Author: etrix Artist: viviantanner Fandom/Genre: spn / gen, pre-series & season 1, character study Pairing: Mary/John Rating: PG-13 Word Count: 22k

Warnings: contains original characters, (mostly) mild language, and some discussion of discrimination, bullying, politics, and adultery.

Summary: Three days after the sexy guys disappeared from her family's motel, Mandy finally cleans out their room. There are charts on the weather and quotes about demon behavior, but there's also a bag filled with Mary Campbell's diaries from the late 1960's. Mandy stores everything behind the counter half-hoping one of the (smoking hot) McGillicuddy males will come back for them. In the meantime, there's nothing stopping her from reading them is there? Takes place at the end of season 1. Written for the spn_reversebang challenge on Livejournal where the art comes first.

Acknowledgements: I love betas. They help make me sound better than I probably am and they make me think about what I'm saying. I actually had three betas this time: I had a fanfic I could show my mom, so she made comments (Thanks for being so nice, Mom!). Then my RL friend Alecto Nyx covered it with red ink, and finally rince1wind picked it apart. It's a much smoother story because of them.

Finders

"Housekeeping!"

Mandy banged on the door but got no response. Not that she really expected one since both the mini-monster truck and the old muscle car were gone. Three days gone actually, and the McGillicuddys' pre-paid week had ended more than a day ago.

Too bad, she thought, because she wouldn't have minded catching any of those guys in just a towel, even the older one.

Unfortunately, it was more likely the abandoned room was going to contain moldy food containers and maybe some used condoms. Although, considering the three guys had posed as father and sons, that last thought was kind of icky, but it wouldn't be the first time people with 'non-standard inclinations' had used their motel to indulge themselves.

Or maybe there'd be a dead body! That would certainly spice up Mandy's day.

They'd never had that happen in their motel, but Cindy, whose family ran the truck rest-stop north of the highway, had found a guy who'd had a heart attack once. But if one of the McGillicuddys had died, why hadn't one of the other two called the ambulance or something? They could've kept up their father-son cover story, no problem.

Or, she thought, maybe they'd killed someone.

Her heart rate bumped up a notch as she wondered if, like Clooney and Tarantino in From Dusk Till Dawn, the McGillicuddys were serial killers on the run. There could be a cut-up body in the room, and that would explain why they'd left in such a hurry.

Mandy snorted as her common sense kicked in. It wasn't impossible, but there was nothing on the radio about anybody being missing, and it would've been plastered all over (and gossiped about). Big news in Salvation was the fund-raiser to buy a new bus for the high school or the biggest fish caught in West Okiboji this year. Hell, the Holts' house fire still made page 2 of the local paper. (The Echo was only eight pages in total so that wasn't as impressive as it might have been.)

Besides, she'd been there when her mom had checked them in and none of the McGillicuddys had had the vibe that said 'screws-seriously-loose'.

Dangerous? Hell yes, (and sexy as hell, too!) but not serial killers.

Mom wouldn't have rented to them if she'd thought they were seriously nuts. The motel wasn't just a business, it was their home, and Mom never forgot that. She'd even got money from their dad to install a straight-to-the-cops panic button under the front desk. Not that it had been hard to get that money. Like Mom always said, he'd been a lot of things ("lying, womanizing, bastard" was Mom's favorite) but he'd never been tightfisted.

She and Claire were supposed to go visit him at the end of the month, or rather she was. Claire was too busy getting ready for college. It was just going to be Mandy this year, which meant it was going to be freaking awful! Claire was the only thing she and her father had in common. Without her sister as the center, she and Dad wouldn't be able to find more than a dozen things to say to each other, including "pass the salt" and "boy, it's hot out".

Two weeks of socially awkward hell—something to look forward to.

She sighed in resignation and gave the thin wood another sharp rap before hauling out the master key and opening up the door into the dark room. She removed the 'Do Not Disturb' sign as she sniffed cautiously for signs of anything rotting.

Nothing.

Just stale air and the fading scent of a bunch of healthy guys in a small space. (It was all Leila's fault that she knew what the guys' locker room smelled like and she never wanted to go into another one.) Another sniff, because—mmm—one of them had worn a spicy aftershave and not that stinky Axe stuff either, something lighter. It was actually kind of nice.

Leaving the door open (to give the place light and fresh air), she pulled on the gloves (just in case). The room wasn't filthy (certainly no dead bodies anywhere), just untidy.

There were empty pizza boxes (Luigi's. Ugh. They made the worst pizza in town!) lying neatly beside the kitchen garbage that were easy to remove. There were empty beer cans stacked up on the table that she put in a bag so they could be returned for the deposit, but nothing horrific, nothing that couldn't be explained by the three of them leaving in a hurry. The grossest things were the used Kleenexes on the end tables, but they'd been there long enough to be completely dry. She stepped closer to sweep them into the garbage can and noticed the stuff pinned to the wall.

Damn it! Pin holes were the worst because they were hardly worth the effort it took to fill them.

Then she saw what the pins were holding up.

What the…?

She squinted in confusion. Who needed old weather reports?

She looked at the next section: clippings from the World Weekly News on cattle mutilations in the area.

She snickered until she saw the name of the ranch. The articles were about old man Halford's cattle. He'd lost four head last month and talk was it had been pretty gruesome. Everyone thought Shawn Curbin and his gang of sicko ass-wipes had done it but the cops hadn't been able to prove anything. Nothing had happened since and the talk had finally died down. As far as Mandy knew, Mr. Halford hadn't told anyone in town about the article, and you'd think he would've been milking his celebrity down at the Legion as soon as the reporter called.

Of course, it was the World Weekly News, which was mostly used to line bird cages, so maybe Mr. Halford just hadn't wanted to be linked with a paper that ran articles about possessed toasters and alien Elvis babies? Still, his picture in a national paper… Kinda cool.

As Mandy pulled the pins out and gathered up the clippings, she glanced through them. There were more clippings about the weather and other strange happenings, and there were hand-written notes, strange symbols (possibly Wiccan but maybe Satanic; Mandy wasn't an expert). Right next to those were a couple quotes from the Bible and some Latin-looking words, and a map with colored pins in it. (More pinholes! Inconsiderate asses.) The pins were all connected by colored yarns, like they were trying to figure out a pattern.

Mandy realized that the McGillicuddys were like Fox Mulder, trying to find proof that aliens existed or something.

Cool!

Though it was kind of sad that guys so good looking were all insane.

She piled all the papers on the table with the vague thought that she'd read through them later; see how the minds of alien hunters worked (since manning the desk during the day gave her long periods of nothing-else-to-do, and there was only so much Minesweeper she could play). She looked at the pinholes more closely. Maybe she could use the spearmint gel toothpaste to fill them. It dried to almost the same pukey green as the wallpaper.

Happy with her plan, Mandy hummed along to her MP3 player as she filled and wiped and hauled and washed and vacuumed. She didn't actually mind the work. Her sister, Claire, would much rather do the bookkeeping and form-filling. She wanted to be an accountant or maybe a tax lawyer, but that was because her sister was weird… and actually rather brilliant.

She knew she wasn't as smart as Claire and she was okay with that. There was less pressure on her to do something with her mediocre brains, both from her parents and from inside herself. Claire loathed the idea of being limited in her life, and the idea of staying in Salvation filled her sister with dread. Not Mandy. In fact, the idea of staying here at the motel and living her whole life in Salvation was kind of reassuring. So she cleaned and hummed and thought that one day, it would be nice to put in cabinets with a honey-wood finish and get rid of the butt-ugly gold/cream laminate that had come with the place.

Mandy made her second big discovery after stripping the beds. Underneath one of them was a worn leather satchel (they called it a 'man bag', but really it was just a plain, heavy purse). It must've gotten pushed there sometime during the McGillicuddys' stay and none of them noticed it was missing. Maybe they hadn't realized the beds were on regular open frames and not the solid ones a lot of motels and hotels used for just this reason (another thing to put on the 'nice to have' column.)

Didn't matter why really, it was here and the McGillicuddys weren't. They'd have to hold it for 30 days in case any of them came back to claim it.

Not that many guests ever came back for their stuff but it could happen.

Maybe she'd be working the desk, early afternoon or late evening would be best because those were the quietest times, and the tall one with the shaggy hair and dimples would come in. That would be nice. Although the older one, the father, had a great voice: a low, sexy growl that would sound good reading a dictionary. Claire had liked the green-eyed one, and sure he was hot, but Mandy figured he was a bit of a player, and she'd never really liked the idea of being one of a crowd. Still, he'd had nice hands… and a nice smile.

Yeah, who was she kidding? She'd spend time with him if he asked.

Really, though, it wasn't actually likely that any of them would be coming back for it after how many days. She could stuff the papers in the 'man bag' so Mom wouldn't throw them out and Mandy would be able to read them when it was slow.

The bag was surprisingly heavy as she carried it over to the table. It actually went "thunk" when she dropped it.

Huh.

She opened the bag to look in and saw the books. Not book books, but coil-bound notebooks with clasps, like a Day-Timer but thicker.

These were probably where the McGillicuddys kept all their alien research, Mandy thought with excitement. They'd be filled with notes and drawings and map coordinates, just like Indy in The Last Crusade. Except there were a couple so obviously girly it was surprising three alpha-male-types had bought them. Big-ass flowers in psychedelic colors hardly matched the testosterone-overload levels of the McGillicuddys. Unless there was a meaning to the covers: red for alien abduction stories and flowers for crop circles?

Then Mandy thought, maybe there'd be a name or a phone number or something in one of them, some way for her to call and let them know they'd left a bag behind.

Opening them up and taking a look wouldn't be snooping, she told herself, it would just be good customer service. The actions of a concerned and caring tourist industry worker…

She could totally do that.

There was an extra jig in her step as she packed up the vacuum. It would be a lot more interesting than watching CSI: Miami, that was for damn sure.

They were diaries, not research journals; six volumes of the personal, intimate thoughts of one Mary Campbell from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There was no address or phone number in any of them. Aside from Mary's name and the dates written inside the covers, there was no information about the owner. Mandy didn't think that any of the McGillicuddys had stolen them—why would they?—which meant that one of them (probably the older one given the dates) had kept them out of sentiment, and that made it strange that he hadn't come back or called about them. He'd cared enough to haul them around with him, but not enough to keep track of their whereabouts?

Still, his negligence made them fair game, right?

It took two more days for Mandy to have enough quiet time to start reading.

Owning a motel was cool and all, but it was a lot of work for the three of them. Claire was running the sheets through the wash. Mom was supervising Jed as he fixed the plumbing in 7A, (nice enough guy, but light-fingered and a little lazy) so Mandy had the desk, which was nice and quiet. The corporate rep dude had already checked out, a couple of state researchers had checked in, and there were the Holts staying in 10B while they dealt with their insurance agent.

Their house had burnt down a week ago and the insurance company was arguing the payout. The official cause was faulty wiring, but Leila's dad (who was a volunteer firefighter) said that the fire had started on the ceiling, not inside the walls, which is where it would have started if it had been the wiring. Not that any of the firefighters were telling the insurance company that. After all (the discussions went), Charlie Holt was one of them, the Holts needed the money to rebuild, little Rosie was only six months old, and insurance companies were "parasites" and/or "evil incarnate" (depending on who was speaking) and should be forced to pay in full no matter what.

Besides, there'd been no known accelerant used, according to Leila's dad. The whole room had just caught fire and taken the house with it. It was one of the most interesting things to have happened in Salvation since they found crop circles out beyond Milford.

Thinking of crop circles reminded Mandy of the notes she'd found pinned up in the McGillicuddys' room, which reminded her of the diaries, and since mid-afternoon was prime travelling time for tourists and salesmen, it would be slow enough at the desk for her to get a good start on them. The earliest volume was from 1969, so that was the one she pulled out first. It was worn but still bright with the big flowers in hallucinogenic colors that could only be from the late '60s.

1969.

Nixon had taken over as president and America had started bombing Cambodia (she looked it up). Led Zeppelin recorded their first studio album and Elvis did his comeback thing. Apollo 11 landed on the moon. …or not, if that's what you wanted to believe. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was released (Paul Newman—yum!) and there were riots over race and poverty and peace. Old people complained that young people lacked discipline, and young people complained that old people lacked vision.

Mandy smirked at how little the world had changed.

Then she carefully opened the book and started to read.

…

Dear Diary,

Okay, so maybe I was wrong and Lawrence isn't as bad as I thought. It'll never be Sacramento but it's not the back of beyond either. There are three colleges here. Three! I've already looked into their scholarship programs and I think, if I work hard through high school, I'll be able to get scholarships from Kansas U. I could try for the Classics program. I like books and I already know Latin, so that should help.

Dad says he moved out here to be closer to Mom's family but I know it was because he found the brochures from Berkeley and thought I was turning into some kind of hippie peacenik. He thinks that by moving to the Midwest, I'll go back to being the same person I was three years ago. People here are more conservative, all right, but that's not what this is about anyway.

It's about wanting something else, something better than hunting and killing all the time! I want a home and a family that loves me because of who I am and not because I've memorized four different exorcisms and can cast consecrated iron rounds in my sleep–

…

Whoa! Mary's family sounded nuts: talking about hunting, killing, and exorcisms! And what the hell's a "consecrated round"?

Maybe they were a cult, like Charles Manson. There'd been lots of violent cults in the sixties… right? Aryan Nations and all those guys.

If Mary turned out to be a racist, skin-head asshole then Mandy wasn't going to read her diaries! Hating someone for something like skin color—or sexual orientation—was just stupid and hurtful, and Mandy wasn't going to have anything to do with a person like that. Not after what Claire had gone through.

She huffed out a calming breath, and picked up reading from where she'd stopped.

…

–I start high school next week. I'm kind of nervous. What if I don't make any friends?

…

The bell over the door rang and a couple girls in their early twenties walked in. Mandy placed a brochure for the nearby state park into the diary to hold her place and got them registered. Lindsey Hopps and Kelly Parker were best friends, they told Mandy. They were both going to Chicago to attend Northwestern, so they'd decided to make a vacation of the trip.

It was funny, but they were doing what Mary had dreamed of nearly forty years ago—creating a life of their own away from everything they'd known. It was what Claire would be doing in just a couple months, hoping that the big city would give her something she'd never found here.

Mandy couldn't really see the attraction. Well, she could, but not really. Sure those places had art galleries and museums, and all that cultural stuff, but they also had way too many people. Mom and Dad had lived on the same block, in the same building, for over a decade, and Mom said she hadn't known the names of most of her neighbors. It was one of the reasons she'd moved them here after the divorce: so they could get to know the people around them, be part of a community, live at a slower pace.

Apparently, it had been something she and Dad had talked about before they got married, but when it came down to it, Dad turned out to be a big city boy all the way through. He didn't like not being able to put his arm out the window and touch the house next door. He wanted to be able to find a Starbuck's on every second corner, and to not have to spend five minutes saying "hello" to everybody he saw.

Mandy liked talking to people, getting to know them. That's why she pointed the two girls towards Claudio's (waaay better pizza than Luigi's).

Dear Diary,

First day of school and it was mostly a cakewalk. There are fewer than a thousand students at Lawrence High. Most of them went to one or other of the two junior highs so they've already known each other for years. I got singled out, of course, being the new girl. When they discovered that I was from California, everyone wanted to know what Beverly Hills was like. Had I been in any movies? Did I surf?

The questions were silly and it was hard to convince them that I'd never been to Los Angeles, and that I didn't know Kurt Russell, without laughing in their faces.

…

Kurt Russell had been around in 1969? Damn! The man looked pretty good for an old guy.

…

Dear Diary,

Amy, Julie, and Natalie (who just might be turning into friends) dragged me out to watch the football tryouts. They all plan to be cheerleaders but only because they get to meet the players that way. It wasn't bad, I suppose, although my mom's comment that organized sports is just ritualized war kept playing in my mind.

Turns out there are only a couple of the players that they're interested in: Brad Vogel, the quarterback, and Johnny Winchester, who's a wide receiver. I had to ask them what that was (he catches the ball and runs with it) and the girls were shocked that I didn't know the proper terms. I'd be embarrassed but I've never enjoyed football. (Baseball, now there's a game!)

Then they came over and tried to act all super-cool: as if girls should want them just because they play football. They tried to sound like James Bond or Steve McQueen but they're just skinny 14-year-olds like me.

Still, their whole attitude was sleazy and kind of yucky.

Even if Dad would let me, I don't think I'll be trying out for the cheerleading squad.

…

Mandy couldn't help but snicker at Mary's description of the football team and the way the girls had drooled over them. It hadn't changed much because lots of her female classmates did the same thing. And there was the girlfriend hierarchy to make it another step back in time. The quarterback's girlfriend ranked higher than the nose guard's girlfriend who was higher than the running backs'… blahblahblah. She and Claire had laughed about that a time or two.

And speak of the devil…

"Meatloaf for supper," Claire said, holding out a plate with a slice of loaf, piles of mashed potatoes and vegetables, and gravy steaming gently over all of it.

Mandy put aside the volume and took the nearly overflowing plate, inhaling the rich aroma with deep-seated pleasure.

"What you reading?" her sister asked.

She shrugged. "A diary that got left behind by the McGillicuddys."

"Oh, gross!" Claire scrunched up her face. "You shouldn't be reading that. It's private."

"It's okay. It's, like, really old," Mandy explained hastily. "And it wasn't written by any of them. It was written by this chick who wanted to move away from home, do something completely different. Kind of like you." She smiled to take the sting out of the comment. Just because she didn't want to leave Salvation didn't mean she didn't understand why her sister thought life would be better elsewhere.

"I don't know how you can want to stay here," Claire commented, flipping through the fragile diary and having to stop and tuck the loose pages back in.

Mandy entered into the old argument willingly. After all, Claire had brought her mashed potatoes and gravy. "I don't know why you feel you need to leave."

"Oh come on! Everybody knows everybody else's business all the time. There's always somebody watching, gossiping," Claire shuddered and closed the book. "You can't ever be completely private in Salvation."

"That's only a problem if you've got something to hide," Mandy pointed out. She looked up at the ceiling as if searching her memories. "Yeah, nope. Hiding nothing, so no worries."

Claire snorted. "You couldn't keep a secret if were implanted by aliens."

"Hey!" she protested, kind of hurt. "I can keep a secret." Mandy swallowed the suddenly heavy potatoes. They stuck all the way down.

Claire looked stricken. She bumped Mandy's shoulder. "I mean about yourself. You just put yourself out there for people to take or leave. It's… It's very brave."

Mandy wasn't brave. She didn't say that though. Instead she tried to reassure her sister, one more time. "Mom would understand."

"Maybe Mom would, but a lot of people around here wouldn't." It was what Claire always said—didn't help that it had turned out to be true.

"Plus," Claire continued. "You'd get some of the fallout, just from being my sister. I won't do that to you, not when you still have two years of school left." She wrapped her arm around Mandy's shoulders and gave her a gentle squeeze. "Now finish up your supper then you can take your plate in. I'll work the counter tonight."

It was a generous offer since Claire hated being bored and midweek couldn't be anything else.

Mandy lifted one of the diaries. "Did you want to read one?" she asked even though she had a good idea what her sister's answer would be. "It's, like, history, right?"

Claire shook her head. "I'm going to fill out scholarships applications. It would be kind of nice to eat while I'm in Boston."

So, when Mandy went through the back to their part of the motel, she took the diaries with her.

Dear Diary,

I got fifteen bull's-eyes out of eighteen rounds using the silver bullets. Mom was proud and I think Dad was too, a little. Of course, all he said was that we'd keep working until I managed eighteen out of eighteen.

I also got A's in three of my school subjects (English, History, and Home Ec) but do they mention that? Nope. Not a word. Most parents would be proud to have their child on the honor roll but mine? If it can't be used to kill or banish something, they don't really care.

Their priorities are skewed.

…

Mandy re-read that entry a couple times trying to figure out what "silver bullets" was code for, or what it could've been a code for back in 1969, but she kept coming up blank. Aside from Coors beer, (and were they even around back then?) the only thing Mandy could think of was drugs, and Mary had already made her opinion of narcotics very, very clear. (Mary plus an inebriated pass after the pep rally equaled one broken nose! BAMF!)

However, Mary's diary was filled with stuff like that—making silver bullets, learning the rituals to make "holy water" and "blessed blades", plus exorcisms and weapons training. It was weird.

It was also weird that Mandy was halfway through the first volume and she still hadn't figured out what Mary's parents did for a living, or rather her dad, because women didn't usually work outside the home in the '60s. It almost sounded like he was a big game hunter but that was stupid. How could her dad do that from Lawrence, Kansas? It hardly qualified as wild or mountainous.

With a sigh, Mandy set her confusion aside once again, and moved to the next entry.

…

Dear Diary,

Mr. Kieran made Johnny Winchester and me partners for the final assignment. It is so unfair! Winchester doesn't care about school. He just sits in the back reading auto manuals or sleeping. I'll end up doing all the work but we'll get the same mark. I'm tempted to do badly, except I can't. It's not "the Campbell Way" after all.

"If you have to do something, you do it to the best of your ability: no holding back," Mom's always saying and it is one thing we all agree on.

Besides, I don't want to fail, damn it!

I refuse to fail.

…

Dear Diary,

It's as bad as I feared. Winchester hasn't researched anything I asked him to. I don't think he's even read the textbook. He says he's done the map, but he won't let me see it, so I doubt it's actually done.

If he makes my mark drop, I really will hit him no matter what Dad might say. I'm going to GET that scholarship and DO something with my life. Something that's not hunting.

…

She sounded like Claire. Wanting so much more than what small-town middle-America had to offer. Poor Mary.

Poor Claire.

Dear Diary,

I hate to say this, but Winchester's map was fantastic. It was detailed, colorful, and interesting. He caught everything we'd discussed.

On the other hand, he put his hand on my butt and squeezed. I wanted to break his fingers. I couldn't, of course because it was bad enough when I "accidentally" broke that jerk's nose at the pep rally, but twice before Christmas? It would be a bad scene. A) it would be an unforgivable thing to do to the school's best running back-catcher person, and B) there would be questions about where I'd learned how to do it—questions that my family can't afford to have asked.

…

Cult, Mandy thought again, but not any of the ones she'd looked up.

...

–He said it's what the football team does to congratulate each other. I removed his hand and told him next time, he should shake my hand.

He smiled a creepy, leering smile and said, "So there IS going to be a next time? You want it, right?"

Chauvinist ass.

…

He was lucky Mary hadn't hit him, Mandy thought. She totally should have!

The descriptions of the training old man Campbell had put his daughter through sounded intense and ruthless and completely kick-ass. It kind of made Mandy want to take up Tae Kwon Do or Kung Fu. Not that anybody had ever tried to grab her ass, but it would be nice to know how to break their fingers if anybody did.

She yawned hard enough to make her head hurt. A glance at the clock showed that it was after 1 a.m. No wonder she was tired. She'd been up since six and she'd never exactly been a night owl. She marked her place and carefully put a big elastic around the fragile book to hold the pages together.

Mary Campbell would have to wait for another day.

Dear Diary,

John Winchester is a horrible, contemptible person!

He invited me to a party being given by a friend of his. At first I thought he was being nice then he told me that "the guys" thought I was "a bit frigid". He actually said he was willing to save me from that reputation. All I had to do was I kiss him at the party and make out with him a little.

I told him "No." I even added the thank you, to be polite. Then I said I didn't need the kind of reputation hanging around a greaser like him would give me.

That's when he said I was a cold, prejudiced snob, who thought I was so much better than anybody else because I came from California (not true!). Then he said, "If I didn't learn how to relax, I'd never get a boyfriend."

I admit I lost my temper. I yelled that if I ever wanted a selfish, brainless, shallow ASS in my life I'd think of him. Then I said he should go out on the field and learn how to play with his balls by himself since I certainly wasn't going to volunteer to do it.

We were in the cafeteria at the time so just about everyone heard us. Now Amy won't talk to me (and neither will Julie or Natalie) because she's been angling to become his girlfriend since September.

She can have him.

…

Mandy silently cheered Mary on.

Mary might have been a straight-arrow over-achiever but she had a toughness that made her classmates seem twice as wimpy. It made her seem more like she belonged in the present day rather than back then.

Yeah, okay, Mandy knew the Women's Rights Movement had barely gotten started when Mary was in school (viva la internet!), so the other girls' attitudes were more common than not, but Mary's comments at her classmates angling to get pinned or ringed, or their squee-ing because they got to wear their boyfriends' letter jacket? Those were things that Mandy had thought (and said).

Even now, in 2006, there were girls whose greatest ambition was to marry their high-school sweetheart and live in a big house. That was okay if it honestly was what they wanted to do, but that didn't make it okay for them to make bitchy comments about the girls who didn't want to do the June Cleaver thing.

Hel-LO! Women have choices now.

Sure, Mandy didn't want to leave Salvation, but she wasn't about to rush into marriage either. And not wanting to be wedded and bedded while still in her teens did not make her—or anyone else—godless or a dyke. It just made them different.

Mandy thought of Mary, and then of Claire, and sighed.

It wasn't easy being different.

That night Claire was at her second job, waitressing at the Biggerson's out by the highway, and Mom was finishing up the remittances and stuff, so Mandy was once again at the desk. It was halfway busy. The college students and the salesman had left, and another family and some vacationers had checked in, all of them stopping for the night before heading out to Spirit Lake, where they were going to spend a week camping, fishing and exploring. From what Mandy had heard other people say, it was a nice area for a vacation, so she'd told the tourists what she knew and what she'd heard. They'd seemed to appreciate it.

Mandy watched them shift into their rooms with a smile. She liked helping people. It made her feel good.

In between being an unofficial travel agent, Mandy read entry after entry of Mary Campbell's freshman year at Lawrence High School. Aside from the old-fashioned slang, like 'far out' and 'queer' (but not meaning gay), her experiences could've taken place at any time in any school. The way the students hung out in their little cliques was exactly the same as in her school. Mary's diaries talked of drugs and fights, and if they were sometimes more politically based than Mandy was used to (anti-war demonstrations weren't exactly big in 2006), other things were exactly the same.

…

Dear Diary,

I knew it would happen, but I didn't expect it to happen so fast. Amy knows how to hold a grudge and how to spread it around. All of her friends have stopped talking to me. They even move tables if I sit too close. They look at me while they whisper, so I'll know who they're talking about. Julie came right out and said it was because I'd tried to steal Winchester from Amy.

I tried to steal Winchester? Johnny Winchester!

Where were they during that scene in the cafeteria? Because they obviously saw something I missed.

I'm really upset right now. I came home and ran upstairs. Lawrence was supposed to be my fresh start; a place where nobody had any idea that my family was anything other than normal. I was going to have friends, people to go to the movies with or share some pizza.

It's not going to happen now.

…

It was a few days before Mary made another entry. Winchester's best friend, the quarterback, started singing a song at her and calling her "Mary Lou", so of course all the other jocks did too. Needless to say, Mary's entry that day was full of words that were (almost) not fit for a lady.

On the plus side, after the jocks got tired of singing, a girl named Liddy Walsh came up after school and talked with her. Liddy's dad had been in the army when he met her mom, and she was half-Korean. Most people outside Asia didn't know the difference between Korean, Japanese or Indonesian. Plus Liddy had lived most her life overseas, and she'd been places that most of the kids in Lawrence had only seen in movies.

In other words, she fit in about as well as Mary did.

They were partners in their non-conformity, which could lead to a decent friendship. For Mary's sake, Mandy hoped that's what happened.

Dear Diary:

Dad's late getting home. He hasn't called and neither has the man he was hunting with, Daniel Elkins. Elkins is a specialist. That's what Dad said when Mom asked but neither of them would tell me what he specializes in.

I know anyway, of course. I knew the moment I saw the dead man's blood in the fridge.

It's poison to vampires—

…

What the…

Vampires? Is she freaking serious?

…

—but not deadly. It would be enough to stun a couple, make them vulnerable enough to finish the job. Except you have to let them get in real close, too close. If Dad was taking on a nest of vampires…

I'm really, really worried and I hate it! HATE IT!

Parents shouldn't put their families through this. Not their spouses, not their kids. Nobody deserves to be left behind, wondering if they'll ever see you again.

…

Mandy had to stop reading because she couldn't process it. Mary was worried about vampires. Seriously?

She'd thought Mary's parents were part of a cult, but it sounded like it was something worse than that. Who taught their kids that vampires were real?

Wack jobs, that's who.

Freaky cult people who brainwashed their teenage daughters into sleeping with the 'head' of the 'family' and having eight or nine kids by the guy. The kind of people who let themselves be talked into believing that drinking the poison was a perfectly acceptable solution to life's ills (although Mary's folks seemed more the type to barricade themselves into the basement with guns and a year's supply of food and water). If that was the kind of stuff that was going to happen then Mandy didn't want to know about it.

It was one thing to read about it happening to strangers a continent away, but it was completely different when it was someone she knew closely… kind of knew. Reading Mary's diaries didn't actually mean Mandy knew her, but it was close.

It took two days for Mandy to talk herself into re-opening the diary.

It wasn't like there were a lot of other things to do in Salvation, and it was compelling…

For a while, the entries after that dealt with fairly normal things. Her dad had come home hurting but not 'turned'. Into a vampire! (Mandy could practically hear the Underworld theme as she read through those entries.) Whatever had really happened, it made Mary's resolve to get out of 'the family business' even stronger than before. She had thrown herself into her studies, determined to earn a scholarship to someplace else, someplace that wasn't Kansas. It was good, because Mary really needed to get away from her folks before she drank the Kool-Aid.

Unfortunately, studious Mary made for pretty boring reading. Every once in a while there'd be a tidbit tossed into the school gossip-and-homework report. Things like cleansing rituals and protective symbols, and the best way to banish various types of spirits, and Mandy would be thrown out of the ordinary once again.

That Sunday, Mandy got the afternoon off to go see a movie with her friends. It was fun, it was, to hang with Leila and Cindy and Rob, but half Mandy's mind was on Mary—Mary's life, Mary's family, Mary's choices. It was just so odd that a girl with such strength of character, who already knew that her parents' life was toxic, was so willing to buy into the idea of vampires and demons and ghosties and goblins being real. It didn't fit.

At the theater, her friends picked Tokyo Drift over Garfield, so her eyes watched Lucas Black get his ass handed to him in Japan while her mind wandered…

Yes, Mandy had always tried to keep an open mind about the legends of monsters. Even though she'd never experienced anything paranormal, it didn't mean it couldn't exist. After all, they used to think the world was flat and that was completely wrong. So it was possible (she'd always told herself) that there was more to this world than what could easily be seen.

But (and even in her head she knew she was whining), thinking theoretically that those things could exist was a lot different from meeting someone who actually believed they did exist.

Yet now she kind of knew three: First it was old man Halford and his mutilated cows. Then the McGillicuddys with their clippings and weather reports. Now Mary and her father who went out hunting vampires.

Was it possible they were right and Mandy was wrong?

When she got home, Mandy booted up the computer and started looking. She found just the sort of crap she'd been expecting.

There were sites devoted to first-hand accounts of paranormal encounters (ghost stories), americanmonsters and cryptomundo. Sites where the origins of monster myths were argued in terms that would make Joseph Campbell shudder. (She'd once watched a special on him with Claire.) There were rants for and against the rise of neo-paganism as a sign of humanity's increasing enlightenment. She also found links to urban fantasy authors like Tanya Huff and Chuck Shurley, because they wrote about supernatural creatures living among us. (Those she bookmarked to be checked out later.)

None of it helped her figure out if it was real.

Dear Diary,

Something really strange happened today during the awards ceremony. I was sitting in the bleachers with the rest of the ninth-graders and for some reason, I don't know why, I looked over at Johnny Winchester and he was looking at me. Our eyes met and it felt like the world tilted, and there was a plucked guitar string running between us. All of a sudden I needed to go to him, touch him, be with him, and I was sure he felt the same.

Then my name was called for the honor roll and I had to look away.

It broke the connection, but it still took me a moment to realize how strange that had been. I mean, he's not Romeo, I'm certainly not Juliet, and love at first sight is usually the result of a spell.

I ran through the Lord's Prayer and a couple of the other checks I knew. I didn't detect anything, but depending on what kind of spell it was, I wouldn't.

I don't think.

Anyway, to be safe I didn't look at him again, and when I came home I had a bath with blessed water with some of Mom's special herbs for added cleansing. I'm still a little spooked out.

It's a good thing that Winchester and I only have the one class together, and that school's nearly over. That should give this… whatever this is a chance to fade.

I really, really don't want to have to tell my Mom that someone or something is trying to curse me or cast a spell on me. Dad would barge into the school dousing everyone with holy water and spouting Latin.

I don't have many friends as it is, but that? I might as well give up trying to be normal and finish school by correspondence.

…

Mandy would have snickered, because it sounded like Mary had gotten into her mom's 'special herbs', except that Mary sounded really spooked.

Johnny Winchester was, in many ways, Mary's nemesis—the one person instrumental in making her freshman year a misery. For her to feel that he'd somehow shook her world? No wonder she was running home to check herself out for love spells or arrows from Cupid's bow. Hell, Mandy would've done the same thing if she'd ever felt that level of physical attraction towards someone she despised.

Not that she ever had.

Had a nemesis or felt that kind of spark. Neither of those. No sparkles. No world twirling. No heart-pounding faintness or lightness of being.

She was actually pretty glad of that. That kind of love sounded pretty darn uncomfortable. Like being dragged onto an amusement park ride she knew would make her sick, but going along anyway because everyone would think she was a wuss if she didn't.

Mandy wondered what they'd looked like—Mary and Johnny, Liddy, the Campbells and the rest of them. 1969 was a long time ago, but maybe there were pictures of Lawrence High's old graduating classes up on the web someplace. Did high schools even have 40-year reunions?

She clicked the desk's computer over to the browser and started searching. Just typing in their names got way too many results (mostly from useless genealogy sites), and it turned out that Lawrence High didn't post pictures of their graduating classes (not even through Facebook, which was supposed to be invading everyone's privacy). Mandy sighed. She'd have to use that Boolean Logic stuff if she wanted to get anywhere (and she was so not telling her sister because then Claire would chant "I told you so").

She decided to use "Lawrence High" AND ("Mary Campbell" OR "John* Winchester") as her search terms. It helped a little; the number of results went down to manageable (triple digits instead of six) but they didn't have what Mandy wanted. There were articles from the paper of the time saying how Johnny Winchester had run X-number of yards or scored Y-number of points, but the only pictures of him were when he was running down the field in his uniform. Of Mary, there was no mention whatsoever.

An hour. She'd spent an hour to find high school football pictures that could've come from anywhere and anytime.

Didn't matter, she decided.

She had a picture in her head of Mary as a slim blonde, probably athletic, and pretty, like Buffy, so she downloaded a picture of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Mary's dad would be that guy from The Shield ('cause he was seriously badass), and her mother would be Sigourney Weaver from Aliens (becauseRipley never got old). Winchester, she decided, would be Tom Welling from the early seasons of Smallville, and his buddy Brad would be the guy who played Lex Luthor—although with hair. Mandy didn't watch it anymore, but she could still appreciate the scenery.

She even printed out small pictures of the stars and tucked them carefully into the diaries. Mocking herself as she did so, but doing it just the same.

Then she went back to reading, wondering what was going to develop between the two over the summer. (And if Olivia Neutron-Bomb and John Travolta sang theme songs in her head, she was the only one who had to know.)