Leah Stewart
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2006 Season

While she attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, LEAH STEWART interned at The Tennessean (the Nashville daily) and The Commercial Appeal (the Memphis daily) and wrote a short story about a female reporter that later grew into her first novel, Body of a Girl , which won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award and the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for First Fiction. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is a member of the Sewanee Writers Conference staff. She lives near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with her musician husband, Matt O'Keefe, and their young daughter.

Bibliography

Body of a Girl (2001)
The Myth of You and Me: A Novel (2006)

Excerpt

Chapter 1

What if you had never met me?" Sonia says. "What would your life be like?"

Sonia has been my best friend for only a few months, but already life without her is difficult to imagine. All I can muster is an image of myself alone in a room. "Boring," I say, and Sonia laughs.

We are lying on her four-poster bed, staring up at the pink canopy, our feet propped on the wall above her headboard. We are fourteen. When I turn my head to look at Sonia, her hair brushes against the side of my face.

"If you hadn't been standing in the right place in the parking lot," she says, "we might never have spoken."

"We have three classes together," I say.

"If you hadn't come into the gym that day, we might never have become friends."

"Maybe we were destined to be friends," I say. "Maybe we would've been assigned a group project."

She waves her hand in the air above us, dismissing this. "Every decision we make," she says, "affects the rest of our lives."

"Yeah, yeah," I say, because I've heard this from her a million times.

"For example," she says, "what if you had to choose between being my best friend forever and having the boy of your dreams?"

"I can't have both?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"That's the game."

"Maybe you'd marry his brother and live next door."

She shakes her head, and the movement shakes the mattress. "You have to choose," she says.

Eight years from now I will abandon Sonia. I'll drive away from a gas station in West Texas, my eyes on the rearview mirror, where I'll see her running after my car, a shocked, desperate expression on her face. Here in Sonia's bedroom it's all still there before us, every decision between that moment and this.

Sonia rolls over onto her elbows so she can look me in the face. "Choose," she demands. "Choose."

Continued...