Prologue

I didn’t know what her arrival meant, not really, not then. I was just a lovestruck kid who became a shaky bundle of nerves when November Riley came to Old Orchard Beach. How was I to know she was a monster?

It started the summer of 1986. I was fifteen. Unlike the vast majority of people in our small beach town, we, me and about six thousand other people, were year-round residents. That number easily doubled in the summer. We weren’t too far from Portland. In fact, the Amtrak Downeaster ran constantly to and from both Portland and Boston, delivering all sorts of summer people.

We had plenty of things that drew the tourists to us like flies to shit. For the kids, there was Palace Playland, an old-school seaside amusement park, complete with roller coaster and Ferris wheel that stood seventy feet tall. Or they could travel fifteen minutes over to Saco to Funtown, the bigger, newer (if 1960 qualified as new) amusement park on Route 1. Funtown, however, lacked the carnival-like charm of our place. Plus, our dual arcades beat their one lame one every day of the week.

If rides and games weren’t your speed, Old Orchard Beach was also home to the Cleveland Indians Triple-A team, the Maine Guides. The Ball Park, yes, that was and still is the actual name of the field, also opened up for rock concerts on the nights between games. My older sister, Julie, brought me to see Foreigner there at the end of summer in ’85. That first concert experience also supplied me with my first contact buzz from what Julie called Mary Jane. I had a smile for miles and wound up kissing a tall brown-haired girl up from Virginia. I can’t remember if I ever got her name, but I’ll never forget her kiss.

For the grownups not wishing to headbang, go on thrill rides, or watch a ballgame, the pier offered a plethora of bars. Places like Duke’s, The Gin Rail, and Barbara Ann’s were packed full of rowdy drinkers from afternoon through well after midnight. I can’t count the number of times I was woken up by motorcycles and trucks cruising by my bedroom window out on East Grand Avenue. The loud blats of Harleys and big-wheeled Chevys stole me from dreams of flying, chasing ghosts, and kissing Heather Thomas or Madonna one too many times. I always envied Julie for choosing the room on the other side of the hall. She was up and ready for the day, while I met my cereal and cartoons bleary-eyed, and in a daze, as if I’d been the one partying on the pier all night.

It was a morning after one of these long nights of listening to my Walkman in my room that I met the girl who would change my little seaside world. That’s the day I first ran into the girl of my dreams…or at least my girl of that summer.