A Rock and Family Vacation

[31]

It wasn’t long before Blair returned with the rock, carefully concealed and protected in its bag. With a frustrated sigh, Brooke reached in and grabbed it with her bare hand. There was no spark, there was no shock, there was no sign of anything happening as she held and turned it in her grip. Eliot gave her a safe breadth while her children flinched, from the surprise of her just grabbing it, but didn’t back away.

She had no idea if there was ever any reason for her to be worried about the darn thing or if it had moved beyond the rock. But she wasn’t going to risk it with her husband. In appearance, the rock looked essentially the same, with a black, obsidian texture and roughness beside oily rainbows and sharp brightness bleeding through from within.

Blair confirmed that it appeared much the same as it usually did, but she also relayed that it had gone dark for a strange period when they were with the creepy guys and that coincided with Lacy going to the bathroom. Gripping tightly to all of her deduction skills, Blair could only postulate that the entity within the rock had somehow escaped and made contact with Lacy, then brainwashed her into a girly girl (Lacy gave a disgusted shiver), before somehow returning.

Blair also had a vague, dream-like recollection of the time around and after the changing rooms. She imagined it had to be somewhere close to drunkenness as she fiddled with her phone again and walked the rock carefully back to the car. Soon, Brooke curiously flipped through the clothing on the racks, torn between her adult impetus to only focus on the practical and inexpensive while the reinvigorated exuberant, curious side of her yearned for something pretty but comfy.

Blair took the opportunity of her parents debating different clothes to focus all of her attention on her phone. She was appalled to the depths of her soul at the flagrant errors her drunken alter ego had flippantly passed to the skater boy. She wanted to immediately delete his reply without even looking but she had already skimmed it, even though she hadn’t truly absorbed the words.

Flicking her eyes down with a series of frantic blinks, she eventually saw the whole thing.

“hey there. Glad 2 hear from you. Dat’s cool. Stuff happens. We’re actually up on Broad st this afternoon. Love to meet up. Text me again soon. I think yur mistakes are perfectly beautiful. TTFN!”

She knew he wouldn’t be so keen on her mistakes if he knew that she made the biggest one misleading and implying about her age. Or maybe he wouldn’t care, which would make him as creepy as the country club “grandpas”. At least then she could stop talking to him without a guilty conscience.

Lacy had shot to zero interest in any of the clothes claustrophobically surrounding her, aside from a few robes with misprinted designs. She scrutinized whenever their mother moved towards the more androgynous clothing options. Blair raised an eyebrow, and Lacy firmly planted her feet with her arms folded wherever she felt uncomfortable.

“You okay?”

Lacy flashed a sneer at her older sister. “Okay? What part of all this looks the least bit like it’s ‘okay’? Because I’m not seeing it.” Her voice barely held below a strained yell but, with the density of the racks, it didn’t echo far. Everyone turned towards her, but she held up her hands. as though surrendering for arrest. She turned away and grabbed the loosest sweater she could find. It was silver and had material that was quite a ways away from the kind that assaulted her dry fingers. She trembled slightly as she embraced the material. Blair held her hands up too.

Eventually, Brooke went after things more befitting her youthful appearance. Not only that, she scampered up some side steps to a storage area with a lot of scattered, extra marked-off outfits for young girls. It didn’t take long for Eliot to find himself out of breath and feeling his four decades in comparison to his renewed wife. Even Blair had to crack a few joints.

“You were really cute. So…you remember all that as like a dream? It was trippy for me, like unwillingly playing a riff on myself. Like hypnosis. Not painful but very disconcerting.”

Lacy clenched her teeth. “I hated it. What I remember of it. Most of it was stupid. Just acting like a flippantly dumb girl. I mean whoever that was… was doing that. That wasn’t me. She or he or it or whatever stole my body to do all that crazy stuff and hurt mom.” Across the way, mom flashed a radiant smile as she pinwheeled her arms in a flowing, tie-dye top. Lacy rubbed her nose and refocused on the clothes around her.

“I remember you singing an old ABBA song as part of some TikTok thing when no one else was around.” Blair hummed part of it as Lacy acted like an irritated hedgehog. In no way did Blair think her voice compared to the original singer, but she gave it her best shot.

“I’m not seventeen, like the song says. So, it’s more for you. And stop teasing me.”

Blair persisted, but in a different direction. “I also want to say, you fought well against whatever that was. I saw what you did with the hat, and you made sure to squeeze me real tight. Whatever it was, got me too. Although, it also made that one clerk lady really happy."

Lacy emphasized that it made her touch and enjoy the cursed material that damaged her fingers. Or, at least, stuff that kind of felt like it. Drifting around to the far side of the store, Lacy dipped her head.

“I wanted things to be easier. I didn’t want all this girl obligation…whatever to be so tough and frustrating but that doesn’t mean whatever it was gets to brainwash me into someone else. Turned me into a girly jerk pussy…cat. Well, she’ll see my claws.” Blair felt like Lacy was on the cusp of a further admission, but she wasn’t ready to lay bare her emotions, even with so many clothes to insulate the spaces between.

Everyone got a little bit of something. Lacy acquired her own silken robe with high, tough shoulders compared to dad’s. It looked oddly bald, as though a child ran an electric razor across it. That meant it wasn’t as fuzzy with catches as it would’ve been. Blair found herself a red swimsuit number with enough leeway to comfortably fit her entire form. It was apparently slightly too large up top but that was no detriment in her case. Clare rounded things out with a cute little pink windbreaker which had shrunk right to her size because of an accident. It was almost like all the defects that happened were in their favor.

Brooke wound up with whatever she could grab which didn’t break the bank and felt comfortable enough to wear on such a warm day. She wasn’t sure what to think when the older clerk, who faintly resembled a librarian, mistook Blair for the mom and Brooke for just one of the children.

As the best and least uncomfortable compromise, Eliot explained that these were his daughters… and Brooke and refused to elaborate on the relationship between him and Brooke. Since that was all the interaction required for ringing up the clothes, that was all they said.

Outside, Brooke couldn’t resist scampering, stretching, twirling, and darting around all the things that were sure to scrape and scab and injure. She felt alive, far more than she had been at this age. Back then, her father suffused every aspect of her life like an intangible, energy-stealing poison and her body dragged her down the rest of the way. Rarely, it would just be her and her mother.

Away from dad, some shadow of her mom’s mathematic personality poked out. She would invent little games around housework and idle chitchat. And come up with clever solutions to household problems that mattered only to them. Then dad would return from work and the quiet aspects would withdraw, to be replaced by the automaton that served him diligently and repeated everything that he thought.

Glancing over her shoulder, Brooke glimpsed the police station. It was so close. Just a short walk.

But what could they possibly say of a legal nature? Help us, I’ve been turned into a 12-year-old by some kind of spirit that lives in a rock we found on the beach with some weird thing stuck to it. They could absolutely mention the men in green uniforms or the other, loitering guy her husband encountered. She pitched this to Eliot as they tucked all their purchases away in the back. Clare chimed in that the pizza lady who recommended the sheriff guy was really cool with everything, so maybe he could actually help?

Blair and Eliot had the greatest concerns about going to the police. They weren’t from around here. This was a small town, and they had each seen plenty of unsettling movies about the creepy stuff that existed in the South like this. And this was where grandpa picked out the vacation home. None of those aspects felt good on their behalf. Never mind the fact that Brooke was now a tween, and the boys were girls. At least Eliot could still use his ID, if they asked for it, but if they were anything close to sleuthy, then they would immediately detect all sorts of problems with their story.

The alternative was to head back to the beach house and, of course, enjoy what remained of their vacation, but also linger in uncertainty. Brooke didn’t like the prospect of being anywhere near where her father could suddenly show up, making up for the earlier cancellation.

They crossed the busy street as a close group, looped around a pet park, and paused by some streamers. Blair made a quick note that they had to stop by the wind toy shop they saw earlier. Brooke lamented whether she would even be strong enough to hold onto a kite for her kids.

The sheriff station was labeled as Marlon County but emphasized as the locally-established PINCKNEY POINT POLICE DEPARTMENT. The all-caps were prominent in the lettering. Blair thought that it looked strikingly more like a library than what she imagined of a police station and that impression continued as they made their way inside. A female officer directed them through a metal detector and then casually scanned them before allowing them to proceed.

Eliot had to consult his notes taken at the pizza shop but was soon asking for Raymond Cadell. The station had the low drop ceiling of any office building with open partitions separating sections into wall-less cubicles. His impression was that of a 1980s bank. The front desk had a couple of officers chatting with one another. One guy with a thick, red handlebar mustache beckoned them over and kindly asked their business. They all wore tannish silver uniforms with large hats set aside.

It was a stressful matter for Eliot to prepare his response to that relatively simple question. He’d never been in a police station, and he’d never had reason on either side to be in a place like this, but it also fascinated him for all the details and minutia which made a story richer to include. Like, why was there a pair of leather boots hung on the far wall over by the stairs? He had no idea and doubted he would ever be able to ask that question, let alone arrive at the answer.

“We encountered two suspicious men who claimed to be security for down by the boardwalk and they asked us a lot of personal, casing criminal type questions about our stay here. There was also a strange man in a black suit who was trying to solicit business and the two guys and the other seemed to be at odds and… It just created a very nervous and frankly potentially dangerous situation for me and my kids.” Getting that out felt more excruciating than a desperate college mistake that he once recounted to Brooke. The Egg Incident. That reminder actually would’ve been perfectly fine as proof that the scared young girl was her wife and cause him less embarrassment than remembering gopher farts. Because it vividly reminded him of the weirdest dreams he ever had and only casually shared as an offhand admission.

In them, he was a woman named Eleanor Shore. Elie. Just like in the fantasies that Brooke nervously admitted to when they were first dating. He didn’t particularly believe in the supernatural, but he had that. Dreams of a life that couldn’t possibly exist. He was so comfortable with her because Elie and Brooke were close friends and even more. And now, this crazy vacation had brought an inexplicable rock that changed their children in ways that felt crazy, alarming, and bizarre but which left a tickle of recognition he desperately wanted to ignore.

It refused to go away, like the nagging sensation all around him that someone was watching, someone like the mysterious girl described twice by his children. Someone who he had also first seen… in his dreams. 

[I have a question at the end of the chapter again to help with suggestions for where the story should go. I'm a couple chapters ahead but I love seeding ideas from people as much as possible. Feel free to add an idea which doesn't show up in the options. Also, if you see any random typos or uncapitalized starts of sentences, please pass them along. I have to cut down on my editing due to release speed and my programs don't seem to be catching lowercase sentences. Thank you for reading!]

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