Paranelope, a ghost hunter who's been cancelled for faking evidence, must discover the truth behind a local cryptid in order to clear her name.
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Penelope, better known as the ghost hunter PARANELOPE to her millions of followers, has only ever want...
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The phone buzzed to life on the dashboard, its screen illuminating the dark of the truck cab. Penelope jolted awake in the passenger seat, gasping for air like she had been dreaming of drowning.
"I think we've got service again," her dad said, keeping his dark eyes on the road despite the buzzing phone skittering across his dash.
"Ugh," was all Penelope had to say about that.
In the dim first rays of morning light, it took Penelope a moment to reorient herself. Once her eyes adjusted, she could see that they had just started down the mountain. The lights of the town were glittering in the valley below.
The past few hours without connection to the world had given Penelope a bit of much-needed peace. But with every buzz of the phone, reality was now crashing back down. The cab of her dad's old pickup suddenly felt much smaller, like it was folding in, and threatening to crush her beneath the weight of it.
She snatched the phone off the dash. The screen was a blur as message after message flooded in. She had already disabled notifications for YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter but it looked like they had found her actual phone number now. The torrent of messages paused only briefly for her to catch a few words here and there.
BITCH
FAKE
LIAR
"Maybe you should turn that off," her dad said.
"I am," she said, running her hand through her tangled now-faded teal hair. "I don't know why I didn't before."
She tried her hardest not to look as she fumbled for the phone's power button. But she couldn't help it—she peeked again into the stream of messages. It only took one to know that it was a mistake.
KILL YOURSELF
The screen went black before she could see more. She shoved her phone into the depths of her bag and turned to the window, biting her lip to keep it from trembling. She didn't want her dad to see her like this.
"That's better," her dad replied, his eyes still fixed on the road ahead.
She grimaced. It wasn't.
An uneasy silence settled over Penelope and her dad as they continued into town. Penelope stared out the window and tried to keep her mind blank, focusing instead on the lightening sky and watching as the clouds faded from deep purple to pale pink. Distracted, she barely noticed the large wooden sign until it had already whipped past.
