Sampler

From the first draft...

Avalon hung up the phone. At once, she felt faint with newness, ready to burst, like the first few times she had seen Kyle, met his friends, met his family. She regarded the apartment. Palatial sprawl it was not, but really, it was the best the place had ever looked. Avalon gathered the trash in a bunched plastic bag and took it to the open dumpster outside. She poured herself a glass of water in the kitchen and tasted metal. Avalon wasn’t sure how she felt about Kyle coming now. They truly had not touched each other in three months. And if New York was any gauge of how gorgeous the women of the real world were, Avalon wondered if Kyle had touched someone else in three months.

The women of New York were so lovely, that Avalon, once told she was the crème de la crème of Blackwell (or as Kyle had jokingly put it, “Top Five”) she couldn’t help put feel entirely off-put at any given second. They were just so…together. After all, this was not the land of cute girls at keggers, flip-flopped with mussy hair in their eyes, bleary as they studied in the library stacks. This was the land of modeling, drastic plastic women. Avalon saw, for the first time, the difference.

They danced, not stepped, into bars with streaming hair shimmering from street lamps and headlights. They were always pointy-toed, designer denim clad, slim-waisted. Their legs never swished corduroy, sinewy thighs magnetically drawn away from each other, held static by the power of the gap between them. Their cleavage was sublime.

In the cold snap of early winter weather the week prior, Avalon saw the girls grouped together like prized spring colts, cashmere scarf flags flying in the blustery nights. When Avalon chattered in a lightweight jacket, traversing through the park, she saw them, jogging in leggings and blinking long lashes, never once shivering or bucking at the prospect of a gray day. On the streets of Madison they pranced along in tobacco-colored boots with ease, tucked into their slim pants, tasteful jewelry tinkling slightly, like a chorus of dainty silver bells...