Gathering Clouds Read Online Free PDF

disabled girl or something.
    “To tell you the truth, Victoria,” I replied, “I don’t even think about her being black. We just have a great time together. She’s a lot smarter than I am and usually helps me with the homework and research. Even though she’s so tall, she and her mother are very fashion-conscious. We love the same designers. Like me she loves wearing stylish hats. It’s just too bad we can’t share clothes.”
    “You would share clothes with her?”
    “Why not?”
    Victoria shook her head and looked at me as if I were a truly different animal. Once again, I felt sorrier for her than she would have likes, but all I could think was Victoria has so many hang-ups, she’ll never be happy.
    She visited me at the college only once, and that was two months after the school year had started. She came along with our parents to Parents’ Day at the school when they were shown around the campus, attended some classes, and heard in more detail about the subjects we were taking and the objectives and goals the college board had set out for all the students. There was a basketball game that night and they attended with me and watched Lynette play. She was the highest scorer and responsible for the team’s victory.
    There were a number of boys from area schools attending the game, some of whom who were already seeing the older girls at our school, and some “just fishing,” as Tami Ryan, the president of the sorority that Mother wanted me to join, put it. I thought she was clever and funny, actually.
    “They come here, cast their rods, dangle their bait, and hope one of us will bite,” she said.
    Every even that attracted boys from area colleges was exciting for us. Despite Mother’s claim that all-girls’ colleges was exciting for us. Despite Mother’s claim that all-girls’ colleges produced more serious-minded students, it was clear to me from day one that everyone was looking for and hoping for a wonderful and exciting romance.
    I dated four different boys the first three months, but found each of them to be clones of Harrison McAlester. They talked so much about themselves, I wondered why I was even necessary. Money, the prestige around who their parents were, had shaped them into arrogant little princes. Being with them actually made mo more self-conscious about my own arrogance. Mother’s claims about my being spoiled resonated. I had come here blown up about myself, just as many of the other girls, and suddenly, seeing all that reflected in the high-society dates that were arranged for us disgusted me.
    I had finally found some ambition. I wanted to be different.
    I suppose that feeling, that desire, was a primary part of why I ended up dating Larry Ward, a friend of Lynette’s boyfriend Marcus Wells. It was truly unplanned. One Saturday in early November, Marcus and Lynette were going to take a ride to the beach to have lunch and walk along the beach. The day before, I had decided not to accept a second invitation for a date from Philip Rockingham. I suspected he was just the type of young man Mother would want to see me marry. He wasn’t bad-looking, but he never let me forget it either. In fact, I thought he was more enamored with his own looks than he was with mine. He bored me into a comatose state with his talk about his cars and boats and vacations on the French Riviera with his parents.
    Maybe I was too spoiled to be spoiled. He took me to a very expensive restaurant on the first date. He had a Mercedes convertible. Afterward, I met some of his fraternity friends, one of whom was as self-absorbed as the next. I actually found them to be childish, immature, with their silly antics and dirty jokes and their efforts to impress each other and me by how much they could drink or smoke dope.
    “I hate leaving you here,” Lynette said. “Why don’t you come with us?”
    “And be a third wheel?”
    “Marcus wanted to bring his friend Larry Ward,” she said. She let it hang in the air for