Prologue: Kylie Juniper
I was nearly sixteen years old when my father took me on a weeklong canoe trip at the Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Provincial Park, located in Ontario, Canada. For as long as I can remember, I wished that I could stay home and not participate in the trip. I had bugged my parents over and over again to let me stay behind, but my puppy face technique never worked on them. The only way I was convinced to come was that Dad promised that if I could make it through this trip, then he would take me to get my driver’s license. By that point, I had to come.
My name’s Kylie Juniper, and I’m from an adventurous family known as Camp Juniper. For my sixteenth birthday, I wanted to go to the mall in North Tonawanda, New York, our hometown, and pick out the latest fashion designs, but it was time to flush that dream down the toilet. I was going to be celebrating my sixteenth birthday on Lady Evelyn Lake, one of the many lakes that hid in the Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Provincial Park.
At first, I didn’t really mind this trip because I like to canoe, but my perspective of it changed almost immediately when Todd, the hottest guy in school, told me that there were nothing but bugs out there. He had been there when he was a little younger, and he shared the negatives of the Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Provincial Park in the cafeteria on a Friday afternoon, a week before school got out. He told me that there was nothing out there, and the portages were usually infested with bugs. Portages are long hikes through the forests that canoeists take whenever there’s a dead end, or if they want to take a shortcut to the next lake. Like most girls, I totally despise bugs. Well, I probably hate them the most because I’m a bug magnet. Zip, end of story. I can’t take a single step without getting hammered by bugs. Just to my luck, the mosquitoes out in Canada were said to be enormous, and that meant that they would take a big bite out of you, as well as the biting flies. Just what I needed. Mosquitoes the size of a fingernail and flies that wouldn’t leave you alone. Yeah, Dad had packed ultimate bug spray, bug jackets, and bug hats, but I doubted that they would keep the bugs off of me.
I thought this trip would be a disaster, but on the night of the second day, I met somebody—a boy. A mysterious boy named Ihaan, and he became a part of Camp Juniper, basically to hang out with me because I was the only kid on the trip, and I needed somebody else to hang out with. Ihaan was the one, but as the journey progressed, he became more of a threat than a kindhearted teenager. The events that led up to that day were equitable, but in the end, I never looked at canoeing or Ihaan the same ever again. Although, every story has to have a beginning, and a story like this needs to start at the very beginning. It can’t start in the middle. It has to start at the beginning. This is the story of a legend, a tragedy; a legend known as The Ghost of Ontario.
