“Maybe one of you could come?”
Oddly, it’s River who puts a hand on her shoulder. “Look, kid. I know it’s scary out there when you’re alone. My parents kicked me out at seventeen. Didn’t even wait until it was legal. Just dumped all my shit on the driveway in cardboard boxes. And I was terrified, right? But I found people. Made connections. When you go out in the world with a pure heart, the right things happen.”
“Eh,” Leanne interjects. “I think that’s kinda crap? I mean, what your parents did was one hundred percent bullshit, and Florida is known for its child trafficking problems. But I think it takes more than a pure heart to find your place. This isn’t a videogame, with a carefully planned character arc. It takes actual determination. And tenacity. That’s what got us both through.” She meets Ella’s eyes. “And you’ve got determination and tenacity already. And you know where you’re going and why. That’s more than most people know. You just have to keep going for a little while longer.”
“I’ve been telling myself that for weeks,” Ella says, although it’s actually been years. Living with her dad was a different kind of fight.
“So maybe you just have to keep going for another day,” River says.
Ella stands up. They’ve said no. To everything.
She has to do this alone.
“Okay, then.”
“I mean, you can sit down and hang out a while,” Leanne says with a smile. “The fight is tomorrow night, right? So watch some TV. We can get some fast food or something.”
“Pizza,” River adds, not looking up from their phone.
“Pizza,” Ella repeats dreamily. She hasn’t had pizza in forever. You can’t have pizza delivered when you’re squatting in someone’s supposedly empty house.
“Pizza it is. And you can shower and then sleep in my bunk if you want. This chair reclines, and I sleep here a bunch anyway.”
So that’s how it goes. They turn on Leanne’s soap opera, which is over, but now a new one is coming on that’s just as bonkers. Leanne goes back to work on her vaccine every now and then, River spends most of their time on the laptop, and Ella charges her phone and dreams about pizza. It’s funny, how she’s only known Leanne and River for hours, but she’s clinging to them like a life raft.
Because they’ve been nice to her. It’s been so long since anyone was nice.
As afternoon turns to evening, the new drugstore security guard shows up for the night shift and walks around the RV and car, peering suspiciously into Ella’s windows. They get the hint and drive to the Walmart parking lot, which conveniently has a Little Caesars pizza in an adjoining strip mall. Soon they’re watching awful sitcom reruns and stuffing themselves and laughing, and Ella is happier than she’s been in forever.
No one wants anything from her. No one expects her to babysit. No one is mad at her. No one actively dislikes her. No one is primed to explode like a hidden land mine.
Is this what it’s like in normal families?
Probably not.
There probably aren’t any normal families, just families fucked up in different ways.
She gets her bag out of her car and takes a much-needed shower and changes into borrowed pajamas and washes her face and brushes her teeth and stands in front of Leanne’s lower bunk, unsure about occupying such a personal space. River is sitting in the corner of their upper bunk with headphones, brow furrowed as they work, and Leanne is in the lab, doing something she explained but that Ella didn’t understand about purifying samples.
“Go on,” River says when they finally notice her hunching there. “It’s just a bed.”
It’s not the most comfortable bed she’s ever slept in, but there’s airflow and the sheets smell like flowers and even though her body feels like it’s permanently tensed, she focuses on relaxing. She’s been so alert for so long that she’s not sure how to be anything else. Ever since leaving home, she’s been staying up all night, walking the tightrope of anxiety, before falling asleep after midnight and sleeping in until noon. She doesn’t know how to sleep like a normal person anymore. At least Leanne has a huge stack of gossip magazines, which are just the right sort of nonsense but addictive enough to keep her turning pages.
“Can’t sleep?” Leanne asks some time later.
“It’s always hard,” Ella admits.
“That’s what she said,” River murmurs from somewhere overhead, and they all dissolve in laughter, remembering the episodes of The Office they watched earlier.
Leanne digs around in the bathroom and holds out a bottle. “Melatonin. They taste like candy. They’ll help you sleep.”
She pours a gummy into Ella’s hand, and Ella stares at it. “My mom says kids shouldn’t use chemicals to sleep.”
Leanne’s mouth twitches. “Is she a doctor? A scientist? Hell, is she here? Nope. I’m two of those things, and I’m telling you that it’s perfectly acceptable to take a melatonin when you can’t sleep, you’re an absolute mess, and you’re going to wake up and drive three hours to do something scary. You shouldn’t deny yourself sanity when it’s within reach. I’ve been taking it since I was ten. And I medicate for my ADHD. And I’m fine. So there.”
Ella considers it for the briefest moment before eating it. If she was anywhere near functional, she would’ve googled “sleep remedies” back when she stopped sleeping, but the thing about living with constant anxiety is that you can’t break free of the loop to look deeper or even separate what’s wrong from what you’re worried might be wrong. If she’d typed “sleep remedies” into the search bar on her phone yesterday, she would’ve landed on WebMD and decided she was currently dying of four different diseases including cancer and lupus.
She doesn’t fall asleep immediately, but she does fall asleep, and that’s all that matters.
In the morning, she wakes up groggy, and for a moment she can’t tell where she is. The light is strange, and someone is moving around, crunching plastic and jostling silverware.
Ah. Yes. The RV. Leanne and River.