I wrote this two years ago, but I never really edited it and figured I might as well see what people have to say about it. I thought it might be an okay first post story. It's kind of long, so I hope you all can bear with it. But I also have a question: how does one go about posting multiple chapters? Individual topics or all in one topic? Thanks! Until then, here's chapter one and the beginning of chapter two:

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One

Fireworks hissed as they flew up into the sky over the Kay County Fair, the colors exploding and crackling into the clouds. Amelia Dahl watched them at one of the picnic tables in the back of the midway section, alone as the crowds had flocked to the other side of the fair to watch the detonations in the sky.

That year she had applied to work at the fairgrounds for a local man, at the Jon Boy’s Ice Cream stand. The job would only be two weeks long and she had figured it would be easy money before she headed off to college. She figured she was astute to think in such a manner, and she had slapped a baseball cap on her head and tied on the apron with eagerness.

Maybe digging out the hard ice cream and being patient with aggravated mothers fussing with droning toddlers would have been easier if her personal life hadn’t decided to take a nosedive into unpleasantness after her first day.

She sighed heavily at her picnic table as she thought about it, looking down at the words etched across its wooden surface. The night was growing heavier as Amelia sat away from the fireworks display, having gotten off work a half an hour ago. She knew she should be heading to her car to drive home and sleep, but she couldn’t will her legs to make her stand up and return to the dismal place she called home.

She couldn’t figure out how her whole life had gone sour in almost two weeks’ time, the fair nearing its end along with all of the buoyancy she had possessed.

The mess started when the first bit of news came her way after her first day of work at Jon Boy’s, upon coming home to see her mother on the phone. Her mother’s eyes had shot to her with a warning look, letting her know she was going to tell her something she wasn’t going to like once she was off. Amelia had stuffed her face with food in the kitchen, waiting for her mother to finish with the phone and disclose whatever nasty piece of information she had come across.

And then it came once she was situated at the kitchen table with her hands folded in her lap, her mother looking as if she was in a business meeting as she addressed her.

Amelia’s father was moving out of Darlington, moving to California. All the way across the country, thousands of miles away. That’s what it was. That was the first thing to happen that started the nosedive.

Her mother and father had divorced when she was only ten, but she had survived it just fine as her dad lived only twenty-or-so blocks away and she was able to see him every weekend or whenever she wanted. Though her mother, Miranda Dahl, received custody of her, she was a strict, humorless woman who enjoyed her work above anything else. Amelia had always found more of a relationship with her father: a buoyant, adventurous man who did things on a whim and took life in its entirety. He looked older than he actually was but had a young heart, never letting physical limitations stop him from doing anything.

She had always wanted his confidence, his quick thought and zest for things. But the shadow of her mother was over her and she had always felt dull standing next to the wonderful Glen Dahl, while she was too serious and too cautious, traits she had acquired from her mother. No matter how she felt about herself, he loved her and she enjoyed her weekends with him.

The news of his leaving was a sledgehammer against her world, knocking her off her base and sending her into a state of confusion and shell shock. She knew she wasn’t going to be living with her mom anymore and was heading off to college, but she had always figured her father would still be around, near enough for her to visit anytime.

But he was leaving her. Going to a place where she could only visit him once or twice a year, in comparison to twice a week. She had ran to her car after her mother had told her, driving to his house and racing through his front door to yell at him, to pull a reasonable argument out of him.

He had apologized but professed it was something he had wanted to do his entire life, and now that she was heading off to college she didn’t need him around anyway. In his words, “You’ll still have your mother nearby, and your life’ll be racing off in an entirely different direction once you’ve left the house anyway. You’ll be fine. You don’t need me anymore.” He followed this up with one of his audacious smiles.

Right! Fine! His words fell heavily upon her and she found herself too bitter to find the words to argue with him. She stayed at his house for several nights, and he moved to California three days after she first heard the news. He was a very on the whim kind of person. She tried to handle his quick departure as well as she could, but she felt herself turning sluggish.

Maybe she would have handled the news of his leaving better if the rest of her week hadn’t been so awful. But everything had decided to leave her in a quick string of events.

She hadn’t been a popular girl while attending Darlington High School, but she had always been with one thing that held her high in the ranks:

Brendan Ross. Her boyfriend.

He had been one of those young men with hair that was light and styled, wearing the best clothes and possessing a flawless sense of humor. Not to mention he was delightfully understanding and an all around nice guy who could maneuver through any situation with ease. He had pockets full of friends and stood above all the other guys in the high school.

Amelia still had no idea how she had come to be his girlfriend. She had always been the strange green-eyed, shorthaired girl who kept quiet in the classes and never joined any clubs or went to the parties on the weekends. It was magic how one day he had bumped into her as she turned around after closing her locker, and how a week later he was finding out her email address and phone number to ask her out.

They had been going out for two years, and it was miraculous for her. It was what marked her throughout her high school career, the one thing that sent her from Amelia Dahl the nobody, to Amelia Dahl the brunette chick dating Brendan Ross. The elevation was enough that suddenly she was going places and integrated into the finest of the Darlington teenage community. Though Brendan’s crowd had never accepted her fully, she still made friends, however stiff and artificial they seemed. It was all worth being with him.

He had always been good to her. He had adored her. It had been evident to everyone that they would last beyond high school. They were attending the same college in the Fall and had already made plans for all sorts of things, including future living arrangements after the dorms.

How miraculous she had been, Amelia Dahl, Brendan Ross’s girlfriend. Her father may have been moving all the way across the country, but she still had the other part of her world after hearing the news from her mother, she still had her anchor that kept her grounded to her world.

For a short time anyway.

After four days of working at the Jon Boy’s Ice Cream stand at the Kay County Fair, Brendan had taken her out to dinner and told her they were over before she could even touch her salad.

She was pathetic enough that she even thought he had been joking at first, settling down her fork and looking up at him with an incredulous expression. He hadn’t smiled though and she spent the rest of the dinner trying not to sob into her napkin or punch him in the face as he kindly explained his reasoning and grasped her hand in his.

He had said they would continue a relationship as friends, but she had never believed that. It seemed cruel the way he had dropped her entirely, shaking her off his leg and leaving her to fall away from everything that had been built between them. The devastation passed as she talked herself through it, comforting and reassuring herself that she was going off to college soon and she would a find a new guy and that she didn’t need a guy right then anyway.

When the next day came and she picked up the phone after a long day at work, she found that all of her friends had disappeared just as magically as Brendan had arrived. Just as he had left her, so did they, since he had given them to her really.

So now she was alone. Her friends had abandoned her, the person she had been with for two years had abandoned her, her father had abandoned her. Her entire world was gone. It had kicked her out and now she was flailing somewhere, trying to catch her balance again.

At first she had clung onto to some sort of optimism, but the loneliness got to her. Her mother was always gone at work and her house was empty and she had nowhere else to go besides her job. And that had turned from some easy summer occupation to a cesspool she had to lug herself through everyday.

The events of those two weeks seemed to have triggered something in her. She had been tilted, knocked around until she was off balance and her identity slipped from her fingers. She didn’t feel like herself; she felt as if she had dropped it or dished it out like the ice cream she sold to screaming brats and tired mothers.

She even felt hollow when her father called her after situating himself in his new house in California. She heard the empty words slipping past her lips, topics lost to her.

Here Amelia was, weeks away from college and a new life, and she had no idea who she really was as a person. She felt painfully dull, unsure, unconfident. Everything she thought she had been the past two years had fled with everyone else and now she was a skeleton, stripped of all the assurance she once had.

So the Kay County Fair was coming to an end, the fireworks blasting away in the sky, summer collapsing into a finish. Amelia sat at her picnic table between a fried dough stand and a greasy smelling restaurant covered by a red and white tent, staring down the lanes of games flashing their vibrant colors and seeing the outline of the glow from the midway section.

How bored she was sitting there, wearing her red apron with cursive white Jon Boy’s Ice Cream splayed across the front, marking her as one of the drab laborers trapped in a box of fake plants and blinking bulbs all day. She got to hear the shouts from the rides and smell the countless smells of the fair, but she couldn’t even push herself to go enjoy herself when she had the chance.

She could go watch the fireworks from where everybody else was. It wouldn’t kill her, and it would be better than going home to her dark empty house. But either way, she would be alone.

Her mind drifted off to how her life had been a month before. Just a month ago she was cuddling up beside Brendan at the beach with everyone, feeling more unstoppable than she ever had. So she had still been rather quiet in front of the other girls, but she had some sort of comfort with her life and she knew that every weekend she had someplace to be and someone who wanted to see her.

Does my life rely so much on other people? Amelia shook her head as she thought this, wondering what had ever happened to the independence she had once possessed. She wished then that she could be like her father, full of courage and never questioning herself, never faltering and feeling unsure. She wished she could be in California with him then, in the sunshine with a clean slate in front of her and her entire life in Darlington left behind.

California would make her life glamorous, quite possibly. Before this she had needed Brendan to make her life glamorous. Two years of his presence made her forget how to act like she did before. Or maybe before she had been without anything and he had given her something. Either way, she had nothing again, or nothing she could see.

Two years, two years of her life. And then he leaves her because he wants to try other things now, right after they had planned so much together? He leaves her because he had grown tired with the relationship?

It made sense. And yet it didn’t, because she hurt from it. She wrapped her arms around herself and rested her chin against her shoulder, wondering how she had forgotten herself in those two years, how she could have handed her personality over to him just because she had felt comfortable, wondering what she had been before that and how she could get it back. How boring of a person was she to build her life entirely around others and make nothing for herself and add nothing to herself?

Her entire world had gone to disarray and she had no substantial clue about anything anymore, and she hated that.

California. Dad. She should have told him about everything when he had called her. Why hadn’t she? She thought about it for a moment and couldn’t imagine finding the words. Why couldn’t she find the words?

Furious with herself, she kicked at the dirt and slumping over the picnic table, putting her hands to her forehead. She closed her eyes, shut out the world, willed the world away.

Her stomach twisted inside her and she rested her head in the nooks of her arms on the tabletop. She waited for the nausea to pass but it didn’t. Instead it worsened, a headache joining it until she decided she should just head home and take some medicine, to escape the strange sickness that had come over her, to get away from that place and the curse it seemed to have brought her.

Turning away from the table, her movements were sluggish and she felt stiff, as if she couldn’t remove herself from the bench. She tried to stand only to find her legs giving out beneath her. She plopped back onto the picnic table bench, her hands feeling heavy on her lap and her head hung low.

What’s going on? she groaned in her head, closing her eyes and rubbing at her temples. She saw stars of myriad colors explode behind her eyelids as she did this.

Her headache increased sevenfold then and she doubled over, placing her elbows on her knees.

This was the last thing she needed. She figured all of the stress had finally built up and was causing her physical pain, that she had worried herself so much that she had brought this sickness on.

Her headache grew focused and she found herself unable to form another thought as she sat doubled over from the pain. The present seemed to blur then and she blacked out - just for a moment.

When her thoughts began to clear up and make sense she sat up a little bit, feeling the headache fade until she felt as if she hadn’t been sick at all just a moment before. The heaviness left her hands and her head until she felt extraordinarily light.

Confused and feeling faint, Amelia opened her eyes.

Two

The first thing Amelia noticed was that it wasn’t nighttime anymore. She straightened herself quickly, panic filling her as she wondered if her blackout had lasted longer than she thought. She looked up at the gray sky and felt her heart flutter with despair.

Easing herself off the picnic table bench, she gazed around and brought her hands to her chest in bewilderment as she took in the surroundings.

The entire world seemed to have been rearranged around her. The lanes of games had disappeared, as well as the red and white tent of the restaurant she had been sitting next to just a moment before. Despite the change in scenery she could still see she was at a fair, though it didn’t seem to be the Kay County Fair she had just been working at.

Whirling around, she looked at the light blue and white tents, at the old games and the shabby buildings that were positioned differently than what she had grown used to in the past several weeks. Staring down at her feet she saw that the blacktop was gone and a dirt path snaked through the lanes of shops and old games, the light bulbs large and bulky, broken in some places.

Letting out a cry, she put her hands to her face and looked back at the picnic table she had just been sitting at. It had been a brown, etched up thing just a moment before, but now it was green and all of the names and words that had been carved into it were gone, not a mark at all across the surface.

Feeling a shout catch in her throat, she backed away from the table and turned to run down the dirt path. There was a slight wind and clouds of dirt rose as she ran, making her cough and falter until she was gasping and shouting in front of the midway.

Nobody was around. All of the workers and performers she had seen earlier were nowhere in sight. All of the fairgoers who had been perusing through the lanes and enjoying the sights, they had all vanished.

Everything was old. The empty rides were rusted and the Ferris wheel was smaller, painted different colors than it had been. Many areas where there had been rides or games or cages of animals were now empty. It seemed as if she was looking at the same Kay County Fair, but how it had existed decades before.

Grabbing at the hems of her apron, she stood motionless in front of the old rides and a game she didn’t recognize, a whirl of dirt puffing up around her feet as a breath of wind came by. She felt the corners of her eyes welling up and she shook her head, looking around at the vacant pathways and the light of day blaring down.

What had happened? She had just gone sick momentarily and come down with a nasty headache, and suddenly the entire fair had changed around her? It didn’t make any sense. She knew she had blacked out, but it had just been a moment of vagueness, a spot of darkness.

“Hello?” Amelia cried out through the tightness in her throat. Her voice sounded raspy and she wiped at her eyes, looking around once more at the unfamiliar scenery. “Hello, is anybody here?”

She heard a scuffling noise behind her and she jumped, whirling around to see a fat rat scuttle under one of the flaps of the tent. Letting out a shriek, she closed her eyes and put her hands over her face, telling herself that she was just having a dream and when she opened her eyes she would be looking at Kay County Fair at nighttime and hear fireworks in the distance.

But when she opened her eyes everything looked the same. She hit her fists against her temples, willing her vision to change.

“Oh god, I’m dreaming, I’ve lost my mind. Please, please, go back to how you looked before.” she whispered to herself, squinting her eyes shut and trying that again. She even gave the skin on her forearm a sharp pinch. But everything was still the same again when she opened her eyes and she clung at her Jon Boy’s apron, confused and scared.

A soft scuffling noise came again from behind her and she turned jerkily to see if it was another rat or something even worse. She saw nothing but noticed one of the tent flaps fluttering suddenly. No breeze had gone by.

Nervousness clenching her stomach, she walked stiffly over to the flap and pulled it back slightly, peering inside to see if anybody was around. If somebody was, then she could at least find some answers to what was going on.

(more later. Sorry for the length!!)