Old Sunnydale

Abe dropped her in Old Sunnydale under a sign that looked like it had been designed by a branding team that feared irony but loved a revenue stream.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND!

The old drag had a curated cuteness to it in daylight. Low buildings in throwback California style. Faded charm polished into a sellable patina. Tourists in black lace buying pastries beside locals who’d either survived here too long to care or had turned caring into an identity. Costumed demons and fake vampires wandered between coffee shops and vintage storefronts as if this were perfectly ordinary. People here had always been good at looking straight at something impossible and deciding it was a theme.

Nova took it in through the car window and said, “Not to judge, but one must wonder if this is the best way to explain away a tragic geological event.”

Abe snorted. “Imagine how the people of Roswell feel. Besides, you always said you wanted to live somewhere with culture.”

“I was thinking more like Portland.”

He gave her a look. She pretended not to see it, then tested the waters anyway.

“You know I could always look into doing something abroad…”

“Not in a million years.” He pulled up to the curb. “That stuff’s for parents who can’t stand their kids. I happen to like you.”

He said it lightly, but Nova felt the old architecture under it. Not anger. Not even irrationality, exactly. Just a wall, well-built and well-maintained, between her and any version of life that took her too far from where he could reach.

“Remember, curfew’s ten—”

“If you’re so worried, just buy me a phone already.”

“I don’t want you living life through a screen.”

“I’d even be happy with a grimy crime-show burner phone!”

That got a grin out of him, but it faded fast. He looked at her the way he did when he was about to say the thing beneath the thing.

“Hey, bug. I know it’s not easy, but this time we’re staying put. It might take some time, but… you’ll find your people.”

Nova watched a tourist crouching down to adjust her kid’s plastic fangs. Mother and child, both grinning, both completely at home in a town built on top of its own grave.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I don’t think my people are in Sunnydale.”

The Sink sat in a converted warehouse at the heart of the old district, all indie salvage and tasteful decay. Food stalls. An organic wine bar. Vintage record sellers with strong opinions about pressing quality. At night, bands played in the courtyard. In the morning, it was the gathering place of Old Sunnydale: the hip, the broke, the alternative, the people who used irony as a food group and wore it well. Above one record stall, a cracked framed flyer for Dingoes Ate My Baby hung crooked on the brick.

Nova found a corner table, opened her laptop, and the Cambridge application appeared again like an accusation with a deadline.

Send or Save for later.

She stared at it a moment longer than she needed to. Then she thought of Abe’s face in the car. The wall. The warmth. The way they amounted to the same thing.

“Sorry, Dad,” she murmured, and hit send.

The thrill lasted maybe two seconds: a bright flare of rebellion, the particular rush of doing something irreversible. Then guilt arrived on schedule, and she packed up her things and followed the student drift toward the bus stop.

Old Sunnydale kids clustered there in their own little weather systems. More denim. More chipped polish. More attitude. More faces arranged into expressions that suggested they had been born already tired of nonsense and had only grown more tired since. Nova hovered at the edge, which was where she usually hovered, and tried to locate a point of entry. Somebody laughed, shifted half a step, and the little circle closed again without even noticing her.

Two kids sharing a vape were dissecting Vampire Weekend with the solemnity of minor philosophers.

“And I’m like, if you’re gonna call it Vampire Weekend,” the first one said, “fuckin’ book Vampire Weekend.”

“False advertising,” agreed the second.

This, Nova decided, was her moment.

“Or just throw a Ren Faire,” she offered. “At least the Renaissance was cool.”

They looked at her with the specific blankness reserved for people who had not been invited into the conversation and had arrived anyway.

She pushed on, because backing away too soon somehow always felt worse than the original mistake. “Jousting, enlightenment… falconry?”

Nothing.

Nova retreated with the practised speed of a girl who knew exactly when a social experiment had failed and had a lot of data to draw from.

Nearby, a fashion-model-perfect girl in Slayer drag was posing in front of an Insta-wall mural that read KEEP SUNNYDALE WEIRD. She adjusted her stake. She adjusted her pout.

“Hey, you.”

Nova turned, brightening before reason could catch up. “Me?”

“Yeah. Can you scooch? You’re ruining my shot.”

Nova moved.

The Slayer reframed herself and pouted into the void with the commitment of someone for whom this was not play but profession. Nova was almost grateful when a bus wheezed up to the curb and opened its doors.

She boarded, took a window seat, and pressed her forehead against the glass.

The city changed in stages, the way a lie gets more elaborate the further you carry it. Old Sunnydale’s cracked sidewalks and hand-painted signs gave way to newer paving, wider lanes, the sudden gleam of communities named by people who had never lived in them. Maple Court. Monarch. Tapestry. Each one gated. Each one landscaped to within an inch of its life. All of them built on top of what had been, not very long ago, a hole in the earth large enough to swallow an entire town and everyone in it.

Nobody on the bus looked out the window. Nova always did. She couldn’t help it. There was something hypnotic about watching a place try so hard to have no past.