The Perfect Girl
I've had the wild notion that after graduation Scipio Winter will enlist in the French Foreign Legion. He is, after all, a ridiculously theatrical person, especially for someone who has never shown any interest in the theater; and he would agree with me, in part because he is a fictional character whose thoughts and opinions are all products of my imagination, that despite the many glaring flaws of the French people, France is important enough to be worth fighting for. Any resulting adventures could be chronicled under the title "L'Americain" or L'Americain.

I've been softening the opening of The Perfect Girl to make the whole enterprise more believable. Margaret Eastman is becoming, thankfully, less of a philosophically-driven backetcase and more of an overly enthusiastic embracer of circumstance. She may be crazy, and she probably is, a little bit, but all she's trying to do is make lemonade out of the lemons life has placed before her. Before, she decided to lose her virginity to Eddie Beck and made a beeline for his bedroom as soon as she arrived at the frat house; now, she is just as determined to surrender her virtue, but she takes the time to imbibe alongside the lad and rub herself against him on the dance floor and generally allow nature to take its course.

Also before, she choose to try lesbianism as a result of her bitterness at her cheating boyfriend Ben and the aforementioned fratboy Beck, and found Kari Putterman as the perfect recipient of her newly oriented advances. (What in the high holy hell was I thinking when I originally came up with this story?) Now, her motivation is something with which I can very closely identify: upon first seeing Kari at the Halloween party, Margaret is completely and unequivocally smitten. Kari is all Margaret can think about; that Kari is a girl and Margaret has always been utterly hetero is beside the point. If converting both Kari and herself to lesbianism is what it will take to claim Kari as her own, so be it; Margaret will not be denied.

Partial Dramatis Personae
Margaret Eastman
Pete Foster
Mary Peppard "Mary Cannibal"
Kari Putterman
Scipio Winter
Parker Peppard
Stacey Hiraki
Eddie Beck, "The Beckmeister"
Brandy McCown
Ben Roth
Tim & Sunil (go together like C-3PO & R2-D2)
Maureen
Neal Cohen, "NYC"
Svetlana Kaminskaya (primarily in the tangental story "Armistice Day")
Ari Romanov (primarily in the tangental story "Armistice Day")

"The War of Assassins" and "Armistice Day" may be included as chapters of The Perfect Girl or excluded as discrete short stories taking place at the same time and featuring some of the same characters. I need to study the psychology of suicide in greater detail before attempting "Armistice Day." (I loved A Long Way Down, but it mostly explored why people choose not to commit suicide.)