Welcome to Penny’s Diary, a contemporary urban-fantasy serial. Read new diary entries every Thursday. Supporting readers can also access a weekly Writer’s Commentary, along with immersive audio and eBook editions, after each entry.
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Saturday, August 1, 2026
Exact Words First
I had told Ellie everything the night before.
Then we called Teddy before either of us could start convincing ourselves Candy had not meant exactly what she said.
He had gone completely quiet when I repeated Candy’s words.
None of us had slept especially well.
The bench.
The smile.
The exact words Candy had used when she told me she remembered Ellie and me before Clearwater turned us back into friends.
Before breakfast, me and Ellie went into the Memory Vault to write it down.
Because apparently pancakes could wait until after evidence preservation.
Rude, but responsible.
Ellie sat beside me on the window seat—close enough that our knees touched. The Web notebook was open between us, still carrying the safe version Clearwater had left behind.
Ellie staying in the purple room.
Ellie being my friend.
Very neat.
Very believable.
Very wrong.
Morning light came through the blind—which made the whole thing feel even less reasonable. Major supernatural evidence should happen at midnight during a storm, not while Cascades was opening and Gramps was probably downstairs thinking about coffee.
My lower back still ached where the three puncture marks had apparently decided permanence was a personality trait. Ellie looked tired too.
Not sleepy-tired.
Clearwater-tired.
Like her body had spent the week arguing with reality and lost several rounds on technicalities.
I wrote Candy’s first sentence exactly as I remembered it:
“I think it’s sweet how quickly you and Ellie fell in love before everyone decided you were just friends.”
Then the second:
“Don’t worry. I’m not judging. I just like knowing what people were before everyone decided otherwise.”
Ellie noticed it first.
“She said everyone decided twice.”
I circled both versions.
We could have spent the whole morning making theories.
Maybe Candy remembered everything. Maybe only us. Maybe she had an anchor. Maybe Clearwater had never touched her in the first place.
Excellent selection of nightmare options.
But none of those were facts.
The facts were smaller.
Candy knew me and Ellie had fallen in love.
Candy knew the world now called us just friends.
Candy had chosen to tell me.
Underneath the quotes, I wrote:
CONFIRMED: Candy remembers our relationship before Clearwater changed it.
Then:
NOT CONFIRMED: anything else.
My handwriting looked too steady.
Ellie read those two lines once.
Then again.
“She could’ve kept that advantage,” she said quietly. “You’d never have known.”
That landed.
Candy had not slipped.
She had not been confused.
She had wanted me to know she remembered.
Pancake Evidence
Once Candy’s exact words were safely trapped in the Web notebook, we did the only sensible thing left.
We took the Willowfen brochure to Cascades and ordered pancakes.
Ellie had already told her dad and Felicia at lunch yesterday that she was staying in Meridia Falls with me instead of going on their family vacation.
Which was lovely.
And also made me feel like I had somehow stolen her from a perfectly normal family trip involving lakes, ice cream, and nobody being erased by supernatural forces.
So now we were choosing somewhere else to go together.
Because apparently major life decisions require syrup.
Honestly, believable.
We got our usual upstairs booth, which was the official location for cupcakes, emotional damage, suspicious planning, and now selecting somewhere to disappear for a few days without technically disappearing.
The brochure covered half the table.
Willowfen Lake.
The Bellweather Hotel.
Gardens, old streets, little ferry trips, and enough cheerful photography to make me assume at least one swan had been threatened into posing.
Ellie was doing practical things like checking travel times and whether the hotel had breakfast included.
I was ranking locations by likelihood of being haunted.
Different skills.
Strong team.
Candy was still there in the background of everything. Not physically, thankfully. Just in the way my brain kept taking nice things and checking underneath them for wires.
But she did not get the whole morning.
That mattered.
Ellie leaned against my shoulder while we argued over whether a garden town counted as a real vacation if there were no roller coasters. Her hand rested near mine on the table, close enough that our fingers kept bumping beside the brochure.
Not friends.
Not whatever Clearwater had filed us under.
Us.
Charlotte brought the pancakes and noticed the brochure before the plates had fully landed.
She asked where we were thinking of going, and Ellie gave her the short version while I protected the syrup from becoming public property.
Then Charlotte pulled out her phone.
Felicia had been sending her photos from the mini family vacation.
Nothing dramatic.
A lake view.
Felicia holding an ice cream that had already started melting down her hand.
Ellie’s dad standing beside a sign with the expression of a man who had been told the photograph would take two seconds and no longer believed anyone.
Ellie smiled at that one.
A real smile.
Small, but real.
Charlotte flicked to another photo of Felicia wearing sunglasses and grinning into the wind.
“Redheads have to stick together,” she said.
Ellie gave her a look that was mostly amused and only slightly offended on behalf of redhead exclusivity rules.
Then Charlotte went back downstairs before the pancakes could become cold enough to count as a crime.
That was when it hit me.
Felicia was sending Charlotte vacation photos.
Not random ones either. The kind you sent someone because you wanted them included.
Felicia and Charlotte had somehow become actual friends.
Felicia looked happy in the photos.
Charlotte had looked happy showing us.
Not helpful-friendly.
Not convenient-friendly.
Actually friendly.
Changing Variables
Teddy arrived at the Memory Vault after lunch with iced coffee, a bag of sour candy, and the expression of someone who had already been awake too long for a Saturday.
He said we needed a counterbalance to the box of deep-dive cupcakes sitting on the bed.
Sour candy against sweet cupcakes.
Very balanced.
Very scientific.
Then we started with Candy.
The person, not the bag.
Teddy reread the exact words from the Web notebook without saying them aloud.
Which was appreciated.
Once had been threatening.
Twice had been evidence.
A third time would have started feeling like Candy was in the room with us.
We added the quotes to Bobby under CONFIRMED, then surrounded them with the much smaller list of things we actually knew.
Candy remembered Ellie and me falling in love.
Candy knew the world had changed us into friends.
Candy wanted me to know.
Everything else stayed under question marks where it belonged.
How much did Candy remember?
Maybe all of it.
Maybe even Jemma Landry.
Very responsible.
Very unlike my brain.
Then we opened Younger Penny’s fifth diary.
Teddy opened the Matrix notebook while Ellie took my hand.
I touched the first page.
And Clearwater replaced the room.
One second I was in the Memory Vault.
The next, I was small again.
Younger me sat on the edge of a narrow bed while a nurse asked whether her stomach still hurt. Logan had been taken away for an “individual check,” and nobody would tell her when he was coming back.
The memory did not feel like watching.
It felt like being there.
My stomach cramped with hers.
Ellie was still holding my hand, seeing everything Younger Penny saw and feeling what she felt.
Younger me could not feel her.
But I could.
The Memory Vault came back with both of us breathing too quickly.
Ellie gave Teddy the overview for the Matrix.
Logan removed.
Stomach pain.
Adults recording symptoms.
No clear return time.
Then I touched the next page.
Clearwater again.
This time Logan was there, but Eleanor was not.
Then another page.
Eleanor beside Younger Penny.
Logan somewhere else.
Then neither of them.
The rooms changed.
The calm voices did not.
Clearwater kept separating us in different combinations and recording what happened afterward.
Headaches.
Shaking hands.
Panic.
Memories turning fuzzy around the edges.
How long Younger Penny took to calm down.
What changed when they finally let someone back in.
One memory began with Younger Penny already crying.
So me and Ellie were crying before we even understood why.
She had asked three times when Eleanor was coming back.
Then stopped asking because she wanted to be good.
The thought inside her head was painfully simple.
I was good all morning, but they still didn’t let me seeEleanor.
The loss hit before I could prepare for it—not ordinary missing-someone.
Something deeper.
Like the whole room had become unstable because Eleanor was not inside it.
When the Memory Vault returned, tears were already running down both our faces.
Ellie did not let go while she gave Teddy the overview.
“I was there somewhere,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “They knew Penny needed me, and they kept me away anyway.”
I wanted to say something useful.
Apparently my supply had been recalled.
Teddy drew three columns in the Matrix notebook.
LOGAN ELEANOR ALONE
Ellie gave him the memories one at a time, and he tracked the patterns beneath them.
Headaches.
Stomach pain.
Panic.
Memory getting fuzzy.
Time needed to recover.
What happened when Logan or Eleanor returned.
That part was almost worse.
The reunions brought relief first.
Then exhaustion.
Younger me would calm down, then crash.
Sleep for hours.
Cry afterward without knowing why.
In one memory, Logan came back and the room finally stopped moving.
In another, Eleanor took Younger Penny’s hand and the words in my head lined up properly again.
Clearwater had recorded all of it.
Not the way someone writes down that a frightened child needs help.
The way someone records results.
Bobby gained a new cluster.
FIFTH DIARY—SPLIT TESTS Paired with Logan. Paired with Eleanor. Isolated. Symptoms worse during separation. Relief after reunion. Then exhaustion.
Teddy added questions beneath it.
Attachment response? Loss response? Individual performance? What happened without stabilizing people?
I hated that last one most.
Teddy stared at the columns for a long time before he spoke.
“They weren’t checking whether you were okay.”
His pen tapped once beside ALONE.
“They were changing variables to see what broke.”
Not Going
The Three Falls post buzzed on Ellie’s phone while we were packing up after the deep dive.
Teddy was still standing in front of Bobby with the Matrix notebook in his hand.
Perfect timing.
Candy had added another planning update to the Three Falls group chat Ellie was in, written in the bright, cheerful voice people use when they are definitely not arranging everyone like furniture.
Candy had arranged rides to the trailhead.
Nobody would be left alone.
Steve would help with swimming safety.
There would be group photographs.
Everyone should stay together so they could “make memories.”
After the fifth diary, that last part did not sound sweet.
It sounded like instructions.
Candy had not written my name.
She did not need to.
The whole post felt aimed at the space where I was supposed to place myself.
Ellie assigned logistics.
Steve assigned safety and transport.
Marilyn being pulled back into Candy’s orbit.
Me still blank.
A variable waiting to be filled in.
“I am not going to the party.”
The sentence came out steadier than I felt.
Ellie did not tell me I had to.
Teddy nodded and said nothing would get him there either, like the decision had been entered into the correct column.
Then he left before dinner, and me and Ellie stopped investigating because there is a point where continuing to stare at evidence stops being responsible and starts becoming a very specific type of self-harm.
So that was that.
After dinner, movie night happened in the apartment with too many snacks and no documentaries, mysteries, missing-person plots, memory loss, secret organizations, or charming villains who turned out to be running psychological experiments.
Our standards have become complicated.
Ellie curled against me beneath the blanket, her head on my shoulder and one hand loosely around mine.
For a few hours neither of us was a stabilizing person.
Neither of us was a variable.
Neither of us was responsible for keeping the other attached to reality.
We were just us.
That should have settled it.
I was not going.
Except Candy had already assigned everyone else a place.
And I was starting to wonder whether staying away was exactly where she wanted me.
Sunday, August 2, 2026
Missing From the Pew
I walked Ellie to church as usual.
Then I waited in the hot morning air with an iced coffee, my diary in my backpack, and the deeply suspicious feeling that everyone inside the chapel was probably becoming a better person without me.
Ellie usually came out with her dad and Felicia.
Today she came out with Charlotte.
That was the first thing I noticed.
The second was the way Ellie glanced behind Charlotte before she looked for me.
Only for a second.
Her dad and sister were still away on their mini vacation, and Ellie had been the one who chose not to go.
She had chosen to stay here with me.
Willowfen had come afterward.
Apparently choices can still hurt when they are the right ones.
Charlotte said something that made Ellie smile as they crossed toward the park. I could not hear it, but it looked easy between them.
Not forced church politeness.
Not Felicia’s friend being nice to Felicia’s sister because social rules demanded it.
Just easy.
Charlotte waved when she saw me, then told Ellie she would send her the rest of Felicia’s photos later.
“Apparently she’s documenting every dessert,” Ellie said after Charlotte left. “Dad has become background scenery.”
“That feels like a healthy use of mayoral authority.”
Ellie smiled again, but it faded quickly.
I moved closer on the bench until our shoulders touched.
That was all.
No questions about whether she regretted staying.
No speech about how she was allowed to miss them.
Ellie already knew both things, and making her explain would only turn the ache into homework.
She slipped her hand into mine instead.
Families were still coming out of church in small groups.
Parents.
Children.
Grandparents.
People arguing about lunch while pretending they were not.
Ellie watched them for a moment.
Then she leaned against me.
She had chosen to stay.
That did not mean she had stopped missing the people who left.
Public Weirdness Department
In the afternoon, Teddy came over because we technically still had a Media Studies project to do.
This was rude.
Also accurate.
Apparently school assignments do not pause because reality has developed structural problems.
The original idea had been vague.
Something local.
Mysterious architecture. Urban legends. Stories that would not make our teacher regret assigning group work.
Ellie had even made a heading for it and stuck it to Bobby before Clearwater.
MERIDIA FALLS: MEMORY, MYTH, AND LOCAL STORIES.
Now we had somewhere to start.
Not with Bobby material.
Absolutely not with Bobby material.
But with stories that could make Bobby look less like a secret evidence board if anyone ever found him.
Meridia Falls had enough strange history, urban legends, unsolved incidents, odd landmarks, and stories people told differently depending on who was asked.
And we did not have to stop at Meridia Falls.
We could go wider once we had enough to work with.
We could research those stories without publishing anything dangerous.
The public version of weird.
Teddy started outlining what the site would need.
Pages.
Categories.
Sources.
Image permissions.
Other words that made the whole thing sound alarmingly real.
Ellie began drawing logo ideas in her sketchbook.
I claimed research and writing, mostly because the alternative involved understanding website architecture.
Then I looked at Bobby.
Not directly at first.
Just enough to see the photographs, notes, arrows, names, dates, and questions spreading from Bobby across the wall.
If anyone ever saw it, “secret evidence board tracking memory experiments and supernatural crimes” would be difficult to explain.
“Research board for our weird-history website” was almost believable.
Almost.
The website would not contain our real evidence.
No Clearwater records.
No Seven Trees tape.
No Candy files.
No names that could get someone hurt.
Bobby stayed private.
But the project gave him a costume.
Teddy liked that enough to write PUBLIC MATERIAL ONLY across the top of the planning page.
Ellie added a tiny eye beside it.
We did not settle on a name.
Every suggestion was either boring, embarrassing, or sounded like three middle-aged men discussing ghosts on local radio.
So we left it.
Future Us could suffer.
Doctor Who night happened afterward—because Sundays still belonged to Ellie whenever possible.
Tonight was The Celestial Toymaker, which meant an old missing story brought back through animation, because apparently even television episodes can disappear and then return looking slightly different.
Very normal.
Completely unrelated to anything in our lives.
Ellie spent the first ten minutes explaining why the Toymaker mattered and Teddy spent the next ten arguing that the animation counted as preservation, not replacement.
I mostly watched the two of them enjoying themselves.
Then I laughed.
A real laugh.
Not the kind I use when something is horrifying and I need my face to do literally anything else.
For one evening, the Memory Vault was just a room with snacks, blankets, Ellie leaning against me, and Teddy having strong opinions about animated reconstruction.
An ordinary Sunday survived.
Monday, August 3, 2026
Town Pretending to Be Normal
Natal Day made Meridia Falls look harmless.
Flags along Main Street.
Music on the boardwalk.
Families carrying paper trays of food through the park while children ran around with painted maple leaves on their cheeks and the confidence of people who had never had their memories medically reorganized.
Honestly, adorable.
Me and Ellie moved through the crowd without a plan beyond food and not spending the whole day inside the Memory Vault.
For a while, I nearly enjoyed myself.
The town was loud enough to drown out thinking.
Every few steps, somebody was taking a photograph.
Parents lining up children.
Couples leaning together.
Friends throwing their arms around each other while someone shouted for them to move closer.
Normal proof that people had been there.
We wandered down Main Street toward the boardwalk.
Teddy found us near the food stalls.
Then I saw Steve.
He was standing near one of the community booths with Candy and a few others from school. Candy was talking to Anne Harrison from Cascades while Steve carried drinks and helped move a folding table out of the walkway.
Useful.
Polite.
Dependable.
Someone called them together for a photograph.
Candy moved closer to him before it was taken.
Steve smiled a second late—probably nobody else noticed.
The caption appeared online before we reached the next food stand.
Something about Natal Day, amazing friends, and being grateful for people who always helped keep everyone safe.
No mention of Three Falls.
It did not need one.
Steve was already being introduced as the responsible one.
The boyfriend parents trusted.
The lifeguard.
The person who made the party feel safe before it had even happened.
Ellie looked at my phone, then across the crowd toward him.
“We should save it.”
I took the screenshot.
Around us, people kept laughing, eating, posing, and making memories in bright public places.
I had thought crowds made it harder to hurt someone without being seen.
Candy understood the opposite.
A crowd did not stop her from creating a version.
It gave her witnesses.
The First Version
We started collecting possible website stories after lunch.
Not real stories.
Safe weirdness.
Local legends, old buildings, strange newspaper clippings, and things people could read without accidentally learning their childhood memories had been edited by medical professionals.
The bar was low.
I was looking at Bobby for inspiration when I noticed Sapphire Bliss’s card still pinned near the Collins family material.
Plain white.
QR code on one side.
Warnings on the other.
THE FIRST VERSION Do not search from inside the radius. Print before refreshing. Do not use a personal device.
Very relaxed blogging strategy.
Me and Ellie had met Sapphire in the park almost two months ago. She had shown us a protected newspaper clipping, let us see it disintegrate on a bench, explained that Meridia Falls had a suppression radius, and handed us the card like disappearing evidence was a normal occupational hazard.
Her blog was not safe website material.
Obviously.
But Sapphire knew how to write about impossible things without immediately announcing that reality was broken.
That part might help.
“We could look at how she presents the stories,” I said. “Structure. Tone. How much she explains.”
Teddy looked from me to the card.
“Using Truthweaver.”
“Obviously.”
“And we don’t follow anything away from the blog.”
“Still obviously.”
He gave me the look that meant my historical relationship with obviously was under review.
Teddy set up a temporary protected route through the Truthweaver laptop, then used the QR code instead of searching for the site.
It redirected twice.
Then four more times.
The final page looked almost unfinished.
Plain background.
Black text.
No author photograph.
No menu worth trusting.
Teddy checked the address, the redirects, and several other things involving code and professional distrust.
“It’s safe enough to read for now,” he said. “But this route looks temporary.”
Comforting contribution achieved.
At the top, it said The First Version.
The newest post was about corrections.
Not ordinary typo corrections.
The kind where a report changed after publication and the revised version removed the one detail that had made everyone uncomfortable.
Another post said people often appeared irrational when the pressure controlling their behavior remained hidden.
That one made me stop.
Steve smiling a second late in photographs.
Marilyn still being pulled into Candy’s plans.
Candy telling me the truth about Ellie and me with the confidence of someone holding evidence I could not explain.
The world calling us friends because that was the version Clearwater had left behind.
None of those things made sense if you only looked at the clean version.
The posts did not use names I recognized.
No dramatic claims about secret organizations.
No convenient explanation of who was changing the records or why.
Just careful notes about altered reports, corrected timelines, and one rule repeated in different forms:
Save what appeared first.
Ellie took screenshots while I copied two ideas into our website notes.
The original version showed what somebody had decided needed correcting.
And behavior stopped looking irrational once you found the pressure behind it.
I tried opening another post.
The page refreshed.
Everything went white.
Then The First Version disappeared.
The address redirected to a bland travel page about coastal walking routes—which felt almost insulting.
Teddy scanned the QR code again.
Same travel page.
He checked the redirects, then whatever temporary code the site had left behind.
“I don’t think it disappeared,” he said. “I think the QR code opened a timed session.”
“Meaning?”
“We got one access window. Once it expired, the route closed and replaced itself with something harmless.”
“Can we open it again?”
“Probably. Just not immediately. There’s some kind of cooldown attached to the code or the route we used.”
Very relaxed blogging strategy remained accurate.
We still had the screenshots.
I looked from them to Candy’s exact wording in the Web notebook.
I had been treating what she said like a riddle we needed to solve.
Maybe that was not the first job.
Maybe the first job was making sure nobody could correct it later.
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Print-Shop Breathing Room
Me and Ellie took a walk after lunch and ended up at Chen Print.
Technically, we had gone to say hi.
Also technically, checking whether Teddy had remembered food now counted as friendship maintenance.
A help-wanted notice was taped beside the door.
Not a dramatic one.
No bold red letters.
No cheerful stock photograph of people pretending employment was a group adventure.
Just:
PART-TIME HELP NEEDED Afternoons and Saturdays. Ask for May.
Which was somehow more convincing.
Ellie noticed it before we went inside.
Teddy noticed us noticing it and immediately looked suspicious, like his family had been caught doing something reckless.
“Mum’s already had applications,” he said.
Meaning May had already started the hiring process, and Teddy was still adjusting to the idea that Chen Print might not need him for everything.
The shop was busy in an ordinary way.
Boxes beside the delivery door.
A printer making the sort of noise that suggested it had developed personal grievances.
Teddy packing a batch of wedding invitations for collection.
May behind the counter with a clipboard, sorting applications into piles while answering a customer’s third question about paper thickness.
Squirt sat at the worktable arranging stacks of school-event flyers by color.
She looked up when we came in.
I signed hello.
She signed back, then pointed at the flyer pile Teddy had apparently put in the wrong order and gave him a look of deep professional disappointment.
Teddy defended himself in sign.
Squirt remained unconvinced.
Strong management structure.
May had two interviews booked for Wednesday and another applicant coming in for a trial afternoon later in the week.
She said it casually—like hiring someone to help keep the shop functioning was a normal Tuesday task.
Maybe it was.
It still felt like the panic loosening its grip.
Jin’s treatment had started.
Which meant more appointments, more Halifax trips, medication schedules, waiting rooms, and a new collection of words none of us wanted to become good at using.
But the immediate disaster had eased enough for Chen Print to pay someone else to carry part of the load.
Not fixed.
Better.
There is apparently a whole country between those words.
Teddy had been handling deliveries, supply runs, late jobs, and whatever else appeared whenever a family business became a family emergency.
May came around the counter and handed him the collection sheet.
Then she took it back.
“I’ll do this one,” she said.
Teddy opened his mouth.
May looked at him.
He closed it again.
Strong family communication.
Squirt signed something from the table.
Teddy looked offended.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“That Mum should hide the car keys.”
Squirt nodded firmly.
Reasonable.
Ellie asked whether Teddy wanted to come over later and work on the website.
For a second, I expected the usual calculation.
Shop.
Home.
His dad.
Deliveries.
Whether being with us counted as abandoning something more important.
Instead, he glanced at May.
She looked at the help-wanted notice and the application piles, then pointed him toward the door.
Teddy nodded.
“Yeah. I can.”
The answer came too quickly for him to regret it.
That was the change.
Not that everything was okay.
Not that Jin was safe or Chen Print had stopped needing him.
Just that Teddy had enough room to say yes before responsibility filled the space.
Naming the Weird
Teddy arrived with what he called a website skeleton.
It was mostly boxes, menus, and blank spaces where future competence would apparently go.
We had already agreed on the important part.
Public weirdness only.
No Clearwater.
No Bobby evidence.
No Candy files.
Nothing involving the words memory rewrite, secret medical program, or why does my skin glow under UV light?
Very restrictive editorial policy.
The name took longer.
Most of our suggestions sounded either too serious, too childish, or like a podcast hosted by men with expensive microphones and strong opinions about lake monsters.
Ellie looked up from her sketchbook.
“What about something connected to Bobby?”
That made sense.
Bobby had started as the Board of Bizarre, shortened to BOB, then somehow become Bobby and gained a full personality.
But the website needed its own version.
Public stories.
Local mysteries.
News nobody sensible would consider news.
“The Bizarre News Bulletin,” I said.
Teddy looked at me.
Ellie repeated it.
“The Bizarre News Bulletin.”
It sounded official enough to submit for school and ridiculous enough to belong to us.
So that was it.
Teddy shortened it to BNB before either of us had time to object.
He started building the homepage and basic sections.
I claimed research and short articles.
Ellie took graphics, layout, and anything requiring taste.
Then she turned her sketchbook around.
She had drawn an eye based on my diary stamp.
Cleaner.
With a globe as the iris.
Something that could sit beside the site title without looking like we were warning people they had entered a cursed archive.
“We could use this,” she said. “Make the stamp part of the logo.”
A symbol I had used to mark things I could not afford to lose, turned into something public and harmless.
I liked that more than I expected.
Then Ellie’s phone buzzed.
Candy.
Of course it was.
Her message was cheerful, grateful, and written as though Ellie had already agreed to join her and the rest of the Candy Gang.
Planning session tomorrow afternoon.
Final arrangements.
Everyone needed to know their jobs before Saturday.
Candy had even added a heart.
Very normal.
Not threatening at all.
All the while, Teddy was adding sections to the website menu.
Stories.
Places.
Archives.
Every section had a purpose.
Every box had somewhere it was supposed to lead.
I looked at Candy’s message again.
Ellie had already been assigned tomorrow afternoon.
Everyone needed to know their jobs.
Candy was organizing people the same way Teddy was organizing pages.
One assigned function at a time.
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Don’t Go
Ellie was at Candy’s for the Three Falls planning session.
Teddy was helping at Chen Print.
So I went to Cascades for lunch, because sitting alone in the Memory Vault while Bobby stared at me did not feel like a healthy use of Wednesday afternoon.
Marilyn was sitting at the back table.
She had an iced coffee she was not touching.
No crown.
No sash.
No polished Maple Crown smile.
Just Marilyn, looking tired enough that I almost asked whether she was okay.
Almost.
I carried my lunch over.
Before I could sit down—she said, “Don’t go.”
No hello.
Apparently we had progressed beyond social niceties and into warnings.
“To Three Falls?” I asked.
She gave me a look suggesting there were not several other forest parties currently ruining both our lives.
I sat across from her.
Marilyn did not explain everything.
She talked around the edges, which was still more than she usually gave me.
Candy liked public places.
She liked witnesses.
She liked photographs taken before anyone realized they were evidence.
A person could object afterward, Marilyn said, but by then everyone had already seen the smiling group photo.
The friendly caption.
The arm around the shoulder.
The moment that made the victim look jealous or unstable for saying it had not been like that.
“People believe the picture,” she said. “Then they decide you’re dramatic for explaining what happened outside it.”
That sounded practiced.
Not rehearsed.
Learned.
I thought about Maple Crown.
Sponsor walls.
Official photographs.
Polished statements.
A title that made every crack in Marilyn’s image look like proof she had never deserved it.
I also thought about the boardwalk.
The false crash story.
The way Marilyn had stood inside a lie because the truth was impossible.
“Is Candy planning something for the party?”
“I don’t know.”
Marilyn said it too quickly for me to think she was hiding the exact answer.
But I also believed her.
That was the problem.
She knew the shape of Candy’s damage.
Not necessarily which version was coming next.
“Why warn me?”
Her expression closed immediately.
There it was.
The wall.
“Don’t make this into something it isn’t.”
“I was going to say thank you.”
“Don’t do that either.”
Very Marilyn.
“Are you going?”
She nodded.
“Yes. I don’t have the luxury of choice.”
Then she stood before I could ask why she was going if Three Falls was dangerous.
Or what part Candy had already assigned her.
Or what happened if Marilyn tried to say no.
She stopped at the doorway.
Only for a second.
Then she left.
I watched her go and understood the part she had not said.
Marilyn was warning me away from something she could not stay away from herself.
Thursday, August 6, 2026
House Still There
After breakfast, me and Ellie went home to prove the house still existed.
That sounds dramatic.
It was mostly mail, thirsty plants, and one flyer promising twenty percent off gutter cleaning, which felt like a threat from adulthood.
The house was not abandoned.
It was paused.
Mom’s mug was still beside the coffee machine. Her coat was still hanging by the door even though she had taken the useful one with her. A shopping list stayed attached to the fridge with one of the fruit-shaped magnets she had owned since before I was born.
Normal things waiting for someone to come back and continue them.
I collected the mail while Ellie watered the plants.
She knew which ones needed barely any water and which ones behaved like neglect was a personal betrayal, because apparently she had been paying attention during all the times I had complained about them.
Useful girlfriend knowledge.
Slightly alarming.
We opened the windows long enough to make the rooms smell less closed.
Sean’s Seven of Hearts was in my pocket.
I had started carrying it without deciding to—sometimes I touched the edge just to check it was still there.
I called Mom from the kitchen while Ellie sorted the mail into useful, junk, and probably-adulthood.
The conversation stayed safely ordinary.
She talked about the seminar, one of the other attendees who apparently asked questions by giving speeches, and the food being better than expected. I told her the Meridian restaurant preparations were getting serious.
Then Mom asked whether everything had been okay since Clearwater.
There it was.
The question with an entire wrong week hiding behind it.
I looked at her mug beside the coffee machine.
Ellie looked at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just tired.”
Not exactly a lie.
Not close enough to the truth to be useful.
I did not tell her Clearwater had rewritten Ellie and me.
I did not tell her Candy remembered the version of us everyone else had lost.
I did not tell her I was considering going to a forest party because staying away might be part of somebody else’s plan.
We both accepted the versions we had been given.
After the call, Ellie came closer and slipped her hand into mine.
No questions.
She already knew what I had left out.
We locked the door when we left.
The house was still mine.
It just was not the place where I felt safest anymore.
Scott Has Clipboards
After lunch, me and Ellie made it as far as the bedroom before deciding that checking on a closed-up house during a hot, humid morning counted as exhausting physical labor.
An afternoon snooze had been approved.
Then my phone buzzed.
Gramps: Can you both come down to the restaurant? Got some important news.
Important news from Gramps could mean anything from the ovens have arrived to I have accidentally invited an internationally famous person to dinner.
So we abandoned the snooze, made ourselves look slightly less melted, and went downstairs.
Gramps introduced us to Scott Mercer.
Scott was holding three clipboards.
This felt important.
One clipboard suggested organization.
Three suggested he had opinions about napkin storage.
Scott was the new manager of the Meridian Cinema Restaurant.
Not possible manager.
Not future manager.
Actual manager, already working toward the August 23 opening.
Seventeen days away.
Apparently everyone downstairs knew the exact number and had developed feelings about it.
Menu drafts covered one table.
Staff interview times filled a schedule beside the bar.
Supplier deliveries had dates.
The kitchen equipment had inspection stickers.
A seating plan was taped to the wall beside a list titledOPENING NIGHT—FINAL DECISIONS, which felt aggressively real.
Nearby, two people were having a serious discussion about linen colors.
Ordinary problems.
Beautiful, boring, solvable problems.
Scott shook both our hands, asked one sensible question about noise carrying into the apartments, then went straight back to checking whether the glassware delivery had been confirmed.
I liked him immediately.
Not in an interesting way.
In a please continue preventing Gramps from doing six jobs at once way.
Gramps looked lighter with Scott there.
Still busy.
Still checking everything.
Still pretending opening a cinema restaurant was a normal retirement activity.
But lighter.
Then Gramps showed us the part he had clearly been waiting to reveal.
Curved booths ran around the outer walls of the restaurant.
There were no real windows in here.
Apparently Gramps had taken that personally.
Each booth had what Gramps kept calling a faux window built into the wall—except faux window was seriously underselling it.
They were screens hidden behind deep, dark frames, bright enough and detailed enough to make the restaurant look like it opened onto somewhere else.
The default views matched roughly where the real windows should have been.
Boardwalk on one side.
Main Street on the other.
Moving traffic.
People walking past.
Light changing across the buildings.
They could even adjust to the weather outside or show a completely different version of it.
All of it was convincing enough that I briefly forgot there was a wall behind it.
The boardwalk looked slightly cleaner than the real one and apparently had fewer people carrying leaking takeout cups.
An improvement.
Scott used a control panel beside the booth to change the view.
The boardwalk disappeared.
A rain-covered city street appeared in its place.
Cars moved beneath glowing lamps. Reflections slid across the wet street. Towers rose beyond the trees like the restaurant had quietly relocated somewhere much larger and more expensive.
Then came a snowy small town.
A desert road beneath a huge sunset.
A harbor at dusk.
Movie-inspired places that felt familiar without copying any one film exactly.
“Each booth can have its own view,” Gramps said, looking far too pleased with himself.
Of course it could.
The restaurant did not have actual windows.
Gramps had decided it could have every window instead.
It still belonged to Meridia Falls before it looked anywhere else.
Everything beyond that was optional.
Scott was also reviewing security for opening night because of what had happened at Baines Goldsmiths.
That was all.
No new theory.
No folded-object discussion.
Just locks, staffing, cameras, and another ordinary problem being given an ordinary answer.
While Scott and Gramps discussed table spacing, Ellie showed me the finished BNB logo.
Her eye design sat beside the title on Teddy’s latest version of the site like it had always belonged there.
At the center, the globe iris turned slowly.
The Bizarre News Bulletin.
For one minute, it felt real.
A school project.
A shared thing.
Something we were building that did not involve proving somebody had been erased, rewritten, threatened, or nearly killed.
Friday, August 7, 2026
Already Counted In
I was still not going to the Three Falls party.
Even when Candy sent Ellie another message written as though Ellie had already agreed to organize everyone else’s good time.
There was no question.
No can you.
Just instructions to meet at the trailhead at 1:30pm, coordinate rides, and share Mayor Horton’s guidelines again.
Guidelines Candy kept presenting as rules.
Rules she kept presenting as approval.
Which they were not.
Ellie’s dad had explained what needed to happen if the party went ahead. Candy had translated that into the mayor supporting it, because apparently meaning was now a group project and she had appointed herself editor.
Steve was mentioned twice.
Trained lifeguard.
Safe-rides contact.
Then Candy added how reassuring it would be for parents to know someone responsible was there.
Responsible boyfriend.
Responsible driver.
Responsible human shield.
Sergeant Dillon would see Steve’s name and think the situation was covered.
Other parents would too.
Candy had taken the person most trapped by the party and turned him into proof that it was safe.
Then came the confirmed-attendance list.
Marilyn’s name was on it.
She had told me not to go.
Candy had apparently made that advice a luxury Marilyn did not get herself.
She knew what Candy could do in public.
She also knew she could not stay away.
Candy had Ellie handling logistics.
Steve handling safety and transport.
Marilyn standing inside the photographs that would prove everything was normal.
Everyone had a role.
Everyone had already been counted in.
My name was now on the list with a question mark beside it.
Candy was still leaving my role blank.
Still Not Going
Teddy dropped by while running errands for Chen Print.
Officially, he had a delivery nearby.
Unofficially, I had texted him about Gramps’s impossible restaurant windows and known there was no chance he would stay away.
He spent ten minutes testing the different views.
Then he asked Scott several questions about how the screens worked and looked personally offended when Gramps refused to explain where all the movie-inspired footage had come from.
After that, we went upstairs to the Memory Vault.
“I’m still not going.”
I said it to Bobby.
This felt safer than saying it to Ellie.
Bobby had no opinions about loyalty, fear, or whether refusing to attend a forest party counted as self-preservation or leaving everyone else to deal with Candy alone.
Ellie did.
“You don’t have to go for me,” she said.
That made it worse.
Because Ellie was not asking me to rescue her.
She was giving me permission to stay away.
Teddy stayed quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “If you stay home, Candy still gets Ellie, Steve, and Marilyn in the same place. You just won’t be there before she edits the story.”
Rude.
Accurate.
I hated him briefly.
Ellie looked at Candy’s message again.
“She wants everyone there.”
Not everyone.
Everyone in the right place.
There would be pictures.
Video too.
People did not usually ask what happened five minutes before the video started.
Or five minutes after.
The problem was not that Teddy thought the Three Falls party was safe.
He very clearly did not.
The problem was that staying home had started to feel less like refusing Candy and more like leaving the room while she arranged everyone else.
Ellie handling rules.
Steve handling safety.
Marilyn proving everything was normal.
And me absent, which Candy could turn into whatever suited her best.
Jealous.
Scared.
Dramatic.
Guilty.
Probably all four if the caption had enough emojis.
“Fine,” I said.
Ellie’s expression changed, but she did not smile.
“I’m going.”
“You know I don’t need rescuing.”
“I know.”
She waited.
Which meant my answer had been technically correct and emotionally useless.
“I’m not going because I think you can’t handle Candy,” I said. “I’m going because you shouldn’t have to handle her alone.”
Ellie looked down as her hand found mine.
Candy remembered what Clearwater had taken from us.
That was bad enough.
Worse was the way she acted like remembering gave her rights.
Like our relationship was evidence she owned.
A secret she could keep or reveal whenever it hurt most.
Ellie squeezed my hand.
“Candy doesn’t get to decide what we are.”
Clearwater had called us friends.
Candy had named what came before.
Neither of them got to decide what we were.
We did.
And that was why I was going.
Not because Candy had won.
Not because I thought we could walk into the party and prevent every possible disaster through the power of charged phones and anxiety.
I was going because Ellie, Steve, and Marilyn were already being counted in.
I was not leaving them alone inside Candy’s version.
After that, we made rules.
Not a plan.
Plans imply confidence.
These were boundaries written by three teenagers who had recently learned that adults could call something routine testing while measuring how long it took a child to panic.
Penny and Ellie stay together.
Nobody goes anywhere alone.
No private conversations with Candy.
Ellie does not get dragged into helper mode by herself just because Candy says something needs organizing.
We do not isolate Marilyn if we can help it.
We do not push Steve to explain anything in public.
Notice who wants photographs.
Notice who keeps moving people around.
And if something feels wrong, we leave.
Even if it looks dramatic.
Especially then.
The regular diary deep dive would have to wait.
We had agreed to speed the process up, but memory blasts before hiking into Hellgate Forest felt like poor planning even by our standards.
Staying home would not make me safe—it would only make me absent.
A Future After Saturday
The Willowfen booking arrived just before bed.
One email.
One hotel confirmation.
One entire future that did not involve Candy Steele arranging teenagers beside a waterfall.
Gramps had used one of his tourism and charity connections to get us rooms at the Bellweather Hotel. Mom had approved everything after checking the dates, the accommodation, and approximately fourteen practical details designed to prove me and Ellie were not planning to vanish into the wilderness.
Mayor Horton had approved too.
Proper hotel.
Clear travel plan.
Adults who knew where we were supposed to be.
Very official.
Very reassuring.
Almost suspiciously functional.
We were leaving Sunday and coming back Friday.
Six days.
Just me and Ellie having a vacation instead of surviving one.
The confirmation sat on the Memory Vault desk beside the Willowfen brochure.
Ellie’s finished BNB logo was underneath it.
Teddy’s website skeleton was out there somewhere, still mostly blank but officially real.
Downstairs, Gramps’s restaurant was becoming real through Scott’s opening schedules and menu drafts.
Then there was Bobby.
Three Falls.
Candy.
Ellie assigned logistics.
Steve assigned safety.
Marilyn attending even after telling me not to.
My space no longer blank.
Just not assigned by Candy.
Saturday was still there.
Immediate.
Waiting.
But it was not the only thing waiting anymore.
There was Willowfen.
There was our website.
There was the restaurant opening.
There were plans Candy had not made and futures she had not assigned.
I added the hotel dates to my phone calendar and starred the confirmation email.
Then I looked at the Three Falls rules one final time.
I was going.
But I was not going alone.
I was not going unprepared.
And I was definitely not standing wherever Candy told me to stand.
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DB
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