Her entire life has shrunken to the size of her stomach. She ate the last bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, even shaking the powder into her mouth directly from the bag, which is really saying something because she hates Cool Ranch Doritos. She’s been rationing food for the last week and knows she’s well under her caloric requirements, but she just never imagined that not eating could hurt so much. As much as she hates to do it, Ella has to go out and spend some of her precious money on food.
Unlike Mrs. Reilly, if Mr. Reese left a single penny in his house, she can’t find it. And she’s looked, because she has nothing else to do. With no electricity, she can’t use her phone much without having to recharge it in the car. Pretty much everything she enjoyed doing in her normal life is unavailable—no videogames, no internet, no drama club, no music. If it wasn’t for Mr. Reese’s library of old paperbacks, she’s pretty sure she’d be insane.
Well, more insane.
Ella has a sense that she needs to save the last few dollars she has, hoard it like dragon gold for…something. Going out to find her mom. Rescuing Brooklyn. Some imaginary emergency that’s somehow, impossibly, worse than killing Uncle Chad and stealing a car. It’s like when she’s playing a videogame and won’t use her potions even when she needs them because there might be a bigger boss coming up. Even now, it could still get worse.
As her stomach crunches and her headache builds, she realizes that…this has to be the time for potions.
She gathers all of her things, packs them tightly in the backpacks and bags she’s borrowed from the places she’s stayed, and stuffs them in the tiny trunk of Mrs. Reilly’s Miata. She understands now that there is no real safety and that she might have to run at any moment. She felt that way back at home before the Violence happened, which is why she already had a bug-out bag. But it was more a fairy tale she told herself, back then.
One day I’ll be free, and I’ll be ready.
I can walk away from this.
He doesn’t control me.
She used to tell herself all sorts of lies just to stay afloat. Mr. Brannen would never actually touch me or threaten me—he’s the vice principal, not some dangerous criminal. Hayden doesn’t mean to be so dismissive—he really cares about me, he’s just bad with emotions. When Uncle Chad whispered “jailbait” to Uncle Brian, it was just boys being boys, and they were drunk, anyway. Maybe Kaylin really did lead on the assistant basketball coach, maybe she was into it. I’m smart and tough. I would never let something like that happen to me. If someone tried to hurt me, I would just leave.
That was back before she’d killed someone, back before she’d hidden in an impossible-to-find place and almost immediately been found.
She doesn’t know if her dad has other cops looking for her; the only one she’s ever met is Uncle Chad. Was Uncle Chad. She’s heard her dad tell her mom that he has “friends on the force,” but maybe that only worked when Chad was alive to spread the word. She doesn’t know if they’re looking for Mrs. Reilly’s car tags or a white Miata. She would take Mr. Reese’s truck, but it’s gone, and she has no idea how to ride his pristine Harley-Davidson motorcycle, even if that was a safe thing to do and he’d left his keys behind.
She leaves the door to the garage unlocked, hoping that nothing terrible will happen and she can simply go to the store and return here to…What? Wait out the storm? Keep hiding in a hot, stuffy house with no running water and sneaking out at night to fill water bottles at the playground spigot? Ella doesn’t know what to do with her life. It’s like she’s on hold. Her only action items are keep away from Dad, and find Mom. The first can be accomplished by lying low and doing nothing, and she still hasn’t figured out the second one. Before now, she always believed you could just find whomever you were looking for, plug them into Google or Facebook and they’d pop right up. That was before she started looking for someone with a relatively common name who didn’t want to be found—and who was already in trouble with the law.
Outside, the neighborhood is still quiet. Just like with Covid, the Florida governor hasn’t forced any lockdowns, but people are smart enough to realize that you can’t get randomly killed by a stranger if you don’t go out where the random strangers are. Everyone knows by now that Violence storms can be caused by capsaicin or stress, but they can also arise for no reason whatsoever. Delivery drivers now have to get tested before they can wear those branded T-shirts. To someone who lived through Covid, just staying home is the all-too-familiar solution. The government vaccines are still months away, with seemingly no plan in sight. People only go out for two reasons: because they have no choice, or because they’re idiots who don’t understand data.
Ella is leaving Mr. Reese’s house only because she’s desperate. She’s all too aware that she’s the dangerous stranger everyone fears, the one who brings the threat wherever she goes. But it doesn’t matter. She has to eat. She’s not going to starve to death to avoid putting some hypothetical person in danger. She’ll be quick. And she’s not even going to go to a big, nice store where mothers used to push babies around in strollers, making silly faces and peeling bananas as if everything would always be safe. She’s going to go to that same drugstore she went to last time. It’s small, there’s a guard, and her dad wouldn’t go there.
He is, at least, a creature of habit.
The only store he’ll go into is his favorite Publix, and then it’s only really for beer.
Ella pulls up outside the drugstore and parks. There are only two other vehicles in the lot, an SUV and a big, janky RV that reminds her of the one from Breaking Bad. At least the skeevy guard isn’t there this time. It’s an older woman with cropped gray hair, her mouth showing permanent frown lines and her hands clasped in front like she thinks she’s in the Secret Service and protecting someone important, not a gross old drugstore with bad lighting that’s visited only by sick people and drunks, thanks to the attached liquor store. The guard is wearing reflective sunglasses and gives Ella a thorough look up and down and a small nod, as if she’s passed some invisible test. It’s funny how people still look at her and just see a harmless teenager who might shoplift a lip gloss if she’s not watched. She’s a predator in disguise, but millions of years of assumptions about teen girls still make people underestimate her.