On the day it all began, he woke early and started thinking about girls even before he got out of bed and put on his overalls. To Vernon, thinking about girls was the easiest thing in the world to do because it came so natural.
He'd been thinking about girls so much lately, it sometimes made him feel guilty but he didn't let that stop him. He thought about girls sitting at the breakfast table while watching his Ma and Pa eat their biscuits and sausage gravy. And later, when he went down to the barn to hitch-up the horses and load the wagon with fence post he thought about girls some more. Vernon felt good thinking about girls. The biggest problem with doing it constantly was that it left him little time to think about anything else.
He tried to recall the prettiest girl he had ever seen but found that an impossible task. There were just too many girls living around Lepingdale to single out one. Another troubling thing, was that most of the girls in the little town wouldn't have anything to do with Vernon anyway. But that was only a minor problem which he overcame by ignoring. Vernon figured he wasn't hurting nobody just thinking. The girls didn't know when he thought about them, so why not do it as much as he wanted to? He couldn't remember when girls first started to occupy his thoughts all the time, but it often seemed like he'd been thinking about them for most of his eighteen years.
But that day, about two-thirty in the afternoon, something happened that catapulted his thinking in a whole different direction. He was sitting on the big sandstone flat rock on the edge of the front porch drinking from a dipper filled with ice-cold well-water. He had been trying to figure out exactly what it was about girls that interested him so and that's when he saw the jet plane come rushing over a low ridge of pine trees, flames shooting from its exhaust. And the next minute, he thought that his world had come to an end.
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