As she nears her house, Ella pulls up her hood and ducks from shadow to shadow. There are no lights on, and the garage door is closed. Dad’s car is no longer in the driveway. Ella’s Honda Civic is in the grass to the side of the basketball hoop, untouched. She takes out her key fob before remembering that it makes a cheerful beep when it unlocks. That is definitely not what she wants, so she pulls the rarely used metal key out of its fob.
In the patch of azaleas off the driveway, she pauses, sending out her senses. Yes, Dad is most likely drunk in his man cave or asleep in his bed, but it’s unlikely yet also possible that he’s sitting in the hot tub out back with a cigar or staying up late to watch the news. She doesn’t smell the nasty funk of cigar smoke that her mom was somehow always supposed to magically get out of the laundry, nor does she hear a single noise. This must be what a mouse feels like—small and vulnerable and hunted, tasting the air and squinting at lights and listening so hard that it feels like she can sense her own ear hairs quivering, knowing all the while that the predator is nearby and might be watching. Her heart bumps up to a jagged staccato, and her arms and legs tingle and fizz with energy.
It’s now or never.
Ella springs for her car, light on the balls of her feet, and fumbles with the awkward metal key, trying to slot it into place in the pitch darkness. She can’t see a thing, so she whips out her phone and uses a flash of light to locate the keyhole and twist the key. She winces as the door squeaks open, throws herself into the seat, and locks the doors.
It feels safe, now. Her dad would have to bust open the window to get to her.
Amid that relief, there’s a brief burst of reality: There’s also a chance her dad actually would bust open the window to get to her. To hurt her.
No time for weird, useless thoughts like that. Ella pushes the starter button and sighs in gratitude as the car turns on, glad she filled up the gas tank before the shit hit the fan. She takes a moment to reach over and touch her purse where it sits on the floorboard, feeling for her wallet and the thick plastic box that has enough pills to last her for almost three months. She even has her Switch now, although not the power cord. Her backpack and laptop should still be in the trunk, and she doesn’t have to check to know her bug-out bag is still there, too. Her dad doesn’t have a key to her car—she stole it from the spare drawer months ago without him knowing.
These are the things she needs to feel okay, and a surge of triumph makes her grin. She hasn’t grinned in weeks.
Now all she has to do is drive back to Nana’s and she’ll have her car, her pills, and everything in her wallet, which also means she can order stuff online, if she needs to. Nana won’t be happy, but what is Nana going to do—have her car towed back here? There’s a spare spot in the four-car garage, anyway, with Randall gone for good.
She puts it in reverse to back down the driveway, leaving the lights off so her dad won’t see the flash of headlights through a window. So slowly the car rolls backward, the engine barely humming as she watches for the mailbox in the rearview mirror, wishing she had a newer car with a backup camera.
“Ella!”
She jerks her head over, and there’s her dad, on the front porch in his boxers and an undershirt, a beer bottle dangling from his fingers by the light of the open door. He must’ve heard her, even though she knows she was careful. He looks thin and sick, and their eyes meet, and then she slams her foot on the gas. The car roars backward, and her tire bumps over something as she overcompensates on the turn into the road. When she glances at her dad as she puts the car into drive, he’s running after her, barefoot, his face a familiar mass of rage, and he rears back and chucks the beer bottle at her car as hard as he can. She floors it, and the car peels away, fishtailing, side mirror banging into the mailbox. The bottle erupts against the car with a loud pop but doesn’t break any windows, at least.
Ella knows her neighborhood, knows all the tight curves, and she doesn’t look in the rearview mirror to see if her dad is following on foot. She takes the short streets as fast as she can and runs the stop signs until she’s idling in front of the gates, waiting for them to open.
On the best of days, these gates take forever.
On the worst of days, when she’s late for school or a babysitting job or, say, now, they inch open so slowly that she can hear her teeth grinding together. The whole time, she’s glancing nervously in the rearview mirror, glancing at her phone in the cup holder, glancing back to the slowly unfurling gates. The second she thinks she can make it out, she’s inching forward, nudging them open the final foot. It’s not like she’s going to get in more trouble for scratching up a ten-year-old car, and besides, her dad was the one who threw the bottle.
As she pulls to a stop at the main road, her phone buzzes in the cup holder.
Cons back Rich now or I deport the car as stolen
He’s clearly had more than just one beer.
Had so much beer, in fact, that he’s not even going to try to follow her. Because he can’t.
Good.
She turns onto the road and even though she’d love to do sixty back to Nana’s, she drives exactly the speed limit. The police don’t have much time these days for traffic stops, but with everything so quiet, driving too fast would definitely look suspicious. Every red light takes a century. Her phone doesn’t buzz again. She imagines her father calling up Uncle Chad and Uncle Chad’s mean little pig eyes narrowing as he radios his friends about a stolen car. It would be nice if Dad’s text was a bluff, but Drunk Dad isn’t smart enough to bluff. She constantly checks her rearview mirror for red and blue lights.
Ella can’t believe it, but she makes it back to Nana’s neighborhood without any problems. It took her over an hour to walk home, but it’s less than ten minutes to drive the same route. When she pulls up to the guardhouse, some guy that isn’t Homer shines a flashlight in her eyes.
“Name?”
“Ella Martin. I’m Patricia Lane’s granddaughter.”
The man—older, bald, decked out with belt holsters like he lives at the army supply store—flips through a clipboard full of papers.
“You’re not on here.”
Ella looks around her car, wishing she had the kind of grandmother who took selfies or sent birthday cards, any kind of evidence that she has a connection to the woman on the other side of the gate.
“My mom is Chelsea Martin, my dad is David Martin. Are they on there?”
He flips through the papers and stares at her, hard, like she’s an enemy. “They’ve been removed.”
Ella feels desperation rise, acid in her throat. “My grandmother is Patricia Lane, and my grandfather is Randall Lane, the judge. They live at Twenty-Three Oh Five Chatsfield Drive. The usual guard is named Homer.”
The man puts the clipboard in the hut and hooks his other thumb around his belt by his gun holster. “None of that means a thing if your name is crossed out. Why don’t you try giving your grandmother a call, see if she’s expecting you?”
Ella scrolls through her contacts, but of course she doesn’t have her grandmother’s number. Nana has never wanted to talk to her, and why would she ever need to talk to Nana?