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Ellie lost the letter.
Or does it still count as losing it if she knows where it is? It never left the hospital, still sitting there somewhere among the ruins of the Fireflies. Maybe one of the raiders took it, tossing it onto the side of the road after taking her food and water, so it can sit in the sun like the dry skeletons along every highway she’s ever walked.
Joel managed to take her knife before he left. It’s the last true piece of her beginnings, now that the letter is lost.
She remembers the words, though, scribbling them onto a blank sheet of notebook paper a few weeks after they arrive in Jackson to stay. Her handwriting isn’t the same as her mother’s. It’s neater, she thinks. FEDRA-approved. She had to stay after class and write hundreds of lines if it wasn’t.
“I see so much strength in you. I know you’ll turn out to be the woman you’re meant to be.”
So much for that. Salt Lake City was a bust.
There’s no bloodstains on the edges of this paper. It isn’t yellow and oily beneath her hands, permanently creased on the lines it’s been folded a hundred times over. It’s clean and perfect instead. Blank.
It’s like their new “home.” They haven’t added that much to it yet, and most of the items that used to be inside have long since been carried off to other houses. It’s empty. About as pristine as a building can get, nowadays. A perfect house on perfect Rancher Street, where flowers bloom in front of porches and people mill around with boxes in their arms, or children holding their hands, or a reined horse plodding along behind them.
Ellie likes sitting in Tommy and Maria’s house instead. Theirs is lived in. Something that’s entirely their own, with those quilts Maria likes draped over the backs of the couches, and Tommy’s albums and record player filling the downstairs with music whenever they’re on.
They’ve been sitting in the said downstairs for a couple hours now, Tommy having run breathless into their kitchen that morning to announce the birth of a boy, after a long night of labor for Maria.
“Are we gonna be the first ones to see him?” she asks. Tommy had brought them in and told them to wait there while Maria slept. He still has yet to emerge back down the stairs.
“After his parents and the doctors, yeah,” Joel says. He’s cracked open one of the windows, the gentle chill of the morning seeping into the room. The air is sweet and flowery, the quiet chatter of people filtering in from the street. The baby picked a good day to be born. “We’ll probably be the only other ones to see him for a while, he ain’t gonna be in public for a couple months.”
“Why not?”
The nurseries were separate from the general population in FEDRA, but that was so it was easier to keep track of so many infants. Here, all of the babies have at least one adult completely dedicated to them at all times. The older babies are little kings in the community, garnering waves and wide smiles every time they grace the public spaces.
“Babies have always been real fragile,” Joel says. His gaze is fixed on the monument on the mantle, resting on those two little names still sketched out in chalk. “They’re even more fragile now. It’s why you gotta wash your hands real well before you go in. They’re also gonna want to have time that’s just the three of them before they have to go back to the world.”
That makes sense. Sort of. She shifts positions on the couch, her eyes still gummy from sleep. Joel’s hand rests against her knee and she places hers over his, giving it a little squeeze. His gaze shifts away from the mantle. “Birth’s real hard on the mother too. Always was. Lots of women don’t make it now, or babies, or both. Getting through it is gonna take a lot out of them.”
She thinks of the long-dried bloody handprint over the top of her mother’s letter. Her heart skips a beat.
The baby is… odd, when they finally go in to meet him. His face is squished, his head kind of cone-like on the top. His skin’s mottled around his stomach, one of his little fists clenching open and closed. The last time she saw a baby this new it was dead in a Boston clinic, a nurse making an incision across its little blue stomach while Ellie was being stitched up a few feet away.
Maria’s eyes are dark pools in the dim lighting of the room, the baby tucked safely in her arms. They’re softer than Ellie’s ever seen them. The creases on her face are more apparent, her lips curved into a gentle smile. She passes the baby over to Tommy. They transfer him like he’s glass, slow and steady in their movements.
“Benjamin Miller, meet your Uncle Joel,” Tommy tells him, like the baby can actually understand anything he says. He passes him to Joel with the same carefulness Maria had. The baby fits into Joel’s arms so easily, a tiny puzzle piece locking into place.
Joel stares at him for a few moments. His eyes are glittering. “Looks just like his Mama,” he finally says. “Thank god.”
The grown-ups all laugh. Ellie sticks her head out of the open window beside the bed, looking down at the street below, already bustling with people as the day claims the last of the dawn.
“Got his size from his father,” Maria says from behind her. “10 pounds, 4 ounces.”
“Yep. Tommy was 11.” Joel soothes the baby as he starts to fuss, passing him back to Maria.
“Would’ve been nice information before I decided to procreate.” Maria scans the room until she meets Ellie’s eyes. “Do you want to hold him, Ellie?”
She does. Even if he is freaky. She walks over to the edge of the bed, stiff as a lightpost. Joel had given her a whole lesson on how to hold babies a few days ago, using her bear as an example—the same bear that’s eye is currently cracked from where she accidentally dropped it over the stair railing.
Maria guides her hands to where they’re supposed to be regardless. “There you go,” she whispers, and then there’s a baby in Ellie’s arms, warm and wiggly and so, so tiny. Ten pounds is barely anything to the rest of the world. He makes a little sound, clenching and unclenching his fists again.
For a moment, an overwhelming bitterness washes over her, like the sickening, dripping sludge from that brackish green lake she’d fallen into back in Missouri. His parents are watching them, exhausted and glowing. He’s already loved. Already stable. He’ll never know the rows of babies in a nursery, lines formed by numbers and sex, three crammed to a crib. He’ll never know loneliness, or true hunger, or what it’s like to cower under the cold eyes of someone holding a stick.
His skin shines golden in the flickering sunlight and his wide eyes blink up at hers, framed by pretty little lashes. The bitterness trickles away as quickly as it came. She wants that for him. She wants him to be ignorant.
Maybe that’s the best thing a little kid can be.
The baby grows out of his cone-shaped head. He grows in general, his cheeks as round as the apples that grow in the orchard a couple streets over. His legs are impossibly long compared to the other babies she sees around town, his curls growing just as fast as the rest of him and springing out with vigour.
Maria is up on her feet far sooner than everyone says she should be. It doesn’t matter if there’s a baby at her breast—one turn of her eyes is the only warning anyone needs before they scurry off to heed her words.
Maria and Tommy are lucky, Ellie thinks. She knows they’re lucky, because Katherine Whitaker isn’t. She bleeds to death after giving birth a few months later and the whole town goes to her funeral, she and Joel included, even though they never talked to her once.
He makes her wear black to the funeral and keeps a hand on her shoulder the entire time, his gaze fixed somewhere else while Reverend Prescott speaks. She doesn’t hear a word the reverend says. She’s sure it’s nice and heartfelt, given the way everyone around her is dabbing at their eyes, but it all fades to a buzz when his hand goes to his bible.
Katherine’s new baby is crying the whole time, her father trying to soothe her in the front row. Ellie catches a glimpse of her bald head while he sways back and forth. There’s no blood crusted on the top, no birth fluid sticking to her skin. Like it never even happened.
“Do you think her dad’s pissed?” Ellie asks once they’ve funneled into the canteen for dinner. People are back to chattering and laughing again instead of that somber silence broken up by the baby’s cries. The lights overhead are piercing white, the one at the end of the room flickering inconsistently. It sends a sharp ache hammering through her skull.
“Hm?” Joel hums, scraping some of the potatoes from his plate onto hers.
“Ryland Whitaker. Do you think he’s pissed that his baby killed his wife? Isn’t that kind of fucked up?”
Maria and Tommy have gone silent across from them. Tommy rubs the baby’s back and Maria gives Joel a flashing look, the same one that she always gives him whenever Ellie says something wrong.
“I think… I think he’s happy his daughter’s here, and he’s sad his wife ain’t,” Joel says slowly.
She doesn’t push it further. She thinks of the blood on her mother’s letter instead. She thinks about her certainty that she was going to be gone. She thinks about herself, crying her fucking head off as a baby because that’s what all her nursery files said she did. She didn’t learn how to shut up until she was 6 months old, after repeated correction.
Maybe it was the last thing her mother ever heard.
Joel changes her name by accident. Mrs. Albertson, the school’s principal/office worker puts down Ellie Miller at the top of her form when they’re registering her, and he just scans it over and signs at the bottom, not noticing the difference.
Ellie notices. Because it sticks. Ellie Miller goes on her report card, her sports permission slips, the horrible embroidery Maria tries when she and Tommy are still at home with the baby that first month. People say, “hey Millers!” when it’s only her and Joel twisting through the crowded main street. She hears people call her the little Miller girl when she’s definitely not eavesdropping. It’s what goes on her hospital band when she burns off the skin on her right arm too: Miller Girl.
She doesn’t care. She doesn’t even know if Williams is from her mother or her father—whoever the hell he is. She wondered, once, if he was like David. If she was forced onto her mother, the same way she was forced out. If it’s just a fucking family curse, those men with wandering eyes who find them and hold them on the floor, because they see something in them. She puked all over her bed at the thought.
Joel had come in and cleaned things up and had let her lay beside him in his bed, their chests rising and falling in tandem while he hummed to her, his eyes half-closed.
She’s thought a lot less about fathers since she met him.
She thinks about family a lot more, though.
She’s got the same last name as everyone else, now. It doesn’t make a lick of difference in the looks department. There’s so many things people say about Benji in the beginning that it’s hard to keep track of them all.
“He’s got his mama’s eyes.”
“His daddy’s smile.”
“Look at those long legs! You ever do track, Tommy, pass something down?”
She watches the way Joel and Tommy walk in sync, their footsteps beating to the same rhythm and their heads held at the same proud angle. The way Maria and the baby stretch the same way, even before he can sit up, and the way she knows exactly what to do with his hair. His skin has the same creases as Tommy’s, his nose turning the same way as Maria’s.
Ellie’s skin bruises at the drop of a hat, and Joel rubs a foul-smelling paste on the places she keeps breaking out in hives, although they can never really predict where they’ll pop up. He makes her wear a hat when she’s out in the sun, but she and Tommy forget one day when they’re working together in the gardens and her face burns so badly that she cries. Her body keeps curving and changing like a stranger, but her face stays the same, still soft and round, rosy apple cheeks. She punches Aiden Reed when he says she has a “baby face,” giving him a bloody one.
The ultimate betrayal of her body is the reappearance of that slick, sticky feeling between her legs after months without it when she wakes up one day, the sun well-charted in its morning course through the sky and a heavy wave of exhaustion blanketing her body.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Her stomach lurches when she forces herself up, rolling to the side. There’s a dark, crimson stain in the middle of her bed, right overtop of her sheet. She’s going to have to wash it. She doesn’t feel like washing anything.
She trudges into the upstairs bathroom and locks herself inside in the meantime. Her fucking chest is aching, spiking with pain when she accidentally brushes against it with her arm.
The same dark spot that was on her bed is also on her pants, she can see it in the mirror. It’s a fucking bloodbath when she finally dares to take a closer look.
She’s never bled so much. Ever. She’s seen drier corpses, their stab wounds stuffed with chalky, congealed blood. Her underwear is ruined, her pants are ruined, her sheet is probably ruined too. And she doesn’t have anything to stop herself from bleeding more. Her cup and makeshift pads were all in her backpack.
And her backpack is in fucking Salt Lake City. Just like her letter.
She folds toilet paper and shoves it in her underwear in the meantime, leaning her head back against the wall. She needs a game plan. Needs to figure out how to slip out, wash or hide everything, and convince Joel to go to the commissary before she bleeds through her pants again. He wasn’t squeamish about the whole thing while they were on the road, but he didn’t have much of a choice then. He’d probably prefer not to be bothered with it now.
So she’s on her own. And she needs to figure it out fast.
Joel’s footsteps suddenly creak against the stairs, because of course they do. They stop in her doorway after reaching the top. The doorway she left open, with the blankets pulled back on her bed to perfectly reveal that stupid stain.
“You alright?” he calls to the bathroom door, and she slides back against the wall, pulling her knees to her chest.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” Vaguely, she wonders if she isn’t. Her abdomen is twisting and cramping and she can feel a return of the dampness from before. It’s never felt like this. Maybe she’s bleeding out. Wouldn’t that be poetic justice?
“Is there anything you—”
“—I said I’m fine, Joel!” Her voice doesn’t come out quite as fierce as she had hoped, trembling at the end.
Joel’s quiet for a moment. She can hear the groan of his heel turning on the ancient floorboards. “I’m gonna get Maria, kiddo.” He gives her a few seconds for any protests, leaving in their absence.
Fuck.
She shifts to the side, sticky and hot and pissed. She doesn’t know who she’s pissed at. Joel, herself. Her mom, maybe, for leaving her alone with skin that bruises and burns and breaks out and a body she barely knows, outside of those clinical pictures in health class and the whispers that passed through the FEDRA girls’ dorms. None of them knew what they were doing. That’s why there were eight pregnant girls in one year. Half of them survived.
There are more footsteps against the stairs after a few minutes, lighter and quicker than Joel’s. She can hear the babble of the baby from downstairs, Joel’s low voice responding to his nonsense.
Maria knocks once, twice, three times. “It’s Maria.”
“I know.”
“Are you alright?”
She drops her head down to her tented knees, sniffling. Her stomach twists in turn. “I don’t know.”
“Can I come in?”
Ellie unlocks the door and slides back to the side wall, sitting down again. Maria sits down beside her with a slight groan. She’s got a little bag in her hand that she offers out. There’s a new menstrual cup inside, blue this time.
“Same idea as the last one,” Maria says. “Do they sit okay? You don’t feel them?”
She shrugs. She felt her last one, sometimes, probably because she was shit at putting it in. “Not as much as tampons.”
Maria freezes. “Were you… using tampons you found on the road?”
Shit. Maria’s eyes are flashing. She said something wrong. “Uh, yeah.”
“Do you have any of them left?”
“No.”
“Good. Tampons expire, Ellie, they could have bacteria in the cotton. Trust me, that is not something you want to deal with.”
Great. Another thing she didn’t know. She takes in a deep breath, dropping her head to her knees again. “There’s so much blood—like, fucking everywhere. I don’t—it’s never been like this before. I haven’t even had it for a while, I thought it was gone.” She pauses at Maria’s expression. She can practically hear the gears turning in the other woman’s head. “I wasn’t… pregnant or anything.”
Maria nods, offering her a hand. She takes it. “It’s probably normal, then. Malnutrition can change it, or make it stop altogether. Your body is trying to adjust to being here now. Keep an eye on it, though. If you start feeling dizzy, or like you’re going to pass out, you need to tell someone. It can be me or Joel or Tommy, it doesn’t matter.”
Maria’s voice is calm and careful. She knows what she’s talking about, like she seems to with everything.
There’s one physical similarity between her and a family member, Ellie realizes. Their bodies work the same way. It might be cool, if that way didn’t also happen to be incredibly annoying.
“I’m going to bring you a change of clothes.” Maria goes to the door, hand on the doorknob. “We’ll wash your sheets and pants, see if we can’t get the stains out, okay?”
“Okay.” She twists the bag the menstrual cup’s in around in her fingers. “My boobs fucking hurt.”
Maria laughs, opening the door and stepping out. “Sorry, sweetheart. That’s just how it goes.”
There’s a lot that happens a week later between the start of a normal school day and Ellie breaking Poppy Hutchinson’s nose, but nobody seems to particularly care.
There’s no hint of a smile on Mrs. Albertson’s face as she sits in front of her desk, like there sometimes is when she gets in trouble for bringing a frog into class or scaling the roof. The older woman’s hands are folded, her face as severe as the rolling gray clouds outside the smudged school windows. It reminds her of Boston.
They sit without speaking for another five minutes, Mrs. Albertson passing her a cloth to wipe away the blood dripping down the side of her face. She doesn’t use it, wiping the blood with the back of her hand instead. Poppy had given her a couple of good scratches before Ellie had settled things with the final swing.
“Your father’s going to be here soon.” Mrs. Albertson breaks the silence. Ellie focuses on her shoes, saying nothing. They have a few drops of blood across them, wet patches dark against the already-red tops. “We’ll have a long chat about this later with him and Ms. Hutchinson’s parents. For now, I need you to go home.”
“Okay.”
“Ellie.” Mrs. Albertson unfolds her hands, her nails drumming against her desk. Ellie looks up, meeting her eyes. “I’m very disappointed in you.”
It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t fucking hurt. Not when the woman could have yelled or belted her or thrown her in the Hole. Except Mrs. Albertson has one of Ellie’s pictures hung up behind her, a watercolor of the sunrise over the mountains. And she always tracks down Joel at a superhuman speed when it’s a bad day.
And now she’s looking at her like she’s dangerous. It’s the same way everyone else was looking at her after Ms. Laura had hauled her off of a sniveling Poppy, the other girl clutching her hands to her nose.
Stupid, perfect Poppy, who speaks with a soft voice and a quivering lip to the adults, then turns around saying that Jenna Meyers is a dirty whore and leaves expired condoms on her backpack and desk.
Ellie did start it though, technically. Ms. Laura had given them their assignment for their history section that week—family trees that each kid has to make.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Dina had muttered from beside her, and Ellie had kind of agreed. Dina also doesn’t have a mom. She doesn’t have anyone, actually, going back and forth from different people’s houses at whim. She’s the closest thing they have to a foster kid, Maria had said, whatever that was supposed to mean.
Everyone loves her. She’s charming and goofy and sweet. She could pick any of those houses to stay at, but she never does. Ellie’s never asked her why.
It took all of two minutes for that assignment to go south. Poppy turned around from her desk in front of them, resting her elbows against it. “It’s kind of not fair, y’know,” she said. “The rest of us have to spend, like, an hour on this, and you two only have to spend five minutes.”
“Fuck off, Poppy,” Ellie said, Dina focusing intensely on the math paper she was doodling over, her brow furrowing.
“I’m just saying. What’s yours going to be, Dina, a blank paper with your name in the middle?”
“That’s not even how family trees work, dipshit.” Dina lowered her voice as Ms. Laura raised an eyebrow from across the room. “The dead ones still go on it.”
Poppy rolled her eyes in the way Joel always tells Ellie will make them get stuck that way. She turned her gaze. “What about you, Ellie? Just your mom, right? That’s easy enough: Mom, cause of death, me.”
Ellie slammed her copy of Where The Red Fern Grows into Poppy’s face. And that was that. Things got kind of fuzzy afterwards. She knows she was on top of her at one point, hitting her again while she tried to scratch her. She knows Poppy stopped fighting and started crying instead, and Ellie stopped hitting but she didn’t get off.
And now she’s here, with Mrs. Albertson’s eyes boring into hers. She doesn’t hear most of what she says next, slumping forward in her chair instead, arms crossed to her chest. Poppy doesn’t know anything, she tells herself. She took a fucking guess, just like Ellie’s been doing.
There are so many ways for people to die.
Joel comes through the office doors, and she turns her head in his direction. He sits down beside her, his eyes combing her over for injuries like he does every time he sees her, old habits dying hard. “She punched someone, ma’am?” he says after a moment, looking over at Mrs. Albertson.
“Among other things, yes.” She starts tapping her nails against the desk again, the sound grating through Ellie’s ears. “She won’t tell anyone why, but she slammed a book into Poppy Hutchinson’s face, then pinned her on the ground and started hitting her. In the middle of class, might I add. Isn’t that right, Ellie?”
She shrugs. “Sure.”
That’s the wrong answer, apparently. Mrs. Albertson lets out a huge, heaving sigh, Joel’s eyes hardening and cutting between them.
“Why’d you do it?” he asks her.
She says nothing.
“Ellie.”
“I fucked up, okay?” She slides further down in her chair, her feet brushing against the end of Mrs. Albertson’s desk. Maybe she did fuck up. But she’d do it again. She wonders if her mother would’ve done the same thing, if she went into everything swinging and fighting and hissing, like one of those feral cats that live in the abandoned shed near the back gates.
“Obviously, we’re going to need to discuss this further,” Mrs. Albertson says. “Once Poppy is out of the clinic I’ll speak to the Hutchinson’s and you again. Until now, she’s suspended for two days.”
“Alright. I’m sorry this happened, ma’am.” Joel stands up, tugging her up to her feet beside him. He’s just turned to leave, his hand grasping the back of her hoodie, when Mrs. Albertson speaks up again.
“Mr. Miller. This isn’t the first time this has happened. If you need extra support for managing her behavioural struggles, we have a women's group that might do her some—”
“—We’re fine, ma’am.” His voice hardens in a second, his grip on her hoodie tightening. He and Mrs. Albertson have one of those weird-as-shit conversations grown-ups have with just their eyes, before he gives her a nod and hauls Ellie out of the school building.
It’s raining outside, a light little drizzle. It’s been raining for the past week, mud splattering from the bottom of her shoes to the knees of her pants every time she steps outside. Joel makes her shower everyday after school, because she always comes home covered in wet grass.
“Why’d you hit her?” he asks. Tiny raindrops cling to his hair, glittering in the weak sunlight.
“Because she’s a bitch.”
“That ain’t a—” Joel stops walking, taking in a long breath. She comes to a halt beside him. “You can’t keep doing this. I know some people get on your nerves, but you have got to learn to let it go. It’s part of growing up. Unless you tell me why you hit her, I ain’t gonna be able to defend you, Ellie. You’ll have to take whatever punishment they give you.”
“That’s… so fucking stupid.” She takes a step back. Fire rises in her cheeks, licking at her bare skin. “I had a reason! You know I did!”
“What was your reason?”
She could tell him. But it feels… private. That’s why she hit Poppy, maybe. She’s the last part of Anna Williams left, and that’s something that’s hers. It was supposed to be hers.
And maybe she ruined it.
“Fuck off.”
Joel doesn’t even try anymore. He just tugs her inside and tells her to go to her room, which is fine, because that’s where she was headed anyway.
She flops down on her bed and pulls out her re-written letter, the paper crinkling where her fingers touch it.
“When the time comes, she’ll tell you all about me. Don’t give her too much of a hard time. Try not to be as stubborn as me.”
Her mom would’ve punched Poppy, she thinks. She has to think it. Her stomach won’t settle if she doesn’t.
Along with her two-day suspension, Mrs. Albertson mandates that she has counseling once a week for ten weeks. So she does. Joel walks her over and waits outside the house while she talks to Gail. Gail’s house smells like weed and something else she can’t quite place. It makes her eyes burn.
Gail asks in their third session, do you feel like an imposter? Does adoption feel like kidnapping, even if you don't know why?
She sits and thinks.
Gail answers before she can. She says that maybe she is an imposter. That maybe adoption is kidnapping. That maybe nature and nurture and—
Ellie goes home and punches a tree.
She’s grounded for longer than she’s suspended, which is fine. It gives her time to read the books she checked out from the library a week ago, the ones about childbirth. She’s never going to be pregnant, she decides, not when there’s already something crawling around under her arm, depending on her, stealing from her. Maybe it's no worse than her, though.
She killed her mom.
She always knew that, somewhere, but she’s almost certain of it now. It didn’t happen right away—her mother had time to write the letter. Maybe she bled out after. Maybe her heart just stopped. It happens. Babies kill their mothers all the time, Joel had said. His words play on repeat in her mind.
She tries not to think about it during Sunday, which is their unofficial family dinner night. All five of them eat together in the dining room of Maria and Tommy’s house, even Benji, who won’t eat anything but mashed potatoes and has just started being put in a high chair, which he hates the moment he’s done with his food. He finishes his food only three minutes into their meal today, mashed potatoes splattered across his hair and the front of his baby blue onesie. Tommy shovels the rest of his chicken into his mouth and goes to lift him up before he can start howling.
“Mama just ignored you,” Joel says to him. “Of course, you spent almost all your time screaming. Just got normal after a while.”
“Woman never batted an eye,” Tommy laughs, dabbing futilely at Benji’s hair with a wet cloth. “One look from her and we’d be back on the right track, she knew it. She was fair too. Hah, remember when you broke the window when we were playing ball outside the house? She came out practically hissing and spitting, yelling my name. Quieted down for a second when she realized it was you, but she still dragged you inside all the same.”
“Yeah, you enjoyed that, didn’t you?”
“Sure did.”
Ellie stabs her fork into her chicken, stripping a piece of meat from the bone. She knows where it comes from, she tells herself, she walks by the coops everyday on her way to and from school. The meat strings off red and soft at the end, yellow juice dripping into the cavity left behind from the removed piece. She swallows back bile.
“I’m… done. I’ll be upstairs.” She picks up her plate before anyone can say anything different, putting it in the fridge before heading up. The room at the end of the hall is technically Maria and Tommy’s guest room, but it’s basically hers. She spends the night there whenever Joel has longer shifts or overnight patrols, and she retreats to it sometimes during “family events” as well.
She flops down on the floor beside the bed, staring up. The ceiling fan is on, spinning slowly with a horrible, creaking groan. Its wooden blades have been scratched since the first time she saw it, the pull chain missing its end.
Joel had a mother, she thinks, and it’s a weird thought. She can barely imagine him as a kid.
Most people stay with the person they grew inside. Most people stay with the person who made them. Except for her, Dina, and Katherine Whitaker’s baby, apparently.
Her and the Whitaker baby are the same. They ripped through their mothers, stole their breath and blood. What kind of fucked-up people do that in their first hours of life?
The fan continues its shaky circles, and Ellie can see time spelled out in its blur. It’s all around her now, both a breathless freedom and a crushing oppression. She has time to think. To care. To work out all of those things that have been tangled up inside of her over her entire life.
Maybe, though, it’s better to leave some things be.
She can see the corner of a brown box peeking out of the closet. That’s new. There’s not much in the guest room closet other than some blankets and spare towels. She crawls over without a second thought, pulling it out.
It’s old. The box was wet, once, pieces of it flaking off now. She opens it up.
Just pictures. It looks like most of them were taken on the same shitty polaroid camera. Some of them are of a mountain range she’s never seen, the top dipped in snow. Or a truck with big fucking wheels, an absolute giant next to an unfamiliar man.
There’s also a picture of people with pendants around their necks. Her heart stops. She sucks in a deep breath, scanning the ten or so people lined up in the picture. They’ve all got guns draped over their shoulders, half of them wearing dented helmets. She flips it over, squinting at the tight handwriting on the back.
Eastern Squad, 2013.
There’s three women. None of them are her mom. The one in the middle, though, is Marlene.
Fucking Marlene.
There’s footsteps up the stairs all of a sudden and she shoves the pictures back into the box, going back to her spot on the floor. Joel walks into the room a moment later. “You okay?” he asks. His voice is soft. “You left kinda fast back there, kiddo.”
She pushes herself to her feet, wiping dust off of her pants. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You sure?” He takes an extra long moment to look at her, his brow furrowing the way it always does when they both know she’s lying.
“I’m sure. I’ll go back down now.”
He decides not to press, thank god. She follows him down the stairs and back into the dining room, the baby squealing when she makes her appearance. Tommy is bouncing him on his knee right now, his hands giant against that little chest.
Tommy was a Firefly. He went back far enough to have been with Marlene. 2013. Four years after she was born.
Maybe he has something.
Here’s the thing about Joel. He’s everything. He never had a choice to be anything but everything. He kept her alive when they were out on the road. He was her rising sun, back then, a glimmer of fierce light on a horizon full of sky she had never touched before. And now they’re here. And he doesn’t stop being everything. She knows the way mother and father look, for a lot of people. She knows the way they can change too.
Joel made a choice. He stayed with her. And now mother and father are a blurred line, with no clear beginning and end. He doesn’t pick and choose. He’s everything. He’s Joel. He’s the only person she can think about, when something isn’t right. When she’s curled up on the floor in pain or tangled in her blankets from a nightmare. His name comes to her lips every time, even if she doesn't want it to, a cry that pulls directly from instinct.
She’s Ellie.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t tell him about what she found in Maria and Tommy’s guest room. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t confront Tommy about it directly, and instead makes a plan to sneak in to see if there’s anything else.
Because Joel is everything. Because she couldn’t unglue herself from him if she tried, that orbiting planet and setting sun and brightest star in the sky, the one she can always call home. And yet, she still needs to know more. She still imagines what her mother’s face might have looked like. She still wonders what it felt like in her stomach, if she can remember her voice, somewhere.
Anna’s gone, though. Ellie killed her. She doesn’t know what she’s still looking for.
She makes her plan over the course of the next few days. Although, it’s not a plan, really, more of her trying to subtly ask where everyone’s going to be before she goes next door and starts snooping through the closets for pictures of her dead mom.
She’s nervous. It crawls around in her stomach like a ball of ants, tiny, spiky legs scraping her insides. She’s got other things on her mind too. There’s a dance coming up at the school. Dances are dumb, but Ellie’s been to two because Dina was there.
This one’s different, though.
Mother-daughter dance! Sunday from 9 pm - 12 am.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dina whispers when Ms. Laura writes it up on the chalkboard, and Ellie sighs, resting her elbows against her desk. “Like, seriously, who comes up with this shit?” Dina’s normal smile is wavering. She bites her nails, like she always does when she’s nervous.
Ellie wasn’t mad about it before. She’s kinda mad now, though. It’s fucking stupid. All of the girls can go, except for Dina, Ellie, and Katherine Whitaker’s baby. There’s a couple girls in the middle school class too, maybe? One in the elementary.
Everyone except them.
“We can hang out that night,” she offers. “You can come over to my place.”
Dina’s expression shifts in an instant to a bright smile. “Your dad won’t mind?”
“Dude, he loves you.” He does. She’s glad he’s a fan of one of her friends, at least, given the way he is around Jesse.
She does her best to ignore the impending dance, and it’s not that hard. She’s got more important things on her mind now. Tuesday evening, Joel’s working a late shift. Tommy’s out on patrol and won’t be back until midnight. Maria got held up in some meeting, and the baby’s staying the night with a friend. She’s got a three hour period where nobody will be home. That’s her window.
There’s not really much art to sneaking across the street. Tommy and Maria never lock their door until it’s nighttime, safe enough that they don’t have to, and having been unsafe enough to know that a locked door doesn’t do much if someone’s seriously determined. She twists the doorknob and steps inside, taking a deep breath.
Her throat is dry, her hands shaking. She doesn’t know if she’s afraid of getting caught, or afraid of finally finding something. He has to have something. A name, a note, a picture.
She wants to know what she looked like.
The downstairs closets don’t have anything but seasonal clothes in them, she knows that because she crawls in looking for the cat sometimes. Upstairs is where the box was.
The stairs creak under her feet. The house feels wrong with nobody here, rattly and groaning. Like the walls are breathing on a ventilator.
There’s nothing else in the guest room closet. Her heart sinks. She’s not going through the bedroom and the nursery, because she’s not that fucking weird. There’s still the attic, though. And the basement.
The attic yields nothing other than a cloud of dust that makes her sneeze. The basement is as empty as ever, and she only spends a minute looking around before running back upstairs. The lights don’t work down there and the shadows pool heavily in the corners.
It’s luck that she sees it, that thick red book on the shelf with the rest of Tommy and Maria’s collection. It’s bigger than the other books, the ends of the pages sticking out. Like they’ve got something stuffed inside. She takes it out, flipping to the first page.
There’s his pendant. Clear as fucking day, shoved into one of the little compartments of what’s supposed to be a photo album. Not everyone is hiding things, perhaps. Or maybe sometimes the best way to hide things is to put them in plain sight, half full.
There’s another picture of the same group from before, Eastern Squad 2012. Marlene’s still in it. Her eyes bore into Ellie’s. She’s been carrying that look, that zeal, since the very beginning, in a way that’s both hauntingly familiar and completely unknown.
After the first picture, the rest are arranged by year. 2018 and down. There’s not much for each year, just a photo and a couple lists. She flips by the most recent, stopping at 2010. She sucks in a quick breath before turning the page.
Six people. Marlene in the middle. No one she recognizes, other than a baby version of Tommy with a freaky shaved face. Same on the next page, only it’s eight people this time. None of them are her mom.
She sits and stares, aware of every thump of her heart. Heat rises in her chest, prickling across her cheeks and into her eyes. There’s a paper squished into the section on the side. She reads it.
Friends of the Green Dragon
Sanai Adams (Deceased, 2010, Infected)
Elisabeth Anderson (Deceased, 2012, Infected)
Craig Atkinson (???)
Marlene Frank (Deceased, 2024)
Joseph McKinley (Deceased, 2015, Executed)
Thomas Miller
Anna Williams (Deceased, 2009, Childbirth)
She traces her thumb over the last name. There it is. Not a picture, just a confirmation. She drops the book to the floor with a clatter. She doesn’t deserve to touch it.
She hears the creak of the porch steps a moment too late, the front door slowly opening. Fuck.
There’s no time to run, no time to even duck behind the couch as Maria steps through the door. They stare at each other for a long second, Ellie still standing in front of the dropped photo album.
“Meeting got out early. I see you found it, hm?” Maria shrugs her bag off of her shoulder, taking her boots off by the front door. Ellie is frozen. “I thought you might come looking for something eventually. Personally, I prefer to stay as far away from it as possible.”
“What?” she manages to say.
“The Fireflies. After what happened in Salt Lake I can’t imagine any information on them you’ve gotten so far has been satisfying. Come here.” Maria sits down on the couch, stretching out her legs. Something pops and she lets out a slight groan. Ellie picks the album up from the ground and passes it over, sitting down beside her.
Maria flips through it like it’s a normal family photo album instead of a documentation of terrorists over the years, stopping and smiling at some of the pictures with Tommy in them.
“He really needs facial hair,” Ellie says, and Maria laughs.
“Girl, I know.” She flips to the next page. “Not everyone here was a Firefly. Tommy said they used to mix in photos of random guards to make them eat their own if they ever found anything.” Huh. Makes sense. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
Maria is at 2011. Ellie watches her turn one page, then another. Friends of the Green Dragon. With a shaking finger, Ellie points at the last name on the list.
“I killed her,” she says.
It takes a few seconds for it to dawn on the older woman. Ellie can see the moment it does, Maria’s brow rising, then falling again. Her finger comes up beside Ellie’s, tracing over that hastily-scrawled name, proof that Anna Williams once existed.
“I killed her,” Ellie says again. She takes out her letter from where she shoved it into her pocket, unfolding it. “I fucking…” Everything unfurls inside of her at once. Her throat tightens like someone’s wrapping their fists around it. Her face feels fuzzy, her eyes wet. She blinks rapidly.
“Can I…?” Maria motions towards the letter. Ellie hands it over. She’s never given it to someone before. Not even Riley.
“It’s not even the real one,” she chokes out. “I lost that one.”
Maria is quiet while she reads. Ellie sits there with her stomach twisting and her eyes heavy and hot. The house creaks around them, the sun pouring in through the windows. Maria’s skin shines amber in the soft light.
She folds the letter back up after she’s done, swallowing and looking away.
“Fucked up, right?” Ellie asks, pulling her knees to her chest.
“She loved you.”
Uh, okay. Not exactly the response she was expecting. “What?”
“These are the words of someone who loved you, Ellie.” Maria meets her eyes, her gaze sharp and level. “She wanted you to live. She gave you your knife, right?”
She nods.
Maria scrubs her hands across her face, leaning her head back. Her braids spill over the back of the couch in a dark cascade. “I’d have wanted the same, if it were Benji.”
She loved you.
The last of her restraint snaps, that weight she’s been carrying around for so long crashing inside of her at full force. Her breath rasps in her chest, her heart thudding rapidly. “I still…” A tear leaks out of one eye before she can stop it, trickling down her cheek.
“You were worth it, to her.”
Another tear drops. And another. She wipes her eyes.
“Can I hug you?” Maria asks. She nods. The older woman slides closer and wraps her arms around her, pulling her to her chest. Her chin rests against her head, her arms wrapped firmly around her back. “I can’t even imagine,” she says after a few seconds, still holding onto her, “how hard it was for her, not knowing if you’d stay safe. I can’t imagine how hard it is to not know her face.”
She cries harder, sobs ripping through her body. Maria gently rocks her from side-to-side, like she and Tommy do with Benji to soothe him. Her hands move up to Ellie’s cheeks once the tears start to dry, rubbing a thumb under her eyes. “You’ve been carrying this for a while, haven’t you?”
“It’s… so stupid,” Ellie whispers. “It’s basically a fucking paradise here compared to everywhere else, and I still wanted this. Just a name in a book.”
“It’s not stupid. It’s where you come from.” She lets go of her and carefully removes the paper from its compartment, passing it over. “And if we’re doing this right, we’re not taking you away from where you come from. She was yours. No matter what life decided to throw at the both of you, she was still yours and you were hers. And you lost her.”
Ellie smoothes her thumb over the paper, holding it out so the residue of the tears that were spilling down her face don’t splash down and ruin it.
She helps Maria sort through the laundry after she’s calmed down, pairing tiny socks together and folding onesies. There’s a knock on the front door after a little while, and Maria yells, “come in!”
Joel steps inside.
Just the sight of him nearly sets her off again, tears pricking in her eyes and that hot, heavy feeling returning. She swallows, setting down a little shirt with smiling whales on it.
Maria stands up, her fingers ghosting against her shoulder. “Are you alright if he and I have a talk about all of this?” she asks, and Ellie nods. Maria leads Joel back out to the porch and they close the door behind them. Ellie curls in on herself. Normally, she would try and figure out a creative way to inconspicuously eavesdrop. She’s not sure if she wants to listen right now, though.
The door opens again after a little while, and Joel motions her forward with a jerk of his head. She follows him outside and across the street, into the living room of their own house. It feels a lot more like home now, whatever home is supposed to feel like. She’s never really felt it before. Her things are everywhere, though, her hoodies draped over the couch and her colored pencils scattered across the coffee table. Joel hangs up her drawings on the fridge and puts his own carvings around the house. There’s so many blankets too, enough that she can drop all of them together in a pile and hide underneath. He calls it burrowing.
She’s tempted to go burrow right now, slouched back on the couch with her arms crossed to her chest. He sits beside her. His gaze is gentle, the creases under his eyes heavier than usual. “Been a rough month, huh?” he says.
She sniffles, saying nothing.
“Maria said you were, uh, looking for stuff on your mom, that right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She stares down at her feet. They’re swinging back and forth, her heels hitting the bottom of the couch. It’s starting to get dark outside, a thick mist hanging in the sky. She can see the first pinpricks of stars through the front windows.
“Ain’t anything wrong with that, baby, not at all. Just wish you could’ve told us. We would’ve helped you look.” She’s silent. He lets out a long breath, one hand coming up to his watch. “She also said something about you… killing her?”
“Yeah.”
He reaches out and takes one of her hands, dwarfing it in two of his. His palms are rough against her skin, even more calloused than before from work and guitar. “You didn’t kill her.”
“Pretty sure I did, dude. I’m not stupid. I was born and she died, that’s all you need to know.”
“Ellie, you…” he pauses, searching for words. His throat bobs. “Your brain, kiddo.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to—”
“It’s been in your brain since you were a baby.” They’re both quiet after he speaks. A crow flies down in front of the window with a piercing caw, soaring off in a mess of black, ruffled feathers. “That’s what Marlene said while you were still out, before everything happened. It was there after you were born, and it’s been there since. Baby, your mother probably—”
Oh, shit. She sits up straighter. Bile rises in her throat, her stomach twisting and turning. “Fuck, Joel, is she—is she still out there?”
“No. Marlene would’ve done it,” he says.
She believes him. She believes him for the same reason she always believes him, because it hurts too much not to.
That brings up an entirely new thought. Her mother got infected, maybe. Would she have been able to escape if Ellie hadn’t been inside of her? Could someone like her have been saved, if she hadn’t been such a failure in Salt Lake City?
“No,” Joel says, like he’s reading her mind. “No. Ain’t anything you could’ve done. You were a baby. These things happen.”
Her legs stop swinging. “I happened.”
“You happened because she loved you. It’s why you’re here. I love her. I owe her everything, and if things were perfect, she’d be right here too.”
“With you?” she asks. It comes out in a croak.
“With me, yeah.” He reaches out, tucking an escaped strand of hair behind her ear. “Don’t care if it’s your mom there, your dad, both. There’s still me. Still your uncle and aunt. Still your cousin. You got all of us, no matter who’s here or not. We’re yours.”
She cries again. There’s been way too much crying tonight. He pulls her close like Maria had, not separating for a long, long time. One of his hands lays flat against her back, in the way he likes because he can feel every inhale and know that she’s still here, and she’ll keep being here, because she’s a stubborn little motherfucker, to quote Tommy.
“I got you,” he whispers. Right now, it’s all she needs to hear.
She’s exhausted the next morning. Her eyes stick shut with goop when she wakes up and her muscles ache fiercely, like she’d spent yesterday evening wrestling with a clicker instead of bawling her eyes out like the fucking baby. Joel says she can stay home from school and she does, burrowing under all of the blankets in the house (including the ones she stole from him).
There’s a lot going through her head right now. More than she feels like dealing with today, so she reads through the new comic series she found in the library instead, still in yesterday’s clothes.
This lasts her until lunchtime, when the front door opens and Tommy appears in her doorway a minute later, tapping on the frame. “Hey there, cricket,” he says. She gives him the saddest chirping noise she can muster. “I feel ya, kid.” He sits down on the edge of her bed, slowly pulling back the layers of her blanket pile, comic books falling to the floor. “Think I found a couple of birds making a nest in there.”
“Nobody thinks you’re funny.” She rolls onto her back and throws her flashlight across her bed, exposed to the general world again. The general world is cold.
“My son does, I’ll have you know.”
“He thinks the sound of zipping up a coat is hilarious.”
“He ain’t wrong. He’s intuitive.” He grabs her hands and hauls her to her feet, giving her a once-over. “There she is. Was hoping for a buddy today, if you’re up to it. I’ve got an afternoon shift in the stables and I could use the free child labor.”
The stables don’t sound like a bad idea. She’ll get to see Shimmer if she goes, and she knows where some of the patrollers try to hide the good snacks up in the loft. She gives him a nod.
“Alrighty then. Go get your coat, honey.”
They stop in the canteen before heading to the stables, taking two sandwiches to go. She didn’t even realize how hungry she was until she’s tearing into it, Tommy offering her half of his.
It’s chilly out today, the breeze biting at her ears. Winter is coming fast. She doesn’t know what it’ll look like for her. The stables are warmer than outside and she immediately goes to Shimmer after arriving, pressing a kiss to that sweet velvety nose.
Tommy has her muck out Old Beardy’s empty stall, and the feeling of sweat pricking up her arms is a pleasant one. Old Beardy’s stall is across from Shimmer’s and she chats to her while she works—telling her about Tommy and Maria’s pregnant cat, the music they’ve been playing in the canteen, the way the leaves are turning so fast, and it’ll probably be annoyingly cold soon. Shimmer’s the best listener she knows. She always looks thoughtful, with those black marble eyes staring soulfully into everyone else’s.
“I didn’t know her,” Tommy says. He appears in front of the stall, shovel in hand. “Your, uh. Your mom. Anna. I didn’t know her. I don’t think I ever saw her. I’m sorry.”
She blinks, leaning back. There’s hay in her hair, poking at her eye. “Then what was…”
“Friends of the Green Dragon? We were an information team. Named ourselves after where the Freemasons and—” he pauses at her blank look. “Nevermind. We were spies, I guess, sometimes. Although we did radio more than anything, really, tried to get real information out to the people when FEDRA was really cracking down after those first few years.” He rubs the back of his head. “Yeah. We were never all in the same place at the same time, cause, y’know. Just knew who else was there. I heard her over the radio sometimes. Didn’t make the connection until yesterday.”
She straightens up. “You…”
“Her voice sounded like yours. She was funny. Gave FEDRA a run for their money for years, from what I’ve heard. Apple don’t fall far from the tree, huh?”
She throws her arms around him. His shovel falls to the ground with a clatter as he quickly wraps his arms around her in turn. Along with too much crying, there’s also been too much hugging lately. It still feels nice, though. Tommy’s hugs are some of the best.
“I’ll finish up in here,” he says once they’ve separated. “It’s nice out and your friends will be out of school soon. Go get into some trouble.”
He doesn’t need to tell her twice. Her plan to release a bucket of frogs into Mrs. Albertson’s office has been slightly delayed by the events of the past few days.
She’s ready to get things back on track.
The dance comes up that weekend, some of the other girls in class talking about it in small groups. She ignores them. Dina shows up at her house on Sunday afternoon and they drag all of the blankets and pillows downstairs, racing each other in Mario Kart. Dina’s good at it, almost as good as Tommy. She’s eons better than Joel, who’s mentally incapable of using a controller, apparently.
Joel lets them eat dinner in the living room, sitting on the couch and watching them play for a little while. For someone who can’t even figure out how to accelerate the karts, he’s got a whole lot of opinions on what she should and shouldn’t do. Dina laughs maniacally from beside her, because she’s a traitor.
“Y’all going to that dance tonight?” he asks once the dishes have been put in the sink, Mario Kart now turned off in favor of fucking around with Monopoly on the floor. Dina always comes up with brand new rules for board games that make them even weirder. Her versions are way more fun.
“You mean the mother-daughter dance?” she asks, stealing a couple hundred dollars from Dina when she turns her head away. “I don’t think we’re supposed to.”
“Which is fucking stupid,” Dina adds, taking her money back and then some. Ellie apparently wasn’t as subtle as she had hoped. “I kinda wanted to go.”
“You can go.”
Ellie executes an elaborate jailbreak, placing her piece back on the board. “Can’t go with ghosts, dude.”
“That ain’t what I meant. I used to go to this stuff when it came up with Sarah, sometimes. They can’t keep y’all out. I’ll take you.”
Personally, Ellie would prefer to stay as far away from the dance as possible. But Dina is beaming now, so she starts putting the game pieces back in the box. The dance is in an hour. Dina scrambles to get ready, borrowing one of Maria’s dresses from across the street. Ellie just puts on her least stained dress shirt. Joel makes her wear a tie.
She can see Poppy with her mother when they make their way to the church, where most town events are held. From what she’s heard from Tommy, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in that family either. They both pull a face at seeing Joel.
Ellie’s probably going to wind up hitting her again at school tomorrow. It’ll be worth it.
Joel takes one of her hands and one of Dina’s and walks them inside.
They talk about her mother now, sometimes. Not a lot, but when it seems relevant, she comes up. Tommy talks about how she and Marlene used to bicker on air, until someone reminded them they were live. Maria talks about the things women inherit from their mothers during their discussions about health things that still feel kinda weird to go to Joel about, given that he has no lived experience.
Joel makes her a grave-marker. They don’t know if she has a grave. They put the little cross just outside of the pond where he taught her to swim that summer, Anna’s name carved into the middle. It’s right where the sunlight hits the grass at the edge of the forest. Ellie makes a second marker to put beside it.
Anna and Sarah are together.
Joel and Ellie are together.
There’s nothing missing, she decides. She buries a card in front of the grave-markers during Mother’s Day and makes cards for Joel and Maria. Tommy gets one too, because she might as well at that point.
She’s not missing anything, because she knows what probably happened now, and she’s glad she knows. She’s not missing anything, because she never was, because her mother is hers and nothing can take that away, not a dance, not stupid Poppy Hutchinson, not death.
She buries the letter further out, on a hill that overlooks the ruins of the old town. Red flowers spill out of a half-demolished house, waving in the wind. She doesn’t need the physical copy—she’s got it memorized.
She won’t forget.
I'm not going to lie, this is a pretty messed up world. It won't be easy. The thing you always have to remember is that, life is worth living! Find your purpose and fight for it.
I see so much strength in you. I know you'll turn out to be the woman you're meant to be.
Forever... your loving mother