Time Heals All
The memory of her miserable adolescence haunted Olivia Metzger. She could not forget the braces, the acne, the ineptitude that plagues those unfortunates who inhabit the lowest levels of every high school’s rigid social hierarchy. Worse still, she had no mother, no loving arms to enfold her, no warm cookies at the end of a trying day, no model of American womanhood to which she could aspire. She had only her father, a vintner by vocation, a surly man who spent his days sequestered with his grapes in an attempt to avoid the suspicious eyes that still followed him when he appeared in public, a result of his wife’s untimely demise. Shortly after Olivia’s birth, Mrs. Metzger’s lifeless body was discovered on the kitchen floor, a bottle of her husband’s wine in one hand, an empty glass in the other. The autopsy results were inconclusive and the question remained. Was her death by accident or by design? So Olivia slogged through high school, isolated and forlorn, until Whitney, Ashley ...