i'm just a plane ride away

17 days before my 17th birthday

     When I was younger, I didn't care who my dad was. I thought that any dad would be better than no dad. My mom told me over and over that my father was a terrible man, and that I needed to stop waiting for him to come back. All my friends had dad's, it wasn't fair. I told everyone that he was a super villain, and they thought it was cool.
     I found out years later that my dad really was a super villain, but not the kind you see in movies. He was wanted in over a hundred countries, and authorities were told that if they saw him, kill him. No questions asked.
     Him and his men had killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people. They robbed and raped and tortured innocent people, yet we're almost invisible. No one could find, catch, or kill them. And trust me, people tried.
     My mother was probably the only person alive that knew his identity, which made us a target. The man I knew as my stepfather was a trained assassin that dedicated his life to protect my mom, my siblings, and me. We lived tucked away on an island off the coast of Hawaii. Only about 200 people lived there, and it wasn't part of any map. GPSs and satellites didn't even show it. We were invisible, and very few people in the outside world knew we existed.
     We called it Jakamakoo (juh-cam-uh-coo), and it was there I spent the first 17 years of my life. Except, I didn't know any of this yet. I was just a teenage boy, living in a normal family, on a tiny normal island, with normal friends, normal pets, doing normal teenage things, and thinking that telling my friends that my dad was a super villain was completely normal.
My story really starts 17 days before my 17th birthday.

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