eerieindiana | Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: A Ghost in Pink

So, this is actually a prompt for

31_days, but it was yesterday's.

In the last memory that Martyn and Eileen Donner have of their oldest daughter, she is pounding up the staircase in a pink flannel dressing gown and fluffy pink booties, taking the steps two at a time. A stack of paperbacks, checked out from the Eerie library that afternoon, waits for her on the nightstand beside her bed. At the upper landing, she turns back for a moment and the glass of milk in her hand sloshes violently as she calls "'Night, guys!" to her parents before disappearing behind her rapidly-closing bedroom door.

The following morning, when the house is filled with the smell of percolating coffee and frying bacon and Janet still hasn't emerged, Eileen knocks lightly on the white glossed doorframe. When she doesn't get an answer, she opens the door a crack, calls out a greeting and peers inside. She's fully expecting to see Janet sprawled across her mattress, hair covering her face, drooling onto the open pages of a tattered paperback with a cracked spine.

When she sees the empty, unmade bed, she shrugs, twitches the eiderdown back into place, and heads downstairs, where Martyn shakes his head and says that Janet must have gone out early, collecting pinecones or oddly shaped rocks or the bright-coloured seashells that sometimes wash up on the shores of Lake Eerie with "a gift from Neverland" painted on the side.

When Janet doesn't show up in time for lunch, Eileen is annoyed. She's made pot-roast and a rhubarb pie specifically because Janet asked her to, and the least she could do is show up to eat it. Amy, younger than Janet by several years, takes an unhealthy interest in exactly how their parents will punish Janet for her tardiness.

It's when evening falls that they start to worry, calling around to ask Janet's school-friends if they've seen her today. They haven't.

In the days and weeks and months that follow, Eileen will see Janet reflected in window panes and milk bottles and the chrome of the kitchen faucet, wild red hair spilling over a dressing gown that grows grubbier as more time passes. But when she turns around, her daughter is never there.