“Yeah, that’s pretty much it—mowing, clipping, swabbing down the decks—cold cash for college.” Just once he’d like to hit the beach. Dad would go ballistic, spewing fire like a dragon—a sermon and a half on the sins of the flesh—gaining steam as he went. “Tunes, man. Wrote tunes all summer.”
As they walked toward the library a Votran bus pulled up to the curb.
Cisco nudged him. “You know that girl, the one on the left?”
“Sure, like forever. Avra Martin—I got a pack of ‘A’s from working on group projects with her. Why?”
Cisco headed toward the gym. “Saw her in Stavro’s last night.”
“And—”
“That’s all.”
He narrowed his eyes at Cisco. “Yeah, right.” He tossed his backpack onto the sun-warmed bricks on Echo Plaza, and planted a foot on a bench.
The undergrad girls headed toward them, their soft roundness barely camouflaged in store-starched clothes. He rapped on Cisco’s chest with his knuckles. “Look alive!”
“All right!” Cisco fended himself up from the bench and rubbed his hands together. “Come to Papa.” He waggled his eyebrows.
Jesse laughed. He had missed Cisco’s humor, the hero-worship in the younger girls’ eyes. This was living. The girls’ breathless chatter, their short shorts, captivated him.
Billy stepped into the group, hit knuckles with Jesse, then Cisco. The girls giggled. Billy’s shower-damp hair curled on top of his six-foot frame. His cheeks glowed pink as if he’d over-scrubbed his acne.
The crowd swelled beyond Jesse’s group. Students gathered under the clock tower, shouting to friends headed across Echo Plaza. Others milled on the grass, squinting into the sun. Some guys tossed a Frisbee around. A peal of laughter erupted from the cheerleaders’ bench.
Ah, Sleeping Beauty Kallie. Jesse shot a smile at the girl wedged on the wrong end of the cheerleaders’ bench. Her face was pale, her body rigid. Her gaze clamped on his like a lifeline in a sea of unfamiliarity. If she was trying to disappear, she failed―in those traffic-cone-orange jeans and green Converses. But she looked smokin’ hot just the same.
The basketball team camped around the cheerleaders. Jesse frowned. Jocks. He nodded at Kallie and settled his gaze back on the faces in his circle. “It was so boring in New Smyrna Beach this summer…”
Cisco, Billy, and the girls glanced curiously at the cheerleaders’ bench and back at Jesse.
He ignored their interest. “…that the Hometown News ran a half-page article on mosquitoes…”
When Jesse’s crew scattered for their classes, he shot a glance at Kallie’s cascade of straight blonde hair that slipped over her shoulders like silk. Eyes averted, she clenched a salmon-colored class schedule in her hand. He should welcome her to Daytona State, but he hadn’t recovered from meeting her last Thursday when he caught her eavesdropping on his solo jam session. In three minutes, she’d slipped into his soul.
Someone jostled into Avra as she funneled through the doorway after Humanities. She pushed a tress of hair behind her ear and looked up. Cisco. Oh, great. He was going to think she ran into him on purpose. “Sorry.” Feeling the heat rush to her face, she ducked her head.
“Make cookies the other night?” Cisco asked as they pressed into the hall and melded with the stream of students.
She resisted the urge to look around to see if he was talking to her. They walked in step, shoulder to shoulder. “Yeah.”
“Chocolate chip?”
She nodded. The hottest guy in Humanities 301 was making polite with her. What was wrong with this picture?
“Quite the conversationalist, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. She wasn’t practiced up on small talk.
“Have it your way.” He held the glass door open for her. “Next time you bake cookies, invite me over.”
Her eyes popped open like Garfield’s Odie. Her mind whirled. He was kidding, right? “You don’t know where I live.” That was inane.
“If you invited me,” Cisco said in a singsong voice, “you could tell me your address.”
She laughed. “We’ll see.” She shuffled away in a fog. Maybe there was something to “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Who’d a thunk it? She should have tied a chocolate chip cookie around her neck eons ago.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Cisco’s dark curls, bleached white in the sun, bobbed away with the current of students flowing toward the theater building. I guess he remembered me.
Cisco threaded through the flotsam of students toward the theater building. We’ll see? I don’t think so, Avra Martin. He didn’t get maybes, only yeses. The girl had family, cookies, and legs you’d have to be in a coma not to appreciate. He bet a lot went on under those blue eyes of hers. Suddenly, he wanted to find out.
Other titles from Ann Lee Miller
On the verge of bagging the two things he wants most—a sailing charter business and marrying old money—Jake Murray’s fiancée/sole crew member dumps him. Salvation comes in the form of dyslexic, basketball toting Rachel Martin, the only one to apply for the first mate position he slapped on craigslist.
Rachel, on a dead run from an affair with a married man, snags the job on Jake’s boat before she can change her mind. Her salvation is shoving ocean between her and temptation and, just maybe, between her and an oil slick of self-disgust.
The many-layered story weaves together disparate strands into a seamless cord. Mother and daughter look eerily alike—down to their lusts. Their symbiotic bond, forged in the blood of childbirth on the kitchen floor and cemented by their secrets, must be cracked open. A son must go home. Sin must be expunged.
Tattered Innocence is for anyone who’s ever woken up sealed in a fifty-gallon drum of their guilt.
1st Place Long Contemporary, 2009 RWA Faith, Hope and Love Contest
Tracy Krauss '12 Top 5 Reads
Stuck in sleepy New Smyrna Beach one last summer, Raine socks away her camp pay checks, worries about her druggy brother, and ignores trouble: Cal Koomer. She’s a plane ticket away from teaching orphans in Africa, and not even Cal’s surfer six-pack and the chinks she spies in his rebel armor will derail her.
The artist in Cal begs to paint Raine’s ivory skin, high cheek bones, and internal sparklers behind her eyes, but falling for her would caterwaul him into his parents’ life. No thanks. The girl was self-righteous waiting to happen. Mom served sanctimony like vegetables, three servings a day, and he had a gut full.
Rec Director Drew taunts her with “Rainey” and calls her an enabler. He is so infernally there like a horsefly—till he buzzes back to his ex.
Raine's brother tweaks. Her dream of Africa dies small deaths. Will she figure out what to fight for and what to free before it's too late?
For anyone who's ever wrestled with their dreams.
The Art of My Life Page 30