NaNoWriMo Week One Excerpt

NaNoWriMo's been kicking my ass, lads, although I'm proud enough to say I'm at 26,285 words as of time of posting, and we're not even halfway through the month yet so yeahhhhh, I'm good on schedule. I'm still doing some art on the side too, but no fic yet, sorry. 

Here's an excerpt from my NaNoNovel, which...still has no title, and I literally just got the names for all my protags, because this is the ultimate pantsing. I have no plot, no character names, and no character attributes aside from what I make up on the go.

This is...chapter four? I think? Or somewhere further along the timeline. 

This is also unedited, so this definitely has a lot of errors.

When Rue was seven years old, she won hide and seek. 

That was as less glamorous as it sounded, really, even if she would gladly recount the story to anyone who would ask it, because the game had ended with three hours of police and a search team combing the forests with flashlights, and hide and seek was called its name for a reason.

Still, it wasn’t all glorious, because Rue hadn’t even thought to hide where she’d hidden, and she hadn’t hidden at all. She’d run into the forest surrounding the playground - the area past the construction site for the park fence, because it was hide and seek, duh, and she wasn’t about to go hide in the easier places, because Greg had strutted around telling everyone to make it a challenge - and once she’d gotten to the forest, she’d scoured the place for hollow logs to crawl into, or little dips in the earth she could hide behind, or even a tree she could climb, even though she wasn’t quite good at it yet. Anything to make Gregory eat his words, because Rue wasn’t a quitter, and Rue loved a good challenge when presented with one.

She’d actually found a hollow log, and had excitedly peered into it, only to find it wasn’t quite what the movies made it out to be, clean and empty except for a few leaves. It was actually wet and coated in moss, and had mushrooms growing on the edges of it, with spider webs and rotting leaves inside. 

She’d sat up, disappointed, and in the distance, she heard Greg say, “Time’s up, losers!”

Rue had turned to run, because if Gregory didn’t know she hadn’t frozen in a hiding spot yet, he couldn’t do anything about it.

Only, she was standing on a slope. 

Only, it had rained the night before, and the ground was still damp and soft.

Only, her foot had slipped on the muddy ground, and the wet leaves, and she’d held out her arms as if it would help her break her fall, but she only felt the world suddenly tilt back sharply, and one moment, she was staring up at the bright sky, tainted orange and pink as the sun was setting, and the next, sharp pain shot through the back of her head, bringing unconsciousness with it. 

When she’d woken up, it had been dark. Her jacket was muddy and damp, and her arms and back were sore. For about three minutes, she could only stare at the darkness, too confused and tired to be afraid, and then she slowly tried to push herself up, before immediately regretting it at the sudden pain at the back of her head.

She’d barely heard the sounds of people talking, and then the sounds of leaves and twigs cracking under rapid footsteps, and tried not to cry as she remembered she’d hit her head when she’d slipped.

She’d seen Brix when he’d tried to slide down the school hallway, last year in school when they were cleaning. He’d put floor wax on a rag, and tried to ride it down the hallway like a scooter, one foot on the scrap of waxed-up clothing so he could glide. He did glide. He glided and lost control, slipping and cracking his edge on the tile, and Rue didn’t scream. Rue couldn’t scream. Rue could only stare at Brix, unmoving on the hallway, and thought he was moving to get up because she had started to see a shadow, until two minutes later, when the shadow around his head just formed a dark puddle around him, kind of like a halo.

A passing student was the one who had seen him and screamed. 

Rue never saw Brix in school again.

She figured it would be like that now. She’d slipped and hit her head, and even though everything around her was damp and disgusting and wet, she was positive that her head was bleeding. She was going to look like Brix, with his blood halo around his head, and someone was going to find her and scream, and then no one would ever see her in school again. 

She heard herself sob, felt the tears streaming down her cheeks before she could even stop them, and despite the numb pain from her arms, she forced them to push herself up so she could sit. She spent two minutes gritting her teeth through it all, and by the time she had fully sat up, she knew she was openly crying. 

Tentatively, she reached a hand up to touch the back of her head, before deciding she’d rather not know and quickly put her hand down. She stared at it for a moment, at the mud all over it, and somehow, that had made everything worse, because she’d just started crying harder.

That was how they found her. The search party had followed the sound of her crying, and when they’d swung their flashlights towards her direction, they’d all rushed to pick her up, and Rue hadn’t really registered that they had. She’d only thought that she was bleeding, that she was dirty and her wound was most likely infected, and that she was going to die.

She didn’t. 

She was in the hospital for about a month, and then she went back to school to catch up with things like nothing had ever happened. Her classmates and teachers had been understanding and apologetic, for a while, and even arrogant Greg had softened and had let her borrow his notes so she could catch up on work, and a few months later, the questions and the sympathy had tapered off, because Rue was present and Rue was doing fine.

At least, for a little while. The doctors had told her that there might be a few problems with her memory, that she might be confused about things for a long while, but that those things would be normal, since she did just suffer a head injury. 

So when Rue started seeing shapes at the edges of her vision, she’d thought nothing of it. It was the confusion, she’d thought. It was the lights, like when you stare at something bright for too long you can see the afterimage of it everywhere you look for at least a solid minute. It was just the injury. When she visited the doctor again for a check-up and an assessment of how she was doing, she told the doctor about it, and the doctor told her it really was normal, and gave her prescriptions so she could continue healing healthily. 

One year after she’d slipped and fell and gotten lost in the woods, Rue could still see the shapes, except they weren’t really at the corner of her vision anymore, and she’d noticed that they’d kind of stayed in places, like they’d lived there. 

There was a shape on the corner of the street between the gas station and the convenience store; it never moved, but just always stayed there even if it rained. There is a shape in the local chapel, standing right next to the altar, and it moves sometimes, to follow the priest around. There are several shapes in the hospital, and Rue takes note of them all on every visit to the doctor.

There is a shape in one of the classrooms of the university Betsy’s cousin went to. They’d gone there for a school tour, as the school had been a prison during the colonial era and was just converted into a school around the second wave of colonizers, and when Rue had peeked into the room, it was just there, standing by the back wall. Rue saw it again when they were able to visit with Betsy and her cousin for the university festival, and then again during the school tour the following year. 

When Rue finally got too curious, and she saw it again on the way back down to the building entrance, she’d slipped into the classroom, hoping that the press of the crowd of students and her small stature made it easier for her absence to go momentarily unnoticed, even if the students and the professor inside the room itself gave her odd looks.

“Are you lost?” the professor asked. 

Rue only tottered to the edge of the room, where the shape was, and approached it, warily. When it didn’t do anything, she stuck her hand out and tried to touch it, but then it disappeared - and as it did, Rue felt something rip through her, like a cold gust of wind that somehow seeped through the layers of her coat and her jacket and her uniform, and she was knocked off her feet, and left sitting on the floor with one hand outstretched towards the now-empty space in front of her, eyes wide and staring. 

Several chairs scrapped back as students stood up. There was a sound of a camera shutter clicking. Someone screamed. From the door of the room, Rue heard Mrs. Sanchez say, “Rue, there you are,” and then she was being picked up and told never to wander again.

“Wait - ”

“What just happened?”

“Kid, what did you see - what did you just do - ”

Mrs. Sanchez is not stopping, only briskly walking away from the classroom with Rue in her arms, and she tells Rue she shouldn’t have gone away from the rest of the students as she walks the length from the fifth floor to the parking lot where the school bus is waiting.

The cold under Rue’s bones doesn’t cease, and she realizes, when she catches herself crying for no reason, there in the bus surrounded by everyone else, that perhaps it’s because of the heaviness in her chest that feels like it’s going to drown her.

She sees the headlines next morning, when her mother opens the door to several people with microphones in front of their house. They read, Child Discovers University Classroom Is Haunted?, in thick, black letters, and in the photo is Rue, in the same clothes she’d worn yesterday, hand outstretched, dazed look on her face. 

She goes to school after sneaking with her dad through the back door of her house, and they take an alternate route for about two weeks before the commotion dies down. Rue’s mother only sighs and says that’s what happens when superstitious students see a child getting confused over dust motes.

Rue reads the school’s alleged haunting history, and tries not to ask her mother if ghosts are real.

-

When Rue is fourteen, she accidentally gets the reputation of being the class occult hippie. It makes her cheeks color in embarrassment, and she tries to explain that that’s not really the case (alongside infodumping about things in order to attempt to correct misconceptions), but it just turns into a case of The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, and eventually, she stops bothering to correct it. 

The man by the sidewalk between the gas station and the convenience store - the one who never moves because he can’t feel the rain, and sometimes he forgets he’s even there - told her once, that if it’s a mostly harmless misunderstanding borne from conclusions of half-seen observations, then it never really matters. Rue thinks she’s made quite good friends with the man, so she takes his advice to heart and lights a candle for him there, every afternoon as she walks back home from school.

In retrospect, maybe that’s what’s making everyone think she’s having an occult phase, all the candles in her bag and the matches in her pocket and the ‘list of the world’s most haunted sites’ searches on her browser history during computer class. She’s lucky her mother just thinks she’s curious about these things (she is, so her mother’s not wrong and it’s a testament to how much she knows her daughter, bless her soul), and lets her be, even telling her ghost stories from her hometown on occasion. 

Her friends think she’s a witch, and she tries to explain once that lighting candles to honor the dead and looking up ghost stories online is not how witchcraft works, but they just laugh and tell her not to curse them, and she sighs every time. 

Several of the students there remember that she’d gotten lost in the woods, once, and after the event is recalled and picked up, rumors start afresh. They’re not as alarming as they are annoying, and Rue makes a list of automatic responses once the questioning gets too much. She doesn’t tell her mother about it, because she doesn’t want to worry her. 

She tells the man on the sidewalk, though, putting on a bluetooth earpiece so it looks like she’s just an eccentric kid answering a phone call by a gas station. The man doesn’t know his name, not yet, although he’s trying very hard to, and he’s remembering more with each day he and Rue talk. 

Greg finds her like that. They haven’t been in the same class in three years, as he had moved up north and changed schools, but during a birthday of one of his relatives, he visits, and goes to a convenience store to get more soda, and spots Rue laughing by the sidewalk, a candle steadily burning beside her. 

It’s the first time Rue has ever had a ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ moment, and she freezes, but Greg, strangely, just laughs and tells her it’s been a long time since they’ve seen each other. He asks if there’s someone sitting beside her, and Rue knows, somehow, that he’s not talking about whether or not she’s waiting for someone who’s just had to take a quick pit stop somewhere.

“Yes,” she says, and Greg nods, solemnly, and takes a seat beside her, opposite where the man is sitting. 

He asks her questions about who she’s seeing, and it’s the first time she’s ever tried that - actually tried to be a bridge between the dead and the living - and the man actually looks ecstatic to have someone new to talk to. They talk for hours, about the most mundane things the man is actually delighted to know because he’s lucky if he even remembers he’s dead on some days, and afterwards, Greg buys Rue a soda and bids her goodbye while he brings his loot about three hours late back to the party he should be in.

The man tells Rue he remembers his name, the next day. It’s Jeremy, he says, and Rue wishes she’d had Greg’s number so she could tell him. She doesn’t. Greg goes back home up to the north, and Rue doesn’t see him again. 

- 

She actually tries to use her ‘talents’ to help people, once. She hides behind an online persona and nabs an aesthetic shot of a star chart she’s found online as her profile photo, and offers to be a medium. She gets twelve requests for tarot card readings and three requests for intuitive readings instead, during her first week, and she spends days researching on how to use tarot cards and what intuitive readings are, before giving up and telling her requesters that she’s never practiced either art. 

One person tells her to at least try. She gives them a basic past-present-future reading from a set of tarot cards she hastily buys from the nearest shop and gets a rather grim answer from the cards. The person blocks her when she tells them.

It’s two weeks later when she gets an actual request for a seance - and it’s from a distraught mother whose son had been murdered a month ago. The news had made headlines, Rue remembers. A locked room mystery no one has gotten any leads on yet. The boy had never even screamed. 

Rue swallows down bile as she rereads the request for the third time, before moving to sit on her bed and focus, before realizing, in the silence of her room and the darkness behind her shut eyes, that she doesn’t actually know how to reach out to spirits. She has the boy’s name, his photo, his description, even a photo of an item he used to love as a child since the distraught mom had clearly gone all out, but Rue has never really thought their decision through aside from being a bridge for the living and the dead to connect. 

She looks up articles online, balks at the thought of having to buy a ouija board and have it be potentially seen by her mother, and ends up running to Jeremy’s spot on the road, where he’s sitting by and watching the cars, as always. Rue sits and slides next to him in the same, fluid movement, that he actually looks like he’s skipping the first few minutes of not being recognized and is just going straight to shock.

“Jeremy,” Rue starts, and the man nods, so maybe he did skip through the usual routine of him not realizing someone was there, and that they’d known him because they’d been there before.

“Rue,” he acknowledges.

“I need your help,” Rue says, and then takes a few seconds to rearrange her thoughts because she hasn’t thought this out very well either aside from the train of thought that a ghost would know best how to contact a ghost.

Turns out that hunch is a bust, because the only places Jeremy can see are the ones that are already there by his sidewalk, and ghosts don’t have a hivemind they can tap into at any time. There’s not even an afterlife they can access, because what they have is the afterlife, only it’s a bastardized version of it.

Rue, dejectedly, goes back to looking up articles online when they get home.

She does two rituals and only one of them work, even though that’s better than nothing. She learns that the boy’s ear and foot are behind a dumpster of a McDonald’s within the first five minutes, and ends the ritual right there, child spirit or not be damned.

She realizes, then, that she’s a rather awful psychic.

-

She does apologize, and ends up helping the mother solve the crime more than passing the messages to both parties. 

They adjust their stories so it can be believable from a more - what’s the word - logical point of view, since, despite the mother’s insistence, Rue knows no one’s actually going to buy it if the woman says she’d gotten her clues from her dead son who was talking to her by a seventeen-year-old psychic who was worrying over college applications with holding a seance. 

The boy - who only looks like a vague shape that hasn’t changed since Rue first saw him - tells Rue about what happened to him, and Rue tries not to throw up and tells the child’s mother. They fabricate something, stage a scene, call the cops, let the public and the police connect the dots until they arrest one Daryll Smith for murdering Cody Nunez. 

Rue feels a little accomplished, the day they announce that Smith has been arrested. She’d accidentally helped close a case instead of just letting a mother and her son reconnect, and that’s a pretty impressive feat, not to mention maybe Cody will finally move on, and Cody’s mother, given closure.

Maybe she’s an awful psychic but not so awful she couldn’t play ghost detective for those who’d been wrongfully harmed.

Although, she thinks, that’s the plot for a movie right there. But she’s not in a movie, and sooner or later, the pressure of something is going to get to her, and there might be an incident that’s going to be too dangerous. 

She thanks Cody’s mother for contacting her and sending her a gift of two hundred dollars, and then she never opens the woman’s profile or e-mail address again, even when Cody still hangs around the house, a little ball of brightness hovering around and moving things a little bit to the left when he touches them out of curiosity. Rue’s father blames it on the house cat, and Rue doesn’t tell him otherwise. 

When Smith is sent to jail, she actually celebrates. She dresses up to get herself a heaping of sundae and a movie ticket, and as she goes out of her room, she turns to where Cody is hovering out of the window, like he’s gazing outside.

“Hey, Cody?” she asks, whispering.

The light shifts. Rue likes to think that’s Cody’s way of telling her he’s moving.

“See you later,” she says.

She locks the door with a small click, and rushes downstairs, kissing her mother and father on both of their cheeks before racing outside of the house. Rue gets to the theater faster and gets a sundae while she waits for her movie’s schedule. When it finally arrives, she sits through all the theater previews, and laughs with the rest of the audience as a scene plays.

When she returns, Cody is no longer in the house. Cody stops being in the house for a month, and then Rue decides and realizes, that he’s not coming back at all.