The Hunters of Artemis: A Siren's Call

1)Hello, Wisconsin

"Full Moon" by The Black Ghosts
***

Summer was here but my brother drove with the windows rolled up. Though it was May, the weather was still brisk in Wisconsin. A light jacket was needed. When we left the comforting warm weather of North Carolina it was seventy-five out, the sky a cloudless blue.

I brushed my auburn hair behind my ears and stared blankly out the window at the passing sign; Welcome to Wisconsin. This sky was a cloudy gray. It gave off the impression a heavy rain was approaching. Soon enough we passed a smaller sign stating the county we were arriving in. Located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, is a town called Kenosha. Looks are deceiving when arriving in this place. One passing through may assume this was a small town smacked between Milwaukee and Chicago, but it's not. The population is well over ninety-nine thousand. Even still, the city still holds small-town charm. Houses are close together in neighborhoods and small quick shop stores litter the downtown area. Most of the restaurants are family run and have been in Italian families for generations. This small-town atmosphere was the reason my father and mother left years previously. They wanted more than a simple town for their son and daughter.

My first thoughts of this deceivingly large town was noticing how fast people drove. During the forty-five-minute drive through Chicago, people whipped by at amazing speeds ranging from seventy-eighty miles per hour, and yet, all were such excellent drivers that they didn't crash. The same couldn't be said in my beloved state of North Carolina. People didn't drive at speeds nearly as but weren't as talented of drivers.

Still, bad drivers and all, I missed North Carolina. I missed my friends, the charming southern drawls people had, and most of all, I missed home.

If someone had informed me just two weeks ago I would be moving with my older brother to our grandparents' house in lower Wisconsin for the entire summer, I would have laughed at the absurdity of such a thing. But I wasn't laughing now. The mere thought of living without cable or phone reception for one whole summer had my stomach curdling.

Our widowed father had recently remarried after a whirlwind six-month relationship. My brother Sam thought it was in our -but mostly my- better interest to give the newlyweds space as our father and his new bride jetted off to Europe for an extended honeymoon. Sam could see I didn't have the patience to deal with our dad's happy new bride. He thought it best to bring me with him instead of leaving me to stew with the jubilant newlyweds.

I found there was far too much to dislike about my new stepmom Lauren Hodges. From the outside looking in, someone could make the argument my attitude towards my new stepmother was simply because I disliked the idea of no longer being daddy's little girl. This was not the case. Lauren was just too immature. She was always gushing about something or the other and it usually had something to do with hair products or some type of celebrity drama in gossip columns. She holds the mentality of a sixteen-year-old; a teenager trapped in a model-like twenty-six-year-olds body.

I personally feel Lauren is more immature than myself and that was saying a lot. I still enjoyed pushing my dad to his limits by extending my curfews and joyriding his beloved 1978 Chevy impala. I was stubborn and conceded but Lauren seemed even younger with her own nature. The young women had naïve perceptive on life that everything nearly always revolved around her. She had the audacity to still call her own father daddy. It was strange watching this courtship between her and my dad. There was less than a five-year age gap between Lauren and the twenty-one-year-old Sam. Even worse, I strongly suspected Lauren had been checking Sammy out during a recent beach trip when he had been shifting out of his shirt. The memory makes me wrinkle my nose in disgust. Even still, as bizarre as it is to see my dad in his forties frolicking around with someone half his age, Lauren is still my new stepmother.