Cloudburst Read Online Free PDF Page B

eventually it was completely gone. Probably no other girl in the school took as much pride in her walk now as I did after that, although many interpreted it as my being snobby and absorbed with myself. I was simply grateful and more conscious of my posture and my gait.
    I don’t know how many girls can actually envision themselves when they walk or sit and talk, but I can. Maybe I’m thinking more about my mother than I am about myself, but I see a picture of a girl with a rich, unblemishedcomplexion and silky black hair to go with her black onyx eyes, small nose, and perfectly shaped slightly raised lips. She is lithe, with a figure other girls envy and boys dream of when they fantasize. I always focus ahead when I walk, no matter where I am, and so I seemed undistracted and unconcerned, an exotic statue of self-confidence. Kiera was the first one to mention this to me. She called it my “wow factor.”
    â€œEvery girl needs one,” she said. “Mine is the way I shift my eyes and turn my shoulders. I radiate sex. I can see it in their faces, women as well as men.”
    I thought she was simply jealous of something else about me, but under the note of envy in her voice, I did hear an appreciation and respect for something I did on my own. Because of her, even though people couldn’t tell, I was even more self-conscious about the way I walked and sat. Besides, in this school, I didn’t lack reminders.
    â€œYou walk through the halls of this school as if you own it,” Ray Stowe told me earlier this year. I had stopped at my hall locker. He was one of the senior boys who were upset with my attitude toward them. Maybe they thought I should kowtow like some obedient Asian woman. “I know Donald March was one of the principal builders of it, but that doesn’t mean you own it.”
    Ray’s father was a builder, too. I imagined there was some friendly and maybe not-so-friendly competition.
    I looked first at my girlfriends who were standing by their lockers. They had overheard him.
    â€œDon’t slouch so much, and you can look as if you own it, too, instead of looking as if you’re ashamed to be hereor don’t think you’re good enough,” I told him. Everyone around us laughed. Unable to come up with a good enough counter, he straightened his posture, looked at the smiling faces around us, and walked away.
    Some of the girls who hung with me repeated the things I said all day, especially when I took down one of the boys who was so full of himself. The school had only three hundred students from grades seven to twelve, so having the whole student body hear something someone else said or something someone else did was not difficult. That was especially true for the senior high. We had only sixty-two students in the senior class. Our class sizes were a quarter of what they were in many public schools. It was difficult, even for some of the more modest students, not to feel extra special and not to have their voices drip with pride about being a student at Pacifica.
    My memories of my public grade-school days were so vague now. It wasn’t all that long after my father deserted us that it became more and more difficult to attend the school I was at. However, like most children that age, I was still excited about going there every school day. After the initial days, older students seemed to be generally blasé about it, but not me. I was still as excited as ever about going to school.
    Attending Pacifica was special for so many reasons. Few schools glittered and sparkled as much. Dr. Steiner, the principal, was obsessive about cleanliness. Our desks were actually washed down nightly with antiseptic soaps to prevent the spread of colds and flu. Vandalism here was equivalent to a capital crime. There were little signs warning about iteverywhere, especially outside. A student could be expelled for it, and his or her parents would forfeit the tuition, an amount that