Across the street and three houses down and it had always been the two of them, him scowling at her stuffed animals when she had her silly tea parties and her shrieking that she'd hate him FOREVER when he seemed to spend more time with Kevin Knightley than with her for the week after football camp. Three days later, he'd punched Rudy Tremaine in the nose after the latter pulled up all of her lovingly tended petunias and stomped all over them, and she'd hugged him for so long that he turned red as a sunset and told her that she was being girly.

Nick remembers those days-- and he remembers when her mother died and she wouldn't come down from her tree house for two days. He remembers sneaking out of his bedroom and joining her under the tree, listening to her cry and whispering his love, and watching her finally emerge two days later with matted hair and gray cheeks, supporting her as he led her to HIS house and letting her eat a whole loaf of bread in ten minutes before holding back her hair when it came back up an hour later.

Loving her is easy as breathing and as full of different moods as the sky-- as a thunderstorm-- as her.

There are moments of calm, when he carries her books in school and she cheers at his football games, wearing the rose earrings he bought her and his green varsity jacket. Nick and Lita. Lita and Nick. Once he took her out on an actual honest-to-goodness date and she wore something feminine and rose-coloured and green-sashed and she looked so foreign and ladylike that he was almost afraid to kiss her.

There are moments when he's her strength, when she runs out of her house on bare feet and yet it wakes him despite the closed window and the ungodly hour, tears streaming from her face and the shadow of a father's increasing alcoholism and aberrance lingering like a stench on her clothes, and he always promises not to leave her, not to hurt her, and holds her as she finishes sobbing it all out, concluding with a sloppy kiss for him before taking a few hitched drags on a stolen cigarette.

There are moments when she scares him just a little, when she suggests totally outlandish things like having sex in her old tree house and gets angry when he voices completely sensible objections, and when she's lost in herself, lost in her demons, and her eyes go glassy as beer bottles and she stays terrifyingly still. His Lita is vital and forceful and occasionally pensive but typically blunt and loud, and watching her freeze into herself is akin to watching a tree being buffeted by the wind suddenly still, leaves halfway to the ground.

There are even moments when he hates her a little, when she refuses to speak to him for having a perfectly innocent conversation with Amy Anderson about an upcoming science project and yet loudly proclaims Andrew Marshall, who works at the local diner-arcade, to be cute and fuckable. Or when she steadfastly refuses after a particularly bad episode to tell him exactly what her father did, as though she doesn't trust him with the information.

But now, he simply drives. The town has been left far behind, and they crossed statelines in the dark about an hour ago. They have a bit of money saved and she has a penpal named Raye in California and after all, he had promised her, when they were ten or so, that he'd help her run away. Eighteen forever, young and slightly hopeless, but she has faith in him that she doesn't spare for anyone else, and so he presses his cheek to her hair as she leans against his shoulder, open stretch of lonely highway before and after, off to everywhere and anywhere and surrounded by indigo sky.

They'll survive or die together and he'll remember moments like this and consider himself blessed either way.