11
California Dreamin'
===========DANNY==========
She was standin' by the water / Oh, the Moon was growin' hotter
Neon Signs lit up The Night
Turn it Down / Your Music's Too Loud
So we Ran from the Crowd
They're gonna call us liars
When we say /
We Caught a Spark Brighter than those Broken Lighters
I wrote down in my Lyric Book and started strumming through the chords I liked; listening for the internal melody of the words hidden within the music. Then, all of a sudden, Mom came barging into my room.
"Can you sing and play that again? What you just played?" she asked (and was met with a blunt no).
Mom loved when I played guitar. But knew I hated having an audience. She would embarrassingly stand outside my door while I practiced and then start applauding when I finished. The thought of performing in front of anybody made me super uncomfortable and self-conscious, so Mom didn't nag the idea very often. But today she nagged.
"How do you ever plan on becoming a famous rock star if you can't even sing for your mom?"
"Mom, please don't ever use the term rock star. They call me that at work, and it's annoying. And exactly, I'd be playing for a bunch of random people who voluntarily bought tickets. Not my mother intruding while I write."
"Are you writing about Mary?"
Mom, at times, was just as much—if not more—immature than I was. I took off my sock and threw it at her. Before it could hit her, Mom shielded herself by tugging back the door, and then picked up my sock and threw it back at me. Bulls-eye right in the head.
"Remember, I was an athlete in my prime. Anyway, before you attacked me, I was coming to tell you that I'm going to drop some stuff off that I'm giving away to the Gagliardis', and then I'm going to the post office to ship some stuff to California. Want to come?"
"The Gagliardi's house smells funky."
"It doesn't smell—it doesn't smell that funky."
I told her I was in a good writing flow and didn't want to interrupt my vibe, and that I was going to hang out with Mary soon. Mom graciously reminded me to call the Los Angeles College of Music, and then continued to harass me about writing about Mary, so I threw my other sock and she evaded it again by closing the door on time. And of course, the minute Mom left, I lost the good writing flow I'd been in.
"Froo Froo!" Mary inexplicably answered the phone when I called her a couple hours later to confirm our "hangout" that evening. I didn't really know what response Froo Froo called for, so I improvised.
"G'day, Mildred!"
Mildred sounds like the type of chick who would call someone Froo Froo. Mary rebutted that it was cute of her and that I should like that she called me Froo Froo. Which I felt was pretty ironic, because the conjoined words of Froo and Froo made me feel like a spoiled British poodle. And nothing about that is cute.
"Watcha doin', sugah?"
"Are you high?"
"On life. Yeah. Whaddup, foo'?"
I guess the abbreviation of "fool" was a step up from Froo².
"Just writing some stuff on my guitar. Yourself?" I didn't bother tacking on some slang because I knew it would sound awful.
"Ooh!" Mary exclaimed through the speaker. "What have you written about me so far?"
"How do you know I've written anything about you?"
"Because you're a romantic, artsy kinda guy who's falling in love and is good at writing. So you've written something about me by now."
Her self-indulgence could've been off-putting, and I didn't even want to figure out what her very bold claims about my attraction to her meant—but she said I was a good writer, so yeah.
"Yeah, Mary. This is the most romantic shit I've written yet, I hope you like it." I started making up words on the spot:
"She got an ASS, oh yeah, she got an ASS. If it's flat—we give it a PASS—oh yeah, she got an ASS!"
"That was marvelous."
I murmured in agreement. "Yeah, your personality has really won me over, if you can't tell."
Mary was fabulous at the idea of flirting. While on the phone, all I could think about were the highlights of Mary's eccentric mood-swings. One day a kiss. The next, I'm told to "eff off." And then an hour after that, when she randomly combs my hair, I'm suddenly handsome?
Then she claims I'm falling in love.
At one point in our phone conversation Mary told me to "hold on," and the line went flat. She picked up and asked if we could transfer our hangout to the next night. Naturally, there was a dip in my mood, but I played it cool. With my vibrant social life and having to do things like call LACM, I was so busy.
"You slept with her?" Max's voice jumped a thousand decibels in the midst of folding rags the next day at work.
"Shh!"
"Okay. Okay." He descended into a shout-whisper. "You slept with Mary?"
"I did not sleep with her. She slept over."
"In your room?"
"Yes."
"In your bed?"
"Yes."
"You're telling me that Mary slept in your bed, and you did not sleep with her?" Max's bafflement at my lack of sexual lasciviousness was equal to mine.
I almost felt stupid when he worded it like that, so I rolled my eyes.
"Well, yeah. I want to respect her and take it slow." Which was mostly true, anyway. Max dropped his hands, mid-fold, onto the plywood countertop with a loud thud that sounded like it snapped something important holding the table together.
"Take it slow? Dude. She willingly crawled into your masturbated cum and pube-filled sheets. Believe me. She was not in the business of taking it slow. Whatever taking it slow means."
I let Max rave on about how sexually clueless I was. What Max didn't know was that she was locked out of her house and that I'd insisted on giving her the bed, with clean sheets. Thank you very much. Even when I started to tune Max out, focusing all of my attention on the task of folding the steaming mountain of rags that had begun to fog the window portal to the bright and green world outside, I couldn't help but wonder—What was I to Mary?
To avoid sounding like a girl—and inviting harassment from Max—I did not tell him that Mary and I did, in fact, kiss the night before in The Alley. That Goddamn kiss. Maybe Mary did like me? And then somehow, in the measly forty-eight hours that I had known her, I did something wrong? Mary was a mood pendulum. One moment, yes, the next, no. And wouldn't making a move on a girl I offered refuge to in my house be considered rape? With everything classified as sexual harassment nowadays—I wasn't really sure, as a guy, if you're even allowed to make a move on a girl. Jesus, Mom had gotten more intimate with Mary when she hugged her bye.
Team Nice Guy finishes last again.
"Wanna come drink with me and Stephen Belanger tonight?" Max asked, interrupting my thoughts. "Yesterday we climbed on top of St. Andrews, you know, the elementary school by my house? We wanna go back and make a fire. It's sick, man. There's this corner that you can't see from the street, so it's totally safe."
"Max. The last thing that sounds safe is drinking and making a fire on the roof of an elementary school."
"Well, dude, we're gonna burn too."
And that is why sometimes Max really pisses me off. He rips me for not taking advantage of a girl who's locked out of her house, yet finds no fault in possibly burning down a grade school. In all fairness to Max, it wasn't that long ago that, I too, belonged to the fellowship of pyromaniacs. Back when we were kids, in the summertime, we'd ride our bikes to the edge of the ravine, secure them to tree trunks that were just the right size, and then venture down the creek to build fires and blow up aerosol spray cans. Axe cans, Mom's hairspray, air fresheners, Febreze. You name it, we blew it to smithereens.
"Dude, it's brick," Max protested. "It can't burn. Have you ever tried burning a brick?"
But now, I was all a little too aware of the repercussions of exploding things in modern-day America. Let alone scorching your face off.
I was about to answer before I was interrupted.
"Rock Star!"
I turned to see Rob hollering at me from the opposite end of the garage. "It's three. You can take off."
From the open garage door behind Rob, there wasn't a single car in line. Max had just gotten in an hour before, but I'd been working all morning, so I ditched rag duty and grabbed my car keys.
"So, dude, you gonna come with us or what?" Max asked me on my way out.
"Nah, man. I've got plans with Mary tonight."
Max reminded me to wash my sheets. I pretended not to hear him and walked out of the wash, determined to make tonight the night I got to kiss her again. Yes, tonight, Danny, like a battering ram, was going to break out of the Friend Zone.
The mall food court smelled arguably worse than the Gagliardi house. (Mary and I had made plans to see a movie—not quite the date at the Americanview Drive-In that I imagined, but teenage dating was defined by the cheap comedy movie date, because sex was elicited by the infamous Arm Around The Girl in the seats). The smell of grease simmered in the air, thanks to the semi-circle of one-off Chinese takeout cuisines, a McDonald's, and the JFC—yes, Jersey Fried Chicken—surrounding me. The smell was only occasionally beaten back by the reek of highly-potent cleaning solutions. I watched some middle-schoolers get a real kick out of sliding the plastic food tray with their JFC boxes in the trashcan. We were probably attending the same screening, and I realized I was bordering pathetic. I started tapping my fingers on the table. Looked around. Made awkward eye contact with the old man sitting next to me. Kept tapping my fingers. Checked my phone: 7:03pm.
Okay. Okay. Only three minutes late, no problem.
I checked my phone again.
Okay, only seven minutes late.
I then brushed off ten minutes. Excused fifteen. Got anxious at twenty. Doubtful at twenty-five. Angry at thirty. And gave up hope at fifty.
Mary stood me up, I declared to myself. I can't frickin' believe this. Mary stood me up.
Those middle-schoolers met up with some middle-school girls—heck, even the old man's coffee date arrived. And there I was, more pathetic than those acne-prone twerps, sitting by myself in the greasy food court. So I did the only logical thing: called her. I dialed the number Mary told me to call for her house phone. At first, it was silent and static, and then it rang twice, followed by the sound of a phone unhinging from a receiver only to be slammed back down. The line beeped.
What a bitch. What a cruel, mean, heartless bitch. All the worst possible scenarios came to mind. I considered giving her the benefit of the doubt and then scrapped that, concluding that she was probably hooking up with her ex-boyfriend, screwing in the backseat of that Chevrolet Impala. So I whipped out my phone and tried searching her name on all the popular contemporary forms of social media so I could message her. Nothing. I tried pretty much everything and couldn't find her.
Is she just a figment of my imagination? Why is she not anywhere on the internet?
I tried spelling different variations of her name. Mare-ee, Merry, Marrie, Mareigh. Nothing. I decided I was getting a little too obsessed with this online crusade when I began scrolling through Nick Savignano's followers.
Screw her, I thought, shoving my phone back into my pocket. I stood up to leave the smelly mall's food court. You don't need her cockiness and tobaccoy breath and nose ring and romantic lyrical assumptions and white girl semi-racist Ebonic speech, I told myself. Screw Mary.
And to make it all sweeter, I didn't talk to Mary for another two days.
On the second day of absence, I got a call from an unknown number. My heart leaped when I went to answer it, only to find out that an overly energetic woman had revealed that I'd WON a FREE tropical cruise.
I was in an irrevocable bad mood. Mom, during a dinner congested with her typical California soliloquy, interrupted herself to ask me what was wrong.
Where to begin?
In an epic beyond epic conversation Mom and I had that previous Fall, when all high school seniors must decide the fate of their careers amongst the days of changing leaves and football games, Mom proposed California.
Mom had a cousin out there who had convinced her that Cali was the Promised Land. Mom, a lot like me, hated the winter and the snow, and unlike many Northerners, rejected the idea of skiing. So, Mom asked me what I thought about moving out there. Ironic, ain't it? That a guy who insisted that all he dreamt of doing was running away, instead mumbled in thought, and then shook his head.
"No."
For the rest of the year, there were arguments and guilt trips and—shit, Mom, I just didn't want to go. Why couldn't you understand? But, when I finally realized why Mom's eyes changed when she talked about moving, and slowly came to perceive the unspoken forces that drove her yearning—that it was much more than just palm trees and having a 9021—something zip code—I agreed to go. I mean, I always hated Gilmore Park and I'd always imagined that any place had to be better than that dumpy one. Although still reluctant, little by little, I became fond of California.
But what sealed the deal for me opened my mind like a Holy Enlightenment. Mom mentioned how many opportunities I would have for my music out there.
True.
The New Jersey music scene was rustier than the carousel, and New York was an impenetrable, stupidly over-expensive island.
But to be in Southern California with Hollywood around the corner? The possibilities would be endless.
The Troubadour. The Roxy. The Viper Room. Whisky a Go-Go. Sunset's House of Blues. And hell, who knew which drunken record-exec might just be in the crowd on any given night, and might just be impressed with the long-haired kid making lightning with his Telecaster. I was sure I could finally join a band that wanted to play something other than screamo.
The endless-summer weather. The California girls. Cruising down the PCH blaring The Ramones with the Mustang top down, convincing the world that James Dean never died. Getting to start over as anyone that I wanted to be. It would all be perfect. In my mind, I built a utopic fantasy of what life on the West Coast would be like, and I began to love it. God knows it was the only thing that carried me through the rest of high school, and made me—sorta—care about my grades.
The forefathers of adventure were calling. "Go West, Young man!" And I was the next eager disciple in line, ready to embark on that unknown road and travel out west. No one other than me and Tom Joad (ok, and maybe Will Smith in Fresh Prince), packin' up and participating in America's greatest tradition: moving out West. Smell ya later, Jersey.
"Danny?"
"Nothing, Mom," I barked. "Nothing, nothing is wrong. Really. Just a long day at work." (I called in sick that day). I knew just one sign of my emotional fragility would be detrimental to Mom. Her conscience needed to be kept clear from any ill during the Cali transition. Receding my feelings, I deluded Mom into believing I was just fine. I couldn't bother her with my drama.
Later on, in my bedroom, trying my best not to think about Mary and working through a few lead guitar riffs I came up with, during a moment of silence between the sting of the notes and the grainy feedback from my practice amp, I heard my phone vibrate on my bed. Mary.
I jumped up, laid my Telecaster down, and swiped for my phone. By the time I held it in my hand and looked at the screen, it had stopped ringing, but the screen flashed with a missed call notification from Max. I swiped the screen to call him back. It rang only once before it was answered with a long, gasping breath.
"Danny. Danny, dude, where are you?"
"At home, you okay?"
"I'm having one of those nights."
"Okay, stay calm. I'll get you."
It had never been medically diagnosed, but Max suffered from depression. In my ignorance, I did not feel it was clinical by any means. Unlike a splintered broken arm, you cannot see a splintered broken mind. But more often than not, Max let the slightest, smallest thing upset him, and then beat himself up with it until he was mentally bruised and emotionally exhausted. Never had I suspected that there was actually something inside of him, something deep in that intangible part of the spirit, that was broken. I mistook his depression as an elixir of his own eccentricities and teenage angst. Nothing devastating had ever occurred, just simple lapses. Much like me, Max was prone to the triggers in his own world. Though the difference may have been that, whereas I was hunted down by the guerilla soldiers, Max stood against the firing wall.
Do you need that? I thought as Max breathed a cloud of pot around his head while we sat at the boardwalk's edge.
Max shriveled into a hunched posture, incessantly shivering. The guy never wore a jacket.
"Man, I just need to get really high," he said as if reading my mind.
Maybe I outwardly projected my dislike for his smoking a lot more than I was aware. Sitting, waiting for him to reach his desired state of mind, I felt my phone vibrate from within the pocket of my nineties jean jacket. False alarm—it was just an email notification from damn LACM about July campus tour dates.
In three quick, saliva slurping inhales that sizzled the burning tip of the embrowned joint, Max folded his shoulders in towards his chest and threw what was left of his roach in the ocean. I turned around, looking to see if there were any trashcans close by. The night sat on the edge of eleven-thirty; at the moment, the boardwalk was deserted. Lunatic Larry was only half an hour away from setting up, and so I figured we would wait for him. The night was strangely foggy. The haze had thickened since we sat down and grown dense enough to expand the glow of the lamplights.
"Bro, I feel so good."
"Yeah?"
He turned to me, rocking his head. "Yeah, man. This world is fucked, Danny."
I wasn't so much in a world-hating mood. Well, I wasn't until I checked my blank phone again.
"This town, man, it sucks the life out of you," he continued. "It's a death trap. It's so depressing."
Although all I could think about was how Max was trying to suck the life out of me. For the first time in a while, I didn't feel depressed. But perhaps the only reason I wasn't all anti-Gilmore Park that very second was because I was still coming off of some Mary high––I'm not sure.
"Dude," he said. "I'm gonna fall into the water."
"No, you're not," I answered, irritated at his nonsensical doped delusions.
"Danny, man, the waters like coming at my face. Holy shit! It's like rising!" Max exclaimed through an excited, paranoid laugh.
I suggested that we walk a bit.
On our sobering stroll down the boardwalk, we passed soundless strangers sitting on a bench facing the water, as well as a couple chitchatting while their Doberman panted around. Only a few lonely stragglers passed us coming the other way. A man wearing a lifeguard vest, swerving on a bicycle weighed down with plastic shopping bags, preached loudly to the sea. In arrhythmic flaps the gears of a flagpole clinked against the steel mast in the faint ocean breeze.
"Bro!"
"What?"
"Am I tripping? Or do you hear that? Like a trumpet or some shit?"
To my surprise, Max wasn't tripping. A low-blasting horn was coming from somewhere. To my ear's best guess, the brass hum was coming from the end of the pier. Deciding to check it out, we sauntered to the pier, where the saxophone sound grew louder, but its player remained masked in the fog—someone was trying to show-up Lunatic Larry. Walking nearer, the outline of the sax man slowly grew bolder, emerging out of the mist.
"Sick sax, man," Max said as we passed him.
I realized that the Sax Man, capped in a fedora, standing out on the sea's edge, was communicating in some accord with God, so I just nodded. I didn't want—or get—recognition back. I was convinced he was the most spiritual man I'd ever come across. Something deeper told me that once he packed up his horn and transcended through the thick of the fog, he would not emerge back on the boardwalk. He'd walk through the abyss straight up a misty stairway to heaven; he had reached some otherworldly enlightenment. Standing at the very end of the pier, standing on the edge of the World, my Sax Man sought a voyager ship to take him to new ones. Lunatic Larry, alone in the ruins of yesteryear, would stay in the old. Thinking like that was why I didn't need drugs; my mind was already so warped. If I smoked a joint or something, I would turn into electric rings of flashing light, spiralling atop the sea.
In a high, squeaky voice, Max started repeating: "Cannabis, puts me in a bliss... cannabis, puts me in a bliss... cannabis, puts me in a bliss." Then, shouting in his regular voice: "I FEEL SO GOOD! FUCK GILMORE PARK!"
Embarrassed as all hell, since I secretly longed to be as stoic as the Sax Man, I glanced back in his direction. Maybe to give him a look that told him, "That ain't me," but by the time I turned around, I saw he had already begun his pilgrimage to the celestial realms.
"Eight-teen, man," Max said to me, or himself—hard to say which. "Danny, you know what happens to me at eighteen?"
Before I could respond, as if that's what Max was looking for, he swung his leg, booting his foot off the ground, launching his shoe over the ocean. It submerged deep into the water with a loud plop.
"Shit! Shit, Danny!" Max's jovial attitude flashed in that second to genuine disparity. "My shoe! Goddamn!"
"Max. What was wrong? Why did you even call me?"
"My shoe, Danny! Fuck!"
He called me because he needed an outlet for his angst, I realized. For a couple minutes, Max volleyed himself into hysteria, no different than how he took a simple gesture and devoured himself into depression. An onlooker would be convinced that his life depended on that shoe.
After his initial exasperation, Max fell silent. He stared out at the space on the ocean where his shoe fell. The skin around his eyes suddenly wrinkled as if he were going to cry. Then slamming his shoed-foot down, he regained his composure. The waves lapped gently against the pier.
Quiet, in thought, he let out a single scoffing laugh. "Guess same thing happens to you at eighteen," he said, swinging his hands up in front of him and then looped his thumbs around one another and fluttered the forefingers. "You get to fly away like a leetle bird. Tweet, tweet." Max raised his hands up above his head and then unlatched his fingers. When he turned to watch for my reaction, I saw that the whites of his eyes were red.
"Hey Danny."
"What?"
"Did you—" he snickered "—bang Mary?"
"No. No, man. I didn't." Reminding me to yet again look at my phone and see nothing but the time displayed.
"Fuck girls, man."
"I agree."
"That Roxanne broad stopped texting me," he said.
"Oh, shit, man. Why?"
"Says she don't want to be serious or shit cuz she's going to college." He dragged the remaining shoe against the pavement. "Probably just wants to go to college to be a whore."
"Did you ever steal that street sign?"
"Told her I would and everything. She didn't give a shit. Stupid broad told me last week how romantic that would be and shit. I told her it could be something to hang in her dorm room. But she didn't give a shit."
The low-whirl of a jet plane with red and white blinking lights crossed the sky, and then quickly passed out of sight and sound.
"I had it all planned too, man. Been dicing up my tips to pay Stephen's older brother to drive me out to the sign so I could steal the fucking thing. And then the night I was gonna give it to her, I was gonna take the stupid broad to the beach house."
Max jerked his head towards to the beach—towards the direction of the private estates—towards what I preferred to call The Old Abandoned Beach House.
"I even broke-in with Stephen last night and left some candles and sleeping bags to set it all up. Like to surprise her, y'know? Be all romantic and shit," Max continued. "Burn then hookup and stuff looking out at the waves. Would've been the realest thing."
Instantly struck by the lightning bolt of my rebellious streak, I suggested: "Wanna go steal it?"
"Dude, it's like, all the way in North Brunswick or something. I Google Maps'd it, and it's like, an hour drive."
"Screw it. I've got nothing to do. Let's get it, leave it at her doorstep, then she can take it to college with her and hang it in her dorm room, and stupid Roxanne can be reminded of how great of a guy you were when she's with all those college pricks."
One-shoe Max and I trekked back down the pier, and unlike The Sax Man, we must've had lessons still to learn in this world, because we did not disintegrate into particles indistinguishable from the mist and merge with new ones. Back on the boardwalk, Lunatic Larry played on.
In my car, we gunned out of Carraway Beach, taking the NJ-18 North all the way to North Brunswick, somewhere all the way out in the Middlesex County. The GPS on my phone led us through the suburbs until we arrived at Roxanne Court.
Now, we had not thought so far in advance as to how we would steal the street sign. Bringing neither a foot ladder to even reach the damn thing, let alone the proper tools to take it off the post.
We drove down the small circle and made a U-turn in front of the big gray house at the end. Parking on the opposite side of the street, I surveyed our terrain. We were on a mission. Two spies. Two vigilantes. Trained to scope the objective, relying on luck and intuition for the mission's success.
"Shit, man," I said under my breath. Thinking that we might have just blown an hour's drive for nothing.
But a light bulb went off when I looked over at the bungalow next to us and saw a pile of empty trashcans sitting by the edge of the garage. Max agreed that was our best bet.
We got out of my car, and as stealthily possible, quieter than midnight, approached the house. Taking the lead, Max following in his socked feet behind, we hunched over and placed soundless steps up the driveway. Looking back, our invisibility confirmed, we then snatched a trashcan each and booked it down the road.
Mid-stride, I flipped my trashcan down, planting it on the ground in front of the post. I then grabbed Max's, topping it over the first one. I held it still for support as Max lunged up, wobbled on the small surface, and then snatched my shoulder to keep from falling, nearly making me fall. It took a second, but he regained his balance. Slowly, and with precision this time, he lightly landed his other foot atop the doubled-up circular base, and then leaped upwards. The sign we wanted was harnessed to another; Max's fingers grazed the bottom one, and both signs shifted. Neither were secured to the post. They could be lifted off. Max checked in with me, I confirmed, and then in an explosive jump, he pushed the signs off the post. Sunny Terrace and Roxanne Court both crashed to the ground.
The trashcans kicked back with his momentum, banging and echoing as they hit the concrete. Max landed screaming, "Ow!", picked up the still secured together signs, now chipped at the corners, and we ran for our lives. Our pavement-smacking feet were the loudest noise in the universe. I flung my hands to the latch of the trunk, ripped it open for Max to drop the signs in, and then, in perfect unison, we jumped over the convertible sides of my car and gunned off. Bolting out of North Brunswick as if the cops were in hot pursuit.
Max read out the directions on my phone and, with only one mistake in navigation later, we launched onto the highway. Speeding down the freeway, we cranked up our victory anthems. Max blasted "Straight Outta Compton," condemning the world with the power of street knowledge, screaming, "Fuck you, Roxanne!" out the side of the car.
I let him have his moment, but the race back to Gilmore Park ended with my preference of The Clash's "I Fought the Law."
After dropping Max off, sometime after two in the morning, Mary finally called.
"Hello?" I answered the unrecognizable series of digits while lying on my bed, hopelessly inventing poetry in my Lyric Book, unable to sleep.
"Danny. Hey," she said, as if her voice did not require declaration.
I did not ask, nor did she tell, where she had disappeared. Mary, like all females, was an assembly of non-convention, or rather, a reflection of the paradoxical heart. The heart in its never-ending quest for acceptance yearns for companionship, yet shies away when companionship is presented. We long to have our hearts captured by someone, but the human arc has notoriously always been about freedom.
"Yo," she said.
"What?"
"Sorry."
=========Author's Note===========
Thank you for reading this chapter of "Some Place Better Than Here"!
Writing this book certainly wasn't easy by any means. It was an honest-to-God from the bottom of my heart labour of love. And so, if the writing has touched you in anyway, please share your thoughts in the comments or vote on a chapter that you particularly liked!
Sharing a little bit of love back really helps me grow my platform as a writer so I can continue to publish great works for you and I both to enjoy !
Also, if you enjoyed SPBTH please check out my latest project "The Roar of Andora," a explorative fantasy that will be told over a three-part anthology.
https://www.wattpad.com/611263651-the-roar-of-andora-book-one-prologue-the-boy-king
Thank you for reading "Some Place Better Than Here"!
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