Then she slipped through my fingers, and all I could feel was loss. We touched fingertips and I saw green sparks in the darkness. There was no groundīeneath my feet, and I was clawing at mud.

I stretched out my arm, trying to catch her. She called to me, and just the sound of her voice made my heart race. I was free falling, tumbling through the air. Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong.

We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.Īt least, that's what I thought, when I closed my battered copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, clicked off my iPod, and turned out the light on the last night of summer. There were no surprises in Gatlin County. To, the jokes, the girls, who would park where. Year at Stonewall Jackson High, and I already knew everything that was going to happen-where I would sit, who I would talk Tomorrow would be the first day of school, my sophomore The neighbors kept watch from their porches in the unbearable heat, Gatlin wasn't a complicated place Gatlin was Gatlin. Stubble-terrible for walking, but perfect for throwing at angry possums, the meanest animals alive. Good houses were on River, and everyone else lived south of Route 9, where the pavement disintegrated into chunky concrete It came out on DVD, but you had to hitch a ride over to Summerville, by the community college. You could see a movie at the Cineplex about the same time The library still had a card catalog, the high school still had chalkboards,Īnd our community pool was Lake Moultrie, warm brown water and all. All we had was a Dar-ee Keen, since the Gentrys were too cheap to buyĪll new letters when they bought the Dairy King. We were too farįrom Charleston to have a Starbucks or a McDonald's. Gatlin wasn't like the small towns you saw in the movies, unless it was a movie from about fifty years ago. Just another reason I couldn't wait to get out of here. Everyone under the age of sixty called it the War Between the States, whileĮveryone over sixty called it the War of Northern Aggression, as if somehow the North had baited the South into war over aīad bale of cotton. Only folks down here didn't call it the Civil War. My father was a writer, and we lived in Gatlin, South Carolina, because the WatesĪlways had, since my great-great-great-great-granddad, Ellis Wate, fought and died on the other side of the Santee River during Everyone else finds a way out.' There was no question which one he was,īut I'd never had the courage to ask why. 'The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. 'The stupid and the stuck,' my father had affectionately classified our neighbors. There were only two kinds of people in our town.

Author of beautiful creatures