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I stood outside what was to be my new home for the next three months, and all I could think was: What. The. Hell.
Nestled at the center of a maple clearing was a small Victorian style home. Two bay windows gazed out onto a sweeping, wraparound porch and a polygonal tower at the back of the building reached up into the sky.
The house must have been elegant long ago, but a few decades worth of neglect had ruined its beauty. The porch roof drooped on the left side, and the warm yellow paint had flaked away from the siding like fallen snow. Sections of shingles were missing, and half the building was covered in a tangle of ivy.
But that wasn't the reason for my bug eyes.
An explosion of lawn ornaments littered the property, almost as if someone was trying to cover up the poor condition of the house with fancy bird feeders and pink plastic flamingos. Tiny stone statues of little critters like frogs and bunny rabbits lined the front walk, and a large population of ceramic gnomes sunbathed on the grass.
Most noticeable, though, was the collection of wind chimes. If I had to guess, I'd say there were more than thirty of them, dangling from the porch and trees like an orchestra of icicles. Their song was both gentle and eerie, and a shiver ran down my back as I listened to the wind play music.
I was completely baffled. The place looked like a cross between my grandma's winter retreat in Florida and a haunted house out of a horror movie, so it took me a few minutes of staring before I was able accept that I would be stuck here for the entire summer.
Moving in with my godmother was not my idea. My parents thought I needed a change of scenery to help me recuperate before I started my freshman year of college—their words, not mine. As if shipping me off to live in the middle of nowhere was going to miraculously change me back to the person I used to be. While I wanted to forget the past few months of my life, there was no way living in a town so small there wasn't even a McDonalds that its insignificance would suddenly make me forget that my entire world had fallen apart.
It was getting dark. The trees cast long, reaching shadows across the front lawn in the light of the setting sun, and even though I didn't want to be here, I sighed, picked up my suitcase, and headed toward the house. After knocking and waiting a few minutes with no response, I tested the doorknob and found it unlocked.
"Hello?" I called out, tucking a strand of pale blond hair behind my ear as I stepped inside. "Ruby, are you home? It's Evelyn."
My godmother's name was Ruby Brooks, and she was my mom's roommate in college. Both my mom and Ruby grew up in rural Wisconsin only a few towns apart from one another, and while they probably went to the same parties and football games back in high school, they didn't meet until their freshman year when they moved into the dorms at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
After graduating, Ruby relocated to New York to pursue her writing career. I didn't know much about her—except for the fact that she wrote books for a living and had a daughter around my age—because she only visited friends and family every few years. But then two summers ago her father died and she inherited her childhood house, so she decided to move back to her hometown of Middle of Nowhere, USA.
