Chapter Text
She knew it all wasn't right when she found herself looking forward to spending the summer with a stranger.
(She's not a stranger, she heard her mother say in her head. Her name is Anya, and she's someone I've known for a long time. She took care of you while I was- away.)
Any friend of her mother's couldn't be good, she knew, but- still. She couldn't help but hope.
She left the city with something dense in her stomach, and there were words sitting on the clouds when she looked out the car window.
it could be good.
The inside of the car teemed with unspoken words, but they were silent throughout the seven hour drive. They stopped once, at a large rest stop in the middle of nowhere that boasted a dozen separate fast food establishments. Greasy, chemical-laden meals were turning humans into radioactive beasts at every table. Lexa imagined the children ripping out of the grips of their parents and running mercilessly outside, into the sun, onto the playground that stood dejectedly on moldy woodchips. The metal and plastic contraptions would hum with the life force of the kids. As dusk fell, they would all claim different areas of the rig and perch there with their cliques, resting quietly, the eldest kids speaking their deepest fears aloud to the strangers around them, looking up into the sky.
But the kids didn't reclaim their youth. Instead, they sat in cold metal seats and ate their food without complaint. Lexa followed her mother around the Quik-Mart quietly and kept her fantasies to herself. Leaving the parking lot, she looked at the playground and a sadness filled her chest.
Her mother slamming her door was what woke her up. Her neck was sore from being bent unnaturally to rest her head against the window, and on her cheek, a rough pattern made itself known, harsh and red. She looked up and saw her mother walking towards a farmhouse. Lexa wondered at what point during the drive she'd become angry.
(Lexa fell asleep half an hour after their pit stop. Her mother looked back at her in the rearview mirror, and she regretted not getting her daughter anything. But only for a second. She decided instead to think about the time she was wasting driving Lexa out into the middle of nowhere. The road ahead of her stretched on for miles. She had hours to go.)
(Lexa was only now, at the tender age of six, beginning to feel weird feelings inside her directed at her mother. She didn't feel them a whole lot, but sometimes she was sad, and then she loved her mother dearly.)
Lexa gathered her things, stretched and opened her door.
It was the air that took her by surprise. It filled her with a shining giddiness, one she hadn't felt in a long time, and for once her feet felt too light to keep on the ground. Green, green grass was everywhere. She had never seen so much live grass. There was a small, 10 square foot dog 'park' in the middle of the parking lots behind her apartment building, but even there the grass was dull, nitrogen-stained.
Behind the farmhouse, an orchard stood stoically on a hill. Beyond it, she thought she heard water and the thrumming call of the wild. She looked back at her car. It seemed small compared to the earth now, and she wondered if she had really just spent seven hours in it and not cared. Another car was parked farther off, on the shoulder of a road, but her mother had driven and parked on the grass. Lexa flushed.
Deep, dark feelings were turning over in her stomach then, but she was too young to notice. She turned, and started towards the house.
A pretty sunset lit up her silhouette, and she could feel summer blossoming in her, deep, deep inside the core of her very being; perhaps the core of the very earth itself.