S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t confirm that either. His “Family” page looked sparse and mysterious. He felt like a ghost.
    Things heated up on the “Academics” page. Cody had worked hard and done well in school. Marcie had encouraged that, following his report cards and checking his weekly grades and calling his teachers when she thought they’d shortchanged him. “I don’t think you read his paper
carefully
enough,” he’d heard her lecture one, blaming the teacher for Cody’s less-than-stellar grade. “Maybe you and I and the
principal
can read it over together?
Carefully
?” Cody reckoned his mother was responsible for boosting his GPA a third of a point from her strong-arm tactics. Nevertheless, he’d given her a solid foundation to build upon.
    S’wanee’s e-mail said not to worry about high school transcripts; they’d requested them electronically. Ditto the teacher evaluations, not necessary now. S’wanee understood teachers were hard to track down during the summer, and the admissions department was on a tight deadline anyway. Cody was relieved. He didn’t trust any of his old teachers with an assignment this pivotal. He couldn’t, at this moment, remember their names. They probably didn’t remember his either.
    Page four asked Cody to list his extracurricular activities: hours per week, honors won, offices held, letters earned. Cody withered. The application had spaces for twelve different activities. Did anybody really have that many, or did they make them up? Cody had wanted to be a joiner; he’d wanted to write full-time for the school newspaper, to letter in cross country in the fall or track in the spring, to build sets for plays, to paint spirit banners for the football games. What he did, however, was leave school at two and go work at the mall. For another school, maybe he’d lie and pad. That was common. S’wanee would never know, never check. But he couldn’t. He wrote, “Technical Service Adviser—Apple Store, thirty hours/week.” It was simple, accurate, and he was proud of it. S’wanee would understand. This was a scholarship application.
    Disciplinary History: none. He’d never expended the necessary effort to get into trouble. He hadn’t been that needy for attention. Cody knew someday he’d regret being a bore in high school, but right now he was glad.
    Cody knew what was coming, any page now, and he dreaded it, and now it faced him. There was only one topic: “Indicate a person who has had significant influence on you, and describe that influence.” His ex-girlfriend Kimberly had had a tutor help with her writing samples; there were classes and books on writing college essays, because this was the important part, what they read and analyzed and critiqued. How they got a feel for you.
    In the empty white box, the word count blinked and would keep track up to five hundred words, which seemed so very many. He opened a blank Word page to test his thoughts, to list and organize and make sense before he put them in the application.
    Now Cody wished he were more self-centered, had spent more time thinking about himself and his feelings and emotions. That came naturally to his high school classmates and other kids. There was always a cloud of babble around them—in the hallways, the lunchroom, the parking lot, the mall. Talking, texting, tweeting, sharing every detail of their days and nights. The taps were always open. It was the constant background hum in his life, like traffic or the air conditioner in his room. He had no practice of his own.
    Cody zigzagged his memory for a teacher or coach who’d had any influence, much less a significant one. There was very little to mine. His mother’s temporary husband had tried to exert a fatherly influence on him, but it had been fleeting and artificial, and Cody could only remember one afternoon with him in their Palo Alto apartment, when his stepfather had taught him to tie his shoes, a major victory that had eluded his mother. It was a skill he