The Graduation Read Online Free PDF Page A

was not sure why she was doing this. She supposed that like anything else, virginity got old after a while and-like a hundred percent of the young ladies in her present situation-she d been a virgin since she was born. Once she had imagined that when she finally did give herself to a guy, it would be to someone she really cared about. She guessed hormones and biology had finally caught up with her. Now all she wanted was to have a good time.
    It’s all I can hope for at this point.
    That was closer to the truth. She wanted a lot more than a roll in the hay, but she felt—until something better came along—that this would give her life spark. The flatness of each day was becoming almost unbearable.
    Yet she hoped boredom was all there was to it. She hoped she wasn’t attempting to seduce Bill in an effort to prove to herself beyond a shadow of a doubt that she really didn’t care about anything.
    That was a frightening thought.
    And what was even more frightening was that she recognized her self-destructive streak, and its source, and still wasn’t able to free herself from it. She had not killed Alice. She had not crippled Maria. She had not chased Michael from school. But somehow she felt as if she had allowed all those terrible things to happen. As if she should have known ahead of time. As if someone had been trying to warn her of the dangers and she had not been listening.
    Someone…
    “Everything’s set like hell,” Jessica said, forcing her thoughts back to Sara and trying to shake off her melancholy mood. “We don’t even know if we’ve got ingredient A.”
    “Russ will be down. Bill’s coming to the party. What’s the problem? You think we can’t seduce two eighteen-year-old boys?”
    Jessica remembered back to senior-prom night. Bill had kissed her long and hard in his car before dropping her off home, yet she couldn’t have sworn they had been passionate kisses. He had made no move to grab her or even touch her. It had left her feeling frustrated and with all sorts of doubts about her own sexuality.
    “I don’t know if the shower routine is what we want,” Jessica said.
    “What’s wrong with it? We have every reason to be in the shower when they get to our rooms. People are dirty creatures—they’re always taking showers. It won’t look like a setup. They’ll see us naked, we’ll squeal, and the rest will be history.”
    “Don’t give me that confident B.S. You’re scared to death Russ will take one look at your bare ass and bust up laughing.”
    Sara was insulted. “What’s wrong with my ass?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never looked at it that closely. Christ, this is beginning to sound ridiculous. You would think we were hard up or something.”
    “Yeah, isn’t that a ridiculous thought.”
    Then they laughed at how far past ridiculous they already were. Jessica began to feel a bit better. If nothing else, she had her best friend to share her misery with. Jessica nodded at Sara’s yearbook.
    “Let me sign it,” she said. “And you can be the first person to sign mine.”
    But Sara held her book back. “Later. On the boat.”
    “No, let’s do it now.” Jessica reached out for it, and when Sara held it farther away, Jessica naturally snapped it out of her hands. “What’s the problem with you. What’s—” She stopped. Sara’s yearbook had a crudely cut rectangle of brown paper pasted over the inside front cover. “What is this?”
    Sara grabbed her book back. “I got a defective copy.”
    “How can you get a defective yearbook for God sakes?”
    “All of them are defective. Miss Fuzzy-Film Face.”
    “Haven’t you insulted me enough times about that already this year? I know what’s wrong with your book. Somebody wrote something nasty in it.”
    “Sure. yeah, who would do that?”
    “Bubba. That’s who. I know that’s it.”
    “I wouldn’t let that slime touch my book if he didn’t have any hands.”
    “What did he write?”
    “He didn’t write