eerieindiana | Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Plans (Reply)

Written for Day 10 of the

31_days challenge. The prompt was, "by land or water, girl, get outta town"

In the weeks before Daylight Savings Time, Janet Donner makes a plan. There are craft fairs and flea markets in Indianapolis, concerts and museum exhibits in Muncie, and once, a town festival in their sister city of Normal, Illinois which she simply had to visit, for reasons that remained obscure to her parents and younger sister. She stood in the heaving crowd, scanning the faces around her for anyone in mirrored sunglasses, and the knuckles of her clenched fists turned white when the float honouring the Normal Dairy Farmers Association passed her spot on the parade route.

One year, she breaks her ankle a week before a Girl Scout camping trip that would have seen her earning her Trailblazing badge in a patch of woods just beyond the Eerie city limits. The night of the clock change, she borrows a small row boat from the the run-down rental stand behind the Eerie Baitshop and Sushi Bar and manages to get to the far shore of Lake Eerie just before Eerie Methodist strikes the first of two midnights. She gathers birch bark at the water’s edge and lights a small fire, both to ward off the chill of oncoming winter, and to show any garbage men who might be watching that she isn’t afraid of them, and builds a fleet of small bark boats while she waits for the new day. Hunting up broad leaves in brilliant fall colours to serve as their sails keeps her mind occupied and the delicate work of attaching them stops her hands from shaking.

She rows back inside the Eerie border as the pale autumn dawn is staining the sky in pale pinks and blues, and when she gets home, her parents ground her for a month. They demand an explanation, but the only one she has is one they can’t believe, so she stays quiet. She can’t figure out a way to make them see that she stays away so that, the rest of the year, she can stay at all.

Janet

A Ghost in Pink by