Smashed Read Online Free PDF Page A

head around the curtain again and screams at me, ‘Just get out of here! Get out of here now, you pathetic moron.’ 
    It’s so awful I have this terrible urge to cry. But I know that whatever other loser nerdy useless things I might do, I’m not going to leave her to clean up my puke. So I run backwards and forwards like an Energizer bunny, until everything that’s free of lumpy bits is in the washing machine and I’ve wiped all the surfaces I can find. Jacinta has retreated to the lounge, and refuses to talk to me. She’s huddled in a ball and won’t meet my eye.
    As I head towards the door to leave, I try to apologise just one more time. ‘Look I’m —’
    She turns on me then, her face pale and expressionless. ‘I wasn’t going to screw you anyway … I just needed you to help me with my Stats.’ Then she laughs. I swear to whatever god you want me to, the way she looks at me will haunt me always.
    There’s nothing left for me to say. As I close the door behind me, the last thing I hear is, ‘ Loser ’.
    It takes me hours to get home. The cold has sobered me into a nightmare trance, and I find myself sitting on a swing at my old primary school, pondering whether the best thing now is just to die. When word of this gets round — and there’s no pretending it won’t — my life will be over anyway. No one will respect me. I don’t even respect myself. Here I am, stinking of puke, so cold I can no longer feel my feet, and my goddamned mind — mygreat and wonderful and highly intellectual mind — keeps trying to picture Jacinta in the shower. I’m doomed. I’m lost. But that small pink flash of nipple, as she tore that stupid nightgown off …
    It’s getting on for 4 a.m. by the time I get home. I don’t want to wake my parents, so I tough it out and hose myself down outside. I have to bite my lip to halt the yell of shock that wants to burst out when the freezing water hits my skin. But it kind of pleases me too — a fitting punishment for a fool. I race inside on tiptoes, shivering so hard my teeth are chattering in my foul-tasting mouth. I fish a towel off my bedroom floor and dry myself roughly before a final freezing dash into bed.
    I’m fully awake now. My head is pounding and my stomach is so emptied out it’s feeling hungry. I sneak back into the kitchen to raid the fridge, and head back to bed with a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. Milk’s what they give you when you’re poisoned, so I figure it’s pretty safe.
    To block the night’s horrors from my mind I pick up one of my textbooks and start to read. When a vampire bat returns from its nightly blood-sucking expedition empty-handed and still craving the taste of blood, it can rely on the generosity of a close friend to regurgitate a small ‘donation’ of its own stash — and will return the favour on some future night, if their fortunes are reversed. What matters is that both bats benefit in the long run …
    I’ve read about such things before in my Psych textbooks: unselfish acts of giving, where the giver believes the gift will be returned in his or her own time of need. Reciprocal altruism. Tit for tat. But in real life it goes both ways. Good for good. Bad for bad. Only I can’t decide who deserves the payback more — me or Jacinta.
    At last this whole ridiculous drama catches up with me and I’m slammed by lead-boned tiredness. Briefly, I’m puzzled by the faintest noise, like someone crying. But before I can consider this, I sink into exhausted sleep.

    It’s almost 1.30 in the afternoon when I finally drag myself out of bed. The place seems deserted. Rita’s bed’s not only empty, but her bedding’s strewn around the room as if she’s had a fight with it. God knows what time Don brought her home, but I figure it wasn’t as late as me, if she’s up and gone already. My head feels like it’s been filled with concrete while I slept; every time I swallow, my saliva catches on a bitchy little sharp point in my