Something had happened to June when she was ten years old, something she had pushed from her mind and never refound, not even all those years later when she awakened in front of the monsters at the ill-fated institution.
Before it happened, she had been a different little girl, one who delighted in the simplest of routine pleasures—coloring at the table while her mother cooked, practicing braiding the hair of her dolls so she’d know how to do her own one day, convincing her older brother to let her sit on his back and ride him around the living room like a horse. She didn’t like scary stories and wasn’t intrigued by darkness or pain like she eventually grew to be.
Everything was how it should have been, unthinking and never ending in its constant state of normal. She was a delight to her parents, to her classmates, to the people at her church. Everyone was always telling Mom and Dad what a sweet, obedient little girl they had raised. And June loved to hear it, loved to have it confirmed for her that she was doing right.
Then one day when she was ten, June woke up with a headache and felt as though an immense amount of time had passed in her mind, but not in the reality of her bedroom, her house, her family, or the planet itself. She’d had an awful, prolonged nightmare but couldn’t remember the details, no matter how desperately she clawed at them. In fact, the more she did, the more they dissipated like smoke.
So June stopped trying to remember. She stopped going on her nightly bike rides to the wooded area that looked over her town, suddenly illogically afraid of the entire area. She went on with her life, grateful to be somewhere secure and safe, grateful to have a stupid brother that made her want to punch him, grateful to have food and shelter and comfort.
But new values grew in her after the mysterious nightmare had scared her straight, new hopes and dreams, things she hadn’t considered before. June now felt lucky to have a life like hers. Suddenly, things that others thought were scary or distasteful were interesting to her, and she felt that exploring such feelings could teach her something useful, something that could help her protect herself from the deadly bliss that her previous ignorance had offered. She felt obligated to turn this knowledge into something important, was desperate to discover whatever fate awaited her in adulthood and work toward it as hard as she could.
But her parents seemed to be bothered by postnightmare June. No matter what she did or how genuinely open she tried to be, they were suddenly and constantly disappointed in her, giving her puzzled looks, raising their eyebrows and whispering behind her back. Strange, she heard them say. Off. They noticed right away that June’s number of friends had dropped significantly.
Then one day, Mom told June that they were going to the doctor. Nothing ever came from the appointment, but what June heard her mother say about her disturbed June so deeply that she decided to ignore that it ever happened, erase it from her mind forever.
“Something’s wrong with my daughter,” Mom told the doctor, who looked unconvinced, as the ten-year-old who sat before him seemed perfectly fine. On the counter in the white and sterile room, there was a newspaper with a headline reporting multiple accounts of an unidentified flying object in local skies. “I don’t know how to explain it, but you’ve got to believe me—she’s changed. It’s like it happened overnight, a little while back.”
June didn’t feel like she had changed, but if she had, it was in a good way.
“You’ll have to be more clear,” the doctor said, obviously irritated at the waste of his time, but what did he care as long as he got paid in the end? “How exactly did she change?”
“It’s the strangest thing, the most bothersome thing. Her entire personality is different,” Mom said, insistent. “It’s almost like my daughter was taken away and replaced with someone who looks exactly like her.”