Page 1 of Sweetheart and the Grouch
AINSLEY
“My legs hurt,” Elena complains, her young voice sounding tired as her worn out shoes scuff along the dirt road while she tries her best to keep up with me.
“Not far now,” I gasp, also feeling worse for wear. It’s been a long journey by bus from Sugar City to Whisper Valley, and this walk is the last part of that. But once we reach our new cabin, we can rest to our hearts content.
“How many steps?” Even though she’s ten years old now, Elena is still very driven by counting things to gauge time. It started when she was five and counting how many sleeps until she started school and continued from there. Now it seems we’re adding steps into the mix.
“Maybe a hundred?” I reply, turning back to see her blue eyes go wide above her rosy cheeks. I give her an encouraging smile. “You can do that, right?”
She frowns, two featherlight brows arching down from behind her blonde bangs. “Do I have to count themall?”
“No, Ellie. You don’t have to count them all.”
“OK, then. I can do that,” she says, skipping a couple of steps so she’s walking right next to me, her matted teddy bear clutched against the side of her face for comfort—another thing she refuses to grow out of, but something I have no objection to. If I can keep her childhood alive for just one more day, then all of this will have been worth it.
“Of course you can do it. You’re tough as they come,” I say, trying to keep her spirits up since I’m the adult she looks to for support these days. Not that I’m much of an adult at only nineteen. But I’m all she’s got. We’ve been through hell and back over the years, and she’s been such a trooper these last few months. It hasn’t been easy, but this is the final leg of our journey—a literal mountain climb to our final destination. This cabin is the place I’m hoping our luck will finally turn around. Somewhere we can start fresh. New town, new home. A place where no one knows our story or our past and all we have to do is build toward our future. Together, as sisters.
“Is it a hundred steps yet?”
“I thought we weren’t counting,” I say with a smile. She rolls her eyes, then moans and stops walking.
“Can I just sit for a minute, Ainsley?Please.”
I stop with a sigh, knowing that even a brief pause is going to make it a thousand times harder to start up again. But my little sister is suffering, and as always, I’ll do whatever it takes to make her feel better.
“OK. But just for a little while. It’ll be dark soon, so we have to keep going.”
“OK.”
Hefting the oversized suitcase I’ve been dragging behind me to the side of the road, I gesture for her to sit on it while I shift the weight of the giant hiking pack off my back. I feel like I might float away now that that thing isn’t weighing me down.
“Here, take a drink.” I pull out a water bottle and hand it to her.
She does just that, drinking thirstily before giving it back. “I’m hungry.”
“Me too.” I dig into the pack a little further and pull out a granola bar, snapping it in two for the both of us to share. I’ve brought just enough supplies for a couple of days, and after that I’ll need to venture back down the mountain for more. It’s a difficult feat when you don’t have a vehicle, but I’ll figure it out. After getting us all this way without too much drama, I kind of feel like I could manage anything right now.
“All right let’s get moving,” I say after we finish our meager meal and wash it down with some more water.
“I wish we had a car.”
“I know, honey. And I promise to sort that out as soon as I can. But for now…” I pick up the pack again and swing it onto my back. “We’ve gotta use the feet God gave us.”
If I thought the pack felt heavy before, taking it off and putting it on again seems to have increased its weight tenfold. The moment I’m strapped in, I don’t think I can hold it.
“Oh no!” I yelp, my arms flailing as I overbalance, teeter forward, then correct myself by turning sideways before I succumb to the unyielding power of gravity on a steep hill.
Thud!
“Fuck.”
“You said a bad word,” Elena whispers as I lie winded on the side of the road, legs and arms floundering as I try to work out how to both breathe and right myself when I’m headfirst down an incline. “And you also look like a turtle.”
Elena nods very seriously, and it’s at the point I stop flailing and just start laughing. Who would have thought that after all my careful planning and preparation for this journey that the one thing that’d stop us getting to the finish line is my fat ass pinned to the dirt by a heavy pack? I’ve never regretted lying to get out of gym class more in any moment of my life.
“You look ridiculous.” Elena places her hand over her mouth, giggling along with me.
She’s right. I know I look ridiculous. And if I could stop laughing, I could probably work out how to get myself up, but I’m tired, and I’m in a situation I never dreamed of being in a couple of years ago, and lying by the side of the road having a giggle fest with my little sis seems like a pretty reasonable idea to me. Well, at least until the crunch of tires on gravel and an idling motor pulls our attention.
