The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel Read Free Page B

reason George didn’t believe he would have alerted the authorities. The mess that she’d gotten involved in was many years in the past. But it was bad enough that she must have been running ever since, and she would have to continue running the rest of her life. Of course she didn’t have a cell phone. And of course she wanted to meet somewhere public, a bar at an intersection in a busy part of Boston, somewhere she could take off from right away.
    “Okay. I can come,” George said.
    She smiled. “I’ll be here. Noon.”
    “I’ll be here as well.”

Chapter 2
    T hey had met the first night of college. George’s RA, a gangly, nervous sophomore named Charlie Singh, had brought several of his freshman charges to a jam-packed keg party in McAvoy. George had followed Charlie up the crammed stairwell to a sweltering, high-ceilinged quad with window seats and scuffed hardwood floors. He drank a sour beer and made small talk with Mark Schumacher, one of the freshmen from his hall. Mark begged off, leaving George alone in a sea of attractive upperclassmen who all seemed engaged in making one another laugh riotously. He determined that he could leave the party, but only after he got himself one more beer. He mapped an approach across the room to the unmanned keg and picked his way through the flannel and khaki. He was edged out by a girl who took hold of the nozzle just as he was reaching for it; she pressed the knob, and nothing but foam and air sputtered into her lipstick-smeared cup.
    “It’s empty,” she told him. She had flat, dark blond hair, cropped just under her jawline, and blue, blue eyes spaced far apart on either side of a heart-shaped face. The spacey eyes made her look a little dim, but George thought she was the prettiest girl he’d seen so far at college.
    “You sure it’s empty?”
    “I don’t know,” she said with a drawl that meant she wasn’t from New England. “I haven’t really ever done this before. Have you?”
    George hadn’t, but he stepped forward and took her cup from her. “I think you pump this thing. I actually don’t know either, but I’ve seen it done.”
    “Are you a freshman too?”
    “Yes,” he said as a stream of beer went half into her cup, and half over his wrist and down his sleeve.
    They spent the rest of the evening together, smoking her cigarettes by an open window, then exploring the campus late at night. They made out under an arch that linked the college chapel to the main administration building. George told her how his father—a farmer’s son—had invented a mechanized system for slaughtering poultry and had made more money in one sale than his grandparents had made in their lifetime on the farm. She told him how her dad was an ambulance-chasing lawyer in a small town, then added, as George slid a hand under her shirt, that she was a girl from south of the Mason-Dixon Line who had no intention of having casual sex just because she was at a college in New England. The way she spoke was not censorious but matter-of-fact, and her almost-innocent directness, plus the brief feel of her full breast held by a thin, satiny bra, was all it took to make George fall immediately in love.
    He escorted her back to her dorm and dropped her off, then half ran across campus to get into his unfamiliar bed with the freshman orientation handbook. Her name and address were in it, but no picture. He stared at the name, though, and the blank space where her picture should have been. George felt he had never met a creature like her before. Unlike the alternately repressed and opinionated members of George’s family clan, she had seemed wide open, talking as though the words were falling directly from her thoughts. When they had met by the keg, she had stared at George in a way that felt challenging and yet completely innocent. She stared at him like she had been newly born into the world. There had been something almost spooky about it. Then George remembered the hungry way she