Joe College: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

parents took the station wagon to the campground. We can take your car if you want.”
    “That’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “How often does a girl get to ride in a lunch truck?”
    I opened the door and helped her up into the cab. Then I circled around to the driver’s side, climbing in beside her. An open box of Snickers bars rested on the seat between us, along with a parking ticket and a stack of coffee cups decorated with a Greek-column motif. Cindy helped herself to a candy bar. I started the truck.
    “Kinda melted,” she informed me, struggling with the taffy-like strand of caramel produced by her first bite. “You should keep these things out of the sun.”
     
     
    Five minutes later we pulled up in front of her house. I shut off the ignition and headlights, turning to her with one of those dopey what-now shrugs that was the best I could muster in the way of a suave opening gambit. She nodded yes, sliding toward me on the seat. I moved the candy bars and coffee cups on top of the dashboard, out of harm’s way.
    I hadn’t been kissed all summer, and the first touch of her tongue on mine released me from a prison I hadn’t even known I was in. All at once, the boundary between myself and the rest of the world disappeared; a sudden weightlessness took hold of me, as though I were no longer a body, just a mouth filled with tastes and sensations. For some unidentifiable period of time, I lost track of who and where I was.
    When I could think again, my first thought was, This is amazing! My second was, She’s a secretary! The thought was so jarring, so ridiculous and uncalled-for, it made me pull away in confusion. We sat there in the humid cab, separated by a distance of maybe a foot, breathing so hard we might as well have just delivered a refrigerator. She ran one hand through her formerly neat hair and looked at me as if I’d said something peculiar.
    “What do you want?” she asked, her voice low and urgent.
    “Want?” I said.
    “Why are you even with me?”
    Instead of answering—or maybe by way of answering—I kissed her again. This time it felt more like real life, two bodies, two separate agendas. I put my hand on her breast. She removed it. I groaned with disappointment and tried again, with the same result. Instead of backing off, though, she kissed me even harder, as if to reward my persistence. I wrenched my mouth away from hers.
    “My parents are away for the weekend,” I whispered. “We’d have the whole house to ourselves.”
    She ignored the invitation. Her face tightened into a squint of pained concentration.
    “Tell me what it’s like,” she said.
    I didn’t bother to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. In some strange way, we’d been talking about it all night.
    “It’s just college,” I told her, leaning back against the door, trying to calm my breathing.
    “How’d you get in?”
    “I applied.”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I did really good on the SATs. Much better than I expected.”
    This was my standard answer whenever anyone at home asked me how I’d gotten into Yale. It was easier to write it off as a fluke than to go into all the other stuff, the AP classes I’d taken, the papers I’d written for extra credit, the stupid clubs I’d joined just so I could list them on my application, all the nights I’d stayed up late reading books like Moby Dick and The Manic Mountain with a dictionary beside me, the endless lists of vocabulary words I’d memorized, the feeling I’d had ever since I was a little kid that I was headed out of town, on to bigger and better things.
    “But it’s hard, right? They give you a lot of homework?”
    The word “homework” seemed jarring to me; it had dropped out of my vocabulary the day I graduated from high school.
    “I didn’t know what homework was,” I admitted. “High school’s a joke in comparison.”
    “It must be fun, though. Living in a dorm and