Excerpt from Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You looking for anything in particular?"

He leaned a hip casually against the waist-high table supporting several of the cases in the aisle, his face lit from below like a Halloween trick, the brightness settling in his nostrils and sharpening the tip of his nose. He was about her age, or maybe a year or two older, and he wasn't chunky or fat but just undefined in the way of a whole generation of guys who played video games compulsively through all the hours of every day of the week, of which Todd, thankfully, wasn't one. "I don't know," she said, "tell me about them. I mean, they're gorgeous. Are these the prices here, these numbers on the side?"

"Oh, yeah, sure, but if you see something you really like, I'm always willing to bargain—I breed them, you know? That's my thing in life."

"This one, for instance," she said, leaning over the case nearest her, where a milky pale snake maybe two feet long and decorated with neatly defined bars the color of lemon peel lay inert on its belly, looking at nothing. "What's his story?"

"That's a banana-coral glow. A ball python morph?" He swept a hand in the air. "All these right here? They're all balls. I just got back from Repticon over in Kissimmee—the big expo?"

She nodded, though she had no idea what he was talking about. He was trying to sell her something and she was going to buy it. These were the preliminaries. Part of the price was to listen to him talk.

"And I just laid them out, even my rarer hybrids, in case somebody stopped by. The really primo ones go back over to my house when I close up at seven, but I am in business and most of what you see's for sale."

"It's pretty," she said, then pointed to another, this one the color of dried blood with a black imbricate design like something you'd see in a print top at Anthropologie. "This one too. But the one that really caught my eye is the one in the window, which is too big, I know, but do you have any like that—I mean, that pattern—of maybe this size?"

"Well, yeah, a couple, but most people want balls. They're the fad right now." She followed him across the room to another table, where there were four cases containing snakes just like the one in the window, only smaller, much smaller—a tenth the size, a twentieth, even. They were somehow cute, if you could describe a snake as cute. Self-contained, sleek, vibrant—she couldn't find the adjective, except that at this size they were proportional, just right. Neat, as her mother would say. "Are they babies?"

"More or less. These are Burmies, Burmese pythons? They banned them for a while a couple years back because of the problem down in the Everglades." "They got loose, right? Didn't I hear about that?"

"People can be totally irresponsible, let's face it—just look at the thousands of dogs and cats that have to get put down in the shelters every year—but we got that overturned. Owning a snake is a basic constitutional guarantee—life, liberty and happiness, right? And nothing'll make you happier than having a snake in your life, and while the anoles and the bearded dragons and all that are fine in their own way, for kids especially, a snake's the real deal, you'll see." He paused. He had a polka-dot kerchief knotted round his neck—to soak up the sweat, she supposed. It was hot outside, hotter in here. He took a minute to unknot the kerchief, slap it against his thigh two or three times as if that would do any good, then stuff it in his pocket. "First time, right?"

"Is it that obvious?"

"No, no, it's exciting," he said. "It's like, welcome to the club. And I love the Burmies, don't get me wrong—they make great pets, but they do tend to get big." He was gazing steadily at her now, delivering his pitch, and she wondered if her face was flattened by the lights the way his was, which, of course, it must have been—which only added to the sense of intimacy, of initiation, because this was cool, so very cool, a whole new world opening up to her on a day that was otherwise as ordinary as the two poached eggs on wheat toast she'd ordered at the diner before they brought the car in.

Excerpted from Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle. Copyright © 2023 by T.C. Boyle. Excerpted by permission of Liveright/W.W. Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.