Chapter Text
Chapter 1
The Old Loon
It was one of those miserably hot days where the sweat unceasingly slides down your back and you pant for no reason at all. Which, apparently, to my mom, was the “perfect weather to play outside! Now go.”
So, of course, I rushed to my room immediately, unless I wanted something rather unfortunate to happen to me. I hastily threw on a t-shirt and shorts, added tennis shoes, a few odd barrettes, goggles, and slipped on my backpack filled with odds and ends. I was out the door before she could catch me.
That’s how I was forced to go to my very friendly neighboring kids and ask if any of them wanted to play outside. Most of them appeared in the doorway sucking on ice pops and staring at me as if I was crazy. Which they had good reason to believe.
Okay, that was unfair. Let’s backtrack for a sec. My name is Ayan Fare and I’m thirteen years old, but everyone knows me as the Old Loon, mostly because I did the unthinkable.
***
It was a fair-weathered April night when it happened. And even though it earned me my Old Loon nickname, I didn’t mind one bit, because I don’t regret it.
The event I have been carefully keeping secret is more of a tall tale nowadays, a story the older kids tell the younger kids to scare them. No one says it, but I know that they know that I know since I’ve overheard them in passing.
“There’s the Old Loon, watch out, she’ll bite off your toes!”
“Some say Ol’ Looney over there can ask her ghosty friendos to haunt ya, so don’t upset her.”
“All of your nightmares about her? Those aren’t nightmares‒nope, those aren’t nightmares. Her dead friends plant them in your head at night so ya know to stay away.”
“Yeah, she hangs with the dead every afternoon, sippin’ coffee made from tormented souls!”
And so on. The reason most associate me with ghost stories and soul coffee is that I walked into a “haunted” junkyard, at midnight, with ten eyewitnesses. I also didn’t have pants on. I still don’t know how that condition got into the dare. But whatever. The story spread that Ayan walked into the haunted junkyard and visited the dead, and the eyewitnesses reported that “she was never the same.”
And I wasn’t. But not because I had a brush with a ghost or even a dead body. No, it was because I found someone‒someones‒who made my life a whole heck of a lot more interesting.