The window to purchase a set of Activity Club pins has been EXTENDED! You now have SIX MORE DAYS to buy yours, which means we have just six more days to hit 400 sold! I know we can do it!

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You can get your pins RIGHT HERE!

I just got hit with a huge surprise dental bill after fighting through tooth pain to make this page, so I could use any support that you are able to spare! As a reminder, reaching 400 pin sets sold will be HUGE for me, since it kicks the campaign into a better percentage of revenue for me from Makeship. Thank you everyone who’s picked up pins and helped to spread the word, you are all my heroes and supremely appreciated!

If you’ve been enjoying my work, you can also support Paranatural on Patreon and Ko-fi! Thanks for reading! See you next week!

~

[Transcript]

        Peter Puckett looked up from the pavement he was mopping to discover a young woman halfway over Clayview Middle School’s high fence. He stared at her, and June stared back at him.

        “Can I... help you...?” Peter asked, pushing up his slipping glasses.

        The muffled percussion of a heartsick rock song gave the scene its tinny soundtrack, pulsing softly from the headphones that had fallen to his shoulders. The sun hung low and red in Clayview; it would be hours still before it set, but twilight’s colors started early in the sleepy desert ghost town. Peter blinked. The girl’s hair stood out from the palette that it matched, an even bolder shade of rust than dusk could muster.

        “Oh! Uh.” June hesitated. She studied the janitor gawking at her in bewilderment. He seemed the hapless hero type (it was that “geek who takes his glasses off and gets hot in the last act” vibe—she’d seen her share of romcoms on the road), which meant he might not snitch if she pretended she could use some earnest chivalry. “...Would you?” June asked, putting on a smile.

        “I guess it depends?” Peter tilted his head. “Were you, um—?” He gestured at the school over his shoulder.

        “Trespassing? No, no, I was just leaving,” lied June, swinging her leg back over the fence that she’d been straddling. On second thought, this was a cut-your-losses situation.

        “...Over the fence?”

        “Yup. Shortcut.”

        Peter Puckett cast a glance at the open gate not thirty feet away at the front of the school. 

        “A shortcut to—?”

        “Y’know.” June’s boots kicked up a puff of desert sand as she hopped the last few feet back to the ground. “To where I parked.”

        Peter looked at the empty parking lot beside him.

        “...Yeah, I don’t do things the way you’d expect. I’m like a—biker... rebel... riot girl, y’know?” June ad-libbed, fluffing out her leather jacket as evidence. “You can’t, um.” She pointed at a parking space half-heartedly. “You can’t put me in a box.”

        “That’s cool,” Peter Puckett said, and meant it, though his dumbfounded wonder helped it read as deadpan sarcasm. “So you were... trespassing before... is what you’re—um. You’ve already trespassed, and now you’re leaving.”

        June grumpily stared back at him in silence for the slow length of a sigh. Then she started scrambling up the fence’s chainlink once again.

        “Hey? Uh? What are you—”

        “If I’m gonna do the time, I might as well actually do the crime,” June said in a stubborn huff.

        “Wait, but—! There’s still staff and kids around! After-school clubs! Aren’t you worried you’ll get caught?”

        June paused at the peak of the fence.

        “...Depends who’s catching me,” she said, looking Peter up and down.

        The bumbling young janitor, however, had caught the vibe but failed to catch her meaning, distracted as he was by her flirtation. Catching on at last, he scrambled to catch up, holding out his arms to catch her... but he’d let go of his mop first, which then gently teetered over and struck Peter in the face. His glasses joined it as it clattered to the blacktop, where the contents of the bucket toppled with it slowly fanned out in a dirty-water delta at his feet. Peter Puckett stood stone-still in mortified surrender.

        A snort escaped a wide-eyed June, who’d watched the whole display in dumbstruck awe.

        “I guess I would be worried if it’s you,” she laughed, jumping down without his help. “Here,” June said. She handed the humiliated janitor his glasses while he groped to right his bucket and his mop.

        “Ah,” an embarrassed Peter mumbled, blinking blurrily up at her. He turned away in shame to clean his spectacles. “Thanks. Uh, thank you...”

        Wait, thought June. She’d only caught a glimpse, but... without his glasses, he really was kinda—

        “Oh,” said a newly bespectacled Peter. Now that he could see again, it was his turn to reappraise his new acquaintance from up close. “I, um... didn’t catch your name.”

        “You didn’t catch a lot of things,” June chuckled, searching her back pocket for a cigarette. “It’s June. June Summers.”

        “...Okay,” said Peter Puckett skeptically.

        June frowned.

        “It is. That’s my name.”

        “No, no! I get it,” Peter said, not wanting her to think he was naive. He winked to prove he understood. “I’m, uh...” He looked down at the tools in his hands, then quickly scanned his own surroundings. Behind the school, the vast plateau at Clayview’s heart loomed like a great tree’s long-dead stump. “I’m Butte Bucket.”

        This earned him yet another few seconds of mystified silence.

        “...You’re wearing a name tag, Puckett,” June said, pointing at it with her unlit cigarette. “Look, my name really IS June Summers. My cruddy parents thought that they were being cute, okay?” 

        “They would have to have been cute,” Peter mumbled in a daze. “Unless you were, um. Adopted.”

        “Huh?”

        “What? Nothing. I mean I think your name is cute. It suits you, and the month and season that it is.” He pushed up his glasses. “I actually, er, know what it’s like to—the kids here ask me if I’ve picked my peck of pickled peppers all the time. I understand the struggle. I just thought you’d make a name up since you’re”—skepticism slipped into his voice again—“sneaking... in...?”

        “...Well I was trying to,” June pouted. He had a point; she’d gotten caught up in the moment and divulged more than she should have. “Look... Piper?”

        “Peter.”

        “Peter. I’m not here to do anything bad.” June waved her smoking cigarette to gesture at the whole of Clayview Middle School. 

        Wait, had Peter missed her pulling out a lighter? He was pretty sure he hadn’t, since he couldn’t take his eyes off her. 

        “Have you, um....” June squinted, as if searching for the words. “Have you seen anything strange around here lately?”

        An apologetic Peter raised a finger up to point at her.

        “...All right, wise guy,” June grumbled. “You’re the one mopping the parking lot, Puckett.”

        “It’s the dirtiest place in the school,” Peter protested. “People drive their cars on it. I know you don’t, but you’re clearly, you know. A standout... standup gal. Girl. Riot girl. What was it that you called yourself before? Not June, that’s your name, I’ve accepted that’s your name, I just meant that, uh...”

        Before June had the chance to probe this latest endearing display of eccentricity, she caught a silhouette over his shoulder: a student staring from the darkness of the middle school’s front doors. The girl had recognized June—that weird woman—from the other day, when she had asked her if she’d ever seen a—

        “Ah! Hey, you!” June called out to her.

        “Eep!”

        A startled young Mina Zarei yelped as she ducked out of sight, back into the school and its deep shadow.

        More than thirteen years had passed since that day. Now Doctor Zarei stood in the same spot... a spectral on the same mission that June had stumbled into.

        The more things change, thought Mina (though she couldn’t fathom just how much had changed in Bayview overnight), the more they—

        Doctor Zarei turned to look at the fence that Agent Summers had climbed so many years ago, when June had first set foot into her life. An extremely suspicious individual in a black hoodie and dark sunglasses was struggling to scramble over it. Mina blinked in mute bewilderment.

        ...None of my business, Zarei thought to herself. She was incorrect about this for more than just the obvious ethical reasons, but she was far too focused on the daunting task ahead to see the signs. None of my business, Mina repeated like a mantra. She smirked and pushed up Patchworm’s glasses. Not until I ace my interview, that is...