Jody

Setting / temporal marker: The story is set in the present day. A movie theater near Jody’s area has Moana 2 playing — “you walk across it and you’re standing at a place that’s filled with places. And the first one is you walk across the world, movie theater writing, which has Moana two on it.” The story is in New York.

Household / family:
Jody has no parents — “she has 10 cats and 10 dogs and no parents.” “She basically has to take care of all the things by herself.” Her younger sister, age six, helps her — “her younger sister who is six helps her, but that’s mostly it.” Additional siblings: ages five, three, two, and one. The littlest ones (the one-, two-, and three-year-olds) go to “pre-K” / “before pre-K” (pre-pre-K).

Animals: “She has 21 animals, but 20 animals and one bird” — Ellie insists the bird is separate from the animals in her taxonomy. Specifically: “10 cats and 10 dogs.”

Food / cooking: “The only thing that she uses to make food is cookbooks and the instructions on the packets.”

Special ability — the medical fairy: “She has a medical fairy that made her room the coolest room of all.” “She can just ask for something or wish for something and it’ll come true.”

Gear and supplies:

• “She always keeps five blankets in her backpack” — “two tiny ones and three big ones.”
• Three backpacks: one mostly on her back carrying food; two carrying sleeping bags.
• “92 bags and each one, they were big and each one had a tent in it with sleeping bags.” The tent is compared to “the one that Cypher went into, that went and used to live in” — Cypher is Ellie’s real-life sister, who lived in a tent for a while.
• “Another bag and it was filled with bedtime books.”
• An Alexa device with “a little power circuit” that “had 10 places for you to plug in.”

Story: The School Bus Day

“The first big jump happens really, really, really early in the story.”

The school is “practically 10 miles away.” They had “only gone two miles” when a tree fell on the bus. “A tree fell on the bus. Everybody was safe, but a tree fell on the bus and destroyed the bus.” They “couldn’t walk eight miles” (the remaining distance).

“It was a dirt road that led to the main highway that led to the school.” They had to “walk up the whole street and then hitchhike on the highway.” They got a hitchhike “from a different school bus, which told they would send another school bus because they couldn’t call.” Jody’s school “had two buses” so it sent the other bus with “the principal in it.” “The principal was the owner of the other bus so she could just drive quickly to get them.” They rode that bus all the way to school.

“It was a blazing hot day.” “It had been raining earlier.” Jody “had bought her an umbrella. So everybody, even the bus driver was just under an umbrella and just sat on the ground waiting for the bus.” They “got to go home early because of the day.”

Story: The Mysterious Forest Path

On the way home, “the bus stopped because they had saw something out of the ordinary.” “A yellow flying something zigzagging above the bus.” Everyone on the bus, including the bus driver, looked forward at it.

They “all took hike through the woods.” There was “this path that went down through the trees.” “Everybody says that it never ended because they took the path and they just kept walking, walking, walking once a stop.” “Nobody knew how far that path went.”

Jody carried her one-year-old and two-year-old sisters “for the entire ride in a blanket.” She carried them “for half of the walk until it got dark.”

“When they turned around and walked back the other way, it never ended.” They “kept walking past the same benches they had passed before” and “the exact same thing over and over again, even the trees.” Then: “there was a big stone wall with a door. Open that door and you walked through the exact same thing. And then you saw that door again and it was the exact same door.”

“It was just endless on and on until it was daytime again. They walked through the night until it was daytime.”

Then: “there’s a tree on both sides blocking. They couldn’t go back because there was a giant tree behind them. They couldn’t go forward because they were giant trees.” “They couldn’t go through the woods because there was a giant tree on that side that blocked all parts. They couldn’t climb over. And they couldn’t go to the other side.”

They were trapped. Jody whispered something and produced supplies. She produced “92 bags and each one, they were big and each one had a tent in it with sleeping bags.” They set up the big tent; Jody also had the bag of “bedtime books.” “They all read books together and went to sleep reading books.” She had Alexa and the “little power circuit” with “10 places for you to plug in.”

The Time Anomaly

“In the morning after the wrong night had passed,” Jody asked Alexa what day it was. Alexa said “December 11th, 2024.” “Her mouth dropped open, literally.”