Avra's God
Ann Lee Miller
In the tradition of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, four friends navigate college and the drama churned up by their Florida beach band to cement friendship and more.
Avra wants love, but drummer Cisco—self-medicating from his parents’ divorce with sex and intoxicants—is a poor choice. Cisco hungers for fresh-baked cookies and the scent of family he finds at Avra’s.
Kallie shares her classically trained singing voice only with lead vocalist Jesse and fights to keep her heart safe. Jesse feeds on fame and hides more than insecurity beneath his guitar.
The friends surf ego, betrayal, and ambition and head for wipe-out. But somehow, when they’re not looking, Avra’s God changes them all.
In September I shared an excerpt from The Art of My Life . Today features an excerpt from the next book from author Ann Lee Miller, Avra's God. Hope you enjoy this tidbit today, and all of those who leave a comment with your email address will receive an e-copy of Kicking Eternity, also from the New Smyrna Beach Series. And one lucky winner will receive a free e-copy of Avra’s God, courtesy of Ann Lee Miller!
Chapter 1
A hot blast of pepperoni-laden air rolled over Avra as Stavro’s Pizza
kitchen door swung shut. She inched ahead in line for a table with her family.
“Yep, me and the idiot sisters are eatin’ fine tonight.”
She swiveled. That voice.
The guy from Humanities 301 thumbed through change he pulled from the
pocket of his cutoffs. Cisco. And she didn’t shower and change after soccer
practice—why?
Her brother’s elbow knocked into her. “It’s gotta be meat lovers,”
Drew’s stuck-in-puberty voice rasped.
Cisco glanced in her direction. Her gaze skittered back to her brother.
Please, God, tell me Cisco didn’t just
catch me staring at him!
Her attention drifted to Cisco’s corkscrew curls that brushed the
shoulders of his ancient Whitey’s Bait
& Tackle—Size Counts T-shirt. The girl behind the register tracked Cisco
from under dark lashes as if she were having a conversation with the back of
his head.
“I want ham and pineapple.” Her brother, Kurt, shot an
I’m-slumming-in-Stavro’s-with-my-family look at a couple of girls behind them.
“Veggie,” Avra said, distracted by Cisco’s gaze on her. “Let’s get
three.”
Cisco’s forehead crinkled like he was trying to remember where he’d
seen her.
Avra feigned fascination with the Best
Pizza in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, plaques on the wall. She frowned at the
reflection in the window of her droopy ponytail and unisex soccer uniform.
Beside her reflection in the glass, the counter girl wore her Stavro’s polo as
a second skin. What was the use? Avra turned toward her family.
Mom eyed them. “We’re celebrating Kurt’s first day of college, the
beginning of Avra’s junior year, not graduation—”
Drew huffed. “What about my senior year of high school?”
Mom dropped her gaze from the illuminated menu on the wall. “We’ll get
two large pepperonis.”
The girl bit a hangnail and watched Cisco. The gummy corners of
“Isabel” curled off her red plastic badge. Overhead, a cardboard pizza twirled
in the draft from the air conditioning vent. Isabel blinked at her customer and
scrawled the order on a guest check.
Dad threaded an arm around Mom’s waist. “And spicy cheddar cheese
poppers.” He batted his eyes through his glasses at Mom and made her laugh.
They melted against each other and glided toward the empty bench talking in
quiet voices.
I want a guy who will love me like
that―forever.
She looked at her brothers. “When I’m married, my kids will have
whatever kind of pizza they want. And I’ll bake cookies―”
Drew’s blue eyes brightened in his freckle-spattered face. “Make some
chocolate chips tonight.”
Kurt shot her an evil grin. “Who’d marry you, Avra? Morgan?”
“Puleeese.” Avra made a gagging noise. She caught Cisco’s smirk out of
the corner of her eye and stopped, mid-gag. Warmth crept into her face. Oh, great. Cisco and everyone in
Stavro’s was going to see her face go apple-red under the track lights.
Cisco’s smirk widened into a smile. “I can’t remember the last time I
had really good entertainment in the pizza line.”
Metal scraped across metal in the kitchen, and she looked toward the
swinging stainless steel doors. Isabel gave her the L.O.D., as Kurt called it.
The look of death.
She narrowed her eyes at Isabel. Trust
me, sister, humiliating yourself in public is not the kind of attention a girl
wants. Look at me. Look at you. Which one of us is likely to get the guy? It’s
not rocket science.
“Hey, what about baking cookies tonight?” Drew croaked.
Cisco pushed off the partition separating the counter area from the
dining room and joined them. “That’s what I’m talking about! My
half-price-plus-a-buck specials sounded pretty good till I heard you guys discussing
homemade cookies.”
The corners of Avra’s mouth turned up. Dark hair curled on Cisco’s bare
ankles above the loose laces of his tennis shoes. Her stomach quivered as it
did when a soccer ball hurtled toward her. She opened her mouth to say something,
anything, and turned away with a flutter of her hand. She shrank into
herself—the result of being too tall for too many years. Just disappear. That’s
what she was good at.
Cisco nudged her shoulder with his. “Thanks again for the show.”
She eyed his shoulder, even with hers. “Sure, Cisco, anytime.”
Cisco jutted his chin at her. “The lady knows my name.”
Heat swept back to her face. Isabel’s L.O.D. burned into her.
Cisco winked. “See you in Humanities Wednesday—Avra.” He pushed out the
door, pizza boxes balanced in one hand over his shoulder. A two liter Orange
Crush dangled from between two fingers.
Breathe, Avra. It was just a wink. But he knew her name.
Isabel’s gaze raked over her as though she were a palmetto bug. She
tossed a boxed pizza onto the counter in front of a man in a rumpled
three-piece-suit. Isabel must have been all of five-three, but in some weird
way, she made Avra feel small.
Avra trailed Kurt’s faded Ron Jon
Surf Shop T-shirt toward the corner table where her parents sat. She would
be translucent again by Wednesday, a blur guys look through but never see. This
was what she prayed for when she hit five-eleven in the fifth grade.
She scooted across the vinyl bench after Kurt, shooting a glance at the
door where Cisco had disappeared. Her hand touched the shoulder Cisco had
bumped—as if anything would ever come of it.
Cisco swung the Orange Crush beside him. His sisters would get into a
brawl about the soda. How was he supposed to remember who liked what? If
tuition wasn’t killing him, he’d be out of there.
A sea breeze rustled the moss-draped oaks overhead. The pizza warmed
the palm of his hand through its box. He breathed in the pepperoni scent and
thought about Avra’s family in Stavro’s who could have stepped out of Charity
De Meer’s Photography window. Their banter had splashed over him, making him
thirsty for more.
Families intrigued him—not his, with Mamá cleaning schools, three to
eleven, Pop living on Freedom’s Call
tied up behind the city marina. His kid sisters screeched at each other all day
like it mattered. No, happy families interested Cisco.
He cracked open the pizza boxes in the twilight to make sure Isabel got
the order right.
His mind swerved away from Isabel to this morning’s class. Avra had
smirked into her Humanities book without looking up when Mr. Smythe-Rollings
called him “Mr. Carter” instead of “Cisco.” His lips curled into a smile at the
memory. She was the kind of girl who blended in on campus. But when you really
looked at her, she was a treat—a sloppy-soft ponytail the color of caramels;
ocean blue eyes; and long, toned legs beneath the soccer shorts.
He cut across the dirt yard to his front door thinking about homemade
cookies, a house with two parents, and siblings that didn’t cuss each other in
two languages.
He tripped on the jagged front step. What was he going to do about
Isabel?
Jesse stood in the asphalt lot behind Daytona State College and locked
the door of his Dodge Neon. He fanned his shirt away from his body in the muggy
morning.
Someone laid on a horn.
His head popped up.
Cisco darted around the grass islands on the far side of the lot in his
Geo Prism as if they were florescent cones.
Jesse shook his head. Only Cisco could make that piece of junk look
cool.
Cisco cut his engine and coasted to a stop facing the cemetery where
grass grew in fits and starts along Welch Drive. Sand grated under Cisco’s feet
when he hopped out in front of him.
Jesse grinned. “Hey, Bro.”
Cisco bumped knuckles with him. “Bud. Where you been all summer?”
Through the open window, Cisco snatched his backpack from the passenger seat,
and they headed for campus.
“I’ve been nowhere at all—the whole stinking summer. You?”
Cisco thumped his chest. “At the beach all day, every day!” He
stretched lazily. “It’s the life!”
Jesse widened his grin. “Still changing oil at Walmart, huh?”
Cisco grimaced. “Old man lock you up in the church all summer?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it—mowing, clipping, swabbing down the
decks—cold cash for college.” Just once he’d like to hit the beach. Dad would
go ballistic, spewing fire like a dragon—a sermon and a half on the sins of the
flesh—gaining steam as he went. “Tunes, man. Wrote tunes all summer.”
As they walked toward the library a Votran bus pulled up to the curb.
Cisco nudged him. “You know that girl, the one on the left?”
“Sure, like forever. Avra Martin—I got a pack of ‘A’s from working on
group projects with her. Why?”
Cisco headed toward the gym. “Saw her in Stavro’s last night.”
“And—”
“That’s all.”
He narrowed his eyes at Cisco. “Yeah, right.” He tossed his backpack
onto the sun-warmed bricks on Echo Plaza, and planted a foot on a bench.
The undergrad girls headed toward them, their soft roundness barely
camouflaged in store-starched clothes. He rapped on Cisco’s chest with his
knuckles. “Look alive!”
“All right!” Cisco fended himself up from the bench and rubbed his
hands together. “Come to Papa.” He waggled his eyebrows.
Jesse laughed. He had missed Cisco’s humor, the hero-worship in the
younger girls’ eyes. This was living. The girls’ breathless chatter, their
short shorts, captivated him.
Billy stepped into the group, hit knuckles with Jesse, then Cisco. The
girls giggled. Billy’s shower-damp hair curled on top of his six-foot frame.
His cheeks glowed pink as if he’d over-scrubbed his acne.
The crowd swelled beyond Jesse’s group. Students gathered under the
clock tower, shouting to friends headed across Echo Plaza. Others milled on the
grass, squinting into the sun. Some guys tossed a Frisbee around. A peal of
laughter erupted from the cheerleaders’ bench.
Ah, Sleeping Beauty Kallie. Jesse shot a smile at the girl wedged on
the wrong end of the cheerleaders’ bench. Her face was pale, her body rigid.
Her gaze clamped on his like a lifeline in a sea of unfamiliarity. If she was
trying to disappear, she failed―in those traffic-cone-orange jeans and green
Converses. But she looked smokin’ hot just the same.
The basketball team camped around the cheerleaders. Jesse frowned.
Jocks. He nodded at Kallie and settled his gaze back on the faces in his
circle. “It was so boring in New Smyrna Beach this summer…”
Cisco, Billy, and the girls glanced curiously at the cheerleaders’
bench and back at Jesse.
He ignored their interest. “…that the Hometown News ran a half-page
article on mosquitoes…”
When Jesse’s crew scattered for their classes, he shot a glance at
Kallie’s cascade of straight blonde hair that slipped over her shoulders like
silk. Eyes averted, she clenched a salmon-colored class schedule in her hand.
He should welcome her to Daytona State, but he hadn’t recovered from meeting
her last Thursday when he caught her eavesdropping on his solo jam session. In
three minutes, she’d slipped into his soul.
Someone jostled into Avra as she funneled through the doorway after
Humanities. She pushed a tress of hair behind her ear and looked up. Cisco. Oh,
great. He was going to think she ran into him on purpose. “Sorry.” Feeling the
heat rush to her face, she ducked her head.
“Make cookies the other night?” Cisco asked as they pressed into the
hall and melded with the stream of students.
She resisted the urge to look around to see if he was talking to her.
They walked in step, shoulder to shoulder. “Yeah.”
“Chocolate chip?”
She nodded. The hottest guy in Humanities 301 was making polite with
her. What was wrong with this picture?
“Quite the conversationalist, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. She wasn’t practiced up on small talk.
“Have it your way.” He held the glass door open for her. “Next time you
bake cookies, invite me over.”
Her eyes popped open like Garfield’s Odie. Her mind whirled. He was
kidding, right? “You don’t know where I live.” That was inane.
“If you invited me,” Cisco said in a singsong voice, “you could tell me
your address.”
She laughed. “We’ll see.” She shuffled away in a fog. Maybe there was
something to “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Who’d a thunk it? She should have
tied a chocolate chip cookie around her neck eons ago.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Cisco’s dark curls, bleached white
in the sun, bobbed away with the current of students flowing toward the theater
building. I guess he remembered me.
Cisco threaded through the flotsam of students toward the theater
building. We’ll see? I don’t think so,
Avra Martin. He didn’t get maybes,
only yeses. The girl had family,
cookies, and legs you’d have to be in a coma not to appreciate. He bet a lot
went on under those blue eyes of hers. Suddenly, he wanted to find out.
Ann Lee Miller earned a BA in creative writing from Ashland (OH) University and writes full-time in Phoenix, but left her heart in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where she grew up. She loves speaking to young adults and guest lectures on writing at several Arizona colleges. When she isn’t writing or muddling through some crisis—real or imagined—you’ll find her hiking in the Superstition Mountains with her husband or meddling in her kids’ lives.
Twitter: @AnnLeeMiller
