Read Online Apart at the Seams by Marie Bostwick - Free Book Online

academically gifted as I had been led to believe. Sure, I’d been on the top of the ladder at my high school, but at Princeton, I was average at best, as my first-semester grade point confirmed. This isn’t an uncommon experience among college freshmen; I’ve talked a number of my former clients through the shock of discovering just how small a fish they are when suddenly dropped into a bigger pond. My discontent ran deeper than that. I just didn’t fit in at Princeton.
    Many, though far from all, of my classmates were a lot wealthier than me, but the gulf that separated us was more than economic. They were miles more sophisticated than I was, better read and better traveled. I’d never been farther from home than the Jersey shore, and though I’d read Shakespeare’s plays in their entirety and written that drama column for our school paper, my experience with professional theater was limited to two trips to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall at Christmas.
    Realizing how limited my life experience was in comparison to everyone else’s, I was tongue-tied in the classroom and socially awkward. My clothes, my unfashionably frizzy hair, even my vocabulary was out of place at Princeton. The only friend I had was my roommate, Lanie Micelli, a pert, pretty, and driven girl, the daughter of a trucking magnate from Chicago. Lanie’s freshman GPA was just as low as mine was, and she fell in and out of love nearly every week, but she knew how to get on in life.
    Lanie took me under her wing. She lent me clothes, made me read Cosmopolitan magazine, taught me to smoke, tried to chemically straighten my hair—a well-intentioned act with disastrous results—and introduced me to a string of her cast-off boyfriends, with similarly disastrous results. Finally, Lanie came to the conclusion that what I needed was broadening and a change of atmosphere.
    â€œDo a summer semester in London,” she counseled. “Smoke some pot, visit some clubs, sleep with the bass player in a punk band. If you have time, maybe tour a few museums and see a play in the East End. You know what your problem is, Gayla?”
    â€œYou mean besides having bad hair?”
    â€œSee? That’s what I’m talking about. You’re too damned serious. Quit thinking so hard! Go to Europe and do something your parents would disapprove of. You’ll be a new woman when you come back; I promise.”
    I was too scared to smoke pot, but I did rip the knees out of a pair of perfectly good jeans, stick a bunch of safety pins on my jacket, and go to some clubs, only to discover that punk music was dead, or at least in remission, and much too angry for my taste. Following a tip from a girl at Marks & Spencer who sold me a tube of pink glitter lip gloss, I found a little club that hosted bands that were less screeching.
    Warrior Poets played the kind of music that wouldn’t be out of place among today’s current crop of singer-songwriters, with thoughtful lyrics and hummable guitar interludes, played acoustically. The band was just okay, but the bass player was divine.
    Brian kept his eyes closed during almost every song, like he wasn’t playing for anybody but himself. I couldn’t stop myself from staring at him. His hair was long then and flopped down over his brows when he bent his head forward. His jeans were ripped at the knees, not because he’d torn them but because he’d didn’t care about clothes. He didn’t have to. Then, as now, everything he put on his tall, lean body looked absolutely fabulous. His fingers were long and slender, like mine. He pressed and strummed and stroked them along the strings and neck of his guitar with a delicacy and skill I found swooningly sensual.
    By the third set, he must have felt me staring at him because he kept opening his eyes in the middle of songs, looking up at me, even fumbling a chord once, drawing a scathing glance from the lead