Page 86 of A Dead Girl's Guide to Living
Something shifted in that moment, out there in the field. It was small and minute, but it was real, like something was slowly rising from the wreckage we’d found ourselves in.
And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t terrify me.
ELLIS
Tip #13: Don’t mistake nostalgia for safety.
Iwas in awe when we rolled into Red Oak II, my eyes drinking in the restored buildings like they’d been thirsting to put reality to the history I’d aggressively read online. It looked like a painting and it was almost too perfect to be real.
A reconstructed ghost town, built in honor of the artist’s actual hometown of Red Oak.
He’d left his hometown, and when he returned in the ’60s, it had become a ghost town—faded and deserted. So he took it upon himself to transform the land he owned in Carthage into Red Oak II, buying homes and businesses from the original site and reportedly from other rural ghost towns and restored them.
Dove was standing in front of what appeared to be the jail, her phone out as she snapped photos. I knew she meant to sketch them later. Liv had vanished in a flurry, claiming she was off to see if there were other ghosts around.
I wandered alone, taking in the full-scale reconstructed town, my mind boggling at the idea that one man’s death grip on the past had been so strong, he’d dragged it into his future.
Everything had been uprooted and torn from where it belonged and transplanted, arranged carefully to give the illusion that it had always been here. That it fit. That it was real.
But it wasn’t.
The lengths he’d gone to... was he trying to fill a hole? Patch a missing piece?
Absentmindedly, I ran my hand down my chest to where I knew the slightly raised, pink scar sat as a constant proof that I’d been rebuilt, too. The heart inside me wasn’t mine. It didn’t belong to me. Yet it had been taken and placed inside me, and it beat just the same as it had in Liv’s chest. And like this town—these old, restored buildings—it pulsed with a life that had already been lived.
My stomach knotted.
The rebuilt town was beautiful, but it was also a lie. A fabrication of something great that had once existed. What would happen when it inevitably fell into disrepair again? When it was abandoned again? Would someone else show up to take care of it?
How many chances could something have?
“How cool is that service station!”
Dove’s voice broke through my thoughts, and I startled, dropping my hand from my chest as I turned to look at her.
The old Phillips 66 station looked like it had been plucked from a Route 66 nostalgia Pinterest board—frozen in time since the 1940s. The teal green walls and bright orange roof and trim were a little loud on the eyes, but it was undeniably charming. Two gas pumps stood proudly out front, both restored, polished, long disconnected.
I made sure to capture as much content as possible as we made our way around the town—filming on my phone, snapping pictures when I could. Another tourist took a Polaroid of Dove and me under the Red Oak II sign, and I added it to the growing collection in the pocket of my bag.
Liv had wandered off toward the jail long ago, and Dove and I headed in the direction of the general store.
I let my eyes fall on Dove as she wandered a few steps ahead, looking around with gleaming eyes as if truly interested in the stop. I had to admit, it was one of our better ones.
Her oversized shirt hung off one shoulder, and her black Converse were scuffed to all hell. At this point, she looked like someone who’d stumbled out of a punk band’s tour van and fallen into some kind of Technicolor Western.
It unsettled me, a little, how fully she seemed to exist in this world.
And yet I—I felt like I’d been fading for years.
“How weird is it?” Dove asked, turning to look at me, the sun catching in her brown eyes, giving them a hazel glow. That familiar loose strand of hair had fallen from her space bun, and my hand dared to twitch on its own accord, as if I could reach out and tuck it away. “Like, this place isn’t the original, yet it still feels soreal. Like, the fact that it’s all rebuilt and restored to its former glory—maybe even better than what it originally was—none of it is where it started, and yet someone still cared enough to put it back together.”
“Like being in a memory,” I murmured, trying to stop myself from thinking about my rebuilt body. My body that had been cared for, patched together by strangers. Yet the past always lingered. The way my scar would sometimes itch. How my lungs would seize now and then, haunted by the memory of chemo.
“This place is hella haunted!” Liv’s voice came from the porch of the general store. We looked up as she stood on the railing. “It’s crazy! Can you feel the energy?”
“Sure,” Dove said with a shrug. I wondered if she meant it or if she was just placating our overly enthusiastic pain-in-the-ass ghost.
Liv disappeared back inside.
