19

(Look what I just found! I started writing what would ultimately become my novel project. Only I wrote it like a year before the project. And then I started both things in exactly the same way. Wizard.)

I’d never really been a believer of all that hokey “love at first sight” business. I was a realist, considered by some to be a cynic, and took things in stride as I saw them. Believing in fairy tale endings was a condition solely for saps and six year old girls. I fit into neither of these categories.

But then again, there was one of Gram’s—who avidly believed in the truth of happily ever after—adages that I wanted terribly to believe. I’d heard it countless times since birth, with more frequency since I’d started dating. Every time I’d come home with my heart broken by a beautiful girl who hadn’t wanted to go out with a brain, she’d said the same thing.
“Colin,” she’d sigh, puffing on her cigarettes, which she’d started smoking as a teenager and never stopped, “if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times: Everyone has their miracle. You’re only granted one. You have to wait for it, lad. But trust your old Gram; it will come.”

Somehow, this always made me feel better, even when Susannah Monroe stood me up, and the time when, at sophomore homecoming, Paula Lee had left me in the middle of the night for her ex-boyfriend.

But by the time I was seventeen, and Gram was dead, I had more or less given up on miracles. If miracles existed, Gram wouldn’t have died of lung cancer even though she smoked like a chimney, and Dad wouldn’t have lost his job, and Mark wouldn’t have moved away.

So, when it happened, it was a mix of two things I didn’t believe in: love at first sight and miracles.

Samantha was my miracle. And I loved her instantly.

She was walking across the parking lot of the movie theater, in a grey pea coat, the blustery winter wind dragging across her face. She was tall and thin, with impossibly long legs, but what caught my eye first were her eyes, filled with impossible longing.

Not stopping to think, or to call Mark, which was usually what I did in situations involving girls, I got out of my car. She was close enough that the lights from inside my car should have attracted her attention, but she didn’t even look my way.

“Hey,” I called softly.

Halting then, she turned her morose grey eyes to me. It sounds trite, but under her glance I felt as if I were being dissected, all my secrets and things I was ashamed of laid out to see. “Do I know you?” she asked in a voice rough from crying.

Still, I wasn’t thinking much. “No,” I shook my head, redundantly.

She sighed. “Are you trying to pick me up?” she snapped, nonetheless sounding melancholy. “I don’t think I can deal with getting picked up right now.”

I smiled ruefully. “I promise not to try to pick you up.”

Despite herself, she seemed interested in what I was trying to say; a bit apprehensive, yes, but interested. “Are you a rapist?” she asked, almost sounding resigned.

Shrugging, I replied, “No, though if I were a rapist, I’d probably say the same.

Want to go see a movie with me? Or just talk?”

She titled her head to one side. “Why?”

“I want to,” I stated matter-of-factly. “And I already promised to not try and pick you up.”

Apparently in acceptance, she stuck out a thin, dark hand. I liked the way her dark olive skin looked against my pasty nerd shade. “Samantha,” she introduced herself.

“Colin,” said I with a nod.

She gave me a small, timid smile in return, as we made our way towards the movie theatre, not speaking, looking, or touching.
And so it began.