Girl in the Static

The summer of '89 should have been about poolside parties, mixtape exchanges, and furtive crushes, but for me, June was a harbinger of doom. I was fifteen, an age already brimming with awkwardness and identity crises, and my life was about to be utterly upended. Being biracial, I'd always felt a slight, undefinable otherness, a sensation that was only amplified in the wake of my parents' cataclysmic divorce. Their carefully constructed world, which had once felt like my anchor, shattered into a million sharp pieces, leaving me adrift. Mom, a woman made of frayed nerves and misplaced nostalgia, immediately packed our meager belongings and dragged us back to her hometown - a place I'd only ever heard whispered about in hushed tones, a place called Rockaway Bay, Oregon.

It wasn't just the jarring relocation from a city I knew to a small, rain-soaked coastal town that made my world tilt. It was the undercurrents here, the way the ancient forests pressed in, and the constant mist felt like a veil over secrets. Because in Rockaway Bay, I quickly learned, the line between folklore and fact was gossamer-thin. Ghosts weren't just campfire stories; their chilling whispers seemed to cling to the damp, salt-laden air, and the shadows lengthening in the twilight felt less like trees and more like watchful presences. And witches? Oh, they absolutely, unequivocally existed, their legacies woven into the very fabric of this forgotten corner of the world, a knowledge that prickled my skin and set my teeth on edge.

Amidst this unsettling new reality, there was Quentin McBride. He was the undisputed golden boy, the finest guy in Rockaway Bay Oregon, with a laugh that echoed like sunshine through the perpetual gray and eyes that held the mystery of the sea. He glided through life with an effortless cool that was both captivating and infuriatingly out of reach. It was an immutable truth, as unyielding as the Oregon coastline itself: he was rich, I was suddenly, painfully, not. He was the prince of this damp kingdom, and I was just the lost girl from out of town, a planet away from his orbit. The very thought of him made my stomach knot with a frustrating mix of longing and the bitter knowledge that he was utterly, irrevocably out of my league.

Honestly, between the shattered family, the spectral neighbors, the ancient magic, the impossible crush, and the involuntary time-traveling psychic episodes, life in the 80s truly, unequivocally, spectacularly bit.