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Joel’s always been good at teaching, even if Ellie has often hated to admit it. He did well teaching her how to shoot a gun, a memory which Ellie looks back on fondly despite its tarnishing by Silver Lake and everything that went to shit in the winter. Beyond just that, though, Joel always liked to drop little bombs of knowledge on Ellie, especially about Before.
Before, apparently, people cooked for fun. They had restaurants where people would pay to eat and some were so special that people would travel across the city or the country or even the world just to sit and get something famous and expensive. And they had ice cream shops - a delicacy which Ellie has heard about but never seen in person - and bakeries - where they only sold bread and things that looked like bread but were more complicated for some reason - and Joel said Sarah would go to a smoothie shop every Friday after school because there were places that just blended up frozen fruit and put it in a cup and somehow, someone made enough money off of that to pay the bills.
Joel told Ellie that he was one of those people who liked to eat. He liked to get coffee in the morning on his way to work - a drink which he’s sure Ellie would have found gross back then too, but says it used to be better Before - and spent the weekends slaving over a hot stove because, according to him, it was how you showed people you cared. Before, Joel had a big book of recipes he got from his mom, and he was going to give it to Sarah and Sarah would give it to her kids and so on forever. Now, he doesn’t have the book anymore, but he does have a few staples memorized and a half-willing participant in Ellie.
It’s only been a few days back in Jackson and Ellie has been sleeping like the dead for most of it. She wakes up briefly to a hot meal pushed in front of her face, sometimes to use the bathroom or shower, and then goes back to a deep dreamless sleep, like her body is finally recognizing the sheer exhaustion from months spent traveling. This bed is soft, and this shower warm, and Ellie’s never had a home before, and yet, somehow, it’s familiar. Like her body was looking for it all along: a heat-seeking missile, and the Millers are a supernova.
First thing Joel teaches her, upon their return to society - after, of course, she spends a week sleeping like the dead - is how to fry an egg. She’s never really considered food as a thing you do for fun. It’s a necessity, like choking down the canned dog food they served at the FEDRA mess hall. Or like the winters in Silver Lake. People do what they need to to survive, and even worse when they’re desperate. And frankly, you don’t get a lot of eggs in the QZ or on the road. Food being so particular, something that you create - and Joel mentions something about smoke points and flavor profiles and it all sounds so made up - is unheard of.
“Little butter goes a long way,” Joel says, like he’s a professional and this is rocket science and not just two raw eggs in a hot skillet. “Make sure you don’t get any shells in the pan when you crack it, or pull ‘em out if you do.”
“They make you sick?”
“Nah,” Joel answers. He’s sipping on his stinky bean coffee. “Just gross.”
Food being gross is actually not a new concept to Ellie. Avoiding it, however - pulling gross stuff out and eating only what you like, not taking everything and anything that’s handed your way because your stomach hurts from how empty it is - is definitely new.
When she cracks the egg, and a tiny corner of the brown shell falls into the hot pan, Joel scoots her gently out of the way to pull it out pinched between his pointer finger and thumb. She reaches for the pan to help and he says, “Don’t touch it, it’s hot. Real hot.”
“But you’re touching it right now!” Ellie whines.
“Oh, the horror,” he deadpans. “What will you do, not bein’ allowed to poke at a burnin’ hot skillet? Oh no, the nerves in your fingers are kept well intact.”
Ellie stomps on his foot, three times the size of hers. Naturally, he doesn’t even blink.
“Now, you hold this: a spatula-”
“That’s a stupid ass name.”
“It’s for flipping. See how this all clear stuff is turning white? Once it gets solid at the bottom, you pick it up on this spatula and flip it upside down.”
“Did cooking always have so many steps? Waiting until it changes color and using fancy tools for stuff?”
“This is probably the easiest thing in the world to cook,” Joel admits. “Things get a lot more complicated. But, you got nothin’ but time to learn. For now,” he tilts his chin to the pan, where Ellie will be flipping any second now, “egg.”
Ellie’s first time frying an egg doesn’t go as perfectly as she’d hoped, so afterwards Joel shows her how it’s done. In the end, he eats the one she burnt, and what he feeds her is perfectly cooked with a little runny center.
Back in Boston, FEDRA’s school took in kids from all over and trained them to be soldiers. Mostly orphans, but some kids would get shipped off from parents who didn’t want them or couldn’t keep them. All the administrators with families got their kids in special classes, like a VIP section so none of the normal kids could get too close. They didn’t get beat on like other kids did. Like Ellie did.
In that, Ellie met a lot of people. She hated most of them, and the ones she tolerated never stuck around for too long anyways, but she met people nonetheless. One girl Ellie remembered - short and fat, fatter than any other kid in school, but she wouldn’t be for long - told her that before she came to their school, she’d been living with her grandmother on the outskirts of town, and her grandma had been lying about how many people lived with them so they could get more food. When they got caught, her grandma was executed and then she was sent to FEDRA.
“Grandma loved to cook,” she explained. “More than anything else in the world. She said it helped her remember all the good times from Before. We didn’t have much but we made it work. She told me, back then, food meant family. You’d eat together ‘cause you loved each other. And you looked forward to every meal.” It’s how you show people you care , Joel will say one day.
A week later, Ellie is the first one in the gym, so she finds the body still warm on the track. Rumor had it, she’d been made to run laps the day before, and they wouldn’t let her stop. She just kept running and running until her body couldn’t take it anymore.
Ellie doesn’t spend a lot of time mourning people she barely knew. FEDRA was full of assholes and idiots. But that girl - whose name Ellie can’t remember, and probably no one alive knew it - has been on her mind since moving to Jackson. She probably would have really liked it here.
Sunday dinners just sort of happen to Ellie without her even noticing the pattern. It starts their first Sunday in Jackson, just one week in, and by the time the weather warms up, a month has gone by and Ellie’s eaten at Tommy and Maria’s house every week. Maria is about ready to pop and Tommy keeps badgering her to sit down while he finishes cooking. They’re bickering with two big dumb grins on their faces when Ellie turns to Joel and asks, “Why do you guys do this every week? Don’t you get tired of it?”
Joel pauses. “It’s a family tradition,” he says, musing, like he’s never considered it before. “Growin’ up, Tom and I ate every damn meal together. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Our mama would cook, so we’d do the dishes and set the table and all. So, food is - it’s real important to the family. You sit together for meals ‘cause some days it’d be the only time you made time for each other. When things get busy, you forget what’s important. You eat together, because you love each other.”
Sarah, Ellie realizes. The girl’s name was Sarah.
How strange.
They’ve been in Jackson for six weeks when Ellie does the math. Well, Joel does the math, using the calendar the council keeps.
“It’s almost June,” he explains. She didn’t even know she didn’t know what day it was, until suddenly she overheard Maria asking Tommy if he wanted something for his birthday next month. She had a birthday too, maybe. Barely.
“May 20-somethingth,” she tells Joel when he asks. “At least, that’s when Marlene dropped me off at the orphanage. And you don’t celebrate any birthdays or holidays in FEDRA schools.”
“Ever?” Ellie can tell, the way he lifts his brow and tilts his head, he’s sad. He hates hearing about how hard shit was for her in Boston, growing up. He gets all pouty-faced about it.
“Riley and I did, sometimes,” she says, trying to avoid his sad dog eyes.
After a quiet moment, Joel says, “Your birthday is this week, then. May 20-somethingth.”
So, Joel teaches Ellie birthdays.
Ellie’s really not used to all this food that’s allowed to be wasted and thrown out and gone uneaten until it molds over in the fridge because no one remembered it was there, so when Tommy cups a handful of flour and hits Joel upside the head with it, she thinks her birthday is ruined. Tommy’s wasted a precious resource, and even though Tommy’s a grown-up, Joel is older and bigger and stronger, so he’ll whoop Tommy’s ass and no one will have fun anymore today-
Joel grabs the back of Tommy’s t-shirt and cracks an egg down his neck. Tommy whines, Ellie gasps, and Joel laughs.
The cake they make is mostly Joel and Maria doing the work while Tommy and Ellie goof off. Despite their attempts at sabotage with spitballs and thrown hand-towels, Joel is a dutiful sous chef to Maria’s barking orders, so the birthday cake turns out a perfectly edible and frankly fucking awesome chocolate cake with raspberry preserves. In impressively neat white frosting, Joel writes, Happy Birthday Ellie . Underneath, in a much less legible font, he adds, & Tommy .
“Oh, my god,” Ellie says upon her first bite. “I - I don’t ever want real food again. I only want this for the rest of my life. Ever. Wow.”
Joel chuckles and rubs his big calloused hand over her hair, flattening the frizz and pulling the flyaways from where they edge near Ellie’s plate. “You’d get a stomachache from all that sugar, kiddo.”
“You don’t understand, Joel. This is a life-changing experience.”
Tommy, in all his wisdom, says, “You make it sound like you ain’t ever had something sweet before.”
Ellie blinks. Before Joel can say something, anything, to save her from the hole she will inevitably dig herself in, Ellie’s mouth opens and out falls, “I don’t think I have.”
It’s quiet. “It’s just-” and she’s doing it again, now; she’s explaining FEDRA military schools to people who have no idea how bad they are, people who grew up at normal schools with packed lunches and even worse, parents , who would never have sent their kid to a place like that, like Ellie’s parents sent her- “FEDRA food was really bad.”
What more is there to say? It was bad. It was really bad. It was so bad that most of the time, Ellie just didn’t eat instead, right up until her body was going to give out on her and she’d take as much fuel as she could manage and start the cycle over again. It was bad in that Ellie hasn’t had a period in three years, not since her very first one, and Ellie didn’t really know any girls who did have a regular cycle despite what the books she’s read says about periods being normal and healthy. It was bad , bad for you and tasted bad and made your stomach feel bad and sometimes as punishment the officers would take away your utensils and make you eat your mushy peas and mystery meat with your hands tied behind your back.
“Never had a birthday cake before, then?” Maria asks, soft like Ellie is a stray dog she’s trying not to frighten.
“Never - no, never.” Joel’s hand is steady and warm on her arm, rubbing up and down just a little so she doesn’t float away. Ellie thinks, not for the first time, he must have been a really good dad. He doesn’t embarrass her, doesn’t talk about how poor and sad and abused she must have been all her life even though she knows he feels sad about it. Instead, he tells the table about the one year Tommy snuck downstairs the night before Joel’s birthday after they had a fight and ate the entire birthday cake and then spent the whole night and day throwing up while Joel got to play with his new toys without him. He says it all with a sad faraway smile, and Ellie wonders if he told Sarah this story once.
Beyond cake, it appears there are gifts , too. Ellie’s received some presents in her lifetime - she’s not a complete fucking loser, she has had friends before - but most of the time they were handmade or scrounged together with love and urgency and the desire to make it small enough that no one will find it and steal it or have it be taken away as punishment for talking back. Now, after Maria and Tommy have gone home and the sky is black except for the stars, Joel drops a box of things in her lap.
“Thought you’d like it,” he says, but Ellie can tell he’s shy. She knows, in an instant, he has spent all week - if not longer - tediously seeking out presents for Ellie. He didn’t stumble across these things. He planned this. A set of colored pencils, which only seem to be missing a few shades of blue; a tiny carved wooden giraffe with painted spots, which he’s probably been working on this since they got back to Jackson; a board game, only a little dusty called Twilight Imperium: Third Edition that Joel admits Ellie might not like because apparently games can last upwards of 6 hours and he doesn’t think she’ll be okay to sit still long enough. Underneath the larger things, there’s little dinosaur-shaped pins and socks with graphics and a sweatshirt that says Tostitos Fiesta Bowl Championship .
And above all else, there’s a huge, barely dusty, mostly clean, completely empty sketchbook, save for the calligraphed For Ellie across a corner of the inner cover. She didn’t know Joel’s handwriting could be so neat and orderly.
That night, from a page in her new sketchbook, Ellie draws a butterfly, colors it purple, and tucks it underneath her mattress for safe-keeping.
Ellie has spent a lot of time disliking food, but not a lot of time wasting it. Now, in Jackson, no one is starving, and all the time she hears people complaining about food. I don’t like asparagus, can I have corn instead? or I don’t want to finish my chicken, I’m full or Do I have to eat fish ‘cause I reeeaally don’t want to and everyone just says it’s okay , like it’s not a big deal. Like it’s not precious fucking resources that are going down the drain whenever you scrape your plate and there’s still a little meat on the bone or a weird-looking but still probably edible tomato. Red meat creeps Ellie out, but she eats it and just lets herself feel nauseous for a few hours after and then sometimes has nightmares about Silver Lake. As long as she doesn’t puke it up, she’s fine.
Until she is introduced to zucchini.
It’s summer, so the crops are getting bigger and better and the ground is green and lush and Joel comes home with a bunch of new foods Ellie’s never had and one of them is something he calls summer squash , big and yellowish-green with a funny looking flower. He puts it in the oven with some oils and spices and it smells decent, for a vegetable, and looks unassuming on her plate next to the cheesy potatoes Joel knows she loves and the deer he shot and kept on ice for the past few days. It’s their turn for Sunday dinner, since Joel insists Maria needs a break from hosting while she recovers from having a baby and Ellie likes it even more this way, coming downstairs in sweats and fuzzy socks and setting the table and holding the baby while Maria eats. But today, there’s something unfamiliar on her plate and normally Ellie would just eat it. She should just eat it.
She takes a bite.
It’s… gross, frankly. It’s bitter, and kind of soggy-feeling in her mouth, and the spices and stuff definitely help but it’s so undeniably vegetation it makes her mouth feel all herbivorian, with their flat teeth made for grinding grass.
“So domestic,” Tommy teases Joel as Ellie fights the urge to spit her demon squash back onto her plate. “Pickin’ zucchini from your garden like a real communist.”
“What do you think of it, Ellie?” Maria asks. All three of them are on this kick to get Ellie to try all the foods she’s never had before and there’s this pressure to love it every time. Most of the time Ellie does like it, to be fair. Fruit is awesome. And she liked beets, and liked them even more when they made her shits purple. And she knows, in some far-off objective way, that she’s allowed to dislike the food she is given. Maria is always complaining about the way Tommy apparently overcooks her steaks and Tommy says Joel is too heavy handed with his hot sauces and chilli flakes. Joel doesn’t seem to dislike things, really, but only in the same way that he doesn’t really like things either, so you just have to pay attention to how he always saves his cauliflower for last and smothers his meatloaf in extra gravy. Everyone else has scraped food off into the trash at the end of the night or swapped plates with someone else and it’s just laughed off, no harm done. But Ellie’s never done it before.
Joel sees her reaction and before she even says a thing, takes her plate and pushes half of her zucchini onto his own. “You eat a little, ‘cause it’s good for you, and I’ll let you have popcorn after dinner.”
Ellie squints at him. “What kind of deal is that? Seems pretty heavy in my favor.”
“I don’t like squash either,” Tommy says. “Pretty sure Joel makes it just to piss me off.”
“I make it because pre-Outbreak, 90% of Americans didn’t eat enough fiber and I know damn well you’re not getting it elsewhere.” Joel reaches over and stabs at what’s left of Tommy’s serving of venison. “Plus, you were the pickiest goddamn eater I ever met. You didn’t like anything I made.”
“Really?” Ellie is surprised. Picky eater . She’s never met one of those before. Like a cryptid.
“I don’t much like anything green,” Tommy explains. “But Joel was pretty good at getting me to choke it down. If you finish your broccoli, I’ll take you to the park .”
“Was Sarah picky?” Ellie asks, and immediately regrets it. Tommy flinches, Maria sucks in a cold breath, and Joel…
Joel doesn’t even blink. He grins . A small thing, and his eyes are a little misty, but it’s a smile for sure. “She was more like a damn raccoon.” He shakes his head, scooping at his potatoes a little but not taking a bite. “She ate anything you put in front of her. Made my life easier, ‘cause she didn’t care about how food tasted all that much.”
“She was kinda gross,” Tommy says, testing the waters a little. Joel huffs a little laugh, nodding like he knows exactly what he’s about to say. “She’d put vanilla ice cream on top of buttered noodles after her soccer games. For protein .”
“What is all that? Fiber and protein? It’s part of food?”
Joel freezes. “Uh. Well. Protein is. Like. Sort of a… a thing inside food that… well, it-”
Maria bursts out laughing. “Joel Miller,” she says, and he groans.
“You try to explain macros , then!”
She looks at Ellie, still laughing a little, and says, “Those are the nutrients that are in foods. Like chemical compounds that help your body feel good. Carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins - our bodies take it from the food and turn it into energy.”
“I thought you were a lawyer, not a damn biologist,” Joel grumps.
“Fancy lawyers go to fancy lawyer schools,” Tommy replies. “Maria graduated from Dartmouth, Magna Cum Laude.”
Ellie has no clue what any of that means, but Joel lifts his brow like he’s impressed.
“What good it does me now,” Maria says with a wry smile.
Joel shakes his head. “Well, you know what a protein is, so. Some good, I guess.”
They keep talking about these nutrients and no one complains once about Ellie’s distrust in zucchini or how as soon as she clears her plate Joel really does get her a bowl of popcorn with extra butter and enough salt to kill a man, just how she likes it. Tommy steals a few pieces, and Maria pokes at him with her feet until he apologizes. That night, when Joel drags Ellie to her bed and tucks her in, as he does every night even though she’s fifteen fucking years old, he smooths down her hair like always and smiles while Ellie thinks about the zucchini she didn’t like and how instead of getting in trouble, she got a reward.
“You had a good day today?” he asks, like they didn’t spend the whole thing together.
“Yeah,” she says. He asks every night, just like this. Sort of like, Ellie thinks, a little delirious with the joy of it, a family tradition. “Hey, Joel?”
He looks at her expectantly, eyes warm and face soft. “What’s goin’ on, kiddo?”
After a long moment, Ellie wills herself to say: “I don’t like red meat.”
Joel blinks. Once, twice. Then, he smiles. “Alright, Ellie. I won’t make it any more.”
“But you like it,” she says, she knows.
Joel just shrugs and tugs the blanket up to her chin. “Chicken’s easier, anyway.”
It’s not, Ellie’s pretty sure. They usually have an easier time getting cow and deer than the small game Ellie prefers, but — Joel is earnest, and Ellie is honest, and she remembers what he said about food being something you’re supposed to love and thinks it won’t be the end of the world if she skips out on red meat a little.
Next Sunday, they have a big roast chicken with carrots and potatoes and Tommy’s homemade bread, and Ellie sleeps easy.
If Ellie has a violent heart, Joel’s beats twice as fast. Ellie has seen Joel kill more people than he’s spared, knows the way his soul can disappear into his body and let his muscles take over, has seen his eyes go dark and foggy like he’s possessed. She saw it for the first time when they left Boston and the FEDRA officer pointed a gun at her, but she hasn’t seen it in months. Not since Salt Lake. Not until now.
Things have been smooth. It’s a Tuesday, which means it’s Ellie’s day to babysit Oliver, which means it’s her favorite day of the week. She’s better at holding him, but he’s a wiggly thing, so when they lay down for a nap she stays on the floor with him to cuddle. Tommy’s working at the stables and Maria is taking her be a person break where she showers and knits a little. By the time she comes downstairs, Ollie is just waking up, already hungry.
“Lunch time, isn’t it?” Maria says, picking up Ollie and helping him settle while he paws over her shirt. “Why don’t you head over to the dining hall? We’re running low on food here.”
“Want me to get you anything?” Ellie asks, already sliding her sneakers on. She prefers eating at home, but Joel is working on a shoddy wall at the school building and she likes food she doesn’t have to work for even more than eating alone in her kitchen. Maria agrees to a plate and off Ellie goes, only a few minutes to walk to the dining hall and everyone waves at her while she passes like in the movies. It is a cartoonishly good day. The sun is shining and birds are chirping and there’s a beautiful cozy breeze in the air that just barely rustles the hair against her shoulders. The Jackson teens, who have been vying for Ellie’s attention, all wave but make no effort to bother her. Life is good.
Ellie pieces together a plate for herself and sits at her favorite table, right next to a window with the perfect view of the Jackson gate and pulls out the sequel to the book Maria got her for her birthday because she already finished the first one, and she’s about to pull out her headphones when something blocks her precious sunlight. She looks up.
“Is anyone sitting here?” Some guy, who Ellie maybe has seen before but hasn’t really noticed, gestures to the empty bench across from her.
She shrugs. “Um, no.” Goes back to her book, but doesn’t pull out her headset. Something in her stomach churns, like if she moves, the quiet safety she keeps will crumble. Instead, she stabs her fork into the spinach leaves Joel is trying to get her to eat more often, and pretends to read. Food feels like cardboard in her mouth but she chews anyway.
After a moment’s pause, the man sits down as if her no had been permission. Ellie tries not to react, doesn’t even blink, just flips the page. “I’m Eric. You’re Ellie, right? New in town?”
“Uh, yeah.” She’s not particularly eloquent today.
“What are you reading then, Ellie?”
They talk. He gives a lot and Ellie only begrudgingly replies, disinterested but as polite as she can manage. She’s working on her manners, doesn’t want to make the people of Jackson think she is actually from the woods and raised by wolves like some people say she is, so she doesn’t tell him to get fucked. He doesn’t even say anything bad , really. He just keeps saying her name. Ellie Ellie Ellie , over and over, like he has some kind of ownership to it. David had said her name a lot too.
Ellie isn’t really done eating, but she’s finished her spinach salad and picked at her chicken enough to make it seem like she’s full, so she closes her book. “Nice meeting you,” she says, with all the manners of a wild rabbit, “but I have to get back to my aunt now.” She’s actually never called Maria her aunt, but it sounds better than saying the councilwoman who let her brother-in-law that she kind of hates kind of adopt me . Actually, maybe she should add: “Maria Miller.” He doesn’t seem phased.
“Maria’s nice,” he says. “You don’t look a thing like her, though.”
“Right.” Ellie blinks at him.
“Don’t get me wrong, she’s fine and all, but you - you’re beautiful.”
This might be the first time in her entire life she’s been called beautiful and frankly, she doesn’t like it one bit. Maybe from Joel or Tommy or even Maria, it would be fine, but on this guy’s lips - Eric - it sounds villainous. A perfectly normal and nice thing to say to someone, sure, but it makes Ellie’s heart race and stomach flip all the same, like she’s in fight or flight. She stands and begins putting together her backpack to shuffle off. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around, then.”
“It’s Eric,” he says, and puts his hand on her arm. Not tightly, just holds it, presses it in a little like a gun to her back.
She nods. “I remember,” and then swings the backpack over her shoulder with her free hand and moves to step away. His grip runs tighter and he stands.
“Oh, don’t leave, Ellie.” Eric puts on this show of pouting at her, making his voice do a whiny thing as he’s begging her to stay. “I’d be lonely without a pretty little thing like you.”
His hand isn’t directly over her bite, which is covered by the flannel she stole from Joel anyway, and he isn’t actually holding tight enough to hurt, but it scares her anyway, so she tries to rip it out of his grasp and that makes him actually bear down, hard enough to bruise and pulls her back down to the table. “Sit, Ellie,” he says, voice dark like a threat.
“Get your hands off of her.”
There it is. Joel’s asshole voice, well-earned, paired with the glassy sort of look in his eyes like he isn’t even awake under there and it’s some other person controlling his body. He glares down at Eric, who doesn’t, for some stupid reason, react much. He just grins and says, “You’ll get your turn with her next, old man.”
Joel steps forward and grabs Eric by the throat and throws him to the ground. As Eric is gasping on the ground, the wind knocked out of him, Joel takes Ellie by the arm and rolls her sleeve up just enough to see the fingerprints left behind. That’s all he needs, she guesses, and he turns and punches Eric in the nose. And punches, and punches, and Ellie is frozen, watching with bated breath to see if this will be another time she watches Joel beat a man to death for threatening her, wondering if they’ll get kicked out of Jackson because she was too nice or not nice enough to this weird, slimy creature.
“Joel!” Tommy shouts, running through the building to peel Joel off the guy. “What’s going on?”
“He hurt Ellie,” Joel says, hands bloody and Eric beneath him groaning and wheezing. Ellie hasn’t decided if she’s thankful or not that he’s still alive.
Tommy looks at Ellie. “He touch you?”
She shrugs. “Just grabbed my arm. He didn’t - nothing else.”
Tommy keeps looking, like he’s taking stock. “But he said something to you, didn’t he?” he asks after a quiet pause. Ellie notices, now, that the entire room is silent, watching too.
Ellie inhales, slowly, and then nods. “Yeah,” she whispers.
Joel picks the man up off the ground and passes his half-limp body to Tommy. “We takin’ this walk together, or am I going out alone?”
Tommy grabs Eric’s arm and tugs. “ I am taking him. You are going to walk Ellie back home, leave her with Maria, and find out what he said to her. Then, you come to the jail.”
This satisfies Joel, seemingly remembering that Ellie’s standing right there and still a little scared, and he jolts into action, sweeping her into a hug that is achingly gentle. It must scare the others in the dining hall, how he can switch so easily from ruthless to tender, but it’s comforting to Ellie because she knows that all his anger is just the embers of his love. He takes Ellie’s bag for her, dresses up the tupperware she brought for Maria with enough food for two or even three people, and walks her right back home. Through it all, he doesn’t say a word, not until they’re on Maria and Tommy’s porch and he sits her down on the bench and mumbles be right back and hustles inside.
After a pause, Joel comes back without the food but with Maria in tow, who is looking as grim as he does. She sits beside Ellie and Joel kneels in front of her, gently taking her face into his hands when she tries to avert his gaze.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Nothing,” she insists. “He was just - weird. Talkative. Then, I got up to leave and he started saying stuff, asking me to stay, I guess.”
“What did he say, Ellie?” Maria asks. Her voice is soft like it always is, but Ellie hears a hardness underneath it, just barely hidden. “You’re not in any trouble, honey, we just want to make sure we know the whole story.”
“He was asking about me. School and stuff. He kept saying my name. And then I told him I had to get back home, and he said I didn’t look like you - and like, fucking obviously, so I was just gonna leave but he grabbed my arm and. Ugh.” Ellie takes a deep breath. “He was telling me how beautiful I am. He’d be lonely without me.”
Joel huffs air through his nose like a bull, his face doing a series of impressively confusing expressions before landing on one Ellie’s pretty familiar with that he does when he’s a little bit sad for her, big eyes and big frown. “Can we show Maria your arm, baby?”
Ellie reluctantly pulls up her sleeve to reveal the handprint that has made its way from the detailed imprints to a patchy red bruise across her whole wrist.
“He said something to me too,” Joel said. “About Ellie. Somethin’ inappropriate.”
Maria nods. Pauses, like she’s thinking.
“Whatever you and Tommy decide,” she lands on. “I’ll watch her tonight.”
All at once, they stand, and Ellie stumbles to follow. “Wait!” she says, fisting at Joel’s t-shirt. “Are you going to kill him?”
Joel looks between Maria and Ellie before saying, “I don’t know yet. Me and Tommy will figure it all out.”
“He barely even touched me.”
Joel shakes his head and scoffs, hardened a little from the reminder that he touched her at all. “He’s a grown man trying to - to flirt with a little girl. He’s a predator. That means he’s not the kind of person that keeps Jackson safe. He put his hands on you, Ellie. I’m not letting that shit slide.”
Ellie looks at Joel, whose eyes are a little red-rimmed despite the furrow of his brows, and with a pain in her chest, wonders if this sort of thing ever happened to Sarah. It just seems to follow Ellie, and maybe it’s not a her problem, maybe it’s a world problem and maybe this isn’t his first or even second time wanting to kill a man for being a creep.
Joel stalks off like a stormcloud and Ellie looks at Maria desperately. “Why are you letting him do that?” she hisses. “They’re going to kick him out! And Tommy! You - you can’t let them.”
Maria shakes her head, looking right into Ellie’s eyes. “Whatever choice Tommy and Joel make will be what needs to happen. The council would rather the boys have blood on their hands than that man ever hurt another little girl again. And I would rather him be nowhere near my niece.”
That’s twice in one day, that Ellie’s been connected to Maria like they’re family. Once from herself, and once from Maria. It’s interesting because Ellie’s never had a family before, only lingering thoughts of maybe’s and could be’s and daydreams from her time in the QZ, before the bite and even before Riley when she would look up at her moldy ceiling and wish she had someone to pet her hair or tuck her in at night. And twice, today, has she been not just family to Joel, who obviously at least sort of thinks of her that way, or Tommy, who may out of relation to Joel always at least try to make her feel included like he must have with Sarah, but with Maria , who by no means is supposed to love Ellie. And yet, Maria steps forward, puts her hand gently on Ellie’s wrist, hovering right above the bruise and says: “Let’s ice this, honey, and get some food in our bellies. That sound okay?”
Joel and Tommy come back a few hours later, looking unchanged except for the streak of blood across Joel’s face that he must have forgotten to wipe off. When he sees Ellie looking at it, he curses under his breath and scrubs at his face.
“He’s dead, then?”
Tommy sighs, throwing his body onto the couch and pulls Maria in close, dropping a kiss on Oliver’s forehead. “Yeah,” he says. “Got some information outta him beforehand. Ain’t the first time he behaved this way, it seems.”
“I’m glad he’s dead, then,” Maria says. “He won’t do it again.”
Joel sits next to Ellie and hesitates before wrapping his arm around her, a little bit like Tommy had done with Maria and Ollie. “There’s more, isn’t there?” she asks.
Joel looks at her, then up at Tommy, who looks at Maria. She nods.
“He was… interested in you. For a while. Been watching you. But you weren’t the first girl, either. There were others, in the QZ he came from and here, in Jackson. We got a list of names.”
“You’re going to… talk to them? Tell them he’s dead?”
Tommy sits up a little straighter. “They’re all young. Your age or smaller. So we’re going to tell their parents.”
“He thought you were younger than you are,” Joel whispers. “Really, we shouldn’t be tellin’ you any of this, but I know you want to know it all.”
“What, he thought I was like, a little kid?” The silence is answer enough. “Fucking… gross. I mean. That’s gross . That’s worse - worse than David, right?”
Tommy and Maria do not know who David is, which Ellie remembers by the strange looks on their faces, but Joel does so he shakes his head and grimaces. “I don’t think any of it is worse or better than the other. It’s all bad. Do - do you understand, Ellie? What he did - and, and David - is never ever okay. It is always bad. If someone does it again, or even if you just get that gut feeling that something’s wrong, you let me know. Or Maria or Tommy. And we’ll handle it.”
“You’ll kill them, you mean?”
“Not necessarily,” Maria says. “I mean. Sometimes, we might have a councilperson intervene, or maybe they would be banished. But what happened tonight was because he was a predator. Even if we kicked him out of Jackson, there would be a chance of him doing it again to someone else somewhere else.” Maria reaches forward and puts her hand in Ellie’s. They’re about the same size, which Ellie only notices because usually Joel’s dwarf hers, his hands huge compared to her nimble ones. “This was a really hard day. And what happened to you was scary. It - it happens to a lot of girls. It’s happened to me. So I think I know the kind of weird feelings in your head, right now. What do you want to do tonight, to feel safer?”
Ellie thinks about it. Thinks about how the safest she’s felt in her whole life is right here, collapsed onto Joel’s warm body and Tommy and Maria and Oliver no more than a foot away, close enough that they’re all breathing the same air. She thinks about Maria’s kid who died, and Joel’s Sarah and the Sarah from Boston that probably doesn’t have a single person alive left thinking about her. She thinks about Tess and Sam and Henry and Riley and her mom and Dr. Anderson and the kid he left behind. She thinks about Eric and his clammy palms and David’s pearly white teeth, sharp like a shark, and how many of the FEDRA officers would take girls into empty classrooms when they were supposed to be at work assignments. She thinks about it maybe ever happening to Ollie one day, and Maria saying it’s happened to me , and she says:
“Ice cream.”
She hasn’t tried it yet, and frankly, wants to see what the hype is all about. Tommy laughs. Joel shakes his head with a knowing, only-a-little-bit sad smile, and Maria pushes Oliver into her husband’s lap to stand. “Food makes everything better,” she agrees.
Ellie had never thought so, before, but when the only ache in her body about ninety-nine minutes later is a stomach ache from too much sugar and a crick in her neck from the way she cuddled up to Joel while they watched Space Jam , she thinks Maria must be right.