The Somewhere I See You
Again
By
Nancy Thorne
Excerpt
(340 words)
Expensive jeans and the newest styles of desert boots
and sneakers shuffle in front of us. My eyes follow denim up to a zipper then
to a pocket stuffed with a hand. A blue T-shirt with a Rolling Stones logo
covers what appears to be a flabby abdomen. I gaze up at a face that distorts
from my angle. The guy peers down. He’s not attractive, but not ugly either.
“You have the coolest hair,” he says to Stacy.
I’ve never considered Stacy’s hair cool to be honest.
Guess I’m just used to it. But looking at it now I can see what he means. Far
past her shoulders, it’s parted in the middle and each side gleams copper in
the setting sun.
Stacy leans back and lifts her chin. “Um thanks. We live
on the other side of the park.”
“You two from Slum Hill?” the short guy blurts.
“It’s Sloan Hill,
“ I snarl.
“Don’t mind him, he’s a dickhead,” says a scrawny guy,
swiping at a thick head of hair too big for his body.
“You know someone around here?” the not attractive but
not ugly asks.
“Nope.” I wonder the same about him. But he gazes at
Stacy like he wants her to answer. Like I’m invisible.
“Your school the one being torn down?” he tries again.
Stacy does a hair flip. “Yep. We’ll be going to Carver this
year.”
“Oh yeah? That’s our school.”
“What’s is like?” Stacy asks in her polite, doltish way.
“Are the teachers strict?”
“Depends on who you get. Some are cool. Some are
assholes. It’s sure gonna be crowded this year.”
The group continues down the road in their boy-pack
parade.
Except for him.
“I could grab the keys and give you a ride home if you
want.” He brushes aside straight bangs. “It’s a long walk to Slum−I mean, Sloan Hill.”
“You live near here?” I ask.
He lets out a laugh. “Yeah, real near.”
He points to my dream house, and the robin’s egg blue
convertible parked in the carport.
Can
you, for those of us who don’t know you already, tell something about yourself
and how you became an author?
I don’t feel that I became an author, I felt in grade school that I already was an author. It’s funny, right? I have
no idea where the notion that I was meant to be a writer came from. But I knew
how much I loved words and the emotions they evoked. As a child I would sit at
my vanity and read aloud the events of my neighbourhood into the mirror as if I
were a news anchorwoman in front of a camera. Sometimes, I daydreamed about
becoming a defence lawyer so I could use words to save the innocent.
Still, I kept my dreams hidden. It felt to
me as though someone would eventually pick up on my author premonition, but of
course no one ever did. I was a shy child and didn’t go around proclaiming my
writer ambition. I have a vivid memory of writing a story in grade school. I
waited for her to shed a tear as she read my words. But she simply crossed out
my grammar mistakes with a bright red pencil and handed me back the sheet of
paper. It seemed to me then that I couldn’t possibly be a writer if a teacher
couldn’t see any talent in my story.
It took many years for me to begin my author
journey. But I had the constant itch of belief that I should be a writer, and
it wouldn’t stop no matter how much I tried to scratch it away.
What
inspired you to write this book?
Much of this book is true, although I have
never blackmailed anyone, a crucial plot in the story. As a teenager, I spent
two summers hitchhiking across Canada after telling my mother that I was taking
the train to Vancouver. Memories from those two summers remained in my brain as
if they were seared with everlasting ink. It was a magical time in my life,
filled with new experiences and a greater understanding of life and the people
within the climate of those times.
If
you knew you’d die tomorrow, how would you spend your last day?
Easy question to answer. I would happily and
contentedly spend my last day with my immediate family and our pets.
What
is your favorite part of this book and why?
My favorite part of the book is when
Hannah’s eyes open to the realities and injustices of the world beyond her own
life experiences.
If
you could spend time with a character from your book who would it be? And what
would you do during the day?
It wouldn’t be one character from my book –
it would be all of them. I would love to time-hop back to Jasper, Alberta. The
Athabasca River would still be pristine. The mountains would still be topped
with snow. And all the hitchhhikers who stayed in tents in the shallow valley
that bordered the river would be exactly the same.
Plus, I’d love to find out if a particular
hitchhiker ever found her dog. She spent a lot of time one evening screaming
for her lost dog who had run into the woods. Sometimes she’d swear, “Arlo!
Where the fuck are ya, Arlo?” So, I gave the name Arlo to one of my main characters. I choose to believe that she
found her dog before she went back on the road.
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