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Lex yawned as she passed another exit that broke off and wove out into the hills, trying to keep her head up over the steering wheel. The camper van’s dusty headlights gleamed on the dark road in front of her and the clock light read 5:56 , the engine rattling with the strain of most use it’d had in its lifetime. It’d stalled and broken down a couple times already, scaring Lex half to death.
But each time, before she could let her panic get to her, Ethan would already have her toolbox out, saying she probably knew what the problem was and that it wouldn’t cost them more than twenty minutes. She’d always been right, spinning the pressure gauge between her fingers and smiling over at Lex reassuringly while ushering Hannah back into the van.
Lex wasn’t sure when it was going to hit her that she was actually in California– she had figured there would have been some palpable change when she left Nevada, some indescribable shift in the air that she would breathe in and just know was California, but that had never happened. The beaten-up camper had crossed the border hours ago, and it had just felt like more highway, more of the same shitty drivers and sun-baked gas stations she’d passed along the way. Ethan had turned in for the night hours ago, so she didn’t even have anyone to talk to, and to keep from waking Hannah she’d been forcefully suppressing her road rage.
At least she was off the interstate now, and instead of mountains there were just low, green hills bordering the roads. A little further back there had been some cows she’d seen grazing, but with both Ethan and Hannah asleep for the night, there had been no one to point them out to.
But as the path started to curve, the hill to one side of her sloping away, there was another behind it– except instead of a dull green, it was orange. She leaned over the steering wheel to look up at it, her attention caught by anything that wasn’t more road, and saw that some patches were darker than others, sloping up the whole hillside. She’d never seen anything like it, certainly not in Michigan.
If Hannah was awake, she probably would’ve brought up iron in the soil or fungus or something nerdy like that, but as she drove closer, she realized it wasn’t that at all.
They were flowers.
Bright orange poppies, blanketly so densely over the hill that the whole thing had looked orange from afar, blooming in a carpet that stretched to the hill past it, and the hill past that one.
There was a lump in Lex’s throat, a stinging behind her eyes that didn’t go away when she looked back to the road. So she set her jaw, turning over her shoulder at the empty road for miles behind her before pulling over to the side of the road. Her GPS was telling her there were only 40 minutes left to drive, and she left her phone on the dash before turning the engine, grabbing the keys, and getting out of the camper.
She just needed a second. Just a few minutes, Ethan and Hannah wouldn’t even know about it, and they’d be back on the road before it mattered that they’d stopped. She dug a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket, patting down her jean pockets for her lighter, and walked around the front of the camper to the base of the hill.
The sun was rising and weak light was bleeding into the sky above her, the stars fading into a soft, cloudless blue. Bowing her head to light her cigarette, she saw there were poppies sprouting at her feet, growing right up to the shoulder of the road. The petals were just the shape she’d memorized, seen night after night in dreams that had her waking up to the smell of beer and unwashed clothes, crushing the brief fantasy beneath the bitter cold and stifling air of Hatchetfield.
But Hatchetfield was long gone, miles away in the middle of Lake Michigan, where Frank and her mom and her annoying Toy Zone coworkers would be wasting the rest of their pathetic lives.
None of them would ever get to know what this was like, to find a place two days’ drive across the country that felt more like home than anywhere she’d ever been. They’d never get to look up at a hill in full bloom and wonder how there could even be that many flowers in one place.
Lex swore around her cigarette when she heard the van door slide open, breaching the quiet of the morning, and blinked fiercely at the tears that had been building in her eyes. She’d just needed a moment to stand by the side of the road and deal with an emotion too strong to explain, she hadn’t planned to wake anyone up.
She hadn’t planned to remember these few minutes as anything special, but she already knew the sight of a hundred thousand California poppies stretching over the hills in the morning sunlight was going to be etched into her mind forever.
“This thing break down again?”
Lex glanced over her shoulder to see Ethan walking up behind her, cheek tucked against her shoulder as she put in her earrings.
Lex shook her head, taking the cigarette out of her mouth, and Ethan frowned as she walked up to her.
“Oh, shit, babe, you’re crying,” she said, like it was something she needed to point out, and took Lex’s face in her hand. Her gloves had weathered down from use, thinned to a soft, worn leather that was warm against Lex's face. She remembered that on the day she met Ethan, they’d been pretty much brand new, and her throat grew so tight it hurt.
“Well, I fuckin’ know that,” Lex mumbled, but let Ethan carefully wipe away the tear that had spilled down her cheek. Her fingers felt weak on the cigarette she held by her side, something swelling in her chest that was too much for her to know how to feel.
“You didn’t wake me up.”
“Wanted to let you sleep,” Lex said, reaching up to touch the collar of Ethan’s jacket. “You drove for all of last night, didn’t you?”
Ethan thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Hm. I guess.”
She leaned forward to kiss her temple before lowering her hand, turning her attention to the hill they’d stopped beside.
“Hey, are those…”
She trailed off, lifting her hand to rub her eye with her knuckle.
Lex could see the endless amber petals reflected in Ethan’s eyes, letting out a soft breath as she looked up at the hill. When she craned her neck, a strand of hair fell back from the tattoo in front of her ear, the rounded petals and frilled leaves that stretched up toward the corner of her eye. The tattoo artist had done a good job. It looked like just the real thing.
“Yeah,” Lex breathed, lifting the cigarette to her lips again, and she failed to keep her voice from trembling slightly.
It was hard to keep herself together when for so long it had always been ‘when we get to California, I’ll do it,’ ‘once we’re in Cali, we can,’ ‘maybe in California,’ ‘just wait ‘til California,’ and now they were there .
She’d been swamped in so much stress and anger for the past years of her life that she’d forgotten how to feel anything else, and now she was so overwhelmed by a sudden flood of the ‘anything else’ that she didn’t know what to do with herself.
She wanted to scream so loud that every poppy in the state would hear her, she wanted to wake up Hannah just to see her reaction to the flower fields. She wanted to kiss Ethan and tell her that she loved her so much it was humiliating, and she’d been so frayed that she’d never gotten to really say it, but that she loved her in a way that she didn’t think was possible for her to love anything anymore.
But all the impulses blurred into one hopeless knot of emotion, and so she was crying instead. She let out a shallow, trembling laugh, tasting the salt of her own tears on her lips.
“We made it,” she said, fingers curling around her cigarette, “I didn’t think we would.”
She had still hoped for it, because otherwise she would’ve had no hope at all, but on bad nights it would feel like a delusion– a desperate, barely literate teen trying to cope with the undeniable truth that her life was slowly collapsing in on itself. But it was real, and the poppies were more beautiful than she ever could’ve imagined.
“I did,” Ethan said, looking over at her. It was painfully sincere in the way only Ethan could be, not even an ‘I told you so.’ But Lex desperately wished it was, because to think that Ethan had believed in them even when Lex didn’t have the strength to was making her chest hurt.
“And you were right,” she said, gesturing at her with the cigarette, and a moment later, it hit her– Ethan had been right . And that meant that now all the promises she’d made while curled around Lex’s back at night, arm draped over her waist and mumbling sleepily about how nice it would be to finally escape Hatchetfield– they could just as well be true too.
Hell, they could drive down to the coast to watch the sunset on the beach, find Hannah a good school to go to, and once they were stable and happy, send a postcard back to Tom and no one else. The idea of it made her so happy that she sobbed and laughed at the time, the feeling of a real, genuine smile feeling strangely foreign on her face.
A smile crawled on the edge of Ethan’s lip, too, and she lifted her hand, tenderly touching the edge of Lex’s lip with her thumb.
“I missed this.”
Lex had to bite her lip to keep another laugh from bubbling out of her, a problem so weird for her to have that it made her smile all over again. “I know. Sorry it was gone for so long.”
Ethan tilted her head, shrugging. “It wasn’t really gone, I don’t think.”
And it was moments like these when Lex wanted to punch everyone who had ever called Ethan stupid or irresponsible, including every time she’d said it herself, joking or not. Because Ethan hadn’t been stubbornly optimistic all those years because she was naive, she was just smart enough to know not to doubt herself. Lex didn’t know if she’d ever learn how to do the same, but even if she never did, that was fine. Because Ethan was always willing to do it for her.
“...You make me really happy, you know that?”
Ethan brushed back a lock of hair and tucked it behind Lex’s ear. “Good. You deserve to be happy.”
Lex didn’t know how to admit that if Ethan kept saying that, she might start to believe it, so she just took another drag of her cigarette and inhaled the smoke along with the smell of poppies. Ethan stood next to her, slipping her hands into the pockets of her jacket, and she looked content.
Time passed, the cigarette burned down, and it was Lex who eventually broke the comfortable silence.
“You better not tell Hannah that a sunrise and some flowers made me cry,” she said, tilting her head back to look at the sky. Sunlight had been steadily seeping in, and the poppies were rippling gently in a light, warm breeze that had picked up.
“No promises,” Ethan replied, reaching over to take the cigarette from Lex. “You did her about that time I tried to adopt a feral squirrel when I was like, 12.”
“And almost got rabies.”
Ethan took a drag, passing the cigarette back to Lex. “And almost got rabies.”
Lex turned the cigarette over in her fingers, sighing at the black mark on the edge of the paper. “Dammit, Ethan, you got lipstick on it.”
“You don’t care,” Ethan replied, smiling out over the flowers.
After a moment, Lex sighed, taking Ethan’s free hand as she brought the cigarette to her lips again. “No, I don’t.