Gardner is enrolled in college and has met a woman in his Literature class. She wears lilac perfume and wears floral dresses, so in his mind he calls her Flower Girl. They get introduced in an odd way and bond quickly, but Gardner gets cold feet b...
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Joe Mazzello as Gardner Langway
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Christina Hendrix as Flower Girl/Leah Masters
A subtle floral scent disturbed Gardner's usually stolid fortress of impermeable defenses from the outside world's challenges to his serenity and sense of stability. He was sitting in his Literature class on his first day at college, anxiously waiting for the class to begin. It wasn't a bad sort of anxiety – he was excited about enrolling in college and finding out what the world of knowledge held for him from the relative safety of a desk in a building situated in his hometown. That was just about his speed. Not totally without the chance of negative consequences, but on the other side of the equation were balanced ripe possibilities of all sorts of rewards and new horizons.
It was just like writing a letter and sending it off to someone. You would lay your words upon the page, choosing how much of yourself you wanted to reveal and inquiring in return that the recipient divulge their knowledge and truth (or their version of it anyway). What came back to you, if they chose to respond, was beyond your control, but if and when you got that return letter, the payoff could be mind-blowingly satisfying. Their words could surprise or enlighten or amuse or captivate or delight you, or they could squeeze your heart or pride or confidence until you cried for mercy, wrung out with tears and aching until you were a mere husk. Gardner, a former postal carrier, believed in the power of the letter and witnessed its ability to unite and inform. By extension, he also believed that a solid education could do the same for him.
Authors who wrote fictional stories were really just writing letters to their readers after all, he reasoned. Story tellers memorialized in writing oral histories they had heard, or concocted and wrote down fantastic tales they imagined with universal themes of love, anger, fear, jealousy, greed, hate and loss, which all functional human beings needed to understand and experience, even if only vicariously. Gardner had mused upon how much of his own experience had been of the vicarious sort, at least until a few months ago, when he had met a woman named Paige who was a customer on his postal route, who had initiated him to a few of those most basic of human emotions in a less-than-joyous way. They had had a very brief encounter – he dared not even call it a relationship or even affair, since that annoyed and provoked her so profoundly that it had led to the fissure of their friendship and they were no longer in communication. What he mostly learned from Paige was firstly, how to have sexual intercourse with a woman (fairly unsatisfactorily), and secondly, what he didn't want in a romantic relationship.
