Miranda finds an amazing life-like doll at the second hand store for a steal that resembles someone she knows. Walking home while enjoying her new purchase, she encounters her upstairs neighbor Mark. She has been admiring him from afar, spoken to him when they see each other, but has never managed to catch his interest…or so she thought. Mark asks her about going to the Halloween ball with him since neither has a date. After growing up in a house that didn’t celebrate the holiday, Miranda is looking forward to her first Halloween party. Could this be the start of something wonderful, or does Mark have other ulterior motives?
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Excerpt:
She simply could not believe it was real. The tiny plastic body that proved anatomically correct… the hair that felt more real than even her own… the deep brown eyes that stared at her as she caressed the bare, buff plastic arm between her fingers. She’d never seen anything so lifelike. Standing just over a foot tall, the doll was remarkably realistic. Realistic and handsome.
Quite handsome.
“How much for him?” Miranda shouted, not meaning to raise her voice but eager over the excitement of her find.
“The doll?” the old man behind the counter questioned. “Three bucks.”
“Really?” she asked as her eyes grew wide with disbelief.
“Sure. I don’t even remember where it came from. Probably in a box of junk toys, for all I know. It’s three twenty-nine with tax.”
The old clerk offered to wrap and bag the doll for Miranda, but she kindly declined his offer. She wanted to carry him, in her hand, flesh against flesh… Crossing the street, Miranda did not bother to look up, but faith guided her safely across, even as her eyes never once left the doll that seemed to gaze back at her with a killer smile and twinkling eyes.
“I don’t know who you look like more,” she chatted to the doll as she rounded the corner onto Montgomery Street. “It’s either Mark in the apartment above mine or the hottie on the cover of that book I’m reading.”
Miranda was quiet for a moment, as if waiting for the doll to respond. When it said nothing, she continued just as softly as before.
“I’ll have to think of a name for you… You look a little Italian, but then again, I’ve never heard of a little Italian!”