Aquamarine (23 page)

My life is like a fairy tale. Okay, a fractured fairy tale. At age eleven I fell hopelessly in love with a little town in eastern Oregon. A population of under fifty didn’t even qualify this town as one-horse, but the place had character, not to mention an abundance of arkayesses
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I had never heard of an arkayess before, let alone seen one, but on the first day of my visit, I became intimately acquainted with a particularly gruesome member of this species—also known as the road-killed snake
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Swinging a dead snake like a lariat, the orneriest boy in town raced toward me on his bike. “You’d better run,” he yelled. “I’m gonna wrap this arkayess around your leg!” He chased me half a block, aimed, then let it fly. The snake cartwheeled through the air with deadly accuracy to coil itself around my bare leg
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The boy was almost as shocked as I was; he hadn’t expected to hit his target. To make it up to me, he proposed … and it only took him nine years to do it. I accepted, of course. How else could I stay in eastern Oregon and live happily ever after in my very own castle? Okay, so it’s a three-bedroom ranch house, but it has an irrigation ditch out back, and that’s practically a moat, right?

It also has a computer, where I spend an inordinate amount of time conjuring up slightly off-beat romantic adventures on my enchanted keyboard. I write from the heart, but filter everything through my funny bone, my goal being to entertain Loveswept readers while I earn enough magic beans to put the three baby Mulvanys through college
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