Prologue
Hindu Kush 04:06.
I whispered into the mike:
"Sierra Five Zulu, this is Four Delta Quebec. Do you have visual on targets? Over."
A little further down the valley, George, my opposite number in 2nd platoon, pressed his transmit button twice in rapid succession. The clicks in my ear confirmed that he had indeed seen the Taliban commanders we were waiting to intercept.
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Mandy's weekend had not been good at all; from the early start to the heavy traffic to the slowest bellman in the entire country to the flaky actresses, the Georgia peach was anything but sweet by the time she arrived home. A more apt description would be an ornery lioness, ready to claw the next person who had the audacity to simply look at her wrong.
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Out of all the social functions I attended each year my favorite by far was Caroline Carson's annual summer kickoff party, held every June at her twelve room plantation home on the river. Caroline's parties were legendary in savannah's social circles; she picked the guests personally for each party.
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I fell in love watching you shower, you know. I've done it so often I know your routine off by heart. I know how shy you are and how you shriek when you catch me watching. I always hated the see-through shower doors until the first time I saw you through them, now I wouldn't trade them for anything.
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When you start writing a fiction story, it's fun to think about where to start. But when you're writing a true story, especially one with a lot of threads runnings through it, deciding where to start is really hard. There are so many strands involved in explaining the key event, and people won't understand you if you don't describe them well. They may even judge you.
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Spots of dappled sunlight streamed through the trees and danced and twirled on the pavement as I waited for her outside the building. She was always late, frantically trying to keep up with her life. Not that I would ever want her life, I snorted to myself. Immediately regretting the thought, I focussed on the distant rush of traffic echoing softly through what had to be the last quiet street in Brisbane's central business district.
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Sitting under the awning next to her truck, Vanille looked down the street and decided that the fair was beginning to wind down. She breathed a sigh of relief both because the long day was over, and because she was going to turn a decent profit from working the small town street fair. Considering her name, she might very well have been destined to sell homemade ice cream from the back of a truck, but it certainly hadn't been her plan.
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"Thin" isn't a word anyone has ever used to describe me. "Beautiful" isn't either. But "sexy"? Well, that's another story.
It's funny how long it takes us to come to a realization of who we really are. For me, it took just over 40 years. My whole life I'd struggled with the weight of my own expectations—always wanting to be fifteen or twenty pounds lighter, to have better cheekbones, to have my hair be a better color or my complexion a little better.
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When the Black Death swept through her village in central Germany, Brigette didn't really understand the changes it would bring to her life. Indeed, no one was prepared for the chaos that arose from nearly half the village not being able to work – and then beginning to die. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was sick and everyone huddled in their homes, afraid of human contact. But it came home to her when her mother and older brother came down with it, and then both her younger sisters the next day.
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I can still see it in high def, up close and personal; the image is engraved on my brain. The bald, glistening vulva of a teenage girl — a squirming, moaning teenage girl, knees up — is not to be forgotten. The best night of my life was the night my sister had a slumber party.
To save money during my last year of college, I moved back in with my parents and commuted from their home in a Boston suburb.
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