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“Honey, are you sure you don’t need me to drive you?” her mother asked, wringing her pale hands together. “I can just drop you off, and we can start setting up your apartment together. How are you going to get the rest of your things?”
“I’ll come back later for everything else,” Jolyne said. The straps of her old backpack, the bottom starting to fray after years of use, dug into her shoulders. “I just wanna get used to it first. Look around, figure out what I need, all that kinda stuff.”
She could tell that her mother wasn’t convinced, but this time around, trust seemed to overshadow reason. It only served to make Jolyne feel guilter about what she was doing.
“Alright.” The bus for the coastal line rumbled down the road, drawing closer and closer with every passing second. “Call me if you need anything, okay? I mean anything. If things don’t work out, you can always come back home.”
Jolyne smiled. “Yeah, mom. I know.”
She kept that smile on her face as the bus pulled up to the curb, the door sliding open and letting her board without so much as a passing glance from the driver. Jolyne made sure to take a seat by the window towards the back, backpack swung onto her lap and hands free to wave at her mom. Once she vanished from view, the bus rolling down the intersection and around the block, her face fell.
It was a stupid idea, really, but she didn’t have any other choice. The specifics didn’t matter. There would always be some corner of the world she could carve out to rot away in peace.
The harsh sunlight was filtered through the window, but it still made the skin on Jolyne’s arm uncomfortably warm. She shifted to try and avoid it, but there was no real shade for her to hide behind. It made the ride that much more miserable for her.
Gradually, the small clusters of houses that made up her city became sparse, interspersed with long stretches of open road that offered nothing but asphalt and empty soda cans littered along the ground. Jolyne was tempted to doze off, but the heat kept her from reaching anything beyond a half-conscious daze.
Maybe that was for the best when she caught a trace of sea salt in the air.
The bus came to a rolling stop, opening up to nothing but a few weather-worn stores and dilapidated three-star motels. With a brief wave towards the driver, Jolyne picked up her backpack and got off.
It was easy enough to find a cab lingering around one of the larger hotels, the address she was looking for rolling off of her tongue as soon as she got in. It was a little ways away, even more isolated than the sundown town she was in, but she still remembered how to get there.
The roar of the waves breaking against the shore in a foamy mist grew louder as the cab wound up the cliffside, twisting and jostling up the mix of paved asphalt and loose gravel. It stopped just by the road leading up to the house on the cliffside, just as sturdy as she remembered.
“This your stop?” the driver asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks. Keep the change.”
She didn’t check the bills she left behind twice, already out the door and trudging up the hill, the rocky driveway crunching and lurching under her feet. The walk used to be tortuous when she was a kid, complaining and up and down to anyone who would listen that there was no reason why someone would want to live in such a weird place.
She was stronger now. The walk wasn’t quite as bad as she remembered it to be.
It was a small comfort she kept as she knocked on the front door with two dull thuds of her fist.
Faintly, over the cries of the seagulls and the rush of the tide, Jolyne heard a slow pair of footsteps on the other side grow closer and closer before the door finally opened.
With a faintly bewildered look on his face, her father furrowed his brow.
“Jolyne?”
“Hey, dad,” she said. “You mind if I crash here for a bit?”
Dressed in nothing but an old sweatshirt and a faded pair of slacks, he looked more like a tired professor than the larger-than-life hero who came to her rescue every time she called. That effect was only heightened by the way he blinked at her, then squinted, as if that would somehow unearth the answer he was looking for.
She waited for him to turn her down. It was the reason why she came, after all. If he would make her leave, then she could say that she exhausted all of her options and live out the rest of her life with as little regret as possible for all of that wasted potential she tossed.
But for some reason, he stepped back and held the door open.
“Come in.”
Jolyne stared at him. He stared back at her.
She waited for the punchline, but found only a blank absence where there should have been one. She was invited inside.
Thrown off-kilter, Jolyne didn’t try to offer any half-hearted protests or gratuitous thanks. She just reached down to unzip her boots, slung them off to the side of the entryway, and let herself in.
Once her father shut the door behind her though, he finally spoke.
“I thought you were moving out today.”
Jolyne paused. “You called mom?”
From the corner of her eye, she saw him nod. For anyone who didn’t know someone like Jotaro Kujo any better, they would have assumed that such a dull approach was a passive-aggressive slight, or some other thinly veiled form of accusation directed at her. She knew that his monotony was just his way of trying to keep things neutral though.
It was a shame that neutrality wasn’t what she was looking for.
“Yeah, about that.” She straightened her back and turned to face him head on. “I lied. It’s not like I can get an apartment if I don’t have a job, you know?”
A hint of confusion flickered across her father’s stoic face. His lips twitched like he wanted to say something, but she didn’t gave him the chance before she continued on.
“I’ve just been mooching off of mom and bumming around. You really think I’d be getting my own place like this?”
The words came out bitter, harsher than she expected and nearly spat out with the fervor that fueled them. It wasn’t the clean, well-rehearsed explanation she thought she could give, and the thought that she was fucking this up too only made that pit of visceral anger churn in her stomach.
The fact that her father didn’t so much as flinch only made it that much worse.
“Did something happen with your mother?” he asked. It was the politest way of asking did you get into a fight, and in any other case, Jolyne would have appreciated the discretion. Now, all it did was make her grimace and bite her tongue.
“No,” she said. “I just can’t stay with her.”
The faintest flicker of worry crossed his face, and Jolyne couldn’t handle it.
“Did she kick you out?”
“No!” Jolyne snapped. “I kicked myself out!”
The leash around her tongue snapped and Jolyne found herself spilling all of the gnarled knots of emotion that lodged themselves in her chest.
“I know she’d let me live with her. She said that she’ll let me stay until I can ‘get on my feet’ or whatever, but I can’t. I don’t even know how. I can’t go to college, I can’t get a job without having to explain why the fuck I got locked up, I can’t do shit!”
It felt like she had wrenched her ribs inside out, the pressure she had tried to keep a lid on finally bursting free without her say. Horrifyingly, Jolyne realized that her voice had started to warble.
“I know she’s worried about me and I know I’m fucking up my future, but I can’t fix it,” she gritted out. “And she shouldn’t have to see that.”
Despite her best efforts at fighting them back, her vision started to blur with tears. Jolyne brought a single fist up to rub them away with a harsh frown. She didn’t know why she had come here at all. She should have just left when she had the chance.
For a long while, the only sound in the empty house was of her own shaky inhales, reedy and wobbly in her attempts to keep her breathing even.
“You can stay here then.”
She squinted past the watery haze and tried to decipher the look on her father’s face.
“What?” she muttered.
“You can stay here,” he repeated. “Your room’s clean, if you still want to sleep there. I’ll call your mother and tell her you’ll be here for now. You can talk to her yourself later. I won’t say anything else.”
Jolyne didn’t understand. If he had just said no, then she could have been absolved. But now, Jolyne was faced with the terrifying possibility that there was a future out there that she would still have to try for.
“Why?” she asked. Her voice rose, but cracked along the way, barely strong enough to hold the raw desperation she threw into it. “I’m not doing jack shit. I’m one of those fucking dead-end failures. Why don’t you just tell me to fuck off and grow up already?”
When her father met her eyes, Jolyne faltered.
“Because you’re my daughter,” he said quietly. “And you’ll always be my daughter before you’ll be a failure.”
He said it like it was an unshakeable fact, a rule of the universe as impermutable as any other. He didn’t say it with fanfare, because to him, it wasn’t something that needed one.
Jolyne stared at him, but he didn’t falter. He didn’t move to take back what he said.
He was her father and she was his daughter. That was all there was to it.
The bag on her back dug into her shoulders, so unbearably heavy that it threatened to drag her down with it. She wiped at her eyes again. And again. She brought her other hand up when the tears threatened to overflow. Again. And again.
When her father tentatively held his arms out, she reached out and snagged herself around him without a second thought. His sweatshirt was thin and slightly scratchy against her cheek, but she didn’t care when he brought a gentle hand up to rest on top of her head.
She remembered following him around when she was a kid, shrieking with delight when he would scoop her up and leave her feet dangling in the air. She was never scared. She knew he wouldn’t drop her.
And even now, even though she was crying into his shirt, holding onto a bag stuffed with a few spare clothes and all the weight of adulthood in it, Jolyne knew that it still held true. It never mattered if she was strong enough to do it on her own or not.
Her father would never drop her either way.