_The small Mississippi town in which you live is starved for event, but rich in gossip. At an early age, you become a cynic and a veteran of lies, and in the summer before your tenth-grade year, a real whopper comes down the pike about a girl named B. from Jackson who's moving to town and entering your grade at school. The story—ha!—is that she has just been on the cover of a Fleetwood Mac album. You don’t even consider believing it. What, New York and Hollywood ran out of models, and Fleetwood Mac had to come to Mississippi looking for girls? And once they discovered this girl, she promptly decided to move to a smaller, bleaker Mississippi town? Please.

In any case, the ridiculous rumor sweeps through town virtually overnight. Conveniently, no one knows details. You go to the record store daily to pore over the bins, scanning the Fleetwood Mac section and asking if they’ve gotten any new arrivals, never letting on that you’re interested in something specific. You are glad when you don’t find the album. If she existed, she would be the kind of girl who would only torture you.

Then football practice starts two weeks before the first day of school, and the star halfback, who is a senior class officer, comes in talking about how he had been paired with her for the three-legged relay race at a student council party for new students. You think, That doesn’t prove anything, until he goes on about how he saw the album in an out-of-town store and how she looks even better in person.

You keep visiting the local record store, and then one day after football practice you find the album. It’s just there, as if it had been there all along and you had overlooked it. You want to buy it, but you don’t. You just stare at her and feel how out-of-your-league she is.

When school starts she is in three of your classes, and you stare at her from the back of the room. For some reason, she acknowledges you and smiles when you make eye contact. After a while, as she begins to date someone else, you become friends with her, insofar as your blubbering in her presence counts as friendship.

Then one day you are a senior in high school and you have more confidence than you used to and she no longer has a boyfriend—and pretty soon it seems like her smiling might mean something. You are not sure, though, so you proceed carefully, and then one day she asks you out. On that first date, you cannot stop thinking, This is the girl from the cover of the Fleetwood Mac album! You begin asking her out every weekend because it seems like she enjoys being with you. Then one day she becomes your girlfriend, and you realize that you never, in two years, heard the exact details. So you ask her the story.

She says that Fleetwood Mac and their “people” were enamored of some images in a Jackson photographer’s portfolio. They chose for the cover of their new album a photograph that he had taken at a Mississippi blues festival, but were unable, somehow, to attain clearance from those pictured. While discussing alternatives, the photographer suggested to the band that they come to Mississippi and let him shoot them there. They told him, instead, to form his own band of Mississippians who in some way represented them. So, she tells you, it happened that Stevie Nicks had been a ballerina as a young woman. She, B. happened to be a ballerina. The photographer came to the Arts Center, where her company rehearsed, in search of a young Stevie Nicks analogue—and he found B. She had surmised nothing of this until one day he called her at home and asked if he could take her picture for the album. She said okay.

You cannot believe she is your girlfriend.