It amazes Tess sometimes what survives in a can. Twenty year old Chef Boyardee, beans in molasses, mushy peas, tuna –– all of it processed within an inch of its life and sealed into an aluminum prison, coming out maybe a little brown but certainly edible, as long as the can itself wasn't too dinged up.
What she did not expect to survive was paint. When they'd rescued these cans of paint from the garage and cracked them open, it hadn't seemed likely. Tess had imagined it'd be just a solid block of plastic, hard as a rock on top, maybe gummy at best underneath. She hadn't expected it to still be liquid, but sure enough, once they'd keyed the top off, it was. The colour was all settled on the bottom, the top an oily yellow, flecks of rust from the outside of the can peppering the surface. Salvageable, maybe, with a good stir. Might even be a nice shade of blue. And if they're really lucky, it'll be bonding time for the three of them, and no one will punk out after one coat just because they only have one roller and two extremely crispy hand brushes.
"Last chance," she says to Ellie, as she ties up her hair into a messy bun. "You sure you don't wanna keep this colour?"
She jerks her head at the walls. The perky stripes in two shades of pink and lime green trims, the sun-faded spots where they'd pulled down posters of those idiots in B4-4 with the frosted-tipped hair. The lacy-trimmed curtains are gone, too, and goofy-looking iMac is sitting in the hall, waiting to see if someone can get it booted after decades collecting dust.
"It's just pink, you know, it's not the enemy."
She would end up with a kid who doesn't like girly shit.
Ellie gives Tess a look that says it all: fuck no is she going to live in a bedroom with pink walls.
"Pink is fine when I can take it off," she says. She has a few articles of faded pink clothing, or maybe it's more magenta. Hard to tell. It just doesn't need to be literally surrounding her at all times. "This is just way too much. Offensive, even."
The trim isn't too bad. Green is great. But she's planning on covering that, too.
"Besides," she says, rubbing her nose as she motions to the walls, "It'll feel less like living in some dead girl's room if I get to choose the color."
Ellie and Joel are in agreement. He'll take any color over the violent assault of pink and lime green. Together. Joel would even go so far as to say that he would settle for some variation of the bright purple that Sarah had begged him to paint her room as opposed to what they're currently about to cover up or strip away, but that would be a lie. The headache from that particular project had lasted long after the walls had dried, and he isn't eager to add that to his list of aches and pains, growing longer by the day and undoubtedly made to double after they finish up in Ellie's room. He's already tripped over the computer shoved up against the wall in the hallway once, when he was carrying an armload of old, moth-eaten sheets up from the linen closet downstairs, and he's got his eye on the roller when he joins them with the last of the bedding he's willing to ruin.
No way is he getting some kind of cramp from using the brushes.
"Don't think you've got much color to choose from, kiddo." Joel sees about the task of unfolding the sheet he's brought with him and wafting it over the last uncovered corner of the room. They haven't done much to move Ellie's furniture - technically, the girl who lived here before's furniture, but Joel has been thinking of it as Ellie's for long enough now that possession really is nine-tenths in his mind - but it's away from the walls enough that they shouldn't run the risk of getting paint completely all over everything.
As he straightens up from smoothing out the last of the sheet, he fishes a wooden stir stick he'd pulled from the workshop in the garage out of his back pocket and hands it over to Tess, since she seems to have taken charge of the paint pouring portion of this exercise. To Ellie, he says, "Alright, let's open the windows. Last thing you wanna do is breathe this in all afternoon."
Tess takes the stir stick with an amused little huff directed at Ellie:
“Okay, if you say so.”
The paint swirls together, the sick yellow streaked with blue as she pulls it up from the bottom and reincorporates it. The can’s sticker claims “cowgirl” blue, which could be anything, but as it comes together, it’s a dusty robin’s egg sort of colour. Boring, in Tess’s opinion. She’s hardly a fan of the eye-searing tone of this room at present, and could swear that it glows in the dark, but it feels like a tragedy to lose one of the only colourful rooms to the tyranny of bucolic blues and wilderness greens and browns, which consume Wyoming like the plague.
But it’ll have to do. Even setting aside availability, this whole thing is a compromise. Something to make Ellie happier in the house, part consolation prize for the garage not being ready before winter.
Tess glances at Joel.
“Be careful with the left one, the string on it is still broken.”
Or whatever the string is. She doesn’t know what it’s called, just that it keeps the window from slamming down and breaking one’s fingers. Whatever. He knows. It’s inevitably going to be his job to fix it.
Joel gets a look, too. If there hadn't been paint, Ellie would have found something else to plaster the walls with for the sake of her eyeballs.
"Man, you never let me have any fun." Because paint fumes? Hell yeah. But she's mostly just being a brat (her favorite occupation), and goes to throw open one of the windows before coming back over to observe the paint looking more like paint and not a puddle of piss.
"Do you think this is gonna be enough?"
The room isn't huge, but it's nicer than anything else Ellie's ever been given. What if they end up with a pink, green, and blue room? She'd have to cover the rest with comic book pages or something.
... which isn't a totally bad idea, in her mind, but she can already imagine the looks she'd get from Joel and Tess if she suggested it. They don't get it.
In a perfect world - or, really, just a regular one - they would prime the walls and sand down the chips where ancient tape and sticky tack peeled away the alternating shades of pink, leaving imperfections and rough edges. They would block off the windowsills and the intersection where the ceiling meets the walls with painters tape so that they mitigate the risk of trailing it where they don't want it. He would have some other colors to choose from, a handful of little cards for Ellie to flip through before deciding on something that was more appealing than this cornflower blue. They don't have those options or materials, though, so they'll have to make do with what they've got. At least Cowgirl Blue is less offensive than Fourth Grade Pink.
Joel gets to work on opening the other window, mindful of Tess's warning regarding the broken sash cord. Eventually he will fix it, just as he'll eventually address all the other issues in the house that have been stacking up in his mind. For now he produces a ruler from the desk drawer and heaves the window up, propping it open in this way and reinforcing it with a coffee thermos he'd brought up from the kitchen. It's not ideal, but it's still better than running the risk of the ruler snapping and shattering the window all over the place. Or Ellie trying her hand at becoming some paint huffing fiend.
"It'll be fine," he answers Ellie, crossing back over to join them and crouching down to inspect Tess's progress. "If it ain't, we'll figure somethin' out." In all honesty, they might actually be cutting it close. He's never used twenty-year-old paint before, and even though Tess has managed to mix it back into a serviceable pigment, it could be thinned or even just less than it looks. It wouldn't be the first time that he's had to run back out to get more product to complete a job, although it's not like he can just drive down to Home Depot and ask for another can. He tips what they have toward him, sloshing the contents of one of the cans, then asks Tess, glancing around, "You find anything to pour this into?"
With both windows open, the cross breeze drifts in uninterrupted. The air is cool even as summer approaches, not saturated with humidity the way it had been in Austin and absent the lingering stench of the Boston QZ. It all still feels a bit surreal.
"Yeah, we've got something," she says, rising up on her knees just enough to reach for a rusted cookie pan and a few chipped mugs. She drags them over to pour into.
They're not ideal, but it will work –– Tess imagines that there will be a twenty-four hour period where she does not roll her eyes at the bastards who lived here before, and the things they did or did not leave behind. Brushes and a roller but no tray? Fucking animals.
"You've got two options, kid," Tess says. "Either we do one coat and it looks a little patchy but it's mostly blue, or we do one wall at a time and see how far we get."
She dumps a sizeable amount of paint into the pan, and then a bit under each cup. Some of it near the bottom isn't mixed perfectly, but whatever, she is not one of those shaking machines at the fuckin' Home Depot.
Ellie has no idea how this whole painting process is supposed to be as opposed to what it is now. Isn't it all just slapping paint on the surface and it sticks? Evenly, she guesses...?
Did Joel explain at some point? Yes. Did Ellie retain any of that information? No.
She looks up from the paint to Tess. "My vote is mostly blue. If there's an ugly pink wall left, then that's better than a whole ugly pink room. I can always cover it with stuff, anyway."
Besides, she's not going to live in this room forever.
What had he been expecting? A rusted baking sheet was not it, but it's better than nothing, and, really, what else would there be? It's certainly better than a mug he's pretty sure he's drank out of at least once or twice before, though thankfully it's not the one with the owl he's subconsciously reached for on the mornings that they do have coffee. They have to make do with what they have, though, which isn't a lot in the way of appropriate supplies. Although if he goes out into that workshop in the garage again and finds a tray shoved underneath some table or tossed into the back of some forgotten and barely accessible cupboard, he's going to rip all the baseboards out of the kitchen in some sort of postmortem retaliation. That'll show 'em.
"That's my vote, too," he says, seizing one of the cups and swirling the contents in it just enough to see if it will mix further without sloshing over the lip. He isn't entirely successful. "Somebody's bound to have more paint if this ain't enough, though. Probably not in the same color but. Better than nothin'. You could do a not pink accent wall." He holds the mug in his hand - white with a buffalo stamped on it, Grand Teton arching above it like a sunrise - out for Ellie to take along with a brush. "What 'stuff' would you cover the walls with if we run out?"
Not that he cares, since it's her room, but he is curious. While Ellie takes the time to answer, he eyes the roller, then looks at Tess, waiting to see if she's planning on fighting him for it.
"You know, when I was a kid, we just called accent walls 'being too broke for enough paint'," she comments wryly. She'd had a bedroom that was three parts primer-white and one part wild berry purple, the only one she could pull off with a $10 quart of paint.
She eyes Joel eyeing the roller. Without waiting for him to make a move, she leans forward and reaches across the floor for it, cat-like –– it's easier than crawling forward on her knees –– her eyes on him the whole time. Truthfully, she can't be fucked to deal with the up-and-down of it. Let Joel get the shoulder work-out, but also let him think for a second that she's going to take it from him, a grin sliding across her face.
Tess sits back on her heels, roller in her lap, and she looks at Ellie for her answer. Well? What's it going to be, kid?
Accent wall sounds like a fancy name for a mistake. Ellie keeps that remark to herself, eyes drifting between Joel and Tess. The paint brush means more work, but she thinks it'll be more fun, too.
(Ellie has no idea how to paint walls, let alone the work it takes to get an even layer with a brush. She'll learn.)
As for the mystery of her accent wall, she shrugs as if she doesn't know. But she does.
"Art? Posters? Tommy says there's some abandoned record store not far from here, and there's still posters rolled up in plastic and everything." Yeah, a record store. Super hip. When Ellie's eyes lit up at the mention of it, he said they might have to take a trip once she's properly settled in town. Painted walls sure as hell sounds like settled in. "Might be cool."
Joel holds Tess's gaze until Ellie mentions the record store, intrigued to hear about it particularly as it's news to him. It stands to reason that if there are still new posters rolled up in plastic tubing, there could easily be actual records still in sleeves or CDs that still have the cellophane wrapper encasing them. Hell, maybe they could find a set of speakers that actually work as opposed to crackling with static for thirty seconds before dying completely and refusing to be resurrected. The chances are unlikely, but the paint isn't coagulated beyond belief and the three of them are standing here, alive, still breathing in fumes despite the open window, so maybe their luck hasn't entirely run out just yet.
"Sounds cool to me." Does that make it less cool? Is Ellie at that age yet? Are things between them peculiar enough that anything he categorizes as 'cool' is rendered uninteresting just on principle? It doesn't feel that way, thankfully, but he can't always be sure. "Might be able to find some posters of that Savage Sunlight or whatever it's called. That comic book you read. Sometimes they carried stuff like that." Or maybe some space-themed posters. If there's a record store nearby with untouched musical relics from years gone by, there might be something out there for would-be astronauts, too.
As interested as he is in the record store and Ellie's plans for her potential accent wall, he is more interested in getting the roller back from Tess so he can get started on the walls. Joel meets her grin with a Look that carries no real weight and holds out his open palm. "Hand it over." In his defense, he is the only one who really knows what he's doing, but like that has ever stopped either of them before. Even if Ellie doesn't know how to paint, he'll find some way to live with the end result.
Ellie may be straddling the line of being old enough to be repulsed by anything adults like or care for, that know-it-all phase that had Tess insisting her own parents didn't know jack shit and that she had all the answers, but in the here and now, Tess lets out a scoff of a laugh. Now she needs to give him the roller so his feelings don't get hurt. She chooses not to elaborate on it, simply passing him the roller with a shake of her head.
"Trade off if it starts fucking with your back," she warns him. "And maybe we can find something for Ellie that isn't the same thing she's read a million times."
When, she wonders, do kids grow out of comic books? In her mind, it's a hobby for nine year old boys and aging collectors who rarely leave their couches.
"Savage Starlight. Jerk." He fucking knows the name. How many times has she gone on and on about the plot, the characters? Even if he's actively tuning her out, some stuff has had to gotten through. She lets the use of cool slide because Tess is showing him what's what.
"She just called you old," she helpfully points out with a grin. But she also has to point out, "I notice new things every time, okay? And there are hints about a sequel, but I don't know if that even got made before, you know."
Here he is, trying to help paint a room that Ellie is eventually going to vacate once he gets around to figuring out how to finagle plumbing in a garage, and he's being made to accept a roller as some display of sympathy and suffer disparaging, mocking comments about comic books. He doesn't even like comics, although he does remember almost every detail that Ellie had ever told him about the ones that she enjoys, at least in broad strokes, even if he'd gotten the name wrong in the moment. It's not like she's talked about it in a while, in his defense. He still makes a mental note to look around and see if he can suss out anything regarding a sequel.
Tess doesn't even need to explain to him what she's laughing at because he knows without having to ask, so he doesn't feel bad about smacking her ass with the dry roller as soon as she straightens up with one of the paintbrushes, nor does he feel bad about tugging Ellie's ponytail in his version of childish retaliation as he passes by to actually get started on one of the walls. Someone has to do something around here beyond twiddling their thumbs and talking around how lame he actually is.
"If this is how it's gonna be with you two, I'll move out to the garage myself." Joel is almost old enough to be retired, a fact he knows better than either one of them. He can think of nothing more peaceful than a space all to himself where he can determine what's cool and no one can question his authority on it, and where he can lock the door and let neither of them in when they inevitably need him to rewire a light switch. Unfortunately for now, he has to start painting, if only to prove a point, although -
"You wanna do the honors, Miss Starlight?" he asks Ellie, nodding toward the paintbrush and mug.
Tess throws him a look when he smacks her ass; the gesture isn't unusual on its own, but in front of Ellie is different in a way that is not unpleasantly surprising. She says nothing, just the upward twist of her lips.
"Notice new things in what, it's just drawings," Tess says to Ellie, relucantly dragging her gaze off Joel. She has a growing suspicion that Ellie would have a lot of in common with the kids in high school who gathered in some benevolent teacher's classroom one lunch hour every week to watch Japanese cartoons, the squeaky voices piercing the hallways. The ones she occasionally hazed.
Or, actually: "You've seen posters for that Dawn of the Wolf movie, right?"
They're fucking everywhere, littered through every major town, the last marketing blitz before the world started dying.
"When the outbreak happened, even with everything going on, those obsessives still found time to complain about never getting to see the second one."
"Hey, watch it old man," Ellie warns, but there's no real bite in the words. Screwing around like this makes it easier to forget all the other bullshit, the increasing weight of so many questions, and the things that still keep her up late at night.
Tess just doesn't get it. Ellie's tried to explain it to her before, but she swears her eyes glazed over at some point and she wasn't going to waste her breath on someone who clearly has no taste when it comes to sci-fi.
Ellie nods at the mention of the movie. She's grown up with it despite never watching the thing.
"Yeah, I guess it was based off a book?" Ellie shrugs a shoulder, attempting to balance her paint brush on one finger. "Never read it. There were like, stacks of the things in the back of the military school library back in the QZ. Never saw 'em move."
They just kind of got shoved into a closet that wasn't used. Maybe someone had plans for them at one point.
Joel snorts. He saw that movie. Or, rather, he sat through that movie. Sarah had dragged him the weekend it came out, and Joel, fresh off a string of double shifts and overtime on Saturdays, had accepted the two and a half hours of painfully acted romantic angst and werewolf drama as his punishment. He doesn't even really remember the specific nuances of the plot, thank god, only that Sarah had gone on and on about what was different from the book the entire ride home.
No part of him can even pretend that it had been enjoyable, but at least the two other people in the room with him are of the same mind. The posters still plastered outside of storefronts and advertisements slapped on the side of crashed buses had at one point felt like caustic reminders of that occasion, designed specifically to torture him, but thinking about them now just makes him shake his head as he drags the cookie sheet over closer to where Ellie is standing.
"You're not missin' out. It was bad," he chimes in, trying to conjure up long dead memories of a film he never cared about in order to better support his case. Nothing comes to mind beyond the posters and promotional images that dotted their progress across the country, so he'll have to trust that his succinct opinion sums things up nicely for the two of them. Even Ellie, who has at least one foot planted in that sort of fantastical escapist stuff, probably wouldn't have found that genre to her taste. Too girly, despite the werewolf premise. "People got mad about never findin' out why Darth Vader went all evil, too. Guess we'll never know."
He is not huge on pop culture outside of his own wheelhouse - no one loves cheesy action movies the way he does - but he had also been ten-years-old when the first Star Wars movie came out. That just had to be seen through all the way to the end, no matter how bad it got, too.
Tess, now thoroughly committed to socializing rather than doing menial labour, meanders the room stirring paint in a mug with the brush.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Tess argues. “It just had annoying fans.”
Case in point: fucking Meredith, the girl on the cot next to hers in a FEDRA evacuation camp, bemoaning the loss of the greatest love story ever told. As if that was even a fraction as tragic as the downfall of society. Tess only knew her for four days but will carry that grudge to her grave. Fucking Wolf people.
Ellie's interested in the conversation and the painting, but the conversation takes some precedence. She kinda loves it when they talk about things that she can only imagine--though there are plenty of movie nights here, and a sizable collection of DVDs to pick from. It's one way to glimpse into the past, when it's not fantasy, and see how Joel and Tess might have lived before.
"Now you're both sounding ancient," Ellie grins. "But I'm pretty sure anything about space is way better."
Because space? Is the best. You know the moment she finds any of those glow in the dark stars and planets, they're going on the ceiling.
First he's getting ganged up on, and now he's the only one doing any of the actual painting? Color him surprised.
From where he's crouched, sliding the roller through the paint spilled across the baking sheet, Joel gives them both a look: Ellie, briefly, for lollygagging around with her mug and brush, more interested in the conversation than getting started; Tess, the longer and more incredulous of his expressions, half-flabbergasted and half-insulted. And some third piece of the puzzle, like he suddenly does not know her at all.
"It was way better," he agrees with Ellie, getting up on knees that, okay, are ancient and make a little popping sound as he stands, but Joel ignores it, prepared to set his roller against the wall if no one else is. He says to Ellie, over his shoulder, "She's outta her mind." And then, for good measure, to Tess, "You're outta your mind."
In the war between teen romance and space, Ellie will pick space every goddamn time, no matter how horrible the acting, so it is not in Tess's strategic interest to propose a marathon to compare. She will, however, die on this hill, as there are few opinions she won't mercilessly defend.
"Didn't take you for a kids' movie kinda guy, Texas," she says, with a smile.
To Ellie:
"It's barely about space, anyway. It's just people talking about trade routes and aliens keeping people as slaves."
It has been twenty years, but is she wrong? She has not even considered it.
Space is great. Romance in space is acceptable, but not ideal. Ellie grimaces, looking between Joel and Tess and wondering if this is how people painted bedrooms back in the day. One guy with the knowledge, the other two just sort of here for back up and moral support and keeping conversation going. Oh, and paint fumes.
"Is this what people argued on the internet about?"
Asked as if she really has any idea. It's such an abstract concept to her, but she's heard people reminisce about the time before enough to know that it was a thing.
"Ooh, maybe you two would have met online and gotten mad at one another and not even know until now."
Talking about Sarah like she was an actual person and not a landmine to be avoided has gotten easier, day by day, but the muscle is still tight with atrophy, rusty from disuse. So instead of dignifying Tess's response with one of his own laying out an explanation as to why he knows the specific plot points of a twenty-year-old film detailing a werewolf romance where no one ends up gutted - honestly, that would have made the movie worth watching - Joel just drops a pointed look over his shoulder, making a sound halfway between a scoff and a laugh, and goes back to rolling Cowgirl Blue up and down the wall in front of him. The roller makes a familiar, almost soothing sound as it goes, and he counts Ellie's preference for space themed anything as a point in his favor.
He doesn't remember everything about Star Wars - Tommy probably would, though - but he is fairly certain those details weren't part of the story in any meaningful way. Mostly he just remembers the laser swords and the explosions. As a teenager, that had been particularly entertaining, less so as an adult. Just as the internet had never grabbed him beyond printing out directions to Sarah's away games or checking the four emails he got occasionally. The computer they had was mostly used for homework and drafting invoices, not arguing with someone about the finer points of a galaxy far, far away.
Ellie probably would have used and abused it for that exact purpose, though.
"I don't think so," Joel replies, leaning down to get a little more paint on his roller. At least his wall is coming along. "Somethin' tells me Tess ain't the type of person to get her kicks arguin' with someone from behind a screen." From what he knows, that doesn't sound like what Tess from twenty years ago really got up to, besides.
Oh, Ellie absolutely would have been one of those housebound NEETs, up until the small hours of the morning on the family computer, embroiled in some arcane forum discussion. Tess is positive about that, and it's a tragedy to her: Ellie could do so much better than those pockmarked, greasy-haired anime nerds, you know?
Tess finds a place on the window bench, mug and brush in hand, to start doing the trim around the window, but she grins as she goes.
"We would have met at some shitty dive bar and we would've knocked heads over something and then I would've followed him out the door anyway," she remarks. "What do you know about the internet, anyway?"
Ellie watches Joel curiously. He knows how this painting shit should be done, and so she figures she should follow his lead with her dinky little paintbrush, but she's sort of at a loss as to where to start. You just slap that shit on and go? Her eyes drift to Tess, where there's a little more care involved.
Okay, whatever. Painbrush to a random part of the wall, here they go. Ellie doesn't really care that she's getting paint flecks on her clothing (and hair) from the first stroke.
"Lots of stuff. Old folk talk about it all the time," she says, purposely trying to get a rise out of one of them. "You could download music."
And listen to it, Ellie presumes.
"Guess that was a good idea until all your music disappeared when shit went down."
If Ellie took any more care beyond what was necessary to slap that shit on and go, it would be a surprise. Half-turned to address Tess, Joel watches the teenager next to him splat the paintbrush against the wall with a finesse that only she could achieve. It leaves a blotchy smear of blue that drags with every stroke she makes, the individual strands of the brush stamped into the overlap of pink and green. Resolved to either go over her work with the roller so as not to give himself an aneurysm every time he walks into the room once the paint has dried or to swap her, he doesn't correct her just yet.
That comment about old folks doesn't go unnoticed, but Joel chooses not to lump himself into that particular category. He's not sure he ever even figured out how to download music off of the internet, though he does wonder if there are any iPods they could blow Ellie's mind with lying in wait somewhere in one of the surrounding towns. "Not all of it," he replies, tapping index and middle finger against his temple. "All the good stuff's still in here." The good stuff that he and Tess would have knocked heads over in a dive bar, no doubt.
A splatter of blue catches his eye, and Joel reaches over to pinch out a particularly bright glob of paint from the twist of Ellie's hair in her ponytail. Doing so is probably pointless, given how it had gotten there in the first place, but Joel can't stop himself from doing it all the same, wiping his fingers on his shirt.
Eyes on the trim, Tess runs a long line of blue along the edge of the windowsill, the stiff edge of the paintbrush leaving a relatively clean snail trail. Whoever had painted this last had not been quite so careful –– this close, she can see the waver of the strokes, the jagged edges where painter's tape hadn't quite stuck well enough.
"An earworm's never as good as the real thing, though."
She runs her brush off the corner. There's a humour in her voice that feels smug, but her smile is a little fond, watching him fuss over Ellie's ponytail.
"Plenty of bad stuff up there, too. Not that you'll ever get him to admit it."
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dog_eat_dog) wrote2023-04-20 08:45 pm
Painting Ellie's room
It amazes Tess sometimes what survives in a can. Twenty year old Chef Boyardee, beans in molasses, mushy peas, tuna –– all of it processed within an inch of its life and sealed into an aluminum prison, coming out maybe a little brown but certainly edible, as long as the can itself wasn't too dinged up.
What she did not expect to survive was paint. When they'd rescued these cans of paint from the garage and cracked them open, it hadn't seemed likely. Tess had imagined it'd be just a solid block of plastic, hard as a rock on top, maybe gummy at best underneath. She hadn't expected it to still be liquid, but sure enough, once they'd keyed the top off, it was. The colour was all settled on the bottom, the top an oily yellow, flecks of rust from the outside of the can peppering the surface. Salvageable, maybe, with a good stir. Might even be a nice shade of blue. And if they're really lucky, it'll be bonding time for the three of them, and no one will punk out after one coat just because they only have one roller and two extremely crispy hand brushes.
"Last chance," she says to Ellie, as she ties up her hair into a messy bun. "You sure you don't wanna keep this colour?"
She jerks her head at the walls. The perky stripes in two shades of pink and lime green trims, the sun-faded spots where they'd pulled down posters of those idiots in B4-4 with the frosted-tipped hair. The lacy-trimmed curtains are gone, too, and goofy-looking iMac is sitting in the hall, waiting to see if someone can get it booted after decades collecting dust.
"It's just pink, you know, it's not the enemy."
She would end up with a kid who doesn't like girly shit.
no subject
"Pink is fine when I can take it off," she says. She has a few articles of faded pink clothing, or maybe it's more magenta. Hard to tell. It just doesn't need to be literally surrounding her at all times. "This is just way too much. Offensive, even."
The trim isn't too bad. Green is great. But she's planning on covering that, too.
"Besides," she says, rubbing her nose as she motions to the walls, "It'll feel less like living in some dead girl's room if I get to choose the color."
So there. Dark, but true.
no subject
No way is he getting some kind of cramp from using the brushes.
"Don't think you've got much color to choose from, kiddo." Joel sees about the task of unfolding the sheet he's brought with him and wafting it over the last uncovered corner of the room. They haven't done much to move Ellie's furniture - technically, the girl who lived here before's furniture, but Joel has been thinking of it as Ellie's for long enough now that possession really is nine-tenths in his mind - but it's away from the walls enough that they shouldn't run the risk of getting paint completely all over everything.
As he straightens up from smoothing out the last of the sheet, he fishes a wooden stir stick he'd pulled from the workshop in the garage out of his back pocket and hands it over to Tess, since she seems to have taken charge of the paint pouring portion of this exercise. To Ellie, he says, "Alright, let's open the windows. Last thing you wanna do is breathe this in all afternoon."
no subject
“Okay, if you say so.”
The paint swirls together, the sick yellow streaked with blue as she pulls it up from the bottom and reincorporates it. The can’s sticker claims “cowgirl” blue, which could be anything, but as it comes together, it’s a dusty robin’s egg sort of colour. Boring, in Tess’s opinion. She’s hardly a fan of the eye-searing tone of this room at present, and could swear that it glows in the dark, but it feels like a tragedy to lose one of the only colourful rooms to the tyranny of bucolic blues and wilderness greens and browns, which consume Wyoming like the plague.
But it’ll have to do. Even setting aside availability, this whole thing is a compromise. Something to make Ellie happier in the house, part consolation prize for the garage not being ready before winter.
Tess glances at Joel.
“Be careful with the left one, the string on it is still broken.”
Or whatever the string is. She doesn’t know what it’s called, just that it keeps the window from slamming down and breaking one’s fingers. Whatever. He knows. It’s inevitably going to be his job to fix it.
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"Man, you never let me have any fun." Because paint fumes? Hell yeah. But she's mostly just being a brat (her favorite occupation), and goes to throw open one of the windows before coming back over to observe the paint looking more like paint and not a puddle of piss.
"Do you think this is gonna be enough?"
The room isn't huge, but it's nicer than anything else Ellie's ever been given. What if they end up with a pink, green, and blue room? She'd have to cover the rest with comic book pages or something.
... which isn't a totally bad idea, in her mind, but she can already imagine the looks she'd get from Joel and Tess if she suggested it. They don't get it.
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Joel gets to work on opening the other window, mindful of Tess's warning regarding the broken sash cord. Eventually he will fix it, just as he'll eventually address all the other issues in the house that have been stacking up in his mind. For now he produces a ruler from the desk drawer and heaves the window up, propping it open in this way and reinforcing it with a coffee thermos he'd brought up from the kitchen. It's not ideal, but it's still better than running the risk of the ruler snapping and shattering the window all over the place. Or Ellie trying her hand at becoming some paint huffing fiend.
"It'll be fine," he answers Ellie, crossing back over to join them and crouching down to inspect Tess's progress. "If it ain't, we'll figure somethin' out." In all honesty, they might actually be cutting it close. He's never used twenty-year-old paint before, and even though Tess has managed to mix it back into a serviceable pigment, it could be thinned or even just less than it looks. It wouldn't be the first time that he's had to run back out to get more product to complete a job, although it's not like he can just drive down to Home Depot and ask for another can. He tips what they have toward him, sloshing the contents of one of the cans, then asks Tess, glancing around, "You find anything to pour this into?"
With both windows open, the cross breeze drifts in uninterrupted. The air is cool even as summer approaches, not saturated with humidity the way it had been in Austin and absent the lingering stench of the Boston QZ. It all still feels a bit surreal.
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They're not ideal, but it will work –– Tess imagines that there will be a twenty-four hour period where she does not roll her eyes at the bastards who lived here before, and the things they did or did not leave behind. Brushes and a roller but no tray? Fucking animals.
"You've got two options, kid," Tess says. "Either we do one coat and it looks a little patchy but it's mostly blue, or we do one wall at a time and see how far we get."
She dumps a sizeable amount of paint into the pan, and then a bit under each cup. Some of it near the bottom isn't mixed perfectly, but whatever, she is not one of those shaking machines at the fuckin' Home Depot.
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Did Joel explain at some point? Yes. Did Ellie retain any of that information? No.
She looks up from the paint to Tess. "My vote is mostly blue. If there's an ugly pink wall left, then that's better than a whole ugly pink room. I can always cover it with stuff, anyway."
Besides, she's not going to live in this room forever.
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"That's my vote, too," he says, seizing one of the cups and swirling the contents in it just enough to see if it will mix further without sloshing over the lip. He isn't entirely successful. "Somebody's bound to have more paint if this ain't enough, though. Probably not in the same color but. Better than nothin'. You could do a not pink accent wall." He holds the mug in his hand - white with a buffalo stamped on it, Grand Teton arching above it like a sunrise - out for Ellie to take along with a brush. "What 'stuff' would you cover the walls with if we run out?"
Not that he cares, since it's her room, but he is curious. While Ellie takes the time to answer, he eyes the roller, then looks at Tess, waiting to see if she's planning on fighting him for it.
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She eyes Joel eyeing the roller. Without waiting for him to make a move, she leans forward and reaches across the floor for it, cat-like –– it's easier than crawling forward on her knees –– her eyes on him the whole time. Truthfully, she can't be fucked to deal with the up-and-down of it. Let Joel get the shoulder work-out, but also let him think for a second that she's going to take it from him, a grin sliding across her face.
Tess sits back on her heels, roller in her lap, and she looks at Ellie for her answer. Well? What's it going to be, kid?
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(Ellie has no idea how to paint walls, let alone the work it takes to get an even layer with a brush. She'll learn.)
As for the mystery of her accent wall, she shrugs as if she doesn't know. But she does.
"Art? Posters? Tommy says there's some abandoned record store not far from here, and there's still posters rolled up in plastic and everything." Yeah, a record store. Super hip. When Ellie's eyes lit up at the mention of it, he said they might have to take a trip once she's properly settled in town. Painted walls sure as hell sounds like settled in. "Might be cool."
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"Sounds cool to me." Does that make it less cool? Is Ellie at that age yet? Are things between them peculiar enough that anything he categorizes as 'cool' is rendered uninteresting just on principle? It doesn't feel that way, thankfully, but he can't always be sure. "Might be able to find some posters of that Savage Sunlight or whatever it's called. That comic book you read. Sometimes they carried stuff like that." Or maybe some space-themed posters. If there's a record store nearby with untouched musical relics from years gone by, there might be something out there for would-be astronauts, too.
As interested as he is in the record store and Ellie's plans for her potential accent wall, he is more interested in getting the roller back from Tess so he can get started on the walls. Joel meets her grin with a Look that carries no real weight and holds out his open palm. "Hand it over." In his defense, he is the only one who really knows what he's doing, but like that has ever stopped either of them before. Even if Ellie doesn't know how to paint, he'll find some way to live with the end result.
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"Trade off if it starts fucking with your back," she warns him. "And maybe we can find something for Ellie that isn't the same thing she's read a million times."
When, she wonders, do kids grow out of comic books? In her mind, it's a hobby for nine year old boys and aging collectors who rarely leave their couches.
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"Savage Starlight. Jerk." He fucking knows the name. How many times has she gone on and on about the plot, the characters? Even if he's actively tuning her out, some stuff has had to gotten through. She lets the use of cool slide because Tess is showing him what's what.
"She just called you old," she helpfully points out with a grin. But she also has to point out, "I notice new things every time, okay? And there are hints about a sequel, but I don't know if that even got made before, you know."
The world went to shit. Bummer.
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Here he is, trying to help paint a room that Ellie is eventually going to vacate once he gets around to figuring out how to finagle plumbing in a garage, and he's being made to accept a roller as some display of sympathy and suffer disparaging, mocking comments about comic books. He doesn't even like comics, although he does remember almost every detail that Ellie had ever told him about the ones that she enjoys, at least in broad strokes, even if he'd gotten the name wrong in the moment. It's not like she's talked about it in a while, in his defense. He still makes a mental note to look around and see if he can suss out anything regarding a sequel.
Tess doesn't even need to explain to him what she's laughing at because he knows without having to ask, so he doesn't feel bad about smacking her ass with the dry roller as soon as she straightens up with one of the paintbrushes, nor does he feel bad about tugging Ellie's ponytail in his version of childish retaliation as he passes by to actually get started on one of the walls. Someone has to do something around here beyond twiddling their thumbs and talking around how lame he actually is.
"If this is how it's gonna be with you two, I'll move out to the garage myself." Joel is almost old enough to be retired, a fact he knows better than either one of them. He can think of nothing more peaceful than a space all to himself where he can determine what's cool and no one can question his authority on it, and where he can lock the door and let neither of them in when they inevitably need him to rewire a light switch. Unfortunately for now, he has to start painting, if only to prove a point, although -
"You wanna do the honors, Miss Starlight?" he asks Ellie, nodding toward the paintbrush and mug.
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"Got you between the ribs, huh?"
Tess throws him a look when he smacks her ass; the gesture isn't unusual on its own, but in front of Ellie is different in a way that is not unpleasantly surprising. She says nothing, just the upward twist of her lips.
"Notice new things in what, it's just drawings," Tess says to Ellie, relucantly dragging her gaze off Joel. She has a growing suspicion that Ellie would have a lot of in common with the kids in high school who gathered in some benevolent teacher's classroom one lunch hour every week to watch Japanese cartoons, the squeaky voices piercing the hallways. The ones she occasionally hazed.
Or, actually: "You've seen posters for that Dawn of the Wolf movie, right?"
They're fucking everywhere, littered through every major town, the last marketing blitz before the world started dying.
"When the outbreak happened, even with everything going on, those obsessives still found time to complain about never getting to see the second one."
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Tess just doesn't get it. Ellie's tried to explain it to her before, but she swears her eyes glazed over at some point and she wasn't going to waste her breath on someone who clearly has no taste when it comes to sci-fi.
Ellie nods at the mention of the movie. She's grown up with it despite never watching the thing.
"Yeah, I guess it was based off a book?" Ellie shrugs a shoulder, attempting to balance her paint brush on one finger. "Never read it. There were like, stacks of the things in the back of the military school library back in the QZ. Never saw 'em move."
They just kind of got shoved into a closet that wasn't used. Maybe someone had plans for them at one point.
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No part of him can even pretend that it had been enjoyable, but at least the two other people in the room with him are of the same mind. The posters still plastered outside of storefronts and advertisements slapped on the side of crashed buses had at one point felt like caustic reminders of that occasion, designed specifically to torture him, but thinking about them now just makes him shake his head as he drags the cookie sheet over closer to where Ellie is standing.
"You're not missin' out. It was bad," he chimes in, trying to conjure up long dead memories of a film he never cared about in order to better support his case. Nothing comes to mind beyond the posters and promotional images that dotted their progress across the country, so he'll have to trust that his succinct opinion sums things up nicely for the two of them. Even Ellie, who has at least one foot planted in that sort of fantastical escapist stuff, probably wouldn't have found that genre to her taste. Too girly, despite the werewolf premise. "People got mad about never findin' out why Darth Vader went all evil, too. Guess we'll never know."
He is not huge on pop culture outside of his own wheelhouse - no one loves cheesy action movies the way he does - but he had also been ten-years-old when the first Star Wars movie came out. That just had to be seen through all the way to the end, no matter how bad it got, too.
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“It wasn’t that bad,” Tess argues. “It just had annoying fans.”
Case in point: fucking Meredith, the girl on the cot next to hers in a FEDRA evacuation camp, bemoaning the loss of the greatest love story ever told. As if that was even a fraction as tragic as the downfall of society. Tess only knew her for four days but will carry that grudge to her grave. Fucking Wolf people.
“It was better than Star Wars, actually.”
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"Now you're both sounding ancient," Ellie grins. "But I'm pretty sure anything about space is way better."
Because space? Is the best. You know the moment she finds any of those glow in the dark stars and planets, they're going on the ceiling.
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From where he's crouched, sliding the roller through the paint spilled across the baking sheet, Joel gives them both a look: Ellie, briefly, for lollygagging around with her mug and brush, more interested in the conversation than getting started; Tess, the longer and more incredulous of his expressions, half-flabbergasted and half-insulted. And some third piece of the puzzle, like he suddenly does not know her at all.
"It was way better," he agrees with Ellie, getting up on knees that, okay, are ancient and make a little popping sound as he stands, but Joel ignores it, prepared to set his roller against the wall if no one else is. He says to Ellie, over his shoulder, "She's outta her mind." And then, for good measure, to Tess, "You're outta your mind."
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"Didn't take you for a kids' movie kinda guy, Texas," she says, with a smile.
To Ellie:
"It's barely about space, anyway. It's just people talking about trade routes and aliens keeping people as slaves."
It has been twenty years, but is she wrong? She has not even considered it.
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"Is this what people argued on the internet about?"
Asked as if she really has any idea. It's such an abstract concept to her, but she's heard people reminisce about the time before enough to know that it was a thing.
"Ooh, maybe you two would have met online and gotten mad at one another and not even know until now."
Unlikely, but not impossible.
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He doesn't remember everything about Star Wars - Tommy probably would, though - but he is fairly certain those details weren't part of the story in any meaningful way. Mostly he just remembers the laser swords and the explosions. As a teenager, that had been particularly entertaining, less so as an adult. Just as the internet had never grabbed him beyond printing out directions to Sarah's away games or checking the four emails he got occasionally. The computer they had was mostly used for homework and drafting invoices, not arguing with someone about the finer points of a galaxy far, far away.
Ellie probably would have used and abused it for that exact purpose, though.
"I don't think so," Joel replies, leaning down to get a little more paint on his roller. At least his wall is coming along. "Somethin' tells me Tess ain't the type of person to get her kicks arguin' with someone from behind a screen." From what he knows, that doesn't sound like what Tess from twenty years ago really got up to, besides.
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Tess finds a place on the window bench, mug and brush in hand, to start doing the trim around the window, but she grins as she goes.
"We would have met at some shitty dive bar and we would've knocked heads over something and then I would've followed him out the door anyway," she remarks. "What do you know about the internet, anyway?"
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Okay, whatever. Painbrush to a random part of the wall, here they go. Ellie doesn't really care that she's getting paint flecks on her clothing (and hair) from the first stroke.
"Lots of stuff. Old folk talk about it all the time," she says, purposely trying to get a rise out of one of them. "You could download music."
And listen to it, Ellie presumes.
"Guess that was a good idea until all your music disappeared when shit went down."
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That comment about old folks doesn't go unnoticed, but Joel chooses not to lump himself into that particular category. He's not sure he ever even figured out how to download music off of the internet, though he does wonder if there are any iPods they could blow Ellie's mind with lying in wait somewhere in one of the surrounding towns. "Not all of it," he replies, tapping index and middle finger against his temple. "All the good stuff's still in here." The good stuff that he and Tess would have knocked heads over in a dive bar, no doubt.
A splatter of blue catches his eye, and Joel reaches over to pinch out a particularly bright glob of paint from the twist of Ellie's hair in her ponytail. Doing so is probably pointless, given how it had gotten there in the first place, but Joel can't stop himself from doing it all the same, wiping his fingers on his shirt.
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"An earworm's never as good as the real thing, though."
She runs her brush off the corner. There's a humour in her voice that feels smug, but her smile is a little fond, watching him fuss over Ellie's ponytail.
"Plenty of bad stuff up there, too. Not that you'll ever get him to admit it."