Finny
Page 34
At first the crowd didn’t know what to do. Most of them had never danced to an Irish fiddle before. But Sylvan helped the situation a little by pulling Judith onto the dance floor, spinning her out and then drawing her back to him, his arm around her waist, as if he didn’t want to let her go.
And then Earl, with Finny’s permission, held his hand out to Poplan, who took it eagerly, and ended up leading Earl onto the floor. Finny watched the two of them go. For a moment, they appeared much younger, like the people Finny had met all those years ago. There he was, the boy who’d caught her when the fence broke, and who’d helped her under the top rail. There was the woman who’d met Finny in the lobby of the Thorndon School, asking her if she’d washed her hands. They seemed to have shed the intervening years like so much bulky winter clothing.
The last image Finny would recall from the party, when she thought back about it many years later, was of Earl spinning Poplan on the dance floor. Finny saw her purple tie flapping in the breeze.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the organizations that supported me while I was writing this book: the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Hawthornden Fellowship, the Bookhampton Fellowship, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, the Southampton Writers’ Conference, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a number of teachers and writers for their generosity, advice, and encouragement: Ethan Canin, Bob Shacochis, Elizabeth McCracken, Maxine Rodburg, Melissa Bank, and Betsy Bolton.
Thank you to Ayesha Pande, my inimitable agent, for your intelligence, guidance, and dedication; to Millicent Bennett for your peerless insights, energy, thoughtfulness, and humor; to Jill Schwartzman for so many great ideas, so much enthusiasm, and such valuable help in the final stages of this book; to Kate Medina for your wisdom and enormously meaningful support over the years; to Linda Swanson-Davies and Glimmer Train magazine; and to Jane von Mehren, Sally Marvin, Beth Pearson, Anne Watters, Kathleen McAuliffe, Lindsey Schwoeri, and the many people at Random House who have given their talents, care, and weekend hours to this book.
Thanks also to Connie Brothers, Lan Samantha Chang, Asali Solomon, Bob Reeves, Christian McLean, Adrienne Unger, Dan Salomon, Jan Zenisek, Deb West, and Marika Alzadon.
And for love and remarkable tolerance, my deepest gratitude to my family: Jim Kramon, Paula Kramon, Annie Kramon, Salli Snyder, Liz Harlan, Ellin Sarot, John Trieu, Sandy Hong, Brian Trieu, and, of course and always, Lynn Trieu.
JUSTIN KRAMON is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Fence, Boulevard, and TriQuarterly. He has received honors for his fiction from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Fellowship, The Best American Short Stories, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Now twenty-nine years old, he lives in Philadelphia. You can find additional information about Kramon and his work, as well as the reading group guide for Finny, at his website: www.justinkramon.com.
Finny is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Random House Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2010 by Justin Kramon
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House
Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kramon, Justin.
Finny: a novel / Justin Kramon.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60367-2
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Boarding school students—Fiction. 3. Boarding schools—Fiction.
4. Adolescence—Fiction. 5. Parent and child—Fiction.
6. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.R365F56 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009034297
www.atrandom.com
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