I sat alone in my room reading from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer under my bed sheets. Before me lay The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and various other missions in that galaxy far, far away. I pretty much had to hide this way. Nobody understood why I got so into books like those. Why don't you join the real world? or Get your nose out of that garbage and start earning for yourself. They're just words. They weren't just words to me. They were my dreams; places I could go that didn't have the same old dreary people that criticized every move you made. With these characters I could get out of this crummy town for 200+ pages and not be Edward Coulson for a few hours. I could be Aragorn slaying orcs, or Han Solo escaping the sarlac pit with Chewbacca and Luke. I had the chance to be anybody great so that I could be… not me.
Mom didn't get it either. She said that these 'stories' weren't real. That I needed to grow up and accept reality. Well, maybe not here, but somewhere they were real. Somewhere out there in a place like this there was a hobbit smoking a pipe on his front stoop talking to a wizard. Somewhere out there was a ten year old boy building a service droid to help his mom around the house. Somewhere out there was somebody with a more interesting life than mine.
Being twelve in this corner of town meant nothing ever happened. Sure, every second Saturday of every month Danny's farm threw a party with some dancing and a buffet. Usually, the grownups would sit us kids on a haystack during the slow songs; Blake Shelton, Marina McBride, and so on would be playing on the radio; and there'd be games like hackey-sack golf. And at the end of the evening everyone would get a sparkler stick and Joe Barton made s'mores. But other than that and the occasional quilt auctions at the local library nothing interesting made a cameo.
So I would take to the woods, mostly during the day. A flashlight does a lot of good in the dark, but animals have night vision built in and I didn't. So I kept my night visits to a minimum. Only when mom needed something from Mrs. Nance; our neighbor; did I make the night trek to go get whatever Mom wanted me to get. I fancied myself as a fair woodsman, although not as great as Davey Crocket or Daniel Boone, but I figured I could hold my own.
I had to come out from the covers. My breath being stifled by the sheets was nearly suffocating me. My knees ached from sitting in one position for so long and my back raged when I stretched it in the opposite direction it had grown accustomed to. Marking the page where I had left Sawyer in the court room on the witness stand, I swung sideways and put my feet on the floor. I'd come back to it later. Right then, there needed to be blood flow which I had denied myself for a 'few' chapters.
Out my bedroom window I could see something, a tiny flame through the trees. Campfire. People camped all the time around here, I've stumbled up on a few setting up shop a time or two so initially I didn't think nothing of it, until I realized where the fire was coming from. The fire was oddly close to an old farm house that had been abandoned since its owner passed away almost twenty years earlier. It wasn't uncommon for people to camp near abandoned buildings, but no one camped near that place purely out of respect. The last owner, an old lady, wanted the land kept as it was for her grandchildren who never came around anymore. At least not that I could remember seeing or being told of.
Suddenly, my young, naïve mind decided, I've got to investigate. It could be poachers. Honestly, I'm not sure what I thought I was going to do if it was poachers. But, that didn't matter I guess because I grabbed my boots, jacket, flashlight, and my hunting knife and quietly slipped out my window. Unfortunately, my room was situated on the second floor. Fortunately, my window was above the porch roof which had a very handy woodpile next to it. It was tricky not to make any noise but somehow I finagled my footing so that when I jumped I practically floated down the wood stacks like stairs, crumpling silently onto the grass after losing my balance.
Getting up I turned myself in every direction, making certain I wasn't seen or heard. Then, setting my feet due south west I slipped through the dark like a great, unknown hunter; undetectable or traceable; (at least, I imagined myself to be) towards the old Jones farm.