Local Girls Read Online Free PDF

different. He wasn’t like Eugene, and he certainly wasn’t like me. He always played by the rules. My brother was so serious and straightlaced that teenage girls were constantly after him. Several had spent all year attempting to seduce him, but Jason had other things on his mind. He’d devoted every free minute to his senior science thesis. Twenty hamsters were kept in cages in his bedroom. Ten had been given a balanced diet of seeds and grains, but the other ten had eaten nothing but Twinkies. My brother hoped to finish his research before leaving for college, although to me it already seemed obvious that the Twinkie ten were not only fatter but far more intelligent. As soon as they heard my brother’s bedroom door open, they ran to their feeding stations, while the grain and nut hamsters just went on running on their wheels, making the same hopeless circles they spun every night.
    Maybe Jason would have finished his research if Eugene had remembered to write Joey Jergens’s history paper, but Eugene was too busy planning his future, plotting his imminent escape, to pay much attention to our schedule. Eugene had missed the delivery date and Joey was outraged when he called me. I had to soothe him with promises of ten pages on the Salem witch trials by eight the following morning.
    â€œDon’t be mad,” Eugene said as soon as he saw me the next day.
    We were in the field behind the high school and Joey was headed straight for us. Of course, I refused to speak to Eugene. I had slept for two hours. I was in no mood for this.
    â€œI’ll do the Romeo and Juliet for Sue Greco,” Eugene vowed. He knew I dreaded Shakespeare papers, and had one of my own past due. “The Industrial Revolution for Horowitz?” Eugene whispered. “Consider it done.”
    By now, Joey Jergens was upon us. “Got my paper?”
    Joey was not a conversationalist, but it was enough that he had taken fifteen dollars out of his jeans pocket. I started to hand over the opus I’d written, but Eugene grabbed for it. “Let me check for typos,” he said.
    â€œNo way,” I said. “Who sat up all night with this thing? This paper’s mine.”
    â€œBe careful with that,” Joey Jergens warned me, and maybe I was clutching on too tightly. But Eugene was trying to pry my hard work away, and I wouldn’t let him, and that was how Mr. Prospero, the vice principal, found us, struggling over a report neither of us cared about, enmeshed in a battle that would only cause us grief.
    By nine-fifteen we were all suspended. Joey Jergens had been expecting to go to summer school, so it didn’t matter much to him, but now Eugene wouldn’t graduate. Maybe he stood there for a while, staring at the high school, and maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. I immediately headed for home. I was thinking about myself and no one else. I had just lost the summer, after all. Other people would be having a life, I’d be reading Romeo and Juliet in a classroom hot enough to bake bread on the desks.
    Naturally, my brother blamed me for everything. He didn’t care that Eugene had started the business and had practically drafted me.
    â€œHe can still go to Cambridge with you,” I told my brother, even though I knew it wasn’t true. You couldn’t enroll for more than two classes in the summer, and Eugene would be missing four credits.
    My brother phoned Eugene, ready to let him have it for throwing his future away for fifteen lousy dollars, but when Jason came back into the living room he didn’t seem mad anymore. Eugene had already been to the bank and withdrawn our entire joint savings. Then he’d gone home and left a note for his mother in which he swore he would pay me back someday, although I certainly wasn’t about to hold my breath. Eugene had also informed his mother that he was buying a plane ticket and by the time she read his note he’d already be on