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“You’re gonna turn into a damn horse, living off of oats and apples,” Joel says as Ellie sits down across from him at the dining table, which is way too big for two people, and way too fancy for the two of them. She likes the little table in the kitchen better, but this is where Joel set down the plate he brought back from the dining hall, so now it’s where she’s sitting with her latest bowl of oatmeal.
She’s had oatmeal for three meals now, dinner last night and breakfast this morning, and now lunch. She’s being adventurous this time, adding some of the dried apple from the rations that Tommy brought over yesterday. Not rations, Joel had corrected her when she called the food that, he used a different word. Groceries.
They’ve been back in Jackson for two days and Joel won’t shut up about how nice it is to have real food here. Ellie secretly misses the bland canned stuff they had on the road. She knew it was safe.
Obviously she knows all of the food here is safe, but the stupid, scared part of her brain doesn’t believe that. They had chicken soup for lunch when she braved the town dining hall yesterday, and she spent the rest of the day trying not to throw up thinking about that one weird, squishy bite of chicken she’d taken.
Oatmeal is safe. It’s kind of like the hot cereal they served at school back in the QZ, and she can make it by herself here in the house, and it is really pretty good with the maple syrup that she brought back from the dining hall yesterday.
(“It’s not stealing,” she explained to Joel yesterday when he spotted the maple syrup bottle tucked away in her closet. “It’s collective ownership. I own it, just as much as anybody else here, and if I own it, I can take it where I want.” He shook his head, but he hasn’t made her give it back yet.)
“That’d be fuckin’ cool, actually,” Ellie says now, eating another spoonful of oatmeal. “Turning into a horse?”
She’s cut off by a weird sound that echoes throughout the house, two chiming notes. Ellie freezes, not sure if it’s some kind of alarm or maybe a hallucination, she’s had a hard time sleeping since the hospital, but when she looks to Joel, he clearly hears it, too, and he doesn’t seem concerned at all.
Instead, he smiles and shakes his head, amused. “Didn’t know we had a doorbell. A working one, too.”
He gets up to go answer the door. Ellie picks at her oatmeal, scowling. She hates how jumpy she feels here. Maybe she’s not that different than she was before, but on the road, she was being alert. Just last week, she killed an infected in one shot when they crossed paths with a small horde on their route into Salt Lake City, and now she’s scared of soup and the weird noises that the house makes at night and whatever the fuck a doorbell is. It’s like her brain is making up things to be worried about now that she’s somewhere safe. She misses the Ellie she was before, although before what, she’s not quite sure. Before things went to shit at the hospital, before Colorado, before Henry and Sam, Tess, Riley—
“Hi, there,” Joel is saying to their guest.
“Hi,” a girl’s voice says. “I’m Dina. My sister Talia and I live around the corner. Um, these are some vegetables from the greenhouses, they asked me to bring them over.”
“That’s mighty neighborly of you,” Joel says. Ellie pointed out yesterday that the nicer he’s being, the more Texan he becomes. “I’m Joel, I’m Tommy Miller’s brother. I’d reckon you’d like to meet Ellie.”
He glances back into the dining room and gestures for her to come over. Ellie rolls her eyes and gets up. She’s so fucking tired of meeting people. The whole time they were having lunch with Tommy and Maria in the dining hall yesterday, they didn’t go more than two minutes without someone new introducing themselves.
Knowing that it’s another kid at the door, Ellie has the self-respect to not hide behind Joel like she started doing yesterday when adults kept coming up and talking to them. When she steps up next to him and sees the girl, she feels her eyes go big.
It’s the girl who was staring at her in the dining hall when they were here in the winter. The girl smiles, recognition flashing across her face, too. She has a nice smile. She has a nice face, dark hair done up in a complicated braid, warm brown eyes, freckles. Ellie realizes that she’s the one staring now, and quickly glances away.
“This is Ellie,” Joel is saying. She raises her hand in an awkward wave. “Ellie, this is our neighbor, Dina.”
“Hi,” Dina says. “So, when did you get here?”
“Night before last,” Joel says when Ellie doesn’t respond. “Still settling in.”
“Well, Jackson’s really cool,” Dina says. “You’ll like it. There’s a lot of people, but everyone’s pretty nice, and there’s enough food for everybody, and they have lots of town parties and festivals and stuff here, movie nights, and in the summer there’s a big picnic.”
Ellie glances up at Joel, hoping that he’ll have some sort of response to that, but instead he just smiles and says something about how nice that is and takes the basket of vegetables from Dina and heads off to the kitchen to add them to their stockpile of groceries, leaving Ellie alone in the doorway. She resists the urge to turn around and stare daggers into his back.
“You guys came here for a day or something back in December, right?” Dina asks her, as if she doesn’t know.
Ellie nods, frowning. She waits for the facade to drop, she knows how this works, she knows this kind of kid, who’s polite and nice around adults, and then they turn around and are nasty to you the minute the adults are out of earshot, but the adults don’t believe you when you try and tell them that, because the kid is always so polite and nice to them.
But Dina doesn’t stop being nice and she doesn’t even mention anything about Ellie shouting at her the last time they met. She just keeps talking. Ellie doesn’t mind listening.
“My friend Jesse—you sat next to him at the movie night, but I don’t know if you’d remember—he told me yesterday that he heard that Tommy’s brother and niece moved in, and I told him, ‘I bet it’s that girl who was here right before Christmas.’” Dina shrugs, almost apologetic. “We don’t see a lot of new people around here, especially kids our age, so we were all kind of disappointed you didn’t stay. How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” Ellie says. “I’ll be fifteen next month.”
“Me, too,” Dina says. “I mean, I’m also fourteen, but my birthday’s in September.”
They both stand there for a moment, and Ellie wonders if maybe she’s supposed to invite Dina inside or think of a question to ask her, or if maybe she could just tell her goodbye and go back to her oatmeal and solitude.
“Did you go to school in the Boston QZ?” Dina asks before Ellie has to come up with something to say. “That’s where Jesse thinks you’re from, he said that’s where Tommy lived before he came to Wyoming.”
Ellie nods. “I went to school there.”
“I didn’t go to a real school before we came here, so I don’t know the difference, but the school here is nice.” Dina crosses her arms across her chest and bounces up onto her toes and down again. “Um, we’re all going down to the lake tomorrow, you should come.”
“Oh,” Ellie says. This seems like it very possibly could be some sort of hazing ritual, but she also doesn’t really want to hurt Dina’s feelings if it is a genuine invitation. She shrugs. “I can’t swim.”
Dina shrugs in return. “That’s okay, it’s probably gonna be too cold to swim, really, and I don’t really like swimming anyways, so we can hang out at the shore.” She keeps talking when Ellie doesn’t respond, her tone softening a little. “It’s okay, too, if you need some time to settle in. When I first got here, I felt really overwhelmed. I wasn’t used to being around so many people.”
“Yeah, it’s a fuckin’ lot,” Ellie agrees, which makes Dina laugh. “That’d be cool, though, to hang out sometime.”
Dina smiles and nods, and her whole face lights up. Ellie’s pretty sure that her own face does the same.
“I should probably go back to the greenhouse,” Dina says. “I’m supposed to be helping with pruning or something, but I offered to come here with the vegetables because I wanted to spy on you.”
She grins and darts off down the road before Ellie can respond. When Ellie sits back down at the table, there’s a small plate of carrots, quartered and chopped into little sticks, next to her bowl of oatmeal. She takes a careful bite of one, and it is actually pretty fucking good, better than the mushy canned carrots she’s been eating for months, or the somehow mushier cooked carrots at school. She picks up the plate and the bowl of oatmeal and brings them to the little table in the kitchen, where Joel is putting away the rest of the vegetables.
“Thanks,” she says, holding up the carrot stick.
He nods. “Figured you’d like it. More horse food. Maybe we’ll try hay next.”
Ellie laughs, surprising herself. It’s been a while since she’s been able to laugh easily like this, and based on the soft look she catches Joel giving her, he’s having the same cheesy thought. She rolls her eyes at him, but she doesn’t mask her smile. She misses every version of herself that she was before, but this newest one, here in Jackson, who lives in a house with a nice little kitchen table and groceries and a doorbell, who has a sort-of family and maybe a potential friend now, too— this version of herself might be okay, too.
