This isn't weird.

Different Planet

It was an excruciatingly long journey. They drove continuously for nearly forty hours, sleeping in shifts. Tess tried several times to suggest spending a night in a motel, but Millie stubbornly refused; she couldn't, or wouldn't, afford the delay.

They stopped early in the morning at the first place they could find a replacement phone for Millie. Once they had it, she sat in the passenger seat fussing with it for hours, convinced she must have missed some form of communication from Ben during her long hours without a phone.

"Millie, you're making yourself crazy. Stop. He hasn't messaged you," Tess sighed in frustration.

"Maybe I should just call him. Maybe he wants me to call him," Millie speculated anxiously.

"Do not call him, girl. If he wanted to make it right, he would do it. Your sister just almost died, you do not need to be wasting your energy pining over that asshole right now."

"Ben isn't an asshole, Tess."

"Well, he sure does a good impression of one."

They didn't talk about it again.

The only other stops they made were at gas stations, and once in Wyoming, when Millie suddenly pulled over on a deserted stretch of road, got out of the car, and screamed at the top of her lungs until she physically couldn't anymore. When she was finished, she got back into the driver's seat and continued on without a word. Neither of them acknowledged that it had happened.

Their legs and backs cramped from the unending hours trapped in their seats. Their stomachs ached from subsisting on whatever snacks they could grab when they stopped for gas, and from maintaining a steady state of dehydration to minimize restroom stops. Millie spent most of her waking time silently crying, and believed incorrectly that Tess didn't notice.

The hours of silence greatly outnumbered the scattered bursts of conversation that happened during the rare hours when they were both awake. Their first real conversation happened just outside of Amarillo, shortly after Tess woke up from her sleep shift. She sat up, blinking, and squinted at a road sign. "Holy fuck, we're in Texas."

"We sure are," Millie replied, a little more cheerfully than Tess had expected. There was something different about her—an uncharacteristic, very specific sort of ease of posture.

Tess smiled. "You're home, huh?"

"What? No."

"You miss it. You miss Texas."

"Okay, maybe a little," Millie conceded. "The sky is different here, isn't it? Bigger."

"Yeah, I guess it is." Tess picked up her phone to check the GPS and did a double take. "Holy shit, we still have ten more hours to go?"

"Yep."

"But we're already in Texas."

Millie shrugged. "It's a big state."

"Jesus Christ." Tess arched her back, stretching as much as she could from the cramped confines of the passenger seat. "You know what? Next place we stop, I'm getting a goddamn cowboy hat."

"Fucking tourists," Millie scoffed.

"When in Rome," Tess replied with a grin.

She looked out the window, taking in the scenery. It looked so alien to her—the rocky ground at first glance so barren, yet somehow full of life, the dry, cracked earth deviously embellished with sparse, bristling green plants whose very existence seemed like an audacious fuck you to the overbearing sun. When she looked closely, she spotted flowers here and there, coy hints of yellow, red, and even purple just waiting to be noticed. It was all so colorful if only you were paying attention. "It looks like a different planet."

"It basically is," replied Millie with a smile.

"Are you nervous?" Tess asked her.

"About what?"

"Well, you know, everything with, umm—"

"Oh, you mean seeing my physically mangled, emotionally scarred, chronically suicidal, estranged older sister for the first time in five years and leaving behind everything and everyone that I love so I can spend the better part of a year trapped with her in the childhood home I still have nightmares about?" Millie elaborated glibly.

"...Yeah. That."

"Oh, sure. A little."

"You're in rare form today, Mills."

"Thanks!"

The evolving landscape continued to surprise Tess as it grew steadily greener, oaks and junipers appearing along the highway as the flat ground slowly began to sprawl into gently rolling hills. Hours passed, and the earth flattened out again; pine trees began to appear unexpectedly alongside the oaks, and soon outnumbered them. It looked like a different different planet, though the sky continued to have that brazen peculiarity of height and immensity that she had first seen in Amarillo.

By the time the pines appeared, Millie had become quiet again. The reality of her circumstances had finally begun to truly sink in, and the further east they traveled, the more haunted her eyes became. They arrived in Houston after nightfall. As they neared the hospital, Millie finally began to discuss the practicalities of their situation.

"I'll be getting FMLA benefits for the first twelve weeks," she explained, "and I've got enough savings to cover my half of the rent for a few months after that, if I'm careful. But if you need to find a new roommate before I get back, I'll understand."

"Don't even think about that right now, Millie," Tess insisted. "I'm not gonna replace you. I promise." She grinned. "It would be way too much of a pain in the ass to move out all your stuff."

"Gee, I'm touched," Millie said. Her tone was sarcastic, but she really was. She wanted so desperately to be able to return to her normal life when all of this was over.

"I can stay for a day or two, but I'll need to catch a flight back pretty quickly," Tess said. "My boss is pretty unhappy with me taking off on such short notice."

"That's okay. I don't expect you to stick around. You've already done so much for me... Thank you, Tess."

"It's nothing, girl," Tess assured her. "You know I love you. I'll do whatever I can to help you get through this."

At long last, the car came to a stop. Millie took a deep breath.

"Are you ready?" Tess asked.

"Not at all," Millie replied, and got out of the car.