The Sleeping Beauty of Wilshire Blvd.

Henley Hunsaker

Henley Hunsaker had a horrible house. The roof leaked, the kitchen smelled of moldy cheese and dead rodents, the floor sagged between the joists and when it rained hard enough, water would seep through the old, green, shag carpet and ruin her socks.

Her father had been "a no-good meth addict," as her mother would always say, before his accidental drowning in the river and her mother owned a singing telegram business.

Although her mother claimed to love her dearly, she was in terrible debt and in need of a particular operation that would help her get new customers, so she decided under the influence of Jack Daniels, to post a craigslist ad to sell Henley at the age of 14, to the highest bidder.

The next day Henley's life changed and Social Services came to her rescue. Henley was transported to a center, interviewed by social service workers and police, examined for lice, scoliosis and a vast array of other unfortunate issues and then taken to a room with shiny floors a clean bed and some fresh clothes.

That night she dreamed of a beautiful palace. The princess of this palace wore ordinary jeans and a cute pink t-shirt. She smiled at Henley and motioned for her to follow. The princess led Henley up a long winding staircase to an attic filled with trunks and beautiful mirrors.

"Look inside," she whispered as they dropped onto their knees in front of a particularly ordinary chest.

Henley hesitated then reached for the latch and as she opened the lid, her dream was spoiled by the rude screaming of a two year old who had arrived at the facility just before her.

The toddler had come into her room, covered in snot and stinky pajamas and wanted his diaper changed. The light from the outer room poured in across Henley's face.

"Farmer Brown, come here," the social worker coaxed. She wiggled a wonky-eyed teddy bear through the open door. Farmer Brown stopped crying and raced out after the bear.The social worker gave Henley an apologetic half-grin and shut the door.

Some people have very little creativity when it comes to decent names and Farmer Brown wasn't the worst of them, but after waking her up and spoiling her dream, he might have been the worst.

The rest of the night she tossed and turned worrying about her mother and what would happen if she didn't get the money for her boob job. Would she ever get those new customers?

Henley wasn't naive to her mother's terrible parenting, her inability to care for another human being or her strange attraction to drug addicts.
And despite what everyone thought about her, Henley was quite different than her parents. She had long blond hair, pale green eyes, slender fingers an aptitude for playing piano and a love of autobiographies and family history.

She pretended that her mother was actually someone famous and that she had been kidnapped for ransom and never returned. She scoured the internet in the school library for women that resembled her and had missing children and read everything she could about how to get in contact with talk shows that reunited families with their long-lost, loved ones.
She wrote dozens of letters but had never mailed them. It would be too painful if her parents actually turned out to be Bubba and Lucille Hunsaker and DNA proved it.

She was not going to be like them. She never had been. Lucille had frizzy black hair, dark eyes was also short had curvy hips and truth be told, had fifteen fake ID's.
Her father had been born and raised in a good family down in Chile but had made a lot of bad mistakes, having Henley was the worst of them, or so her mother had always told her.

Nothing really added up.

But now Henley had a chance to leave that life and find out the truth.

Early the next morning she told the social worker that she was almost certain she had been kidnapped as a baby and asked for a DNA test.

This test proved her theory correct.