the hand that feeds it. 

“I will be once you-”

“If you say ‘hit you’ one more goddamn time, Ellie, I swear to god.”

Okay, there’s something. He’s mad. That’s good. People only hit her when they’re mad. She’d learned that one real quick. Three years old in a grocery store restroom. She’d been dragged in by the yanking on her upper arm and guided out with a gentle hold on her hand. It wasn’t rocket science sorta shit. Do what you’re told. Don’t fuck up. 

Searching him, Ellie refuses to look away from Joel’s gaze even as she feels him imploring her back for something. She won’t break, won’t look away. She’d hunt until she found what she needed from him. He didn’t hit Sarah. Good thing is, Ellie isn’t Sarah.

“It was an accident.” Her traitorous eyes are filling with traitorous tears. 

“Baby, I know. You-”

“No.” No pet names. No comfort. Not right now. 

When he steps towards her, she doesn’t even mean to. The flinch is second nature. 

Joel stops moving. His hands stay at his side. 

“No, no, no,” she rushes each denial out. “I didn’t mean for you to stop. I-”

“I wasn’t going to hit you.”

For some reason, that’s what undoes her. The tears streak down her face like rain on windows, and Ellie knows she’s fighting a losing battle here. “I’m not her,” she says between errant breaths. She does her best to keep the hiccups from transitioning into sobs. This isn’t going right. What is she supposed to do?

“What?”

“I’m not Sarah.” Ellie steps forward, grasps his hand that has yet to move towards or away from her. “I know you wouldn’t hit her, but I’m not her.” 

That unfreezes him. Joel’s hands move to Ellie’s shoulders as he ducks into her view, and she’s so stupid and so small and so, so ashamed. Ashamed for being this irresponsible in the first place and ashamed that she’s crazy enough to stand here and beg to be beaten and ashamed that she’s not his real kid who would never be this fucked up in the first place. 

“I wouldn’t hit any kid, Ellie. Do you hear me right now?” His fingers are digging into the flesh and bone around her shoulders. It’s not tight enough to hurt, but it’s hard enough to root her in place. “‘Specially not my own.”

“But-”

“And you are my own, Ellie. Do you understand that?”

All routes for entry and exit are closed. Ellie can’t speak, can’t swallow, can’t even breathe. She’s all frozen up, and she fucked up again tonight, and Joel isn’t going to do what needs to be done, and she is going to be here forever; for the rest of her life, she’ll live in this fucked up mindset, and whenever she inevitably ruins things for the rest of her life, she’s going to be begging someone to just make her hurt so she can move on. 

It’s the only way this can end. 

“Please, Joel.” And Ellie knows that this is going to be the main event at therapy for weeks to come. She knows she’s gonna have to look Loretta in the eye and try and explain this fucked up little part of herself that doesn’t even make sense, and in the meantime, she has to live with Joel fucking Miller, who’s not going to give her what she needs no matter how much she asks him to. “You have to.”

Eyes casting through the kitchen, there’s got to be something. Because she doesn’t process a single one of the words Joel is saying, but the tone of his voice is the one he uses when he’s trying to talk her off the ledge, but this is one she knows, it’s a drop she’s gotten pretty damn used to, and she can’t just not jump. 

There are knives but again, not her style. There are walls and cabinets and the fridge and the window that sits right over the kitchen sink. Before she’d even moved in, Joel had a cute little ruffled half-curtains over the window with lemons and limes on them. He said they came with the house. Ellie had teased him relentlessly for owning citrus curtains. 

The memory both soothes and urges her. 

Joel reaches for her, doesn’t look to see if she flinches again or not, just gathers her against his chest and whispers directly into her ear. She doesn’t know what he’s saying. 

“You have to,” she insists in a voice that’s watery and wet and pointless. “I fucked up. I fucked up so bad.”

She’s crying, which wasn’t supposed to be how this went. She could cry after. It was all a part of the release. But there was no point in crying before. It wouldn’t make them stop. Sometimes, it just made them hit harder. But Joel won’t hit her, so she’s just going to make it worse. She’s just making everything worse.

He’s shushing her. He’s rocking her. He’s telling her he loves her.

It’s wrong. 

Pushing him away, Ellie’s fingers dig deep into her scalp. “Stop!” God, why doesn’t he understand? And she’s already pushed this hard, so now she has to face the shame of it regardless. She can’t leave this unfinished. “Just fucking stop!” 

There’s the floor. She could just jam her head right into the hard, unforgiving tiled floor. There’s the spot where she’d vomited. There’s the spot where she danced while chopping vegetables for dinner. There’s the spot where Joel measured her against the doorway’s frame. There could be the spot where she bashed her skull in. Just hard enough to learn. 

And now Joel’s got tears in his eyes, and Ellie’s the one who put them there, and she’s not even thinking about it. She just reaches up and hits herself as hard as she can, and it feels good; It feels right. So she does it again, and before Joel can shake off the shock and grab her, she steps back and just keeps going. She should use the wall, the window, anything heavy and hard and less forgiving than her undersized hand.

But then Joel’s grabbing her. Her arms are pinned at her sides. And it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough. He needs to do more. He needs to make her hurt until she fucking learns. She has to learn to stop being so fucking stupid and useless and…please, please. 

“Shh, Ellie. Stop, honey. It’s okay.”

She thinks maybe she was saying those things out loud.

And it’s so embarrassing, the fact that she’d more or less been bitch slapping herself in the middle of their kitchen but also the fact that she was only doing it because she had to when he wouldn’t just do what she needed him to. 

“I-I just-”

“It’s okay, Ellie. Not right now, baby.” He still keeps holding her, arms pressed tight to her sides so she’s one straight line like a pencil. “It’s okay. Just breathe.”

She was. She definitely already was. But on Joel’s prompting, Ellie sucks in a long, shuddering inhale and holds it deep within the cavity of her lungs. Her exhales comes out with hiccups.

“There ya go. Okay, Ellie. There it is.”

And then she’s sobbing. Just like that, Joel draws it out of her like pus from a wound. It’s roughly as lovely of a visual as what Ellie’s falling apart into within the confines of the kitchen and Joel’s arms.

She fractures, ugly and broken and ashamed of who she is as a person and what she asked for and what she needs, and why she still feels like she needs it. 

But there was blood on her hands from a murder she's committed and never atoned for. There’s an eight hundred dollar cell phone going round and round on a Ferris Wheel that she’d lost. There’s something so recognizably broken and severed and ruptured that exudes from her very being that everyone leading up to Joel Miller had taken one good look at her and said, “Get away. Get out. Stay gone. We don’t want you.” 

And just because she had a bedroom and a collection of composition notebooks and dino-themed button down shirts and a leftover ticket from the fair that she’d put in the front pocket of her shorts at the start of the night so she’d be sure to have something to remember it by, it doesn’t mean she’s stopped being damaged. All splintered up from a dozen or so years of intermittent neglect and abuse. 

So Ellie just stands there. She stands there, and she sobs, and she hates herself, and she doesn’t try once to break from the hold Joel refuses to release her from.

//

In the morning, she wakes up in Joel’s bed. She doesn’t necessarily remember going to bed, but she’s pretty sure at some point in that whole process Ellie had dissociated from herself entirely because it was either that or face the music of the fact that she was acting like a toddler throwing a tantrum. 

So she’s in Joel’s bed. Her shoes are off, but her clothes are on. 

The house has a morning chill to it. The sun’s only just begun to rise.

For a minute, Ellie spares the brain power to wonder if she’d still be allowed to go with Joel to the rodeo today. But it’s more likely she’s going to get dumped at an emergency therapy session and then she’s got a job she better go find. 

Maybe the rodeo was hiring.

Joel’s not in bed. Who knows if he slept at all, probably getting himself worked up over the fuck up of a kid he’s stuck with now. And like, that adoption certificate is pretty legally binding and all, but was there really anything keeping him from changing his mind? Would Marlene still take her if it came to it? Maybe Tommy and Maria. They’d have a baby soon. She could be a live-in nanny or something.

If Joel didn’t already tell Tommy about the fact that Ellie’s in need of an extended stay in the loony bin. 

Figuring she might as well face the music, Ellie slips out of bed. One of Joel's flannels is hanging over the end of his bed frame. It’s green and brown, and he wears it kind of all of the time which means it’s nice and soft and smells just like him. 

Downstairs it already smells like coffee. Not a great sign when the sun’s not even up yet.

Joel’s at their kitchen table. His head is in his hands. The coffee pot is half empty. The mug beside him is almost full. 

Ellie has stressed him the fuck out. Again.

“Geez, who died?” The joke doesn’t quite land because Ellie’s mind very helpful provides the answer of his actual daughter fifteen years ago, which just makes her wince with the awkwardness of it all. 

Chair legs scrape against the same floor Ellie had considered smashing her head into last night as Joel crosses the room to where she stands. 

At once, she’s swallowed by his embrace so there’s just the scent of Joel coming at her from all angles here. Five senses. She should’ve done her five senses exercise last night. 

“I didn’t think you’d be up yet.” His voice sounds weird. 

When he goes to pull away, Ellie clings a little tighter. Joel has seen her in all sorts of disrepair at this point in their relationship. So like, smacking herself in the kitchen isn’t, realistically, all that much worse than watching her jam her head on the dashboard a few times over or cry over the Land Before Time every single night for two and a half weeks straight or just completely not understanding a kind of basic concept in math or cleaning up her fucking vomit for her. Yeah, he’s kind of seen her at her worst a few times already.

But last night…Well, Ellie wants just another minute before she has to face whatever the fallout for that was going to be.

“Yeah, okay.” Joel holds her back just as sure, just as tight. He holds her back like he doesn’t plan on kicking her out of his house. Not that she ever really thought he would. They’ve had a lot of conversations about that one. “I’ve gotcha, kiddo.”

And it’s still there, the tinge his voice was carrying before. The one that kind of makes Ellie think she might have made him cry.

“I am sorry,” Ellie insists while she still doesn’t have to see his face. She needed him to know that the whole…whatever that was last night wasn’t just to get herself out of trouble. “I really will get a job, and I’ll pay you back first and-”

Joel pulls her away now. It’s jarring enough that it takes something in Ellie not to fight her way back into the safety of his embrace. His hands are still on her shoulders. Ellie wraps the flannel tight, her arms secured around her middle as the words die off mid-sentence. “I do not care about a phone, Ellie Williams.”

“But-”

“No.”

She swallows down whatever it is that she was going to say next. Tongue darting out to run across her lips, Ellie fights the urge to gaze down at her shoes. This floor keeps making her think about how it would’ve looked with her blood spilling out across it, and that seems like a pretty unhealthy way of thinking.

Joel takes her hands in his, his thumbs running along her palms before pulling away to frame her face. He winces, thumb running over the curve of her cheek. Ellie wonders if she actually managed to leave a mark on her face last night. That would be pretty inconvenient, considering Joel’s already going to be super weird and upset over this. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He sounds so sad. 

“Tell you what?” Ellie asks because she really doesn’t understand. She’d told him about the cell phone like five seconds after she realized. “I didn’t know until you mentioned about setting my alarm and-”

“Not about the goddamn phone.” The words aren’t angry. It’d be easier if they were. “That you…felt like that.”

“Oh.” Ellie does look down now. “It’s not…not like that,” she says, much like she had after he’d rocked her on the back porch like a baby being put down for a nap. 

“Like what, Ellie? Help me understand here, kiddo, because I am so…I don’t know how to help you.” And she knows it kills him to say that. She knows it’s communication, vulnerability and fear and honesty all rolled into one. Loretta would be proud. “But I’m gonna figure it out. I promise you.”

And she knows she’s hurting him, all those times she’s hurt herself. She’s hurt him just as bad. A fresh flood of shame swallows her whole. 

“It’s not…I don’t do it all that often or anything.” From the expression on Joel’s face, that was not the reassuring statement Ellie had been aiming for. “It’s only…”

“Only what?”

But she’d faded off because Ellie recognized halfway to her statement that Joel would not be a fan of it. Wincing against the response she knows she’s about to get, Ellie adds, “Only when I deserve it,” in a quiet, despondent tone.

Joel pulls her bottom lip out from beneath her teeth. She tastes the coppery tinge of blood when her tongue darts out. 

“I know. I know,” she’s quick to say. “That’s like, deranged or whatever.”

That doesn’t make him crack a smile. Ellie pulls the flannel down over her hands, tries not to remember how she’d done the same with the shirt of his she stole when she’d been shipped back to Boston. The group home she’d gone to had supplied her with a collection of used clothing, and Ellie cycled through it just like she did all the others in the years before. But everything was layered with Joel’s shirt over top. She never washed it, like some crazy gross ex-girlfriend or something. But it smelled like him for a really long time, and that was all Ellie had left of this life she’d been deluding herself would one day be hers. And then she was the most alone she’d been in her entire life. 

The chasm had only grown, once she’d learned what it was like to have someone take care of you. Once she’d learned how it felt to have someone do it exclusively because they wanted to. 

“Ellie, it’s not-you’re not. Jesus.” And then he says nothing. Joel just stares at her, totally unrelenting. Unbroken, unforgiving stare boring into her own. “I’m not good at this,” he says quietly, and maybe a few months ago, Ellie would have agreed with him, but ever since…well, Joel had gotten better at heart to hearts in time. “I love you.”

Swallowing away the lump in her throat, Ellie says, “I know.”

“And I would never, ever hurt you.” The sadness seeps through, superimposed upon the fact that he has to speak that sentence at all. 

Ellie doesn’t think it would help much if she told him that was part of the whole problem here. “I know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks again, this time in a whisper. 

“It wasn’t…I didn’t…” Blowing out a harsh breath, Ellie buries her face in her hands. She can’t stand to meet that look on his face for another second. “It wasn’t like, all the time or anything.”

And though she still won’t look at him, Ellie knows he’s doing that thing where he opens his mouth and is about to respond, but then it closes back up, uncertain of whatever it was he was going to say.

Finally, Joel lands on, “How about pancakes?”

“You hate pancakes,” Ellie shoots back, still not moving her hands to face him. 

“But you like ‘em.” 

It makes her heart do something funny in her chest. It makes Ellie pull away entirely from Joel because otherwise, she will try to burrow into his chest with all the form and elegance of a jackhammer and refuse to ever be yanked away again. 

“Yeah,” Ellie answers, dropping her hands to stare at the floor she kind of detested now. “I do.”

And that’s all it takes. Joel starts whipping out ingredients. He knows the recipe by heart, something which impressed Ellie, especially the first time he’d done it because he doesn’t even like pancakes. Meaning Sarah must have. Sarah must have liked them a whole lot for this sentimental motherfucker to still remember the recipe a full fifteen years later.

Ellie kind of helps, kind of lurks. She’s not feeling very chatty, to no one’s surprise, so she hops up on the counter that Joel usually raises hell over her sitting on and watches him, passing the occasional spoon from the drawer under her legs. 

He makes too many. He always does.

Ellie’s delivered a plateful, and the table’s got whipped cream and maple syrup and even the rainbow sprinkles have found their way over. Ellie chops up strawberries, and she doesn’t think Joel’s casting her a glance when she grabs a knife, but she can’t be entirely sure. 

They eat in silence. Joel drinks coffee like it’s his job. Ellie shovels food into her mouth like the homeless gremlin she was when he first met her. 

“Slow down,” he inevitably tells her. It’s so goddamn nice that Ellie actually does slow down. Marginally.

There’s nervous energy threatening to swallow her up, but as long as she’s still choking pancakes down, it’s probably safe. She eats way more than she should and feels sick which doesn’t help with her whole stomach roiling with anxiety problem.

Joel wipes his mouth, pushes back from the table, and clears his throat in a very “I am an old man” sorta fashion. “We gotta talk about it.”

“Ugh,” Ellie shoots back because she knew he was going to say that, and she hates it exactly as much as she thought that she would. “Do we really have to?”

Joel stares at her. “You got any better ideas?”

Pressing her lips together, Ellie considers him and the offer simultaneously. “Wait until the dementia really takes over, and you forget about this altogether?” she offers without hope that it will get her very far.

Based on the receiving end of the look she’s currently on, Ellie’s safe in assuming she’s not getting off the hook with this one.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

And he sounds so upset, like she betrayed him or something. Which she totally didn’t. “It’s not…”

“Don’t say it ain’t like that ‘cause you’ve yet to tell me what the hell that means.”

It’s not her fault that he’s dragging a gargantuan sigh out of her. He’s asking for this. “It means it’s not like I’m just mutilating the fuck out of myself for fun or whatever.”

“And you think that’s what other people are doin’?”

Okay, well, now she just feels like shit. “No. Obviously not. But it’s not like…I don’t actually really hurt myself. There aren’t any scars or anything.” 

Joel says nothing.

“And it’s not like it’s that often or anything! Like, a few times at most. In all the time I’ve lived here, that’s practically nothing.”

Now he looks like he’s in pain again. An opened palm appears on the table. Ellie rolls her eyes but deposits her hand in his. “Other one.”

“Huh?” She figures it out, pulling her left hand back to herself and plopping the right where it had been.

Joel flips her arm all over the place. “You don’t have a scar from breakin’ your wrist all those months ago, do ya?”

“Alright, alright, don’t go getting all philosophical on me.” She really doesn’t want to have this conversation. “What if…I won’t do it again, okay? I swear.”

“It’s ain’t that easy, Ellie.” Why did she already know that’s what he would say? “Now, you got a scar from your broken wrist?”

“Obviously not.”

“Still hurt you, though. Didn’t it? Still does, even.” 

It was less of a hurt and more…an absence of anything. But that would be splitting hairs, and Joel did not seem to be in much of a mood for that one today. “I get it.”

“Things…” Joel clears his throat again, and she can’t tell if it’s an old-man sound or an I’m-having-a-strong-emotion sound. “People hurt you, honey. And that was wrong.”

“I know. I know.” As if Loretta hadn’t gone over this a few dozen times.

He holds up a hand, cutting her off before she can launch into the diatribe she’s heard a few dozen times before. “You don’t ever ‘deserve’ to be hurt, Ellie. No matter what you do, an appropriate punishment is never for someone to put their hands on you.”

She’s heard this one before, too. It sounds a little different coming from Joel. “Technically, it was my own hands,” she mumbles in a desperate attempt to just turn this into a joke and make him stop looking at her in a way that made her feel like this. 

“That’s because…that’s because you were taught the only way to pay for your wrongdoings was a good solid beating.” Ellie winces. “And that’s wrong, baby girl. That is so, so wrong.”

The shame rushes through her, tsunami waves just absolutely demolishing any humor she’d been attempting to maintain. She stares down at the one twisting hand in her lap and mutters an absolutely pathetic, “I’m sorry.” It’d be pretty easy right now, to just disappear inside of herself, outside of herself, even. Just leave this Ellie behind and fall into an empty, quiet sort of void where she wouldn’t have to hear or see or respond. Just fade into quiet nothingness. It sounds pretty nice, honestly. 

But then Joel’s right in front of her. She hadn’t even heard him get up. She hadn’t heard him groan his way down to the floor. He’s got her face between his hands again. His gentle, careful, rough hands. The ones that she’s seen sanding down pieces of wood and twisting off the tops of the tightest of jars and dragging corpses down to a rushing river. 

Now they hold her like she’s made of porcelain or some shit. They hold her like she’s fragile, like she’s something of value. 

“I don’t need you apologizin.’” And like, okay, she doesn’t really have much else to say here. “I need to know that next time you screw up, which you’re gonna do by the way, you aren’t gonna go inflict some blunt force trauma on yourself as repercussion.” 

“It’s not blunt force trauma,” is what she says with a roll of her eyes. But then she follows where Joel’s looking to the cabinet beside the stove that she’d slammed her head against for who knows how long, and then Ellie considers the tile beneath her feet and the window above the sink and the sheets she’d considered choking herself with and knows maybe she’s not that far away from things taking a slightly darker turn than a few hits against herself. 

“I wouldn’t have to do it myself if I knew you would take care of it for me,” is what she finally whispers out, and maybe it’s the shame, or maybe it’s the sorrow, or maybe it’s the rage that she’s gotta go through this at all, but she starts to cry. “And you take care of so much for me already. You do everything, and I can’t even manage to go to school or cook dinner or sleep through the fucking night or-”

“Ellie.”

She stops. Waits. She finds that the fear isn’t threatening to grasp her so much as this naked vulnerability tempts to drown her. 

“Don’t know if you know this, but I’m kinda the parent in this little arrangement of ours.” He reaches his thumb over to wipe away at errant tears. There’s an ache buried there in her cheek that Ellie doesn’t dare mention. “Takin’ care of you is my job. Hell, it’s my privilege.” 

“I’m exhausting.”

“You’re the only reason I get out of bed.”

“Like a dog you have to get up and walk?”

“Please,” Joel snorts. His hands are still wiping away tears. “You’re way more high maintenance than a dog.”

Now seems as good of a time as any. “So what I’m hearing is we might as well get a dog.”

There’s a trademarked Joel Look coming her way, and Ellie all but fist pumps when she gets it. It’s something special, knowing someone like that. 

“No matter what you do, Ellie. You do not ever deserve for someone to hurt you. Not even yourself. Ever.”

Ellie blinks away all of the tears she’d thought she was finished with by now. Damn Joel, bringing it back around. 

“I killed somebody,” she reminds him in the privacy of their kitchen. It wasn’t something they talked about often, but it was something Ellie thought about all the time. “Like, full-on murder, Joel.”

His head is shaking. “You protected yourself. That was self-defense. Don’t try and spin it.”

It’s annoying when Joel just keeps being right. 

“I don’t know if I can stop,” is what she finally confesses, knowing he’ll follow her back to the origin of this conversation. “No matter how much I try those dumb five senses or bruise my wrist up with a ponytail holder or whatever else Loretta tries, it’s not…it’s not what I need.” 

“You do not need to hurt to be forgiven, Ellie.” 

They’re going in circles. Ellie doesn’t know how to stop. 

“I think I’m broken, Joel.” She’s just a smattering of pieces that once created a human. Like a puzzle, but one that a snotty-nosed kid has mashed a few of the pieces of in his gums, so the edges are all distorted and don’t really go together anymore. And some of them are cursed, just to top it all off. 

Joel shrugs. “So am I. Just ‘cause somethin’ ain’t right don’t mean you can’t fix it.” 

“Like Bill and his support beams.”

There’s a smile, warm and soft and just for her. “Like Bill and his support beams. You got it.” He sounds way softer than any mention of his supposed work enemy should make him.

“Joel.”

“Yes, Ellie?”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think you might have a crush on Bill.”

He rolls his eyes for so long that she thinks about telling him they’re going to get stuck like that. “Fat chance, kiddo.”

“Don’t worry,” she says, teasing and light and feeling like maybe this conversation is actually, finally, over. “You’ll always be my favorite Dad.”

And that could easily turn into its own thing, but they’ve both had enough of that for right now, so instead, Joel says, “I don’t think his husband Frank would be none too pleased ‘bout this arrangement.”

“Wait, three dads? That’s it, all bets are off. You might fall to second.”

Ellie had been waiting for a hug. Instead, she gets hefted over Joel’s shoulder and body slammed into the couch. She laughs so hard that her lungs spasm. She laughs so hard that her stomach hurts. She laughs so hard that she forgets all about the sadness that had tried to swallow her whole.

//

“So…can we still go to the rodeo?”

Joel had paused, gone to the hall closet and returned with his hands behind his back. “Well now, can’t hardly let this go to waste.”

He plops a true and proper cowboy hat right on top of her head. 

“Fuck yeah, man!”

He laughs almost as hard as she had only moments before.

//

“You know we ain’t done talkin’ about all this, right?” Joel says it five minutes into the drive when she’s got no choice but sit next to him and let him talk.

And of course Ellie knows. She’ll be talking about it with Joel. She’ll be talking about it with Loretta. She’ll be talking about it with Loretta and Joel. She’d probably be talking until the day she took a vow of silence and became a monk just to stop talking about it. 

“I know,” she answers, just like she knew he loved her. Just like she knew she could trust him. Only a few things in life are absolutes. Who would’ve guessed Joel Miller wanting to talk about feelings would be one of them?

“And if you feel that way again-”

“I’ll tell you,” Ellie says, right now when it’s easy and seems so far away from even being a problem to worry about. Really she was just going to shoot her shot at never fucking anything up again and just see how that goes. “Let you straitjacket me up again.”

Joel nods once, keeps his eyes resolutely on the road. “I’ll take it.” At the red light he shoots her a look. “For now.”

Ellie nods. She can work under these conditions. “For now.”

//

Predictably, Joel does not let her get a job. He does sit in on her therapy lesson. He grades her failed history test with a grimace and watches her like a hawk the rest of the night.

“Bad grades don’t really bother me all that much, Joel. I’d already be long dead if they did.”

Probably should have predicted that was the wrong thing to say while she was at it. 

It’s not great, all of the talking and the being watched and the drowning in guilt when he buys her another expensive cell phone, but it’s not the worst either. 

Sometimes, when she takes the time to remind herself, Ellie lets it just feel like being loved. There are a lot worse things to be.

//

The minor stuff rolls off her back, most of the time. Even when she’s a total dick to Joel over absolutely nothing or skipping out on art lessons because some kids kept trying to get her to hangout with them and she was hoping they’d get the fucking message already, or completely forgets to do the dishes she swore she would get to.

But for whatever reason, the thing that next sets her off is a DVD left in the player that was definitely due back to the library over a week ago. DVDs were ten times what books cost in late fees. And this one was late late. All because she forgot to check the DVD player before going to bed. 

God, that was so stupid. Now she was going to have to return the DVD and pay this late fee she doesn’t have money to cover, and Joel’s going to be so mad that she’s so goddamn careless and-

It’s stupid. Ellie’s stupid. She doesn’t know why she can’t get it together already, why she can’t just figure it the fuck out and stop being so…so…

What a dumb reason to want to hurt yourself. 

But Ellie’s holding a late disc for a movie she didn’t even like, and she’s home alone, and this sinking horror of failure and disappointment are slotting into place, and it would be so easy to just make herself learn a lesson for once in her goddamn life.

Instead, she looks at that certificate that hangs on the wall. Which at first makes her want to do it even more. How else will she avoid losing what she’s got?

Five things she can see: The adoption certificate, duh. The late DVD, less helpful. Her cell phone.

She stops doing the exercise, grabs her phone, and presses the first number in her recents. 

“Hey, Joel.”