Lust - 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Harper spoke slowly and loudly, as if deciding that Miranda needed a little help trying to wrap her brain around the basics. “We would have been stuck in there forever ”
    “Oh, please,” Miranda snorted. She began digging through her soggy backpack, assessing the damage: Spanish notebook: dry. Sort of. Paperback Hamlet for AP English: soaked. Stila mascara and MAC lipstick: merciful y intact. “If you’d just waited, we would have been out in an hour.” Harper took a long drag on the cigarette and took a moment to consider that. She shook her head.
    “We’re seniors now,” she said final y “We’ve waited long enough.”
    Boring.
    It had taken the girl—Harper—an endless fifty minutes to guide Kaia through the school, fifty minutes of her life that she would never get back. And the rest of the morning had just been more of the same. People she didn’t want to meet, tel ing her things she didn’t want to know. As if she cared what to do or where to go in this shoebox of a school, or had any interest in who was who—or who was sleeping with whom—as if the mundane details of anything in this tedious town could be anything less than tedious.
    Anything but boring.
    Boring.
    Boring.
    The word had been beating a steady tattoo in her head ever since she’d arrived in this one-horse (or in this case, she supposed, one-Wal-Mart) town. Not by plane, of course.
    There was no airport in Grace, CA. Apparently, there was no airport anywhere near Grace, CA, if the endless drive from Las Vegas was any indication. Though to be honest, she was surprised there were even cars in the ridiculous town—the whole place had the feel of a different century, except for the tacky tourist strip of Route 66 running through the town center
    — there time seemed frozen in a particularly bad year of the 1970s.
    She’d plodded through three hours of the school day and knew pretty much al that she needed to know about her new life in Grace—as in, there wasn’t going to be much of one. Now here she was, standing in line in a cafeteria—a cafeteria , a smel y, cramped room painted hospital green, with long metal tables bolted to the floor, cranky old women in hairnets doling out lumps of food, hordes of dul -eyed students who at least deserved credit for not al outweighing an elephant, if they’d been eating this greasy crap their entire lives.
    Who knew places like this actual y existed? Kaia’s schooltime meals had varied. There was the gourmet health food in the regal boarding school dining hal , with its vaulted ceilings and centuries-old oak tables. And of course the Upper West Side takeout cuisine grabbed to go during lunch periods—wel , any and al periods—at her city prep school. (Prep school had been before and after boarding school—getting kicked out was easy when you had plenty of money and connections to kick you into somewhere else. How was Kaia supposed to know that she would only have so many opportunities to vacil ate between the frying pan and fire before getting thrown off the stove altogether?) Even the lunches the maid had occasional y put together for her—or, years ago, the lunches her mother had packed before she’d decided that mothering was too last season—even those had been better than this slop. But that was then, this was now. This was life in Grace: dry heat, neon, decrepit gas stations, incompetent teachers, grease, dust, cafeterias . This was her life.
    She was stuck. Stranded. A world away from everyone and everything she’d ever known.
    At least it was also a world away from her mother. Thank God for smal favors, right?
    “Kaia, over here!”
    Kaia whirled around to see the mind-numbing tour guide, Harper, waving in her direction. She stuck on a smile—though she didn’t trust Harper any farther than she could throw her (which, judging from the poorly hidden rol of flesh squeezed into the waistband of the girl’s faux designer jeans, wouldn’t be very far at al ). But no reason to