She next hits up Facebook. There are a zillion messages and posts from people at her school and people she randomly met once, but she ignores them. She sends a long, rambling private message to her mom and then looks up Nana, whose profile image is a professional Glamour Shot, and shoots her a friend request and a private message checking in on Brooklyn. Ella isn’t sure why she hasn’t tried this route yet, but it’s only just occurred to her that something as annoying and stupid as Facebook could still be a thing. It’s so out of favor she doesn’t have it on her phone, which is old and doesn’t have room to spare.
While she’s there on Facebook, she tries to think of anyone her mom might still be in contact with. Weirdly, sadly, only one person comes to mind, so she sends a private message to Mom’s Dream Vitality manager, Ashleigh. She then spends twenty minutes scrolling through her own feed and her mom’s feed, looking for any sort of helpful clue about where her mom might be, but it’s just endless garbage and tons of fake news and statistics about the Violence. Everyone still has their STAY HOME, SAVE LIVES frame around their profile picture, recycled from Covid. Sad that the message still stands.
Looks like Nana wasn’t lying—there is a vaccine, but only rich people can afford it until the government vaccine is ready, which might take months or up to a whole year, as the president again gutted the pandemic response team the moment he was back in power. The vaccine is the only cure, and it feels so out of reach right now that tears prick at Ella’s eyes. Even if she could go back to her grandmother’s house, she’s not safe, not to be around Brooklyn. But her heart aches, just to talk to someone familiar, just to know that her mom and little sister are okay. That’s all she needs—just to know.
Even though it’s four in the morning, she keeps hoping for a response from Nana but gets nothing. She leaves her cell number, just in case, before opening a new tab. For several moments as the frogs and bugs sing and the mosquitoes buzz and land and leave itching welts that can’t hurt her anymore, Ella thinks about how to find her mom. There’s no way, and she knows it.
She types her mother’s name into the search bar anyway.
She already knows what she’s going to find, but it’s comforting, seeing evidence that her mom still exists.
At least this time, there are more details.
The pic they’re using is one she took using her mom’s phone, back when Mom was still trying to sell her dumb oils online by looking pretty and carefree. Lifestyle photos, they were called. Ella would feed them through filters to add highlights and warmth and then her mom would put sappy inspirational quotes on top of them and slap them up on Instagram, like that was actually going to help her sell her woo-woo oils. But Ella was always happy to take the pictures, to help her mom look nice. It was one of the rare times it felt like she had her mom’s full attention, when she felt necessary and useful.
She reads several articles before realizing that all the stories say the same thing that she’s already read. Her mom and Jeanie were driving east on I-4 in the minivan. Her mom beat Jeanie to death with a Yeti bottle and the minivan ran off the highway and into a cow pasture. A man named George Blinn stopped to help, and when he approached, Chelsea Martin threw cow feces at him and stole his truck, leaving behind her wallet, phone, and several bags of belongings.
And that was the last anyone has seen of her mother, who is now…well, not a wanted criminal. A person of interest. Her concerned husband begs for any information. George Blinn has a reward out for his missing truck.
No reward offered by Dad to find Mom, of course.
As Ella now knows, they don’t have enough money to pay someone for that sort of thing.
But Dad was looking for Ella, and she’s pretty sure he’s looking for Mom, too, which means if Mom is smart, she’ll be staying off the radar.
There’s nothing newer on her mom than that oft-repeated news story that feels like word salad. No mugshots. No updates. It’s less of a news story, actually, and more just another dumb Florida Woman joke. If her mom hadn’t thrown shit at some guy in a red hat and stolen his truck, it probably wouldn’t have even made the news.
So now her mom is out there, somewhere, without her phone. Without anything. Ella doesn’t even know her mom’s email address.
Which leaves Ella wondering: How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?
And the strangest idea comes to mind, scratching at her memory like Olaf at the back door.
Her mom tried to find her long-lost friend Whitney on that Missed Connections site, so maybe that’s a place Ella could try to find her mom. It feels silly and stupid, but Ella is willing to try anything.
Feeling like a complete idiot, she heads over to Craigslist and, after a ton of thought, writes up an ad for Tampa’s Missed Connections and posts it under two titles. One says Smella looking for her favorite Swamp Momster, which is an inside joke only her mother would understand, and the other one says Chelsea Martin, please email your daughter. She knows she’ll probably get all sorts of garbage in the inbox, but she can’t think of another way to maybe possibly reach her mom.
She also searches for her dad, but his name is so basic that there are dozens of David Martins just in their town. There’s not even any mention of him being in quarantine. His online footprint is nonexistent. Luckily, so is her own.
Next up, she checks her email and finds yet another message from Hayden. He’s out of quarantine now after getting tested—negative, of course, but scientists still aren’t sure if maybe the body gains immunity over time, so it’s possible that he had the Violence but now doesn’t because his immune system is so great. He’s very emphatic about that part. He’s back home with his parents and doing summer e-school so he can still graduate on time.
She rolls her eyes. Yeah, as soon as she started squatting in people’s homes and killing police officers, she stopped believing that calculus was valuable to her current life. Hayden wants to know what she’s up to, why she’s not answering his texts, when he can see her again. He wants to meet privately and apologize. He’s had a lot of time to think about it, and he wants to make things right.
Ella considers what it would be like, taking him up on that offer. Inviting him to Mr. Reese’s house, or meeting him at his house. Would his mom—who didn’t really like her to begin with—be apologetic, as surely she’s seen the footage of him hurting Ella? Or would she be cold and blame Ella for her son’s months in quarantine? She can almost see it in her mind. They would go upstairs to the rec room, the walls white and boring, and sit on the creaky leather couch where he’d brought her to watch old movies that he thought were deep and cool but bored her to tears, and he’d calmly recite some bullshit speech he’d been composing for weeks that would amount to gaslighting and a pity party and probably yet another clumsy attempt to get in her pants.
She would listen to whatever he had to say.
In one version, she nods and tells him to go fuck himself.
In the other, she snorts pepper and attacks him and beats him to death with the glass jug full of pennies to the right of the TV and then calmly walks downstairs and out the back door, bypassing his mom and reminding everyone in his family what the Violence really is, which is very different from coddling and apologizing for a passive-aggressive shitbag kid.