Mary Sue - Coming Home

Chapter 4 - The Book

It seems easy to say that it all started with a book, but it never really just starts, does it? There's always so much backstory, so much prologue, so much that came before but has a direct bearing on right now that it's hard to know where to start.

But, basically, it started with a book. It seemed like a journal, or maybe a diary, but it wasn't written in. Not exactly. Instead, the words written in it seemed to have power, or describe things that hadn't happened yet, but would happen. Sometimes the words were about important people and had stories. Sometimes the words were about people who seemed to be important, but weren't yet. There were lots of rules about the words, but it was hard for people to know what those rules were.

Some stories were for children. There were lots of things that stories about children could be about. Some stories might be about toys that came to life and needed someone to teach them how to be real. Or they might be about elves who kidnapped a human girl to be their princess. They might be about a value that little children need, like knowing when to go to bed or that you should always brush your teeth or eat your vegetables. Or about a girl who was raised by wolves that only she understood, who needed her to lead them because they'd always had a girl to lead them. Wolves can be picky like that.

Some of these stories might be scary, or dark, or bloody. Children, contrary to adult opinions, love blood, as long as they don't have to think about the pain of the person who has it shed. Those stories never stop to think about where the toys come from or how they came alive, or if they were always alive. They never stop to think about the parents and babysitter who were out looking for the child all night until she randomly appeared in her bed the next day, having learned a valuable lesson. They never stop to think how eating your vegetables and brushing your teeth are hard things to do while running a wolf pack.

But the stories work how they work and it's not up to me to question them. This story is kind of an end to lots of other stories. And this story starts with a book.

***

The book was in a moving truck. It was a moving truck that was rented for this express purpose, and not a special moving truck. In fact, the man who rented it, and his daughter with him, tried to avoid ever using something for very long. He had his reasons for this, and his reasons were his late wife and his daughter. He'd lost his wife when his daughter was very young, and ever since, he'd not had her keep things for too long, not let her get attached to objects, because sometimes objects became attached back. And it's not part of some cult he belongs to or philosophy about sparking joy. It's literally because he didn't trust objects, and with good reason.

So, objects come and go in their lives, and despite his best efforts, some objects, like a small red diary, stuck around in his little girl's life. Until today. Today, they were moving into a small town just like those in all the old horror movies and netflix shows and even a few thrillers. The town seemed set a few decades before, as if its writers didn't know for sure what was real and so they set it in the kind of towns they remembered, and no one was really around to challenge their vision. It was a timeless kind of town, where people were still kind of prosperous, and no one really questioned it, where school sports still drove calendars, and politicians knew their constituents, and the weird kids were mostly weird because they liked weird stuff AND also happened to not be cisgendered heterosexual white kids.

This may not have come up on the man's investigation of the town nearly as much as the ridiculously low crime rate, the incredibly progressive laws that were practically european despite the town's red state location, and the fact that unemployment there was crazily low and almost no organized crime, and the police had not committed any atrocities there. These were the kind of things the man checked. He liked checking things. He worked as a fact checker for several news networks while he and his daughter moved around. An astute observer of patterns, like he was, may have noticed that he rarely passed through the same area twice. That same astute observer might comment that it looked like he was running from something, though that anonymous astute observer might be wise not to say it twice in his presence.

But something had recently changed in his and his daughter's life. It was hard to explain, but you could mark it in the small red diary. The pages were running out. His lovely little daughter's diary was almost full. So despite the fact that the town's demographics listed them as almost the only black people in the entire town, they decided to move there. The man is black, and his daughter is, too. Sorry if that detail matters to anyone and I forgot to mention it. Wasn't really relevant until now.

They weren't the only black people in town, really. There were three or four families that had risen and grown in the town, but they were so.... Integrated, that they hardly seemed to register to most people.

As the diary was running out of pages, something it hadn't ever done before in her nearly 16 years, he felt the need to have a home base. He felt the need to bunker down. He felt the need to weather a storm that might soon be coming. His daughter didn't know about the many storms they had avoided in the past, and he hoped she would never need to know. He'd become practiced at moving, and his daughter practiced at accepting his many excuses as to why. He was a smart man, and she was a loving daughter. Perhaps she thought he would eventually tell her why. Perhaps he thought she didn't know better. Perhaps he believed that since things were so like the books she loved to read, that she thought it was normal. Perhaps he was right.

But somehow, in the move to the new house, the diary was lost. Initially, he was crazed with worry and concern. The diary represented something continual in his daughters life that had been inconstant and even chaotic in their many moves from one city, one state, one side of the United States to the other. If it hadn't been for late stage capitalism, and the sheer volume of information, his and her many moves would have been concerning. As it was, with gig economies and such, there were always mass migrations they seemed to just be a part of.

But the diary was a serious concern as he unpacked the moving van along the side street in the new town. The new town had a ridiculous name and its inhabitants were so clearly out of a story book that he felt the stories would never be that obvious. It would be too cliche for them to use such a clearly cliche place. And of course, his suspicions were roused, but if it were really a trap, then what better way to deal with the trap than on his terms. They rented a house for a reasonable rate (a red flag in and of itself) and settled onto the street with six other families. He and his daughter couldn't know that all the resident weird kids lived in this vicinity. They couldn't know that finding the diary would lead them all into a bizarre story that no one would ever believe.

So, initially, his concern was purely of the suspicions that he had cultivated being a black man raising his little daughter for 16 years. The kind of suspicions that kept him safe not only from the institutional racism of the country, the casual racism of police and employers, and the pointed racism of liberal white people. But also the suspicions of a man raising his little daughter alone in a world that doesn't look kindly on single fathers no matter what their race. And this is before the stories that tried to ensnare his very special little girl.

So, while she barely registered the missing diary as they slowly unpacked their things to fill the small, already mostly furnished home in the small town of Placeholder, he was concerned, and used every part of his being to not try to run, not try to distance himself from the jaws of the trap he could feel closing around him. "The best way to deal with a trap is to spring it on your own terms?" That was some white people in horror movie bullshit. The best way to deal with a trap is never to trigger it.

But his little girl had begged for a high school experience, and to do that, they had to stay in one place for a few years. And he had done his research. Unlike most of the places they'd lived, where there'd been warning signs, this place didn't have any. Statistically, this place was impossibly calm, impossibly prosperous, and aside from the ridiculous name, incredibly even boringly ordinary. There had been no red flags, no obvious worries about nearby nuclear power or fairy bridges or monster sightings or any of the normal red flags for a small town. There had been no alien abductions, no spike in mortality or even lack of mortality. They had a hospital, a decent science program in the high school, and even a history teacher vacancy that would allow him to be close to and keep tabs on his little girl.

In short, it was perfect. That should have been a red flag.