Notes on a Near-Life Experience Read Online Free PDF Page B

manage to respond. What am I supposed to say? “It sounds like a load of crap and I can't believe you get paid for this?” “Excuse me, I can talk to myself for free?” “Did yougraduate from an accredited institution of higher learning or earn your degree through a correspondence course?”
    So now I have my own shrink, my own Dr. Marlena Evans from
Days of our Lives
. But the whole thing seems weird: talking to a stranger about the things that are most personal and important to you; paying someone to listen to you. Why would they care? They don't even know you; you could tell them whatever you wanted and they'd never know if it was true. Besides, I don't even know what's really going on. I don't like the idea of someone else figuring my family out, figuring my life out, before I do. And what if she gets it wrong? What if she sees things I don't, or things I don't want to see?

T ODAY ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL A DOG RUNS OUT INTO THE road, and Al swerves and slams on his brakes to avoid hitting it. Al's backpack is open and its contents spill onto the floor of the van. As I'm shoving his stuff back in, I notice a small silver canteenish thing among the pencils and notebooks.
    “What's this?” I ask him, shaking the silver container. I can hear liquid swishing around in it. “A canteen?”
    Allen looks nervous. “Yeah. You know, instead of carrying one of those stupid plastic water bottles, I use that…. It looks cooler.”
    “Yeah, I guess, but it doesn't hold much. You know what it looks like? A flask, like some bum on the street or a secretagent would carry. I've never seen one before, but this totally looks like it could be one.”
    He laughs. “A flask? Yeah, the principal would love it if I brought a flask to school, huh?”
    He's weird sometimes, my brother.

H ALEY OBSERVES THE SOCIAL SYSTEM AT OUR HIGH SCHOOL like she's doing a study for
National Geographic.
“Even the bathrooms are divided up, Meems. Do you know that we've always naturally used the bathrooms for popular kids, even though no one ever told us to?”
    “What are you talking about?” I've never really considered myself a popular person. I wear normal clothes, go to normal parties, have normal friends. I guess I've just assumed that my life is normal, that I'm normal. Maybe things are really better, or worse, than I thought. Maybe I'm popular, or maybe I'm an outcast who hasn't been using the right bathroom.
    “Have you ever used the bathrooms in the math building or the ones near the industrial technology building?”
    “Math building, no. And I have no idea what industrial technology is.”
    “Exactly. We're naturally stratified. We're practically living in a caste system, you know, like in India, where there's a whole class of people whose existence no one will acknowledge. There are some really freaky kids in those bathrooms, too.”
    Haley has a flair for the dramatic. But I wonder about the bathrooms. And the people and things I've never bothered to notice.

K IKI N ORDGREN IS PERFECT . H ER FAMILY IS RICH, SHE HAS A perfect body, and she has the third-highest GPA in the senior class. The only imperfect thing about Kiki is the fact that she is perpetually pissed off. Of course, I could be biased because she has never really liked me. And things only got worse when I was chosen to be a dance team choreographer and she wasn't; she's a senior and I'm just a junior. So I should have known something was up last July during dance clinics, when Kiki kept wanting to come over and practice with me, when she was nice to me for no reason, and when she kept offering to pick me up in the mornings.
    “Well, you
are
one of the only girls on the team who doesn't drive, so I thought I'd ask.” Big smile.
    I noticed that she kept finding reasons to wander aroundthe house in her skimpy dance clothes, but I was too dumb to figure out why until the day I found Kiki in the driveway talking to Allen and Julian while they were rebuilding the engine of