Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,119

several bottles of Boone’s Farm wine: Apple and Strawberry. Both flavors tasted like Kool-Aid laced with malt liquor. Maybe gasoline.

It’s amazing how much I’m remembering now about that summer night in 1975. How vivid it all seems—especially when I realize I haven’t thought about any of this for decades. I grew up. Went to college. Became rich and famous. Locked my summers down the Jersey Shore inside a mental shoebox with the rest of my long-forgotten memories.

But tonight, as I lie in bed, fitfully drifting in and out of sleep, crisp details fill my head.

The swimming pool at the Royal Flamingo Motel with a curving slide lubricated with a trickle of water so you slid down even faster.

The Funtown Pier, home to all sorts of rickety thrill rides—including Dr. Shallowgrave’s Haunted Manor.

The swarm of suntanned bodies bopping up the beach with their radios on. All of them, in my memory, swaying to the blare of a Tijuana Brass soundtrack, the theme from The Dating Game.

But, most of all, I remember Brenda Narramore.

Please don’t tell my wife, who is snuggled up beside me now, cradled against my back, but I am dreaming about a girl I met one summer nearly three and a half decades ago.

Brenda Narramore.

My first summer love.

My muse and inspiration.

How many times have I redrawn her body, first as a leather- clad warrior in my comic books, then as an indestructible street fighter in a ripped and slashed flight suit as the heroine in my graphic novels? How many hours have I spent retracing her curves and lines? In fact, I made my fortune transforming my memories of Brenda Narramore into pen-and-ink drawings of Belinda Nightingale, superheroine of the postapocalyptic world.

The critics always label my impossibly busty Amazon in her tight, revealing costume as “nothing more than an adolescent sexual fantasy.”

They’re right.

She is.

She is Brenda Narramore.

The girl I once feared I’d let the cloaked demon snatch away.

JERRY’S car finally crunched across the seashells on the shoulder of the road.

I could hear “Love Will Keep Us Together” leaking out of his car stereo. Captain and Tennille. It had to be on the radio. No way would Jerry buy a cassette that bogus.

Jerry—who actually possessed a legal New Jersey driver’s license in addition to his fake one from New York State that made him officially eighteen and therefore old enough to buy booze—had his own car. A Starsky and Hutch Gran Torino with a modified V-8 and a Cruise-O-Matic transmission. I can still see the scooped manifold jutting up over the hood. His “ex-dad” had given the car to Jerry just after the divorce.

“What it is, what it is,” he said as he scrolled down his window. “You bring your bread?”

I dug into my shorts. “Five bucks, right?”

Jerry snatched the wrinkled bill out of my fist. “Funkadelic. You steal it from your old man?”

“Nah. I mowed lawns last month.”

“Dyno-mite.” He turned to Kevin. “Don’t leave me hangin’, bro!”

Kevin passed off his cash with a slap to Jerry’s palm.

“What it is, what it is,” said Jerry. I forget why. We all said that in 1975, I guess. “Hop in, brothas!”

Kevin called shotgun. I climbed into the backseat with the two cardboard flats filled with beer cans—one slightly refrigerated case of Schlitz, another of Falstaff. A wrinkled grocery sack stuffed with twist-cap bottles of what Boone’s Farm called wine clattered every time Jerry hit a pothole.

“Didn’t even need to hire Squeegie tonight,” Jerry bragged. “The blind doofus with the Coke-bottle glasses was working behind the counter.”

If Jerry couldn’t score our adult beverages with his fake ID, Squeegie was always his fallback plan: a burned-out World War II vet who slept in the Dumpster out back behind the liquor store. Squeegie would do just about anything for two bucks. Of course, back in 1975 gas cost forty-four cents a gallon, a stamp ten, and a whole pack of cigarettes only thirty-five.

The last time someone sneaked me a pack here in New York City, it cost him nine dollars, and I only got to smoke one before my wife caught me, started crying, and flushed about eight dollars and fifty-five cents’ worth of tobacco down the toilet.

I had told her I’d quit.

I had lied.

WE met the Philly girls at the state park.

Brenda Narramore was beautiful.

A dark pyramid of wavy hair tumbled over her shoulders in a cascade of kinky corkscrews. Her body was perfectly proportioned, up top and down below. She even wore sexy librarian glasses before they became fashionable. That’s why Belinda Nightingale