have faith that I’ll be able to slip out of here without being noticed as long as I keep my head down.
I pull on a black T-shirt and my favorite faded jeans before slipping on my boots. I don’t have much in the green duffel bag I brought with me, but it has enough clothes to last me awhile. The credit cards in my wallet access all the money I have in my bank, but I know if I want to disappear without being traced, I won’t be able to continuously use them. I need to pull some cash out and make do until I can find a job and get some money coming in.
When I get everything together, I take a deep breath and leave the room, setting out on a new adventure.
First things first: I need to find some transportation and an obscure place to stay. I’m ready to walk away from it all. I’ll admit I feel a little lost on what I’ll do with myself, but I haven’t felt this free in a long time. I’m going to make Mom proud of me and be a man who stands on his own two feet and lives by his own rules.
I don’t want to go back to that life. The fame—reporters always in my face—I’m done with it all. I want a life of simplicity, and that’s what I’m going to set out to find.
CELEBRITY POP BUZZ NIGHTLY
The camera zooms in on Linda Bronson, the leading gossip queen on the hit television show Celebrity Pop Buzz Nightly. Her long, blond hair flows over her shoulders in soft waves as her blue eyes stare straight into the lens.
“Ace White, the face of the hottest up-and-coming band, Wicked White, seems to have the world at his feet. His band has just scored their fifth number-one single on the pop charts and is on track to being one of the biggest draws for concerts this year.
“Still, even with all of that, Ace White shocked the world when he gave his band the middle finger at the beginning of his sold-out show and walked off stage. No one has seen him since he disappeared from his hotel room following the funeral of the woman who raised him. He left no word with anyone who knew him. Not even his tour manager, Jane Ann Rogers, has heard from him, which has put everyone who works for Wicked White on edge. It’s a mystery as to why would he walk away from everything—one I’m determined to get to the bottom of and will be making it my personal mission to uncover. For Celebrity Pop Buzz Nightly, I’m Linda Bronson.”
IRIS
She’s dead.
No matter how many times those words roll through my brain, I still have a hard time believing it’s true. Gran has only been gone a little over a week now, but accepting that I’ll never see her walk through her front door again still cuts like a knife.
“Did you find it yet?” Birdie asks as she sits next to me on the living room floor of the trailer I grew up in while Gran raised me.
I shake my head as I continue to sift through the box of papers in front of me. “We’ll never find the deed to this place at this rate.”
Birdie shoves her blond hair out of her face as she continues to dig through the box in front of her. “No shit. Obviously Gee-Gee didn’t believe in a filing system. Are you sure it can’t be anywhere else?”
“No,” I reply. “All of Gran’s paperwork is in these two boxes. It has to be in here somewhere.”
I flip through a couple more papers, and then bingo! “Found it!”
“Thank God,” Birdie says as she shoves the box away and relief floods her dark brown eyes. “I was beginning to think it was a lost cause.”
I take the paper out and examine the deed closely. Willow Acres has been in my family for generations. It all started when my great-great-grandfather opened up part of his farm for his daughter and her husband to pull a trailer onto the property to live. Since then the trailer park has expanded to now hold fifteen trailers, with most of the tenants living here since I was a kid. My place isn’t glorious; it’s no mansion by any means, but this one-thousand-square-foot trailer has been home to me since my mother ran off when I was four and never came back.
“Good, now we can take it