The morning Raven wakes up is a muggy one. She can feel her long, dark hair sticking to the back of her neck and her blankets are in a woolly heap at her feet. With a sigh, she stretches her legs, her arms, cracks her knuckles. Her body is more or less one giant cramp after sleeping on the ancient, springy mattress and she’s hoping she’ll get used to it, considering it will be her bed for the next three months.
Outside, she can hear the faint but never-ending buzz of insects swarming around the long grass, the shade, the forest. Raven wonders how she’s already used to it—she’s been here for less than twenty-four hours, after all. But that’s one of those things she shouldn’t spend too much time on, lest she get fixated like her parents and her teachers and her doctor insists she tends to do. They’re just bugs; just like the wind is just the wind and the sky is just the sky and birds are just birds. Maybe she needs to start accepting the world at face value instead of looking into things too deeply.
Raven shakes her head and proceeds to change into something—anything—else besides her enormous t-shirt and that’s practically glued to her back. She settles for a black skirt and a t-shirt that she shoves beneath the waistband, quickly escaping the heat of her room in favour for the kitchen.
Her parents are already up, of course—sitting in the tiny kitchen with mismatched mugs of coffee. They give her an overly cheery ‘good morning’ before her dad offers her a cup that he knows she’s going to refuse.
“Do you want breakfast?” her mum asks before opening a cupboard, “I can make you…well, nothing…we have no food. There’s a granola bar in my purse if you want it.”
Raven smiles, thinking about how scatterbrained her parents can be at times and that she’s not the least bit surprised they forgot about food. “That’s alright. I was going to go into town to look around…I could pick up some stuff.”
So, her mum sends her off with a granola bar and her dad’s credit card and a warning not to talk to strangers, which. Well, in a town primarily inhabited by tourists it might be kind of hard. Tourists like to talk and ask questions and make friends, not something Raven particularly enjoys but only because she’s terrible at it. Maybe if she was a bit more of a talker the idea wouldn’t seem so daunting.
The walk to town is short, but confusing. At one point, Raven has to pull out her phone and check that she’s travelling in the right direction, which is all well and fine until she loses service (which is often). Hartman Lake is nearly off the map and apparently service providers think so too. Nevertheless, she makes it to town in under twenty minutes and in one piece.
Hartman Lake is an old vacationing town. It’s buildings are ancient and in rough but acceptable condition, it’s sidewalks are poorly paved, it’s residents are…different. Raven is not a judgemental person, but she had been expecting the locals to be a tad more welcoming. The tourists—presumably the ones wearing fishing hats and purchasing overpriced bait and tackle—are the only ones who shoot her a smile. The locals—the business owners, the ones who have lost interest—barely respond to her greetings when she stumbles into their stores.
It’s rather strange, the way they look at her. It doesn’t take her long to feel like she’s teetering on the unwelcome side of the spectrum but alas she persists (reminds herself about the paranoia again). Perhaps she’s been mistaking private for rude. After all, these people have probably endured decades of pestering tourists using their lake and catching their fish and asking for directions. She would more than likely learn to keep to herself as well.
And that brings her to the tourists. They’re all relatively friendly from what she comes to gather (an elderly woman had complimented her hair before explaining that hers used to be the same colour; it wasn’t always grey) but they are all on the later side of life. She figures the majority of them have been coming to this tiny town for as long as they can remember, and never bringing anyone new to tag along.
