Ellie feels like she says it a hundred times a day.
'I'm not a baby.'
'I can take care of myself.'
'I'm not kid.'
Hell, with everything she's seen and been put through, s`he's more mature than people twice her age.
But times like this, watching the little kids, kids four, five, six, kids that are too young to know what really lay outside the walls of the safe little town, how dangerous the world really was, running around and playing on the jungle gym and swing sets of the local park makes Ellie wish she was. She misses her prep school. She misses Riley. She misses those days when she didn't have to worry about clickers or runners or bloaters or hunters, because how would any of those get inside the walls of the QZ?
And then she and her best friend got bitten. Got infected.
Sometimes, she wishes she had died with Riley. She wishes she'd sat against that wall and lost her mind. She wishes it the most when she's lying in bed, having been startled out of sleep by a nightmare about clicking in the dark, screams. She sees Sam's smile and hears Henry's laugh, feels Tess' strong hand on her shoulder and Marlene's around her middle. When she wakes from seeing David's malicious grin, from feeling his hands close around her throat. That's when she'll lie, curled into a ball in the center of her bed under the covers, and wish she'd never been born.
She can't tell any of this to Joel. Not Joel, not Tommy, not Maria, which sucks because the're the only people she tallks to.
It's not because she's afraid of what they'll say. It's because of the way it will make them feel; useless, like they can't do anything right by her, and she doesn't want that for the people she cares about.
It's easier to suffer in silence, to save up all her tears for the shower, where she'll sit in the middle of the spray and cry as quietly as she can into her knees.
This world isn't made for kids anymore.