<div>When 22-year-old Avery Walker, a senior at Penn State, meets Grant Danko, a 37-year-old performance artist from Brooklyn whose stage name is Saint John of the Five Boroughs, her life changes radically as she leaves college to live with Grant in Brooklyn and pursue a life as an artist. Worried about Avery, her mother, Kate, and her aunt, Lindsey, and Lindsey&#8217;s husband, Hank, travel to Brooklyn, where they all face a crisis of their own and make life-altering choices.<br><br>Grant is an angry guy with a curiously attractive personality and a coterie of bright, artistic friends. He&#8217;s used his good looks and his accomplishments, and the accomplishments of those friends, to get by while he works hauling stolen goods for his gangster uncle. He carries dark secrets that have caused his life to go off the rails. Grant is about as lost as a man can get, adept at making wrong choices. But when he finally faces his explosive moment of truth, something extraordinary happens.<br><br>Saint John of the Five Boroughs is beautifully turned&#151;a stunning and layered novel about the effects of violence, both personal and cultural, on its characters&#8217; lives. It&#8217;s about the way violence twists character, but also about the possibilities for redemption and change, for achieving a kind of personal grace. Edward Falco once again proves to be a master of urgency and suspense, of events careening out of control, as he brilliantly explores why we make the choices we make&#151;both the ones that threaten to destroy our lives, and those choices that might save us.</div>

Saint John of the Five Boroughs

By EDWARD FALCO

UNBRIDLED BOOKS

Copyright © 2009 Edward Falco
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932961-88-1

Chapter One

People were checking her out from the balconies. Avery knew it, she could feel it, and so she was conscious of how low her slacks rested on her hips, how much of her stomach showed, how her breasts pushed up by her bra rode just slightly higher than the straight neckline of her tank top. Part of her squirmed, part of her preened. An old Rolling Stones song charged down from a second-story balcony a dozen feet in front of her, the driving rhythm doing its magic, dance welling up through her legs and backbone to her shoulders like someone flipped a switch and for an instant she was wildly happy, and that was a pleasure for the moment it lasted before she started wondering about the actual party where she was headed and about whether or not this night she might really hook up with some guy just because she liked his looks or the way he was built or whatever. Because she didn't want to go back to ice cream and an old movie with Melanie. Because the summer at home that had just passed was all ice cream and old movies, only with mother, with Kate.

Mel bumped shoulders with Avery and said, "Look. That's Billy and Chack."

Avery saw Chack first. He was an Indian guy with big eyes and short, scruffy hair. He had on a short-sleeved madras shirt and khaki slacks, which was like a uniform with him. Sometimes Mel called him Professor Madras. He was a grad student in chemistry or something like that. He and Billy were one of those sets of guys who seemed to exist in a kind of magnetic relationship so that wherever one was, the other was circling nearby. She was still looking for Billy when she heard him scream out Melanie's name and then hers as he emerged out of the crowd and climbed over the balcony railing. He was barefoot and wearing pants that only reached midcalf and a bright red shirt that looked like it was probably a woman's blouse given the fat collar and the lack of top buttons, a small, skinny guy with long hair slicked back and dripping water on the shoulders of the shirt-blouse. When he let go of the railing to wave them up, Chack grabbed him around the waist and yanked him back to safety. Then someone turned up the volume on some Salt-N-Pepa cut, and heads nodded and bodies bobbed in a ripple of motion.

Melanie said, "What's up with that boy?"

"Let's go see." Avery started toward the balcony and then stopped to say maybe they shouldn't, since Dee was expecting them at Vince's party.

Melanie said, "Screw her. She's been a bitch all night."

Avery thought it over for a second and then continued across the lawn. At the crowded doorway, she wanted to turn around, repulsed by the prospect of trying to wedge her way through the dense crush of bodies inside, but Melanie grabbed her by the arm and yanked her into the swarm. "I need another drink," she said. "I'm losing my buzz."

"Buzz?" Avery shouted. Melanie had her wrist in a death grip as she pulled her through pounding music and sweaty bodies. "You're out of it, girl! You left buzz behind hours ago!"

Melanie yelled something Avery couldn't make out, and then a body stumbled in front of her. Melanie's grip broke, the crowd closed around her, and Avery found herself toe to toe with a guy so big she had to look up to see his face, which was amazingly square and flat. "Yo, Missy," he said. "Looking good!"

Avery was about to slide around him when someone knocked into her from behind and pushed her flat against his unmoving body, which was so rock-hard and solid that it startled her. Banging into him was like running into a boulder. "Jesus," she said, the words spilling out without thought, "what are you, like a weight lifter or something?"

The guy's face lit up. "You don't know who I am?"

"I'm supposed to know who you are?" Avery stepped back to get a better look and saw a guy who did in fact look a good bit like a boulder. He was tall and wide, with a neck the size of an average guy's thigh. "Let me guess," she said. "Football player."

He offered her his hand. "Zachary Snow," he said. "I'm pretty famous, but I guess you don't follow football, huh?"

Avery said, "Do we have a football team?"

Zachary's face went slack with confusion before Avery smirked, cluing him in that she was making a joke, and he laughed a weird, high-pitched, tittering laugh. "You're funny," he said.

"I'm only funny when I'm drinking," she said. "Otherwise I'm pretty dull."

"Well, shit ..." Zach pulled a silver flask out of his back pocket, took a swig, and offered it to her. "Can't be talking to no dull girls."

Avery managed one big gulp of bourbon, which she recognized from its familiar sweet burn, before she coughed and handed back the flask. "That's good," she said. "Smooth."

"Booker's," Zach said. "Fifty dollars a fifth."

Avery stalled a moment, offered Zach a coy smile. She was getting that fluttery feeling she got when she didn't know for sure what she was doing but was pretty sure she was about to do it. "So are you one of those football players everybody's trying to get with because they're, like, on the cover of Sports Illustrated and stuff?"

"Nah, not like that," Zach said. "But, you know, maybe. If I have a good season. This'll be my first year starting."

"Starting what?" Avery asked. She had to smirk again to let him know she was joking.

"You're pretty funny," he said.

"So, like, Zach ..." She reached up and touched the biceps on his right arm, which was significantly bigger than the width of her outstretched hand, thumb to pinkie. "How much can you lift?"

"I can bench four hundred," he said. "I got a shot at the Iron Man title. You into lifting?"

She smiled her cutest, girliest smile. "Do I look like I'm into lifting?"

Zach said, "You look good." He pulled the flask from his back pocket and handed it to Avery.

Avery took another big swallow, shook it of off, and looked over Zach one more time as she handed the flask back to him. "So, Zach," she said, "you want to come out to the balcony with me and meet my friends?" She offered him her hand.

Zach said, "Aight," and flashed a bright, happy smile.

Avery gestured toward the balcony and then followed Zach as he bulled through the crowd. She was getting dangerously close to being too drunk, though she wasn't there yet. Sound buzzed and swooped over her, color flashed and flared. Breasts were in fashion again, which was a good thing for her, since she had 'em, but rough on girls like Mel, who didn't have much at all. She briefly pondered this-the current fashion of displaying breasts-as she was pulled through the party, past one girl after another wearing a variety of revealing tops.

On the balcony, Mel was leaning against the railing next to Chack. She held a gigantic plastic cup of beer frozen an inch or so from her lips as she watched Avery approach hand in hand with Zachary. Billy appeared to be passed out. Chack was holding him up with an arm around his chest. The boy looked like a rag doll, his head and arms dangling loosely, his legs bent under him.

"Is he okay?" Avery had to shout to be heard over the music. She touched Billy's hair, which was dripping wet. The clothes he had on-close up, clearly a woman's blouse and slacks-were damp. "What," she shouted, "did he fall in a pool or something?"

"You got it," Chack said, "only dove. Lydia's got his clothes in the drier."

Mel said, "Lydia?"

"S'er place."...