I put Rick out of my head, and I put my sister out, and I put Caitlin Bug out. I knew I could not be the only person in the world who liked Sno-Kone Carts. I felt a spider in my heart. It was jumping around. It was saying, Open it. Open it. I felt so excited, because I knew how happy the girls were going to be as soon as they opened the box, and I knew that they would love it and would always remember getting it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful thanks for invaluable support: Sarah Chalfant and Kathryn Lewis, Esther Newberg and Liz Farrell, and for amazing edits, Tim Duggan and Allison Lorentzen, Meghan O’Rourke, Bill Buford, Field Maloney, Deborah Treisman, Ben Metcalf, and Christian Lorentzen; for brilliant readings, edits, and encouragement, Adam Desnoyers, Keith Gessen, Chad Harbach, and Robin Kirman; my classmates at Syracuse and teachers, especially George Saunders, Diane Williams, Robert O’Connor, Brooks Haxton, and Michael Burkhard; and thanks to my family for love and encouragement. I’m also indebted, for their generous support, to the Rona Jaffe and Saltonstall foundations.
About the Author
I GREW UP (from the age of two) in Gilford, New Hampshire, a semi-rural town of five thousand people on a small road named after my family. Gilford is part of the Lakes Region, so named for the lakes and mountains. It’s a scenic area, and many tourists come from around the country—in summer to go boating, tour around, and swim in the lake; in fall to see the foliage and hike in the mountains; and in winter to ski. Both my sister and I felt, growing up in such a beautiful, rural, isolated, and homogenous area, that we wanted to go somewhere more exciting as soon as we could. Basically we hated it and felt we lived in Hicksville. We both left the area after high school. But when I wrote the stories in this book, each began with the desire to describe a place in New Hampshire that I knew, even if it was an ugly place. The setting for “The Alpine Slide” is based on a local water park where I worked as a slide attendant, as did a bunch of other teenagers. That was the best job I ever had, working in the valley among the mountains, riding the slide; in writing the story, all I wanted to do was describe the park. Since almost all of the stories in this book are set in New Hampshire, and since I probably did no justice to the places—I thought I’d compile, as an apology, a guide to some truly great highlights of the area. Many of these places are mentioned in the stories.
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Copyright
TWENTY GRAND. Copyright © 2007 by Rebecca Curtis. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061856716
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