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Joel’s pretty sure it makes him something far worse than a helicopter parent, but the moment Ellie starts acting off, he notices.
And starts worrying.
*
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, knocking on her door gently. “You up? Gonna have to leave soon if you don’t wanna be late for school.” It’s unusual for him to have to do this–just like Sarah, she’s usually the one who wakes him up, his youngest also a habitual morning person in some sick cosmic joke against him–and he’s trying not to immediately default to thinking something’s wrong. She’s a teenager. Teenagers stay up too late and then sleep in. He got back late from a last minute patrol to check out reports of a raider group in the area last night; she’d been asleep when he got back and peeked in on her, but he doesn’t know when she actually fell asleep. For all he knows, she could have been faking him out just to keep reading one of her books as soon as her door shut again.
Silence.
“Ellie?” He calls a little louder, trying to fight the knee jerk panic. “Kiddo, you up?”
Straining his hearing, he can just catch the sound of her covers rustling, and he lets it settle him.
The fact that she still hasn’t responded means it only settles him so far, though.
“Can I come in?” He asks, and there’s a pause before she finally responds.
“Okay.”
He makes himself open the door far slower than his impulse. When he does, he sees she’s still in bed, the covers pulled up over her head until only the end of her braid is visible. He feels a stupid amount of relief, knowing it’s irrational even as he does, but he thinks losing one child will always add an edge to anything unusual happening with the other.
“Hey, you,” he says, crossing the room and sitting down roughly next to where he guesses her hip is. “You’re gonna be late for school, we don’t get going soon.”
Ellie wiggles a little deeper into her bundle of blankets, her braid disappearing. He frowns.
“You feeling okay?”
A gesture he can only guess is a shrug.
He tugs at the top of her covers gently, and immediately, two small hands appear to hold them in place.
“Leave me alone,” she says, voice muffled.
With no forehead to check, he touches one of her hands. They feel warm from being in her cocoon, but they don’t feel feverish. He squeezes her fingers gently.
“Talk to me,” he urges. “What’s wrong? What hurts?” It’s been months now since they returned from the hospital, but even as she’s regained weight and gotten some sparkle back in her eyes, he hasn’t been able to shake the fragile version of her from his mind, too-thin and weak enough that she could barely stay on her feet. Kids get sick, he reminds himself. This doesn’t mean a relapse or a lingering aftereffect of being a medical experiment.
It doesn’t reassure him as much as he knows it should.
“I just don’t feel good,” comes her muffled response. “I wanna stay home.”
“Alright,” he says, forcing himself not to interrogate her further. If she isn’t giving details, she has her reasons. She hasn’t been that shy before, but maybe she just has bad cramps or something. That had happened with Sarah a couple of times. “You need anything?” He wants a way to help, a way to fix what he doesn’t even fully understand is wrong.
“No,” she says quietly, and then her hands disappear beneath her blankets again.
“Alright,” he repeats, standing and pressing a gentle hand to where he judges her head to be. “Get some rest, kiddo.”
*
He goes to get breakfast and calls out of work on the way, passing it along with one of the worker’s kids who’s started helping out on the construction team. He isn’t scheduled for patrol today and the work is just preparatory to get a house ready in case they have more people joining the town, so it’s not a big deal, and with the world as dangerous as it is, he knows no one begrudges him taking off to look after a sick kid, not when so many have lost their own. It’s a novelty, still, the ability to call off with no consequences, and he’s grateful for it now.
“Hey,” he says, knocking on the door to Ellie’s room when he returns, trying not to worry when he finds her still in her mountain of sheets. A look at her arm before it retreats after putting down the glass of water he’d left with her says he’s down a flannel, her usual comfort outfit, and he can’t help the way it makes him feel soft. “Got some food if you’re up to eating.”
“I’m not hungry,” she says, voice muffled by her covers.
“Can you try?” He asks, the same thing he asked her regularly after Silver Lake when even the sight of food would sometimes make her nauseous.
He catches the sound of a sigh, but a hand emerges from under her covers, fingers flexing in a grabbing motion. Resisting the urge to tease her–he’d rather get some food into her before he focuses on trying to make her laugh–he picks the least-crumbly item available and hands it over, the hashbrown patty disappearing the moment it’s in her hand. Watching her, he thinks of the way the eels moved whenever he used to take Sarah to the aquarium. There’s no sound beyond quiet crunching noises for a moment.
“Are you just gonna sit there?” Ellie asks, sounding self-conscious, and he makes himself rise. If she’s feeling well enough to kick him out, he’ll honor it.
Still, he presses a hand to her back through her covers.
“It’ll be on your dresser, alright? Try and eat more.”
One hand emerges from the covers to give him a thumbs up, and he makes himself put the food down and step away.
*
When he returns later, the rest of the food remains untouched.
*
He doesn’t see her face until that night, when he brings her some soup and finds her finally partially emerged from her nest, her hair a wreck from so much friction all day, her face slack in sleep. He sets the tray down quietly and steps closer, reaching out to gently press the back of his hand to her cheek and forehead. The way she isn’t too warm at all makes him frown, and he checks with his other hand, finding the same. He strains his hearing as best he can to listen to her breathing, trying to see if it sounds labored. He thinks someone might have mentioned something respiratory going around with the kids, but it sounds fine, deep and even.
“What’s up with you, kiddo?” He asks her softly, brushing the backs of his fingers over her cheek softly.
He sits with her for a long while before he rises, pressing a kiss to her forehead before he goes.
*
She’s back to huddling under her blankets the next day.
“Ellie,” he says, tugging at them. “C’mon now-”
“Go away,” Ellie says, voice hard, and he only manages to get her covers down enough to see the frizzy top of her head. “Fuck off.”
He doesn’t hold it against her. She gets snippy when she doesn’t feel good like most people do.
“I’d like to actually talk to you and not your sheets,” he says lightly, but he stops tugging at the blankets. He has no idea why she’s hiding from him, but he won’t push a clear boundary, silly as it is. “If you think you can manage that.”
A sigh like he’s asking the world of her, and then the covers come down enough to expose her eyes and no more.
He tips an imaginary hat at her, something that usually makes her smile.
“Howdy.”
There’s the slightest hint of amusement at the corners of her eyes, but the blanket remains where it is.
“What’s got you down, huh?” He asks softly. “Bug going around school?”
“Maybe,” she says. “I just feel like shit.”
“Think we should maybe stop by the clinic then?” He asks lightly, knowing what the answer is going to be even before she gives it. “Or get one of them to stop by here? You liked Marie, remember?”
“Fuck no.”
The audacity of the suggestion means he loses eye contact privileges, and her blankets move over her head once more. He considers pushing further, but he knows she hunger strikes when she’s upset, and he’d rather get some food into her first. He reaches out and nudges the mug of soup closer.
“There’s food there,” he says. “Try and eat something, alright?”
With an affectionate squeeze to her shoulder, he leaves.
*
When he checks back later, she’s asleep again, the mug only half empty.
He tries to push down his growing anxiety and takes the mug downstairs to wash it.
*
After three days, he finally leaves Ellie at home alone, hating it but knowing it’s not fair to beg off work too much longer when there’s nothing physically wrong with her that he can tell. He stops by her room after dropping off breakfast, finding her in her bundle of sheets where she’s been each time he’s checked on her. .
“I’m heading out,” he tells her, and one eye peeks out at him. He smiles faintly. “We’re working out at that yellow house again.” She knows the one because she’s been helping out with it, a hazard of following him around all day and being curious by nature. He half-expects her to jump out of bed and ask to come along, tricked by the same move that had had Sarah agreeing to the playground after staying home for a stomachache when she was in elementary school, but Ellie just nods.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” he echoes, moving forward enough to squeeze her foot affectionately. “You need me, send somebody to get me, alright?”
“Okay,” she says again, disappearing once more into her blankets.
He resists the urge to sigh as he leaves.
*
“Well, look who’s back to work,” Tommy calls teasingly. “Where’s your shadow today?” His brother clearly looks for Ellie, but Joel shakes his head.
“Still not feeling good,” he says, accepting the hand up Tommy offers him, the stairs up to the porch being one of the things they need to fix.
Tommy’s good humor shifts to concern.
“Damn, poor kid. Know what she’s got?”
“No idea,” he says. “She won’t tell me.” It comes out more tersely than he meant it to. He’s not mad, at either Ellie or Tommy, but he hates knowing something is wrong without knowing what it is so he can start fixing it. Tommy follows him into the house.
“Want me to ask Maria to stop by?” He asks, taking the end of the dining room table when Joel points to it with his chin and lifting so they can get it out of the way. “Might be something she’d only wanna talk to a woman about?”
“Maybe,” Joel allows, though it doesn’t fit quite right. It’s not impossible that it’s a female thing that Ellie just doesn’t want to discuss with him, but she’s never been shy around him before about that kind of thing. “Let me think about it.” They’ve all started to get along, but he’s not unaware that Ellie still bears a grudge on his behalf with his sister-in-law. He’s tried to gently encourage her to let bygones be bygones, but his girl apparently has a penchant for loyalty-based animosity.
(It should likely please him less than it does, this solidarity.)
“Think somebody is giving her trouble at school?” Tommy asks.
“I don’t know,” Joel says, voice a little sharp now, irritated by how little he has to go on. “She won’t talk to me.”
To his surprise, he hears his brother snort, and he looks up at him sharply. Tommy raises his hands in surrender immediately.
“Sorry,” he says, smile not dropping. “Just surprised y’all’s sharing a brain thing is short circuiting.”
“We don’t share a brain,” he grumbles, going back to work.
“Yeah right,” he hears Tommy say under his breath.
Only willing to have one family problem at a time, he elects to let it go for now.
(Though he makes a mental note that it will absolutely be Tommy down in the crawlspace today.)
*
“School going okay?” He asks when he drops lunch off. He means for the question to come off as casual, but he sees Ellie look at him from the corner of her eye when she sits up to eat her sandwich. He’s hesitant to poke at potentially painful things when she’s finally emerged enough to hopefully actually eat something a little more substantial than half a mug of soup or a single hashbrown, but he needs to feel like he’s making some kind of progress on working out what’s up with his kid.
“Fine,” she answers shortly, ripping her sandwich into pieces in a tell that she’s not actually hungry but is appeasing him.
“Your math class going okay?” He presses. It’s a newer system, her “independent study” during math. She’d been skipping for days without telling him, and it was only getting called in by the school’s director that had let him know that his kid was habitually MIA, ducking out no matter how hard her teachers tried to keep her in class, trickier and quicker than any of them. It had taken a discussion she’d escalated into a fight and then an honest talk later that night when she woke up from a nightmare to let him know why a friendly male math teacher with a beard conjured up painful things for her. She’d confessed it like a failing, as if it was her fault something fucked up had happened to her.
He’d gone to the school the next day and sat down to work out a solution: Ellie goes to a room and does work out of a book during math, and then she drops it off on the math teacher’s desk at the end of the day. It won’t be such a problem when she goes up a grade–the teacher who handles the next level up is a woman–but he’d thought they’d managed to find a stopgap for now.
Now he wonders if there’s something else she’s holding close to her chest so she “won’t bother” him, like he wouldn’t work out how to yank the moon down from the sky if she decided she wanted it as a nightlight.
“It’s fine.”
He’s growing increasingly tired of his chatterbox giving him two syllables max.
“Doesn’t seem fine if it’s keeping you home from school,” he says, trying to carefully gauge how far is too far. When she drops her pieces of her sandwich and shoves the plate away, he resists the urge to groan. Too far. He’s pushed too far. “Ellie-” He starts, but Ellie burrows back into her nest in a clear dismissal. He eyes the mound with disapproval. “Ellie, you’re being-”
“If I’m such a fucking problem,” she says, “then get rid of me again.”
He blinks, startled.
“Ellie-”
“Just fucking do it if it’s so goddamn annoying to-”
“Ellie,” he says sharply. “Stop it.”
She does, but he can feel the tension in the air like a physical thing, and he doesn’t miss how she tucks tighter into a little ball, even with the motion covered by layer after layer of blanket.
“I just don’t feel good,” she says, voice quiet, tentative, clearly regretting snapping but too stubborn to say as much. “I don’t wanna fight.”
“I ain’t trying to fight,” he says gently. “I just wanna make sure you’re okay.”
He waits for a response, but she remains in her little ball, and he gets the feeling that she’d rather he leave. He bites back a sigh.
“I’m going back to work, alright?”
A quiet noise in response.
“Try and eat some of that, okay? You got anything you want for supper?” She can sometimes be tempted by mac and cheese or butter noodles even when nothing else appeals to her, and he’s not above bribing Viola in the kitchen if it means getting something into his kid that she’ll eat with a minimum amount of fighting.
There’s a reason Viola is already making plans to get a fur lining added to her coat for the winter.
One brown eye peeks out at him.
“Mac and cheese?” She asks tentatively, like she’s not sure she’s allowed to ask for it after snapping, and he smiles, cupping her head over her blankets before rising.
“You got it.”
*
The promise of mac and cheese gets him Ellie fully sitting up in bed when he gets home that night, him working late to give Maria the chance to talk to Ellie on the slim chance that she can finally get an answer about what on earth has his kid isolating herself in her room. Apparently Ellie locked her door and refused to answer her, so he knows it didn’t go well, so the fact that she’s interested in eating is a pleasant surprise.
“Hey there,” he says. “Feeling better?”
Ellie shrugs, but she sniffs, looking at the covered plate in his left hand hopefully. He smiles, lifting it in acknowledgement.
“First two scoops from the pan,” he says, and Ellie perks up. He hands it over, and she takes it with a quiet thank you because he has managed to teach her some manners.
(At least for mac and cheese situations.)
“Got some chicken, too,” he says, sitting down on her window seat. “If you want any.”
This is a deliberate phrasing that gets deployed between them, the polite fiction that Ellie doesn’t eat meat some days out of preference and not because the idea of it makes her sick. It’s his best guess, after all, for what has his kid isolating herself in the house: something from her past popping up that makes her want to stay where she knows she’s safe. Ellie, though, nods, and when he holds up the breast piece he’d grabbed in case she wanted it, he even gets her finally emerging from her bed. He eyes the shirt and flannel she’s wearing over her fuzzy pajama bottoms, recognizing both.
The mischievous glint in Ellie’s eyes as she sits next to him, folding her legs up, means he forgives her her clothing theft yet again for the simple pleasure of a glimpse at what his kid should be acting like.
*
He holds back the discussion he wants to have until supper is over, keeping the conversation light by complaining about a new kid they’re training up at the construction site. He might exaggerate a few fumbles just for the sake of making Ellie laugh, but for Ellie finishing her entire plate and half of his green beans, he’s willing to let Nate take the fall.
(Besides, his grout work is shit.)
As soon as the food is gone, he takes her plate and stacks it on his, reaching down to set them both on ground. He sees her track the movement, and she groans as soon as she realizes what’s coming next.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” she says, but she doesn’t flee back to her bed just yet, which feels like a win.
“I’d appreciate it if you would anyway,” he coaxes. “I don’t like seeing you so fucking miserable, kiddo.”
“You’re gonna think it’s dumb,” she says, looking at her knees, swinging her legs over the side of the window seat but still not fleeing.
“Whatever it is, baby,” he urges, brushing a hand over her hair and gliding it down to squeeze the back of her neck gently, “we’ll figure it out. You just gotta tell me-”
“Cat asked me out, and I said ‘Like out of the fence?’, and then her friend Nadine laughed, and then she did, too,” Ellie says in a rush of words, resolutely staring at the wall.
He blinks.
“Now I just…” She looks down, picks at a thread on the cushion. “It was just fucking embarrassing, okay? I looked so fucking lame.” She looks at him, face set like she’s ready for a fight. “Go ahead. Laugh at me. I looked so stupid.”
He wants to laugh, yes, but not at her.
He wants to laugh out of relief.
Jesus, out of everything he imagined, doing something stupid in front of a crush–a crush he hasn’t actually heard about before now, which he can tease her about later when she doesn’t look so ready to be bullied–feels like a gift of a problem to solve. After so many life or death situations, something as teenager as being embarrassed in front of somebody she likes feels like a complete non-issue.
Ellie’s face, though, says that isn’t the case for her, and he can’t help the swell of affection he feels for her, his kid who’s always so convinced she’s well on her way to full grown, knocked down by a common adolescent stumble. She misreads the expression on his face, and hers goes hurt. She pushes herself to her feet, and he snags her by her wrist just in time to prevent her from pulling a runner, far too quick for him to catch her if she got out of immediate grabbing distance. She tugs to get free, but he holds on, even when she fakes him out with a bite to his wrist. He lifts his eyebrows, and she glares at him.
“I know,” she says. “It was fucking stupid. I’ve watched those dumb movies. I know what ‘going out’ means. I just-”
“It’s not stupid,” he says gently. “You didn’t know what she meant, and then she hurt your feelings.”
The slightest wrinkle of her nose at the second half of the reassurance, predictable as ever in being determined to be a tough girl. It makes him feel a swell of love in his chest so strong it’s almost pain.
“Come sit down again,” he says, tugging gently. “Tell me about it.” It’s partially so he can hopefully help her figure out where to go from here.
It’s partially so he can continue getting to enjoy a problem with his kid he would have had to deal with even if the world hadn’t ended.
Ellie hesitates, and he knows she’s worried he’s going to tease her, her teenaged pride already smarting, and this particular problem too tender to be funny yet.
(For her, at least.)
“C’mon,” he coaxes, and she finally does, climbing back onto the window seat with all the wariness of a prey animal. “Cat?” He asks, trying to put a face to the name. He remembers all of the little friends she talks about, but given the teenaged proclivities for traveling in packs and avoiding adults as much as possible, a few of them are more nebulous in his memory. “She the one with the green backpack?”
“Yeah,” Ellie says, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around them, making herself into a little ball. “She has the green backpack and the cool hair.”
The last description means he has to hide a smile. He has no idea what makes hair cool or not among the 14 year olds of Jackson, but the way Ellie says it means she’s clearly given it significant thought.
He wonders suddenly whether her own explorations into varying her hairstyle recently have been as organic as he’d thought.
“You like her back?” He asks, and Ellie ducks her head.
But not before he catches the tinge of pink rising to her cheeks.
“Shut up,” she mumbles.
Safe from her gaze, he can smile, even as he reaches out to rest a hand on top of her head.
“I ain’t picking at you,” he reassures her. “You just ain’t mentioned anything to me about it before, that’s all.” Not that he would expect her to–he knows Sarah had been nursing her own crush he hadn’t quite got all the details of before he lost her–but it’s unusual for Ellie to keep things from him, especially innocuous as a crush is.
“It’s stupid,” Ellie says, voice muffled. “I’m being a baby.”
He knows his lines here. He hadn’t had a lot of practice with this before, but this isn’t entirely unfamiliar territory. When Sarah was 13, she’d spilt milk all over herself at lunch in front of her little crush and begged him to move school districts so she could hide her face forever. The memory doesn’t hurt as much as it might have in years past, and he’s grateful for the experience staying with him now that he has need of those skills again.
Thanks, baby girl, he thinks to wherever Sarah might be.
“We’ve all been there, kiddo,” he says. “Trust me, Tommy did shit you wouldn’t believe when he was trying to impress girls.”
“Not you?” Ellie asks.
He makes a dismissive noise.
“Nah,” he says. “I was a heartbreaker back in the day. Suave as hell. Was beating the girls off with a stick. Don’t check any of this with Tommy.”
Ellie snorts, grinning, which was his goal.
“You can’t just avoid her forever, though,” he says, and Ellie’s smile fades, her looking down and turning back around to scuff her rug with her toes. “For one thing, it’s usually better to face these things. For another, the town ain’t that big.”
Ellie groans, dropping her face into her hands in a stunning display of teenaged drama that Joel desperately wishes he could capture in a picture to hold over her later. As it is, he just bites his cheek against the desire to laugh.
“I know,” she says, voice muffled. “But it’s just embarrassing, man. And her friend saw us. And they’ve probably already told everybody I’m a freak.”
“Hey now,” he chides mildly, nudging her knee with his. “Watch it. That’s my kid you’re talking about there.”
She drops her hands, giving him a small, pleased smile the way she does whenever he confirms that she’s his. He smiles back.
“Trust me,” he says, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s worse not doing it and telling yourself stories about how it’s gonna go. Better to just rip the bandaid off and get it over with.”
Ellie groans, and he chuckles, putting an arm around her shoulders.
“Besides,” he says, tugging her a little closer, “she gives you a hard time, we can sicc Tommy on her. He ain't been in a schoolyard fight in a long time. He might actually win this one. How tall’s Cat again?”
“It's not funny,” Ellie grumbles, but she settles against him easily.
“I'm not joking,” he says with feigned innocence. “He’ll do it for you. Pretty sure he already likes you more than me anyway.”
“Who wouldn't?” Ellie quips, and he can hear the exact smirk she's wearing.
“Little brat,” he grumbles, kissing the top of her head.
*
Ellie finally leaves the house for the first time the next day, joining him for breakfast. If she sticks closer to him than usual–which is really saying something given how much she already normally considers his personal space a shared commodity–he doesn’t mention it.
“Well, look who rejoins the land of the living,” Tommy says when he joins them, tugging the end of Ellie’s braid, just the top of her hair pulled back in one of the new styles she’s been trying out. He ignores her taking a swat at him, grinning. “I was getting worried you were gonna be turning into one of those grandpas from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
Ellie levels him with an unimpressed look.
“I have no clue what that even means, dude,” she says dryly, perking up when Tommy hands her his muffin, snagging one of her pieces of bacon in exchange.
“Feeling better?” Maria asks, lowering herself carefully to accommodate her belly.
“Yeah,” Ellie tells her oatmeal before stuffing a spoonful into her mouth, clearly to avoid getting any more questions.
Joel smiles slightly before turning to his own breakfast.
*
He feels Ellie freeze beside him when they’re about to leave, and he tenses on reflex, ready to take care of a threat.
When he turns, though, it’s just a girl with a green backpack and a side shave.
Ah, he thinks, finally having a face for the name: Cat.
“Hi, Mr. Miller. Hi, Ellie,” the girl says, giving him only the briefest flicker of a smile before looking back to Ellie, eyes beseeching. “Ellie, can we talk for a sec?”
“Uh, no, sorry,” Ellie says, fumbling putting her dishes on her tray in a wildly endearing little display of teen awkwardness. “Joel needs me to-”
“It can wait,” he says mildly, and Ellie turns big, betrayed eyes on him.
“Go talk,” he says, nudging at her back gently. “I’ll be here.”
“Joel-” She hisses, but he pushes at her a little harder. He has the sneaking suspicion based on the hope on Cat’s face that this isn’t nearly the crisis Ellie thinks it is, and if she’s still a little too young to figure that out on her own, he’s willing to give her a little nudge in the right direction. He leans in so only she’ll hear him.
“Go talk to her,” he says quietly. “If it goes bad, I’ll be right here.”
Ellie takes a steadying breath before she rises, moving like someone walking to an execution, and he bites back his urge to smile. It’s charming, almost, his kid having faced so much and still being so nervous to talk to a crush. It’s what she deserves, normal teenager crises, little things that feel massively important only when they’re happening for the first time.
It makes him feel like things might end up okay after all.
*
He creates busywork for himself to avoid looking like he’s hovering, only glancing now and then to see Ellie and Cat talking earnestly in the corner.
(Willing to let her flex her wings on this one or not, if that girl makes his girl cry, there’s going to be a reckoning.)
Cat, though, seems completely genuine, face open and apologetic. Ellie is turned away from him, so he can’t read her expression, but the tension in her shoulders gradually loosens, and by the fifth time he glances back, he sees her laughing, easing a knot of worry in his chest that he hadn’t been aware of until it was gone. She’s faced worse things than another teenager making fun of her, but by the same token, she’s suffered enough. She doesn’t deserve other kids picking on her.
From the way Cat hugs her, though, Joel thinks with satisfaction that at least he won’t have to worry about that for now.
*
“You’re a fucking traitor,” Ellie tells him conversationally when she says goodbye to Cat and returns to his side. He accepts the punch to the arm he gets, amused by the pink tinge to her cheeks and the dumb little smile she can’t hide. “You threw me to the fucking enemy, man.”
He holds the door for her and charitably ignores the little kick he gets to the ankle as she passes.
“Sure didn’t look like ‘the enemy’ to me,” he teases, and Ellie’s blush darkens. “Looked to me like you were pretty sweet on her.”
“You were fucking watching?” She demands, obviously deliberately ignoring the second part. “Like a creep?”
He hums a response, barely resisting the urge to laugh as Ellie perks up when she sees Cat, exchanging a little wave. Ellie sees his expression when he turns back and sticks her tongue out at him, attempting to hip check him and succeeding only in bouncing herself off like a bird against a window. He catches her before she stumbles, resting an arm around her shoulders.
“So how’d it go?” He asks, shaking her gently. “Work everything out?”
“Yeah,” Ellie says, sounding pleased and a little shy. “We’re good.”
He squeezes her gently.
“Well then,” he says, barely biting back his smile enough to sound serious. “Seems you and me should be having a talk, then.”
“A talk?” Ellie asks, levity dropping at once, expression going a little nervous. “What kind of talk?”
“Well,” he says, with the same mock-severity, “the rule for Sarah was no boys in her room, and that’s gonna be the same with you for girlfriend-girls-”
She pulls away from him, covering her ears.
“We’re not talking about this!” She says. “I can’t hear you! I can’t-”
“And if the rules are different at her house,” Joel says, talking over her, “I still want that door open and-”
“Bye! Goodbye!” Ellie says, shoving him and taking off. “This conversation is over forever! We’re not talking about this ever! Goodbye!”
He laughs as she darts away, letting her make an escape for now.
They can finish this conversation later.
After all, he thinks with amusement and satisfaction, he knows where she lives.