“Kyle…Earth to Kyle” Kyle Valenti turned his gaze from the car window to glare at his father. They’d been on the road for hours, and Kyle hadn’t spoken to his father since they had taken a break for lunch at one o’clock. It was now eight o’clock in the evening. “Can’t you even let me sulk in peace?” The high school senior asked sarcastically. “It’s bad enough that you’re moving me my senior year, but now you expect me to be chipper about it. And you can’t even move me to a halfway decent town, instead we move to some no-name Hicksville town in North Carolina.” “Don’t take that tone with me Kyle.” Kyle noticed that his dad’s hands clenched on the steering wheel and mentally shrugged it off. “Let’s try to remember that I am the father and you are the son in this little scenario. And the town has a name; it’s Willow Oaks. This is where my contact said they were. Besides, you are entirely to old to sulk like a baby.” Kyle turned his eyes back to the window and stubbornly kept silent. “Why do we have to go now?” Kyle finally asked with a sigh. He couldn’t hold it all in anymore, and his father was responsible for all the anger he felt. “You’d think we could have just as easily done this in the summer. Why now?” “You know why son,” was the only response Kyle got. Not that he actually expected a different one. That vague ‘you know why’ was his dad’s answer to everything. Kyle sighed as his dad turned the 2001 4-Runner down the street toward the end of the town. Kyle glanced at his dad and tried not to gawk in amazement at the house in front of them. It was a huge three-story colonial style house. It looked like something out of an old southern gothic novel. As soon as the car was parked, Kyle’s father was out of it, grabbing boxes from the back and making his way to the front door. For a few minutes Kyle sat in the car by himself, then with yet another disgruntled sigh he climbed out and surveyed his new home. His eyes scanned the neighborhood before stopping on the driveway one lane over and three houses down. He could see a group of teenagers around his age all hanging around by the garage. There looked to be about five of them and only two were male. When he noticed one of the girls turned his way, he quickly averted his gaze and looked out in the other direction. With a sigh he walked to the front door of the large colonial style house that the city had furnished them with as part of the deal when his father had agreed to be the new Sheriff of Willow Oaks. He knew this was going to be a long year. TBC

Part 1