Catalyst Read Online Free PDF Page A

left—plain and glazed. Glazed is an indulgent doughnut, breakfast for spoiled rahrahs. I take the plain.
    Sara cuddles up to Travis and kisses his skull. “Wake up, stud boy.”
    Travis has been snoring quietly, his shaved head reflecting the sun. He pulls the overnight shift at Superfresh a couple of times a month. It’s good for his bank account, but makes staying awake in school next to impossible.
    Sara sets a coffee cup in front of his nose. His nostrils twitch, then he groans and sits up. After a gulp of coffee, he blinks and focuses on Sara’s face, Sara’s lips. He groans again. This boy has it so bad for her, it’s a thing of beauty. They’ve been going strong for four years. This worries me. What are they going to do in September? It’s not like Trav can move into her dorm room (though I probably shouldn’t give him the idea). Shouldn’t they be cutting their losses, closing doors, getting ready to pack it up and say good-bye?
    They don’t care. They R IN LUV.
    Sarah scrapes chocolate frosting off her doughnut and applies it to Travis’s lips. Then she sucks it off.
    “Do you have to do that in public?” Mitch asks.
    Sara unsticks herself from Travis’s face. “Yes,” she purrs, before going back to work.
    Mitch steals Travis’s coffee stirrer and breaks it in half. I keep my eyes on my cup. “Mariah got into Stanford,” I say.
    “She’ll burn out.”
    “Yeah.”
    He slips his arm around my waist again and squeezes once. “Don’t worry. You’re in. The letter is on its way. And if they screwed up and didn’t admit you, you’ll just go someplace else and transfer. Chill, Kate. It’s going to be okay.”
    I dunk my doughnut in my coffee. They’re letting me in. They will. The end of my doughnut crumbles and sinks to the bottom of the cup. They have to.
    At the front of the cafeteria, the football players explode in laughter. The red-checked flannel Teri Litch shape rises and walks to a different table. She sits. The team rises and follows her. It’s a game. Tease Teri.
    The team chants quietly.
    “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”
    The good news is that they aren’t harassing me or my friends. The bad news is that they are harassing Teri. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. We are looking at a situation here.
    The noise causes Sara and Travis to come up for air.
    “I don’t know what kind of bug is up their collective butt . . .” Sara says.
    Travis mumbles something.
    “. . . but they’ve been dogging Teri all period. Three times she’s changed tables and they keep following.”
    “So you’re going to run to her rescue?” I ask.
    “Please. Do I look mental?” Sara sputters. “But still.”
    “They’ll get bored,” Travis predicts. “Picking on Tubby Teri is a middle school game.”
    “She’s not tubby anymore,” I point out. “She’s all muscle. They should be recruiting her for the defensive line.”
    The team chants quietly so as not to alert the cafeteria monitors gossiping in the kitchen. “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”
    Teri has had enough. I tense, waiting for her to throw one of the morons into a trash can. I hate days that start with cafeteria fights. But wait. . . . Teri is walking away. She pauses only to drop her orange juice carton in the garbage.
    “Wow!” Travis exclaims. “Excellent pacifist response.”
    “I bet she’s going to burn down the locker room,” Sara says. “Remember what she did to Amber?”
    Amber, a cheerleader, made the mistake of telling Teri she should bathe more often. They never proved who put the dead skunk in Amber’s pearl-white Jetta, but it didn’t matter. The message was scent.
    The clock is ticking down. We only have two minutes left. Mitch collects our trash and Sara puts the unused creamers in her purse. The cafeteria ladies cackle in the distance. I give the sunglasses back to Sara and put on my own nasty specs. Yuck—the world returns in cold, horrid focus.
    “She’s ba-ack,” Sara says, nodding her head toward