The Beginning of My Newest Book
Hi, all. I'm starting my new book, and I wanted to introduce the first page of it to you. I'm tentatively calling it "Headlines," but we'll see how that works out. You're invited to join the journey that Abby and I are going to take!

Headlines

As the rain from the thunderstorm pummeled the grass and the azalea bush outside Abby's apartment, she lay in her plush bed and sighed unhappily, even though she loved rain and how it cleared the air and, sometimes, her mind. The bed was a college graduation gift from her grandmother. She couldn't figure out if her grandmother had given her the bed because she expected Abby to sleep, English-degree-jobless, on a continuous basis, or if her grandmother just wanted her to have a place to burrow when she actually had time to sleep. The rest of the furniture in her apartment was spare, shabby, old, and included a television set built in the 1980s that she had grabbed from a thrift store for six bucks. She didn't even have a couch.

She knew that she was going to be late for her shift at the Every-Mart, a grocery store across town from her apartment. The store attracted mainly Rastafarians, barefoot women on WIC, and teenaged boys who were members of various gangs. They usually took in her long, flaxen hair, eyed her ample breasts, and asked her, "What up?," but it was generally a rhetorical question. So this is the kind of job an English degree gets me, she thought miserably as she gave the snooze button on her dusty alarm clock one final tap and threw her legs over the side of the bed, stretching her back as she did so. She hated the one-to-eleven shift that she was frequently scheduled to work. That was what she was scheduled for today. She usually began to tire around eight o' clock, and at that point, smiling at customers and bagging their selections of rosemary, popcorn, deodorant, and frozen pizzas caused her great displeasure. She wondered what people who checked out did with some of their items. For instance, what was the shrunken, elderly man (whose name was Perry, he had once told her as he had come through her line with a loaf of French bread as his purchase), going to do with yogurt and condoms? She had tried not to think about that one. He would always eye her as if she were a crossword puzzle and he was illiterate. Actually, she bore a striking resemblance to Gwyneth Paltrow, despite the breast-size issue.

She stepped into her mildewed shower and made the water as cold as she could stand. She was by no means awake, even though she was up and moving. She shampooed her hair with a fifteen-dollar bottle of shampoo which she knew she couldn't afford, but when she had had her hair trimmed at her favorite salon two weeks before, she had let her stylist talk her into the purchase. "It has jojoba in it," Gia had said. "It's also great for thickening the diameter of your hair." Count me in, Abby thought, knowing that that single bottle of jojoba and its hair-thickening properties would be paid for with two hours worth of work at the grocery store.