The Girl From Hicksville Finds Herself

Susan, 19, is bored with life on the homestead, with her parents, Bud and Elaine. Susan's behaviour has got worse recently and she is rude and disrespectful to her parents, who remembered her as a sweet polite girl. Susan meets Matt, who promises to take her away from Hicksville, to show her another life. Susan tells her parents, who disapprove of her leaving to find herself, but she goes with Matt. Matt takes her to various motels on a journey to find Susan's Ease Spot. He is a mystic and tells her she has the most powerful aura he has ever seen, and that she must find a certain location where she will feel at ease. He searches for this location, reading several clues on the way. Matt explains to Susan that she must relocate to prevent the Earth, the planet, from falling out of equilibrium, which will cause natural disasters. She is convinced and lets Matt take her at night to a homestead a few hundred miles from her former home, which is very similar to the farm where her parents live, but which is also different somehow. Susan does feel at ease there, and Matt tells her the aura he saw about her has now been absorbed by the planet. Matt then disappears. Susan goes to sleep. She wakes up puzzled, but then decides to get back to her parents' home. She has no money, so has to hitch-hike home. On the way, she gets into several cars and a truck, but all the drivers she encounters, somehow look like an older version of Matt at various ages. When she gets home, Susan explains what happened to her. Bud and Elaine believe she has had a psychotic breakdown and that Matt is a figment of her imagination. Susan pleads with her parents not to think she is insane, and have her assigned to a mental hospital, where she would be turned into a vegetable. Instead, she suggests they actually move to the new location, a few hundred miles away, where she would feel at ease, and where she has found her Ease Spot. When they look over the new farmhouse, the agent there resembles Matt, according to Susan, but Elaine dismisses this, as all men resemble Matt to Susan. They decide to move there for the sake of Susan's mental health. Susan is genuinely happy at her new location, even though the life there is effectively the same as it was in their former place. She is now well behaved again and the sweet polite girl she used to be, but she is still in Hicksville, as it were.