Chapter Text
Eleanor is four years old and the happiest little girl in the world. Mommy travels a lot and takes a lot of pictures that get printed in the newspaper. Daddy says that’s a good thing. Eleanor misses her Mommy, but her Mommy and Daddy are happy together, and they love her, and that makes her happy, too.
- - -
Seven-year-old Eleanor gets involved in too many fights. She doesn’t start them, she doesn’t even throw any punches, but she gets in trouble anyway! It’s not fair, but at least she keeps some of the littlest kids in her class from getting picked on too much. The teachers on the playground don’t really see what’s going on a lot of the time, so Eleanor just steps in the middle of fights and glares at the bad kid until they stop trying to get around her. It works pretty well, she thinks.
Mommy and Daddy pick her up early from school one day. Eleanor is sporting a blackened eye and a swollen cheek, and sure she’s bruised and bloodied but she’s grinning like a fool. “I made friends with Molly and Daniel today!” she says through the blood on her teeth. “They used to hate each other, but I told Molly to be nice and I think we’ll probably play together tomorrow. Can we go to the beach? Please?”
Mommy sighs, but Daddy smiles and nods, and Eleanor swells with pride and thinks that no punches can hurt her as long as they all have each other.
- - -
At twelve, Eleanor wishes she were less gangly and more curvy, tries to will her hair to be longer and straighter, wants to be prettier, and is overall just really confused with what her body is doing most of the time. She doesn’t have many friends, but the few she has, she treasures.
There’s a boy in her class that she likes. His name is Luke. Luke’s about a foot shorter than her, and much much paler, and he likes to read when Eleanor would rather play basketball. But that’s okay, she likes him anyway. He doesn’t tease her about how a blush looks on her dark skin, or her short hair (there was a Gum Incident), or the way she trips over her own feet sometimes.
A week before summer break, she gathers up the courage and corners him at recess. She tells him she’d like to hang out that weekend, just the two of them. They could play video games at her house. Luke’s answering smile is like the sun, and later that day they hold hands on the bus ride home.
Mom holds a family meeting that night, and says that she and Dad have decided to move that summer, to New York. It’s for her job.
Eleanor says nothing, but pummels her bedding and screams into a pillow until she falls asleep, hours later.
- - -
Fifteen is not the easiest age to be, not for anybody. For Eleanor, it means sitting silently in the back of boring classes, trying not to fall asleep while she doodles spirals in the margins of her notebooks. She wishes she were back in San Francisco. At least she had friends there. And she knew the area like the back of her hand. Here, the air is thick with smog, but it’s a different smog, and she doesn’t like it, okay?
The only class she finds remotely interesting is Psychology. The teacher calls her “Ms. Taylor” instead of Eleanor, like she’s an adult who matters, and he doesn’t mind if she’s a bit sarcastic in her term papers (as long as she cites her sources). He also doesn’t ask questions when she stays late to argue a point with a classmate. Her passion is admirable, he says to her one day.
Sure, Eleanor goes home nearly every afternoon to a quiet house, her mom out of the country and her dad off working who-knows-where, but at least she has her books. It’s worse on the days when both Mom and Dad are home. She can’t concentrate on reading with all the yelling and the tension and the childish refusals to talk to anyone but her in the background. There’s no way she’s going to be a mediator between her ownparents. They need to sort out their own issues, because God knows Eleanor’s dealing with hers.
And if Mom starts taking more and more overseas photo gigs for longer and longer stretches, well, neither Eleanor nor her father seem to care.
- - -
When she’s seventeen, she thinks that her life cannot possibly get any worse. In August, 2013, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake levels her old neighborhood. Eleanor watches the scene unfold on TV, staring blankly at the screen as the monster they call Trespasser crushes her childhood into so many shards of glass and metal.
It takes six days for the government to annihilate the hideous creature with nuclear warheads, and during those six days she barely eats, barely sleeps, barely breathes. Dad sits next to her for most of the time, but she doesn’t really remember if he said anything, or even if he was really there at all. Mom’s in Europe on business. The home phone rings, but no one answers it.
Eleanor doesn’t cry. There’s no room for tears in all her emptiness and disbelief.
- - -
Eleanor turns eighteen with no fanfare. Her mother isn’t home for her birthday, but she just can’t get up the energy to care. She’s been getting through her classes like clockwork, because they distract her, and because she doesn’t know what else to do. (I’m still grieving, she thinks. It’s okay to feel like this. The litany almost helps.)
Three days after her birthday, her mother comes home, all sweetness and smiles. She hugs Eleanor tightly and doesn’t seem to notice that Eleanor doesn’t return the gesture with much enthusiasm. She calls Dad “darling” again, kisses him on the cheek, waltzes around the house in bright colors. She brings life back with her in a way that Eleanor had forgotten she missed. The house is full of love again.
A few months later, Mother and Dad decide to take a vacation together, “like old times.” They leave for a ritzy event in Hong Kong a week before Eleanor’s high school graduation.
The night of the ceremony rolls around. Finding her psych teacher and a couple of friends in the crowd, Eleanor smiles, and waves, and doesn’t cry.
- - -
Mother met with an accident in Hong Kong, her father explains through his tears. The summer is a dangerous time, with tourists driving around so recklessly. He and Mother had been on a pedestrian walkway when she was hit. The doctors say she died instantly.
Eleanor absorbs the news with a blank stare and a tiny nod. She stares at the ceiling all night, and in the morning tells her father of her plans: she’s moving to Canberra to go to college, and to help with the war effort. They gave her a scholarship in psychology. She can make a difference there, Eleanor explains to him, dry-eyed. They need her.
Two weeks pass in a haze, as she packs her bags and tries to ignore her father’s late-night calls in Chinese, the crazed gleam in his eye, the unhappiness he buries under the suddenly manic work effort. Eleanor takes a taxi to the airport—she doesn’t trust her father to get her there on time, or at all.
Guilty dreams assail her throughout the twenty-hour flight, until she trembles with the effort to keep it all in. She could have stayed in New York, she knows, and attended a state school. But she lost her father and her mother at the same time. And she can’t go back to that house, or she’ll die too.
When she finally arrives at the University of Sydney, she stumbles into her single room and flops down on the rickety bed. There, she cries until she has no tears left.
- - -
It’s not until years later that Eleanor gets a call from her father, in the middle of the night on a weekday. She picks up, though she’s unsure what to say, and says hello.
Father’s voice is hoarse, and he sounds like he’s still manic. Eleanor asks if he’s been seeing a psychiatrist. She’s been meeting with a school counselor, and it’s really helped her work through her emotions. A major in Psychology and Psychiatry isn’t far off for her, she thinks.
Her father ignores her and begins to ramble—he says something about an assembly, and then something about Judges. Is he talking about politics? Eleanor isn’t sure. She asks him to slow down, speak more clearly.
Then she wishes she hadn’t. (Hallowed come the Judges. Your mother never believed me. Don’t do what she did. She was punished. I don’t want to lose you, too, Eleanor. Come back. Hallowed come the Judges.)
Eleanor hangs up the phone, tasting acid in the back of her throat. The next day, she throws the phone into a fountain and sends in an application to the Sydney PPDC.