goosebumps | halloween applyfic [1] ✓

1: The Dummy

GOOSEBUMPS,
CHAPTER ONE

"I DON'T SEE why you're so eager to move back in with your grandpa", Hannah Stine sighed as she carried another box up to the familiar house she'd "grown up in." Even though she was much older now, you could tell by the way her heart shaped face was slightly more chiseled and defined and she'd grown into her features, her small nose and her thin lips and even the way her ears stuck out slightly less, with her dark hair pulled up into a messy ponytail she looked more like herself than she ever had. She was still tall and slender and slouched a little due to her awkwardness.

"Because for once us moving doesn't mean I have to start all the way over at a new school in a new state or city?", her daughter, Rebecca Stine, answered as she too carried a box. She preferred the name Becca. She and her mother had moved back to the small town of Madison, Delaware at the start of the new semester. They were doing fine, or at least Becca thought they were doing fine until she came home to an eviction notice stapled to their door. Now here they were, back at grandpa's.

Once they stopped by in the kitchen, setting the boxes down, Hannah turned her big blue eyes onto her daughter. "Your dad keeps calling."

"And as far he should be concerned, I still live in Phoenix", Becca shrugged, beginning to rifle through the box.

"We haven't lived in Phoenix in, like, three years", Hannah pointed out.

Becca's plump lips curved up into a sarcastic grin. "Exactly", she said, grabbing the box once more. "Hey, grandpa. I'm taking this box to your attic."

"Just watch the fifth step on the ladder, it's rickety", Robert Laurence, or R.L. as many people knew him by, informed as he turned his attention to Hannah. Thin lips turned up into a smile that made his already small brown eyes squinty behind his thick rimmed, black glasses. "Welcome home."

Hannah smiled sheepishly. "You know I wouldn't ask you this if it wasn't absolutely necessary. Being a parent is so much more responsibility than I realized."

"Well, no one told you to get pregnant at sixteen", R.L. pointed out. Not in a lecturing way, that time had come and gone seventeen years and nine months ago.