Don't Fear The Reaper, Eddie Munson

01. Hot Girls Hate Indiana

—warning ; This chapter includes some homophobic rhetoric—well, Dana makes fun of the Save Our Children movement (an anti gay and lesbian organization started in 1977) in response to her mom implying it was bad to "look" gay— & discusses the abuse of children in the church by priests. Dana's mom also comments on how much food Chrissy is eating. It's all comments in an argument between Dana and her mom, but I understand both are sensitive topics & you may not want to read that rn!!!

NOWHERE, INDIANA.
18 MARCH, 1986.
8856 AMTRAK CHI → IND

AS TIME WENT on, and the unbearable weight of some fifty-year-old lady's eyes found an acute pressure point on the back of Dana Cunningham's skull, Dana became more and more uncomfortable in her seat on the third Amtrak of the afternoon out from the great, bustling city of Chicago, Illinois to her familiar, drab, cursed hometown of Hawkins, Indiana.

     Dana hated Hawkins enough without some miserable old hag ruining the journey, too.

     In Chicago, while there certainly were still stares and uncomfort, Dana had friends who were just like her—who dyed their hair blue; who wore ripped-up clothing; who pierced their ears seven times in their dorms with sterilized safety pins and ice cubes—and Dana had places into which she could blend. In Hawkins, there was her ex-boyfriend who was, really, the only person she could trust with all of her and there was an obscenely large Raegan-Bush-supporting population and a lot, a lot, of judgment. Dana wasn't built for judgment. She was built for going to Northalsted on the weekends and slipping bartenders her fake IDs and dancing too closely to everyone who wanted to dance with her.

     So, she uncomfortably shifted in her seat, her thumb habitually flubbing through the pages she had yet to read in the novel leaning against her knee. James Joyce. Riveting. (Not.) Eventually, the woman behind her cleared her throat in that petty way middle-aged women do, and so Dana decided to nix the book altogether, and root around in her backpack for her Walkman. She made sure the overdue gifts she bought for her siblings were in order—a large bag of her younger sister, Chrissy's, favorite sour gummy bears and a cassette tape of Billy Joel's An Innocent Man because her favorite song, "Uptown Girl", is on it and an actual Michael Jordan Bulls' jersey because her youngest sibling, her brother Ian, is kind of obsessed with basketball and wants to make varsity his freshman year. She hoped everything would be alright.

     Her childhood home was not a place of refuge from the nature of Hawkins, Indiana— Dana would be the first to admit. But, all through childhood and her teenage years, her mother always seemed the hardest on her out of the three children. Dana was the one who cut her hair in the middle of the night and Dana was the one who insisted on safety pinning her clothes in weird places and Dana was the one who wore "obscene" eyeliner that made her look "depraved". Chrissy matched her eyeshadow to her cheerleading uniform and Ian let their mother style him as long as he didn't have to make any decisions. So, when Dana was heading off to college, she thought that maybe it would be a good thing for everyone. Dana had scholarship money at UIC to study pharmacy (which Chrissy and Dana's ex-boyfriend thought was hilarious because Dana was very familiar with drugs, just not the pharmaceutical kind) and with her out of the house, maybe her mother would chill, ease up on the reigns, pull the stick out from up her ass.

     That's what Dana told herself would happen, anyway.

     But, regardless, Dana just had to get through this train ride and the next eleven days. Then, she'd be back in the city without reminder of her shitty mother, her shitty breakup with her high school boyfriend (she wasn't still hung up on him, honestly, but they spent, like, every waking moment together for years), and the even shittier, looming knowledge that she was walking around the same town as the douchebags who made her life a living hell for four years. At least she didn't peak in high school, was all she could tell herself in reassurance.