Real Shadows - M.E. Clayton Page 0,1
where the police didn’t look at me like I was crazy.
Ignoring the food on the floor, I walked over to the bookshelf, grabbed the silver bunny, and held on until I could function enough to start packing up my life again.
Chapter 1
Fallon~
Most people would balk at driving across the country with their life savings in a suitcase, but desperation overshadowed common sense at this point.
Fleeing California-which is exactly what I was doing-with everything I had seemed like a sound decision at the time. And if I did end up getting robbed at gunpoint, well, there were worse things that could happen to a person, and that thought, in itself, was as grim as it got.
As self-centered creatures, we always think our worries and woes are the worst out there, but, if given the choice, I’d rather get robbed than raped. I’d rather get robbed than murdered. I’d rather get robbed than lose a child. I’d rather get robbed than live in constant fear of a threat I couldn’t identify.
Hence, why I was fleeing California and heading towards North Dakota.
Why North Dakota, you ask?
Because no one lived in goddamn North Dakota.
Well, that’s not entirely true, I suppose. Lots of people lived in North Dakota. But they lived in the ‘big’ towns of Fargo and Grand Forks. My destination was a little nowhere town called Brant. Imagine any small town surrounded by farmlands, with only one high school, maybe two grocery stores, and one auto shop that could charge you an arm and leg but didn’t because the owner is your baseball coach.
That was Brant, North Dakota.
Ideally, it wasn’t a place you wanted to move to if your goal was to be invisible, but I’ve been trying that method for over six years and it hasn’t worked for me. After calling my landlord to give him my thirty-day notice, calling all necessary utility companies, packing my few belongings, and withdrawing every cent I had from the bank, I had purchased a burner phone, called the only person in the world I still kept in contact with, and headed towards North Dakota.
I had grown up in foster care after losing my parents when I was seven. And while it had been rough to lose my parents the way I did, foster care hadn’t been as horrible as it could have been. Oh, I was familiar with neglect and abuse, but I never endured anything I couldn’t come back from.
I had been a shy child, and the fact that I had been scrawny hadn’t helped me much. I had been easily picked on and bullied, but I had thought of it more as picking my battles rather than bowing down. Besides, every kid in foster care had been doing the same thing that I had been doing.
We had all just been trying to survive.
My dreams of being adopted by a loving family had been dashed early on and, like most foster kids, I had grown up quickly after that. I might have still been picked on, but I had been independent, depending on no one, since I was around eleven-years-old. Once the reality of life slapped me across the face, my singular focus had been to make sure I had a plan when I fostered out of care. The hopping around from home to home hadn’t bothered me so much as it had saddened me constantly. No matter how many times I tried to fight against the feeling of rejection, it had always hit me hard.
There had been a couple of homes that wanted to keep me but, without outright adopting me, they couldn’t because foster care was all about supply and demand. They shuffled us around like pawns on a chessboard making room for the newly deserted or rejected.
No longer wanting to be at the mercy of anyone, I had started working after school as soon as I had been old enough. Little had I know that that life choice would make me a perfect candidate to reside in the orphanage instead of an actual home. Homes were for the children still in need; the babies, the helpless, the mentally challenged. They were the ones who needed loving care. The fifteen-years-olds who could work and go to school themselves hadn’t required such things as love and guidance.
I had spent the last three years in foster care going to school and working my ass off with part-time after-school jobs. I had wanted to work, but I knew I needed my high school diploma more