"Jasmine Boudreaux! You girls watch out for snakes now, ya hear?" Mama's honeyed drawl drifted over the languid green river to the wooden raft where I was sunbathing with my three best friends—Bunny Bennett, Mary Alice Cunningham and Misty Stewart.
Although we were as different as the four points of the compass, we'd been best buddies since our first day in kindergarten. Mary Alice was thoughtful, sensitive and more than a little religious. Bunny, the wild child, was on the opposite end of the spectrum. And Misty was our version of intelligentsia, bouncing back and forth between arcane ideologies. One day you'd find her quoting Ayn Rand; the next she'd be reading Karl Marx.
And speaking of dichotomies—I was a walking, talking Gemini. Although I was the most pragmatic member of our group, I was naive enough to fall for every practical joke in the universe.
I was fairly sure Mary Alice and I were the only two virgins in our senior class. I say that tenta ...
read full excerpt from Summer After Summer ebook
