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“You excited to go to school today?” Ellie asks, kneeling down to help JJ put on his socks while he sits on the bed. He can do it himself, he’s four, but he’s not going to be this little and wanting help with his socks for much longer, and it’s not like she has anything better to do.
JJ nods and his long bangs fall in front of his eyes.
“Your hair’s getting too long, Spud,” Ellie laughs. “Can you see me, or am I sorta shrouded in darkness for you? Here.” She takes one of Dina’s barrettes off of her bedside table and clips his bangs back. “Better?”
He turns around and grins at his reflection in the bedroom mirror, touching the green clip. He turns back to look at her, sticking one bare little foot out so she can put the sock on. “Ellie, you know the star city of Nevada?”
He went through a weird phase this summer where he was obsessed with the United States atlas. In lieu of a bedtime story, for weeks he made them read him the names of all fifty states and their capitals (“star cities,” he calls them, fucking adorable).
Ellie sighs, bunching up the sock and putting it on his foot. “Man, you and your geography quizzes. I wanna say Las Vegas, but I know that’s wrong.”
He gives her a withering look, one of those faces he makes that looks so much like Jesse, and he sticks out his other foot. “It’s Carson City. You go there?”
“No, I’ve never been,” she says. “Have you?”
He shakes his head. “Not for real life. ”
“Did you pretend to go there?” Ellie asks.
He nods and they both lean in conspiratorially, their noses nearly touching. “I pretended I was riding there on a horse so fast, and then I went swimmy.”
He’s already grown out of a lot of his endearing toddler mispronunciations, it just about killed her the day that he started saying Ellie instead of Lellie, so she’s never going to correct him calling going swimming “going swimmy.”
He shimmies down from the bed and darts down the stairs. Ellie follows closely behind him, realizing that putting on the socks before going down the hardwood stairs may have been an error, but he makes it down fine.
“Mama, look!” he shouts, even though Dina is standing directly in front of him at the bottom of the stairs. “Look at my beautiful hair.”
“Oh, you do look beautiful,” Dina laughs. She picks him up, holding him on her hip, and takes the clip out, brushing his bangs out with her fingers and tutting over his overgrown hair. “You know, I’m happy to chop your hair off whenever you and your Ellie are ready.”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Ellie says, waving her off. “It’s so cute the way it is. You’re okay with not being able to see, right?”
“I can see!” JJ says, indignant.
“He can see,” Ellie repeats. Dina shakes her head, barely concealing her smile.
JJ wriggles down out of Dina’s arms to go chase after the dog, nearly running straight into the doorframe as he goes.
“He can see real good,” Ellie deadpans.
Dina snorts. “We probably should trim it a bit at some point so he can see okay at school, though, right?”
Ellie resists the urge to roll her eyes. Every fucking conversation they’ve had for the past month has led back to JJ going to school. The past couple of years, since she and Dina got back together, they’ve always just worked out their schedules so that one of them was home with him, enlisting babysitting help from Jesse’s mom, Robin, or Maria on the occasional days when both Ellie and Dina had to work.
Technically, he could have started going to school last year when he was three, but they both felt like he was too little then. All the other kids his age went, though, and Dina decided that once he was four, he should go. Ellie had agreed, reluctantly.
They went on a tour of the school over the summer. Ellie had been on the same tour a decade earlier, and she’s sure that they would have pointed out the preschool classroom then, and she’d walked past it hundreds of times after that during the three years she went to school in Jackson, but she hadn’t really paid any attention to it then.
It was cute, worlds different from the grim, dingy, cramped rows of desks in the classrooms Ellie was in when she was about his age. This room was sunlit and cheery, with tiny tables and chairs, kid-sized plates and silverware and toy brooms and dustpans, shelves full of toys and puzzles and colorful books. JJ made a beeline for the big box of large wooden blocks while they talked with the teacher, Christine. Dina talked with her, Ellie stood there, awkward and uncomfortable, until JJ called her over to look at his block rendering of the state of Michigan (impressively accurate), which she gladly took as an opportunity to not be part of the school conversation.
“He’s so little,” she says now, watching him wave a ball in front of Buckley’s nose. The dog is old and blind, retired from being a working dog and living out his golden years mostly napping on the couch. He doesn’t give a shit about anything JJ does, but that never deters the kid from trying.
“He’ll be fine, Ellie,” Dina says, her voice soft.
Ellie nods quickly. “Yeah, I know.”
The part of her that’s still a scared little FEDRA kid is quick to remind her that she doesn’t know at all, actually.
Boston, 20 Years Earlier
Ellie and all the rest of the five-year-olds got moved up from the nursery up to the big kid dorms last week, and she didn’t even cry about it in front of everybody, not like stupid Bethany, who keeps crying all the time about missing the nursery teachers. Those aren’t their teachers anymore.
“We have new teachers,” Ellie explains again, keeping her voice quiet so she doesn’t wake up the other kids or get in trouble for talking after lights out again, “because we’re big kids, and we get to go to school and if we do a good job in our lessons, then when we’re thirteen, we get to go to the military school and learn how to shoot guns at bad guys and infecteds.”
She makes a finger gun and shoots it at Bethany’s head. Ellie knows all about how everything at the orphanage works, because she’s been there the longest of any kid in her year.
Bethany gives her a sour look in return, scrunching herself up into a tighter ball on her sleeping mat. “I’m not gonna even be here when I’m thirteen. My dad is gonna come back for me.”
“Then you won’t get to learn about shooting guns,” Ellie says. She rolls onto her back on her own mat and makes both of her hands into guns and shoots at the ceiling, making sound effects under her breath.
Bethany sniffles and rolls over, away from Ellie. “I want Officer Hawthorne.”
Ellie is not going to cry about it in front of everybody like a little baby, but she liked Officer Hawthorne, too. She read them stories sometimes, and she would walk to every mat and pat each kid’s back at bedtime and nap time.
They don’t even have nap time now that they’re five, and the teachers here don’t even stay in the room with them at night, one of them just stays out in the hallway and knocks on the door and scolds them if they’re being too loud, although they don’t really seem to care about crying, even though there’s a whole lot of it and it is very loud. There’s twelve kids in this room, which Ellie knows because she’s actually very excellent at counting big numbers, and usually at least five of the kids are crying every night.
She reaches out to pat Bethany’s back when she goes back to full-on crying a minute later, but Bethany scoots away from her hand.
“I’m not doing gun hands anymore, I’m being nice now,” Ellie whispers, but the other girl doesn’t hear her, or maybe just doesn’t care.
At school, the first thing they have to do is practice writing their names, which is dumb because Ellie already knows how to write her name, and lots of other stuff, too. They had a box of books in the nursery and she looked at them all a million times and figured out a lot of the words. She took one of the books with her to her new room and hid it under her mat, but that’s a secret.
She writes her name, first and last, and makes the dots on all three i’s into little faces. She starts to add little outfits on the sticks, but the teacher, Officer O’Neill, who’s walking around and inspecting their work, takes the pencil out of her hand and tells her to stay on task. When she hands back the pencil, Ellie scribbles over her letter people.
They have to learn about days of the week and all the school rules and the sound that the letter A makes, and Ellie already knows all of that and it’s the most boring day of her life. She has to sit at her too-big desk all morning even though her legs want to run, and the classroom smells like cheese but not in a good way, and the kid behind her keeps kicking her desk and bumping her, and it’s potato soup for lunch, which is her very worst food. In the nursery, they always had nap time after lunch, but at this stupid school, when they come back from lunch and settle back into their desks, it’s math time, and she doesn’t know what a math is, but she knows it’s going to be boring and stupid because everything here is boring and stupid.
“This is— this is my worst fucking school!” Ellie shouts, frowning at the teacher.
All of the kids look at her with big eyes, and Officer O’Neil walks over to Ellie’s desk and grabs her arm and drags her into the hallway.
“Vulgar language and insubordination are both major infractions,” she snaps once they’re outside the door, still holding Ellie’s wrist too hard. “Do you understand what that means?”
Ellie hasn’t heard most of those words before, but she understands that it means she’s not allowed to yell fuck. She nods and juts out her chin and narrows her eyes in response.
“I’ll give you a warning, but next time, you can expect to go to the office and deal with the consequences. For now, you—” the teacher frowns, hesitating, then decides, “you can stay out here until you can calm down and show respect.”
She lets go of Ellie’s arm and goes back into the classroom. The teacher is going to leave her out here alone, she realizes.
“No, I can be good,” Ellie says quickly, but the door is already closed.
The hallway stretches out all big and empty, and there’s nobody there, anywhere. Everybody is gonna forget about her and she’s gonna be alone in this hallway forever. She bangs on the door and pulls on the doorknob and screams, but nobody opens the door, and she wonders if maybe they already forgot about her, or maybe they just don’t want her. She throws herself on the ground and screams and screams and screams until she doesn’t have any screams left.
Ellie hasn’t thought much about her life in the QZ in years, but now it’s all she can think about. Getting put in solitary for getting into fights with kids who were picking on her, getting hit over stupid little kid stuff like blurting out the answers without raising her hand (and her answers were always fucking right). She knows it won’t be anything like that here for JJ, she went to school here, she knows he’ll be fine, but that doesn’t stop her from worrying.
“The little guy started school today?” Tommy asks, holding the ladder steady for her.
They’re on better terms than they were when she first came back. She’s pretty sure he still doesn’t really understand why she let things end the way they did in Santa Barbara (she still doesn’t completely understand any of it herself, she just knows that it’s over), but they’re family, or at least the only people left in the world with the same ties to Joel, matching aches in their hearts, and that counts for something.
Tommy’s still not as mobile as he was before his injuries in Seattle, and it’s hard for him to do a lot of things with his bad eye, but he knows what he’s doing when it comes to construction work, and he’s not bad at giving directions. They make a pretty good team. They’re touching up the paint on some of the buildings in town today. Ellie wishes it were a job that required a little more thinking so that she’d have less time to wallow in unfounded worry.
She nods in response to his question. “Dina dropped him off. I’m the weak link, I wasn’t allowed.”
“Maria did the same thing with Lucy when she started preschool,” Tommy says. “I would’ve been pullin’ her out of that school the second she so much as shed one little tear about it. That kid has me wrapped around her little finger.”
“And she knows it,” Ellie laughs. Lucy is ten now, all big feet and long legs and freckles and curly hair, with a dangerous combination of Maria’s intellect and Tommy’s penchant for mischief. “She’s excited for school to start?”
Tommy nods, rolling his eyes. “She told me she put together an outfit for her first day a whole week ago. That girl loves her clothes.”
“Gets that from you,” Ellie teases, gesturing towards him with her paintbrush, “with your special basketball man shoes you would clean every time you wore ‘em—”
“First of all, you don’t mock the man holdin’ your ladder, and secondly, Air Jordans were fuckin’ cool, and I saved up my whole allowance for a year for those damn shoes, I was bein’ responsible, keepin’ my nice shoes clean.” He smiles, shaking his head. “Joel told you about that?”
She nods. “And about your goth phase.”
“Jesus,” Tommy mutters.
Ellie frowns, thinking back to what he’d said earlier. “Did Lucy cry for you guys a lot when she started school?”
“Not much, I don’t think,” Tommy says, “or at least Maria was wise enough to not tell me if she did. She’s always been a pretty independent kid, though.”
She thinks of JJ, asking her to put his socks on for him, expecting her or Dina to carry him if they’re walking more than ten steps, still sleeping in their bed most nights. Not exactly independent. She shakes her head and goes back to painting.
They get done with the painting early, so Ellie heads over to wait by the stables for Dina so they can walk home together. Dina comes out of the stables a few minutes later, readjusting her backpack and picking up a duffel bag.
“Well, hello there,” she says when she spots Ellie.
Ellie kisses her cheek and then wrinkles her nose. “You smell like horses.”
Dina makes a face. “What I love about you is how you always shower me with such thoughtful compliments.”
“Maybe I’m into that, maybe it is a compliment,” Ellie says, which makes both of them laugh.
She takes Dina’s bag and they set off towards home.
“How’d it go this morning?” she asks.
Dina shrugs. “He was a little upset, but I’m sure he was fine as soon as I left. Robin said she’d bring him back to our house when she picks him up.”
Ellie glances at Joel’s house when they walk past it, not turning her head, not slowing down, the same way she always does when she walks past it. A new family moved in there a year or so ago, a couple with three kids a few years older than JJ. She and Dina live a few streets away, she doesn’t have to walk by it regularly, but it’s just always fucking weird when she does.
Dina takes her hand, lacing their fingers together.
When they get home, JJ is sitting on the living room floor, playing with his toy trains. Robin pats his shoulder, gesturing for him to look up, and his little face crumples when he sees them. He runs over and lifts his arms up for Ellie to hold him.
“Aw, Spud,” she says, scooping him up. “What’s up?”
Robin starts to explain. “Christine said that he had a good day, but—”
“No!” JJ shrieks, directly into Ellie’s ear. He points accusatorially at Dina. “Mama leaved me and I had a not good day! I told Teacher, I wanna go home.”
“You’re home now,” Dina says softly, rubbing his back and leaning her head on Ellie’s shoulder. “I would never leave you, I always come back. You’re safe at school. We wouldn’t ever let you go somewhere where you aren’t safe, right?”
He sniffles and burrows his little face into the crook of Ellie’s neck. She runs her fingers through his hair and worries that maybe this is her fault, that somewhere deep down he remembers the months when he was a baby that she was gone and he didn’t have any way of understanding where she was, that maybe he’s always worried that the people he loves are going to leave him, because she did.
“I hit Teacher,” he says, pulling away to look at her with big, worried eyes.
“Not intentionally,” Dina explains. “He pitched a little bit of a fit when I left. It wasn’t on purpose, JJ, you aren’t in trouble, your teacher wasn’t upset.”
Ellie shakes her head in agreement, cupping his face in her hand and then holding out each of his little arms, pushing up the sleeves of his dinosaur t-shirt, realizing as she’s doing it that she’s checking him for bruises. She stops, feeling like an idiot. Jackson’s not perfect, but no one here is going to hit a fucking baby.
“What happened?” she asks instead, wiping his tears with her thumb. “Why did you hit her?”
He scowls. “I hate Teacher. I wanna go with Mama, and Teacher holded me and said no.”
Ellie frowns and holds him tighter. “I don’t want these people putting their hands on him. If he doesn’t want to stay, we’re not forcing him to go. Jesus Christ.”
“Ellie,” Robin says, warm and understanding, so much like Jesse that it hurts, “you’ve known Christine for ten years, the kids all adore her, you don’t need to worry—”
“I do worry, though,” Ellie cuts her off. “Do you wanna go get a snack, Tater?”
He nods into her shoulder.
After being the kind, respectful, responsible adult and thanking Robin for watching JJ, Dina finds the two of them sitting on the floor, eating a brick of cheese, Ellie breaking off a small piece for JJ, and then a piece for herself. Dina holds out her hand and Ellie hands her a piece, too.
“Robin was telling me that it’s normal for kids his age to be emotional like that when they first go to school,” she says, sitting down on the other side of JJ. “Like, even before the outbreak and stuff, that’s how kids acted. She said Jesse was nervous about starting school once they got the school up and running here, and he was, like, nine then.”
Ellie nods. She wonders about what Joel would tell her if he were here, what he’d say about what Sarah’s first day of school was like, if he was an anxious ball of nerves about it, too. There’s so many things she wishes she could ask him about, but it’s always the stupid little things like this that really get to her.
Jackson, 10 Years Earlier
“I just don’t like school,” Ellie says, still picking at the scrambled eggs and toast that Joel set out for her half an hour ago.
“You’re a smart kid,” he says. “I’m sure you’ll do great.”
She frowns. Being smart isn’t the problem. Teachers in the QZ loved to talk about how smart she is, but it was never really a compliment. So smart you’re stupid, she can hear Captain Kwong telling her, and he’d been one of the nicer ones.
It’s her own fault that she’s going to school in the first place, Joel told her a few times she didn’t have to go if she wasn’t ready yet. But she’s made up her mind that she is going to be normal, and normal kids go to school and they aren’t fucking scared about it.
“I’m real proud of you, kiddo,” Joel had told her when she told him earlier in the summer that she wanted to go to school once it started back up.
Ellie just hopes that he remembers that fleeting moment of being proud of her when she inevitably fucks up miserably at school like she always does.
There’s a knock at the front door and she leaves the kitchen table to go answer it, hoping that maybe it’s someone delivering the news that there’s been some sort of tragic accident and the school has burned down or something and school is canceled indefinitely.
But it’s just Jesse, his backpack slung over one shoulder.
“You ready to go?” he asks.
Ellie frowns at him. Jesse’s family lives on the other side of town, he must have walked past the school to come here.
“My mom’s on farming assignment over at the greenhouses, I walked over with her,” he explains. “You ready?”
“Yeah, let me go get my stuff.”
Her backpack’s been sitting by the front door all morning, but she heads back into the kitchen anyways. Joel gives her a hug when she says that she’s heading out. She leans into the hug, but she doesn’t hug him back, because she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to let go if she did. She hasn’t been away from him for a whole day since Silver Lake— or maybe the hospital, the timeline there is still frustratingly fuzzy. She blinks hard, not letting her brain go to either of those places because if she does, her head will fucking explode.
“You’re gonna do great,” Joel says again, giving her a pat on the back before letting her go. “If you need anything, you have them radio for me, I’ll be just down the road working on that new siding on the apothecary. I’m thinking grilled cheese for dinner?”
Ellie nods, not making eye contact because she’s pretty sure she’d start crying if she did. When she gets back to the front door, Jesse’s still there, waiting patiently. Ellie grabs her bag and sets off, leaving Jesse to catch up with her, which doesn’t take long, his legs are a lot longer than hers. They walk past the greenhouses on their way into town and wave at Jesse’s mom.
“What— like, what stuff do they teach, at the school here?” Ellie asks as they turn the corner into town, hoping that isn’t a stupid question.
She’s not really sure what kids her age are supposed to learn in school. In the orphanage, the focus was pretty much just making sure that they were able to read and capable of basic math, and that they were trained to follow orders. Once she turned thirteen and moved up to the military school, most of their day was dedicated to combat training and target practice and drills, and the classroom lessons that they did have mostly revolved around the things they’d need to know on whatever FEDRA assignment they got when they were seventeen. U.S. geography, history lessons that were mostly propaganda based on what Joel’s told her about what actually happened. She knows from what Riley told her that the older kids didn’t really do any academics.
“I mean, a mix of stuff,” Jesse says.
Ellie shoots him a look. “Oh, that’s fucking descriptive, thank you.”
He smiles, shaking his head. “We learn a lot of practical stuff, like foraging and hunting, survival skills, all that shit. In your last year of school, you get to choose an apprenticeship and work half-days at one of the jobs in town. We also have math and science and literature, that kinda thing, which—” he shrugs, which is about as damning as Jesse gets. “Our teacher, Heather, says that it’s to, uh, ‘build our critical thinking skills and preserve cultural knowledge.’ I don’t mind it, but the stuff outside is more fun.”
Ellie nods. She doesn’t ask the other questions floating around in her mind, about the infractions and the punishments. She’ll figure it out.
She follows Jesse inside the school building and into one of the classrooms. It’s set up differently from the FEDRA classrooms, groups of chairs at tables instead of rows of desks, which Ellie figures is probably because it’s harder to find real school stuff here in the middle of nowhere than it is in a city.
The kids are sitting around at the tables, talking. They’re all kids she’s met before, or at least seen around town. Dina’s not going to be here today, she got the flu over the weekend. Ellie personally would be thrilled if she herself had gotten sick today, but she’s sure Dina’s devastated about it. She’s been talking for weeks about how excited she is to be starting in the high school class with the older kids this year.
Ellie and Jesse sit down at a table with Cat. Jesse’s not a troublemaker, he’s actually kind of a goody two shoes, so she’s surprised when he launches into a conversation with Cat about plans for a bonfire next weekend as soon as they sit down. In FEDRA school, you sit silently at attention before class starts and you wait to be called on to speak.
It’s past eight o’ clock, and the teacher, Heather (who apparently they’re supposed to be on a first name basis with, which is so fucking weird), seems to be waiting for the kids to stop talking, but none of them seem concerned about that. She steps closer to their table, and Ellie tries to silently catch Jesse and Cat’s attention, but they keep talking, and even though she doesn’t want her friends to get in trouble, there’s a part of her that’s secretly relieved, because she needs to know how things work here.
Heather finally clears her throat, and they both look up and just give her sheepish grins, which she responds to with a warm smile.
FEDRA teachers would use them as an example, especially early on in the year when they’re laying down the law, but Heather doesn’t even mention it, and Jesse and Cat don’t seem worried. They don’t go over the rules, which is how every other class Ellie’s ever been in has started. Instead, they have to go around and introduce themselves and share something they like to do for fun. The other kids have all been here since at least last year, though, Ellie’s pretty sure, so maybe Heather just figures she doesn’t need to go over the rules with everybody.
They go over the list of some of the school assignments they’ll have throughout the year, some of which actually seem like they might be kind of fun, and then the teacher asks what topics they’re interested in learning about. Ellie can’t figure out if it’s a trick question or a joke, but then the kids start calling out answers, archery and music and Ancient Egypt and drawing, and Heather is writing each one down in a list in her notebook.
Ellie raises her hand tentatively.
“Yeah, Ellie?” Heather says. She gives Ellie the same warm smile she gave the other kids, and it doesn’t feel like a trick.
“Space?” Ellie says, her voice uncharacteristically timid. She clears her throat. “Like, um, astronomy.”
A couple other kids murmur in agreement, and Heather smiles and adds it to her list, and the knot in Ellie’s chest loosens just a bit.
The rest of the school day is just as uneventful and deeply confusing. No one gets in trouble, even when kids are being rowdy or rude. Cat rolled her eyes at something Heather said about homework assignments, and Ellie’s sure that Heather saw it, but she didn’t say anything. For the most part, though, the kids are all just nice without the teacher having to do anything. The closest they get to talking about rules is when they have a discussion about “community expectations,” Heather calls it, but that’s just shit like being respectful and being prepared for class.
When it’s time to leave, they all head out the front doors, and Ellie spots a group of parents waiting out by the front steps, mostly moms, and then Joel, a head or two taller than the rest of the group. The rest of the parents who are waiting all have little kids, and Ellie knows she’s probably supposed to be embarrassed that Joel’s there, but she isn’t. She waves to Jesse and Cat and heads over to him.
“Tommy and I, uh, just finished up,” he gestures towards town with his thumb, “thought I’d stop by, see how your first day went.”
She throws her arms around him and he hugs her back.
“It was fuckin’ weird,” she whispers, which makes him laugh. “Like, good weird, I guess, but— you’ll have to tell me about what school was like before, because this was— I don’t know.”
“Not like FEDRA school?” he says.
She nods, breathing in the comforting smell of his leather coat before letting go.
JJ takes the block of cheese from Ellie and breaks off another piece for himself, then gets up and skitters off to the front hall, coming back and sitting back down between the two of them a moment later, clutching his little backpack in one hand, still holding the cheese in the other.
“I made this at school,” he explains.
He pulls out a piece of wrinkled manilla paper, a pencil drawing of three blobs, each with four spidery limbs, dots for eyes and straight lines for mouths.
“Is that us?” Dina asks.
He grins and nods, pointing to each blob person. “Me and my mama and my Ellie.”
When he was a baby, back on the farm, she and Dina talked about mom names. Dina had gone with Mama because that’s what she called her own mom. Ellie obviously had never called her mom anything, the only parent-like person she’d ever had was Joel, so she liked the idea of just being Ellie. Made it feel a little less like she was stealing Jesse’s kid, too. When JJ started talking, a few months after she and Dina worked things out, and he started referring to her as “my Ellie” (“my Lellie,” he pronounced it then), her heart just about melted like butter.
JJ leans into her, tracing the lines of her tattoo, outlining the moth with his finger.
She wishes, for what feels like the millionth time since JJ was born, that she could tell Joel that she understands now. She still knows that he did the wrong thing back in Salt Lake City, and she also knows that if it was JJ in that hospital, if it was his brain that they needed to cut up to save the world, if it came down to it, she would kill every last one of those motherfuckers, too.
“So, school’s not all bad,” she says, brushing his hair out of his eyes with her fingers. “You get to draw awesome pictures. And they’ve got blocks, right? That’s fun.”
“I bet the blocks at school are so cool,” Dina says.
He gives her a skeptical look. “My blocks here are good, Mama.”
“But it’s more fun to play with the other kids. Gets kinda boring here with just grownups around.”
He shrugs, unconvinced. “Only a little bit boring. I wanna stay with you.”
“You know that we’ll always come back for you, right?” Ellie says. “We would never just leave you somewhere, we always come back for you.”
He nods, taking a bite of cheese directly from the block.
“Oh, yuck,” Dina says, taking it from him and putting it up on the counter.
“You know, I didn’t like school at first, when I was a little girl,” Ellie says.
“In Massachusetts?” JJ clarifies.
Ellie nods. “Yeah, when I lived in Boston.”
“That’s the star city,” he says.
“Right,” Ellie laughs, ruffling his hair. “Can I finish my story, or are we just gonna talk maps?”
He pauses for a moment to think about it. “Story.”
“Cool. Um, I was scared about school. I’d never met my teachers before, and they weren’t as nice as Christine. I remember that I threw a fit, too. And, um—” she pauses, not quite sure where she was going with this, “it’s okay to be nervous about trying something new. I was. But, you know, I got used to it, and I got to learn new things, I got to go to the school library and learn about dinosaurs and—”
“And then your dad came back for you,” JJ finishes breezily, as if it’s the only logical conclusion to the story.
She nods, not able to talk around the sudden lump in her throat, and not wanting to complicate the story for him. And the truth of the matter is that, even though he wasn’t there then, for the short time Ellie did have with him, Joel did always come back for her, every time.
Dina reaches over and rubs her arm.
“You know what?” JJ says.
Ellie sniffs and shakes her head.
He tips his head up to look at her, putting a sticky little hand on her face. “Cheyenne is the star city in Wyoming. That’s where we live.”
She snorts and glances over his head at Dina, who’s holding back a laugh, too.
“It sure is, Potato,” Ellie says.
She pulls him up onto her lap and Dina scoots in closer, stretching her arm across both of them, the three of them enveloped in one big hug.
“I don’t go to school tomorrow, okay?” JJ says sweetly.
“Well, we’ll talk about that later,” Dina says. “But can you go down to the cellar and see if we have those strawberry preserves from Grandma that you like? I have heard that little boys who go to school get to have jam toast for dessert, so—”
“Yeah, I go check,” JJ says quickly, rushing off to go down the cellar stairs.
“Hold the railing,” both of them call after him.
Dina gives her a soft look, tucking a stray piece of hair behind Ellie’s ear.
Ellie makes a face. “Are you getting all mushy on me?”
Dina shrugs. “I sometimes just wish I could go back in time and give baby Ellie a little snuggle.”
“You could give grownup Ellie a little snuggle, if you want,” Ellie grins.
Dina laughs, and she rests her head on Ellie’s shoulder.
“Did that line work on you?” Ellie asks.
Dina kicks her foot. “Shut up.”
Ellie shakes her head. “It’s how I get all the ladies, with my tragic orphan past.”
“Oh, same here,” Dina says.
JJ walks back up the stairs slowly, carefully carrying his jar of strawberry preserves, chanting “jam toast, jam toast” under his breath.
“We’re gonna have to make some kind of jam trade deal with Robin if this is how we’re getting him to go to school all year,” Ellie laughs.
“Yeah, maybe not my best plan,” Dina agrees.
He finally makes it to the top of the stairs and carefully sets the jar down on the counter, and then runs back to where they’re still sitting on the floor, throwing himself into their arms, knowing that they’ll be there to catch him, every time.