Thank you! This is a great response. I would like to represent the “hometown demons” in the story as a character who keeps appearing. Yes, someone who represents his own feelings of guilt and fear for the town and family he abandoned. I’d like to write the character in as a person – antagonist – who later is revealed as a figment of his imagination. The protagonist is always looking forward, but I want to set up a situation that when references to the past come up, the antagonist emerges too, but by the latter half this doesn’t happen as much, indicating he is no longer burdened by these feelings and he is straight on devoted to attaining his goal, which is to find a place he can call home – a place with permanence and friendships that he can feel loyal to. I like your reference to looking in the rear view mirror because this is a highway-based story.

In the story, some of the characters that surround his new home include an elderly man and an elderly woman – giving him an opportunity to have older souls enter his life?- perhaps a redemptive move on his part to make up for the perfect life he was not able to have with his adoptive grandparents.

The backstory is that his parents were killed (car accident) when he was very young, and his grandparents stepped in when he was 6 and took over the parenting. It all goes sour his senior year, and he is forced to leave home. A few attempts to establish a home life after that – when he’s on the run trying to plant roots – make his urge to claim a place as “home” stronger toward the end of the story.