Reunion Read Online Free PDF Page B

advisor. I had to check with him about some of our recent expenditures.
    I thought this would be such a boring topic that Gina would drop it, but she totally didn’t.
    So? What were they? Gina demanded. Your expenditures, I mean.
    Suddenly, the notebook was snatched from my hands. I looked up, and saw CeeCee, who sat in front of me in homeroom and this class, and whohad become my best friend since I’d moved to California, scribbling in it furiously. A few seconds later, she passed it back.
    Did you hear? CeeCee had written in her sprawling cursive. About Michael Meducci, I mean?
    I wrote back, I guess not. Who’s Michael Meducci?
    CeeCee, when she’d read what I’d written, made a face, and pointed at the kid standing in the front of the room, the pasty-looking one with the Palm Pilot.
    Oh, I mouthed. Hey, I’d only started attending the Mission Academy two months earlier, in January. So sue me already if I didn’t know everybody by name yet.
    CeeCee bent over the notebook, writing what seemed to be a novel. Gina and I exchanged glances. Gina looked amused. She seemed to find my entire West Coast existence highly entertaining.
    Finally CeeCee surrendered the notebook. In it she had scrawled, Mike was the one driving the other car in that accident on the Pacific Coast Highway Saturday night. You know, the one where those four RLS students died.
    Whoa , I thought. It totally pays to be friends with the editor of the school paper. Somehow,CeeCee always manages to ferret out everything about everyone.
    I heard he was coming back from a friend’s house, she wrote. There was this fog, and I guess they didn’t see each other until the last minute, when everybody swerved. His car went up an embankment, but theirs crashed through the guardrail and plunged 200 feet into the sea. Everyone in the other car died, but Michael escaped with just a couple of sprained ribs from when the air bag deployed.
    I looked up and stared at Mike Meducci. He didn’t look like a kid who had, only just that weekend, been involved in an accident that had killed four people. He looked like a kid who’d maybe stayed up too late playing video games or participating in a Star Wars chat room on the Internet. I was sitting too far away to tell if his fingers, holding onto the chart, were shaking, but there was something about the strained expression on his face that suggested to me that they were.
    It’s especially tragic, CeeCee scribbled, when you consider the fact that only last month, his little sister—you don’t know her; she’s in eighth—almost drowned at some pool party and has been in a coma ever since. Talk about a family curse …
    â€œSo, in conclusion,” Kelly said, not evenattempting to make it look like she wasn’t reading off an index card, and rushing her words all together so you could hardly tell what she was saying, “America-needs-to-spend-way-more-money-building-up-its-military-because-we-have-fallen-way-behind-the-Chinese-and-they-could-attack-us-any-time-they-wanted-to-thank-you.”
    Mr. Walden had been sitting with his feet propped up on his desk, staring over the tops of our heads at the sea, which you can see quite plainly through the windows of most of the classrooms at the Mission Academy. Now, hearing the sudden hush that fell over the classroom, he started, and dropped his feet to the floor.
    â€œVery nice, Kelly,” he said, even though it was obvious he hadn’t listened to a word she’d been saying. “Anybody have questions for Kelly? Okay, great, next group—”
    Then Mr. Walden blinked at me. “Um,” he said, in a strange voice. “Yes?”
    Since I hadn’t raised my hand, or in any way indicated that I had anything to say, I was somewhat taken aback by this. Then a voice behind me said, “Um, I’m sorry, but that conclusion—that we, as a country, need to start building up our military