Monday Excerpt

Another excerpt from one of my fave scenes in A Faculty Daughter.

Tom St. James rang the bell at 7:05. Karen had asked her parents if she could meet him in the parking lot, but Mr. Howard had said nothing doing. Tom wore a collared sweater and a pair of striped bell-bottoms like Greg Brady on the Brady Bunch. But unlike Greg, this man—no way you could look at him and think boy—smoldered with carnality the likes of which we’d never seen. Tom’s collar afforded us two open snaps worth of chest hair. Lacey and I stood like a pair of ventriloquist’s dummies, gazing at his high planed handsome face, his eyes the color of the sherry my parents sometimes drank. The air around Tom seemed to shimmer with charge. “Is Karen ready?” he asked, his lazy smile the essence of cool.