5. Alice
5
Alice
I leave for Tesoro in three days. Three days to clean out Mom’s house and fill up her storage unit. Three days to pack up my own things and arrange my travel plans. My family will help. No doubt. Still, my to-do list is stretched from one end of this apartment to the other.
Yet, I am curled up on my bed, laptop lighting up the dim space of my bedroom, googling Billy Baxter.
My new boss.
The clearest picture of Billy is at twelve years old—at his parents’ funeral. Such a sad boy. His brown hair is long and partly in his eyes. He’s outside, sitting in front of two marbled caskets. An older couple stands behind him and a crowd behind them—all in black. Just like a movie. Not one color in sight.
The article says Billy’s parents died in a car accident after flying home from a work trip. That his grandmother tried to raise him for several years after. But he made it difficult.
He was just a kid. So young to lose so much.
And so young to acquire so much. Billy inherited billions.
Whoa .
I sit up a little straighter with that lightning-charged “b” word.
It says here that his dad developed a finance software to help people optimize spending and investing. It was a massive success. When his parents died, their business and money were all left to Billy.
My next article tells me that, at sixteen, Billy was granted access to it all. He sold the business for several more million and bought a?—
I squint and hug my laptop closer. That can’t be right.
“A circus?”
Billy bought a traveling circus.
The photos in the article aren’t pretty. There aren’t trapeze artists and elephants standing next to a smiling teenage Billy. Nope, the single photo of Billy is the boy being walked out of a courthouse, his arms up and covering his face. The other photos show a town and the destruction caused by a sixteen-year-old boy’s carelessness.
With legal-aged advisors by his side, the underage Billy bought the circus. He hired men to help him run the business. But according to the article, Billy Baxter called all the shots, while his well-paid advisors either agreed to everything and anything he suggested, or he simply didn’t listen to them. But after a Billy-made stunt gone wrong, a loose tiger, a rampaging elephant, and a slew of unhappy chimpanzees terrorized the streets of Maple Ridge, New York. The town suffered, thankfully there was no loss of human life, but multiple businesses and homes were destroyed by rampaging elephants and wild chimpanzees. People were traumatized, and one of the chimpanzees had to be put down, after which Billy’s circus was shut down indefinitely. It cost Billy over a million dollars to repair the damage he caused. The article quotes a teenage Billy blowing off the whole event and calling it “chump change.”
That was fourteen years ago. There isn’t a lot on Billy since then. In the few articles I can find, he’s always in a hat, always wearing dark glasses. Or he has an advisor speaking for him. Clearly the man suffered for his poor childhood choices. Ones that have followed him around ever since. And clearly, he doesn’t like the limelight.
Can I work for a man who terrorized a town with wild animals?
It’s not as if he intended to...
And he was sixteen—with grief and loss and a brain that wasn’t fully developed yet...
I bite my inner cheek and skip to the next article.
He’s done a lot of good since then. He’s stayed out of the public eye, but there’s a dozen pages where he’s mentioned as a donor. Since that sad October day in Maple Ridge, Billy Baxter has made sizable donations to the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, countless schools, and more.
Fourteen years is a long time.
He had a rough past. Maybe buying a circus was cathartic.
I look away from the glow of my laptop and stare at my ceiling.
Yep , I think I can work for Billy Baxter.
E verything I own is systematically crammed into the back of my old Jeep Wrangler. I give Dad, Mom, and Lula one last hug. My sister drove up from college to see me off. I pinch York’s cheek—just for fun. “Be good,” I tell him. I wave to my Bailey family just behind them, my uncles and aunts all gathered. I might be imagining it, but I’m pretty sure Uncle Levi just wiped a tear from his cheek. I’ve already hugged him goodbye—all of them goodbye. So, one last wave and…
I’m off. Tesoro is a measly thirteen and a half hours from home. I’ve got this. Me, my Jeep, and my array of Spotify playlists. Only no T-Swift—she totally let me down at that wedding.
I stop to pee three times and to eat twice. I take one short walk in a town I never learn the name of, but I could see the big park from the freeway. I pull a magnolia from a tree at the park and press it at the beginning of chapter twenty-six, when Jo moves to New York. Little Women is all about family—maybe that’s why I like pressing my flowers in its pages. There’s nothing more important to me than all the people I just left behind. This magnolia is the first flower marking this new adventure of mine.
And finally—I’m here! It took all day. In fact, I’m leaving everything in my Jeep and falling asleep on my apartment floor the second I enter it. I’m ready for sleep. It’s going to be the best night’s sleep of my life.
I might as well be in a forest for all the pines and mountains shooting up around me. The scent of fresh air and pine needles seeps in through my car. Or maybe I’m imagining it. Either way, it’s kind of magical. I’m very much a grown-up girl who hasn’t really left the safety of her nest—not without her parents. This is exciting. It’s new.
And I’m ready for it.
It’s possible that Boone inviting Mom to go live with him in L.A. was a gift to me as well as to her. I wouldn’t have made this leap for myself without Mom’s leap first.
The dark sky, forest trees, and deep blue water of Lake Tesoro all make me want to celebrate. I’m here! I’m doing this!
But then, maybe I should wait to celebrate until I know for sure that I’m not going to suck at the job.
Zoe gave me directions, and in front of me is the gated community of my new home, my new adventure. I can’t suck. It’s not even an option. This just might be where life begins for Alice Jasmine Taylor.
Here we go!