Local Girls by Alice Hoffman

Author:Alice Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-03-01T07:00:00+00:00

True Confession

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from the blue. One minute she was a seventeen-year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

She’d been daydreaming, staring through the plate-glass window, her arms on the countertop, not even noticing that someone had arrived to pick up his order. When she thought about it later though, she’d felt him there, a heat wave beside her. She couldn’t have kept herself from falling in love with him; she never had a chance. Before she realized he was next to her, he had placed his hand over hers on the countertop, then looped his fingers through hers. Gretel looked up at him, so startled she might as well have been shot.

“I just wanted to wake you up,” he said.

Which is exactly what he did. One look at him and her heart was racing. One look, and whatever her life had been before was all over.

His name was Sonny Garnet and she had heard about him in the way people hear about a skirmish in a far-off country, someplace war-torn and dangerous. He’d been picked up for questioning by the police half a dozen times, he’d been tried and let go, stolen cars had been involved, or was it drugs, or was it a cop who had been paid off? None of it was true, he told Gretel now. It was idle gossip, jealous speculation. He was only twenty-two, but he seemed unbelievably adult. He had a wallet filled with cash and a brand-new Camaro; he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he’d have to be the one to let go.

He paid for the meatball sub he had ordered, but Gretel knew he was waiting for her in the vestibule, and she was trembling when she picked up her pizza; she was holding the box too tightly, surely the cheese would slide off the top, but she didn’t care. She’d had the funniest feeling when she looked at him the first time, and it happened again when he opened the door for her. She was somehow blinded, as if Sonny Garnet were made not out of plodding flesh and blood like other men, but of clear true light. Was he exceptional-looking? She never could tell. He had dark hair and pale blue eyes with features so wary and sharp they gave the impression that he never needed sleep. He was tall, and had to bend to be on eye level with most people, but he did this so gracefully any girl he spoke to had the sense that she was the only person in the world, and that talking to her was more important than breathing, than seeing, than life itself.

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