The Graduation (3 page)

“I changed my mind. Thought he might come in useful. He busted Dale snorting coke in a bathroom.” Bubba took off his hat and fanned himself. “We can’t have an ill-mannered druggie giving any long-winded speeches graduation day. Not when it’s hot like this.”

Michael sighed. “You set Dale up.”

“I may have put the white powder beneath his nose, but I did not force him to inhale.”

“Were his parents able to bail him out?”

“Yes, and weren’t they embarrassed. Relatives flying in from the Midwest and ail. Would you like me to write your speech for you?”

“No, thank you.” Michael stood up, gripping the bag, testing its weight. “Clair’s in the gym. She wants to talk to you. You probably know that, right?”

“Of course.” Bubba got up, too, brushing off the seat of his trousers.

“She said she had a secret to tell me.”

Bubba raised an eyebrow. “Did she tell you?”

“No.”

He nodded. “She’s a good girl. Did you know Kats will be receiving a diploma today?”

“He mentioned something like that once.”

“He’s also coming with us on our cruise to Catalina.”

“Wonderful.”

Bubba smiled. “He might surprise you. He might just be the life of the party.”

Michael had what he had come for. He had a great deal to accomplish before he returned to the campus at three. He bid Bubba good-bye and hurried toward the parking lot. Crossing the courtyard, extremely conscious of the sack in his hand, he spotted Jessica talking to Sara outside the snack bar. He practically dropped the sack. He stepped behind a tree, peeking around like a frightened lowlife.

“
No. Don’t touch me. Don’t get near me. I’m no good, Michael. I’m not.
”

Her brown hair and brown eyes. He always saw them first. Long and silky, big and round. Then would come her smile. Yet she was not smiling now. She was as pretty as ever, but it seemed to him, even at a glance, that she didn’t smile as often as she had. She was no longer the young girl who had almost wept over the grape juice he had spilled on her sweater.

Her clothes were seductive now—as was her body. She had on a short green skirt and a thin yellow blouse. Her legs were every bit as tan as Clair’s. He had dreamed about them the last few months, along with the rest of her body.

Love would not care. It should not care.

Yet Michael did not feel guilt over his sexual desire for Jessica. It was natural, he realized. He could not separate who she was from her body. He didn’t want to.

I just want her.

But she did not want him. Bill came up to talk to her then. He put a hand on her shoulder. Now she smiled.

Michael left quickly for the parking lot. In his car he removed the gun from the brown paper bag and opened the box of shells. Pressing the bullets into the clip of the automatic weapon, he wondered if maybe he should have waited for Jessica as Sara had suggested. If maybe Bubba was right, and he was stupid.

He put the loaded automatic in the glove compartment and drove away.

Jessica Hart was thinking of winning and losing. She had begun the year at Tabb optimistically. She had figured she would earn outstanding grades, be nominated homecoming queen, get accepted to Stanford, fall in love with a cute boy, and enjoy the respect and goodwill of all she met. She hadn’t thought she was asking for more than her fair share.

And none of those things came to me. Not one.

She had received a C in chemistry, the same grade she would receive on her report card. She hadn’t been able to find a lab partner after Maria got hurt. Her overall grade-point average for the year was a C-plus. In a class of four hundred and sixty-four, she was graduating somewhere in the mid-two hundreds. The ranking would have been lower if they’d averaged in her SAT score.

Her father had held back her application for Stan-ford. Maybe after a couple of years at a local junior college, he said. Junior college—it would be like going to summer camp after expecting to climb Mount Everest. Her father had been so disappointed in her. Sara was heading to Princeton.

She had found a boy she sort of liked—good old Bill. But he wasn’t a real boyfriend. They’d only been out three times. She didn’t love him and she seriously doubted he loved her. She was beginning to doubt there really was such a thing as love. Sex, yeah—she was as horny as anybody else. But where were the couples who cared more for each other than for themselves? She couldn’t find them. All she saw around her were boys and girls struggling to boost their egos at the expense of those they supposedly adored. She despised it, particularly since she wanted to do the same thing.

The year died when Alice died. I should have written it off right then and quit.

“I love this material,” Jessica said to Bill, feeling the upper sleeve of his red shirt. “It feels like silk.”

“It is,” he replied. “My mother bought it for me.”

“For a graduation present?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, and I got a car. A Corvette.”

“I hope to God it matches your shirt,” Sara said. Sara had just given them each a copy of the new yearbook. Jessica had no desire to open it; she knew all too well what most of her photographs looked like. The yearbook club had been very disappointed in her. Had they not been so desperately short of football and basketball pictures, they probably would have trashed all her “preglasses material.” She didn’t care, she told herself, but it did bother her. So, maybe, she really did care. Letting go of Bill’s shirt, she pushed her glasses back on her nose. She was never going to get used to wearing them. She hoped the sun burned out soon and everyone could walk around blind with her in the dark.

“It’s black,” Bill said seriously. “It goes with everything.”

Sara winked at Jessica and patted her hair. “My color coordinator says I absolutely should never be seen in a black car.”

“That’s too bad,” Bill said.

“Our parents are sending us to Hawaii next week for our graduation presents,” Jessica said, wanting to stop Sara before she got started. Because Polly was now off-limits, Sara got her kicks out of ridiculing Bill. Jessica hated that he never even knew it was happening. “Isn’t that neat?”

“They’ve got great surfing there,” Bill said.

“It’s the waves,” Sara said confidentially. “Some-thing to do with the waves.”

“Yeah, that has a lot to do with it,” Bill agreed.

“Bill, could you do me a favor?” Jessica said, clearing her throat and looking pointedly at Sara. “Could you get me a book from my locker?”

“Sure. Did you want one in particular?”

No, any old book will do. Just make sure it has pages, a cover, words in it—the usual.

In reality, she didn’t care what book he got. She just wanted to talk to Sara alone.

“My political science book,” she said.

“We handed those in to Mr. Bark yesterday,” Sara said. “Get her something else. Get her a brush.”

“Do you want a brush?” Bill asked, and now even he was beginning to wonder.

But Jessica kept a straight face. “Yeah, I’d appreciate it,” she said.

When Bill was gone, Sara said, “He’s lucky he’s so good-looking or we’d have to have him stuffed.”

“Leave him alone, he’s all right.”

“Oh, I think he’s great. I love him. I can see why you love him.”

“Right, my feelings go real deep.”

Sara laughed. “Hope it goes plenty deep tonight.” She leaned close, her excitement barely concealed. “You know how I told you the captain wanted the passenger suites on the ship kept locked and off-limits? Well, last night I had a long talk with him and arranged for the use of a couple of adjacent rooms. I’ve got the keys. Isn’t that great? Everything’s set.”

Jessica 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 anything!”

“Forget Russ and the shower. Bubba will do it with you no matter how many clothes you have on and no matter how flabby your ass is. What did he say?”

Sara sucked in a breath. “I wish, Jessie, for the sake of our long and warm association that you would please change the goddamn subject.”

“OK. But you’re right—the grease just sweats off that guy. Can you imagine why any girl would go to bed with him?”

“I try not to think about it.” Sara stared at the ground, thinking, chewing on her lower lip.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“What?” Jessica persisted.

“I was wondering if I should tell you this.”

“Don’t tell me. Play it safe. Keep it to yourself.”

“All right.”

“Sara?” she said, getting exasperated.

“Mike was here about half an hour ago.”

“Michael?” The strength went out of her. She had not been thinking of winning and losing. Only of losing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You just got here.”

“But where is he?” She quickly scanned the courtyard, almost afraid to find him. “Where did he go?”

“I don’t know,” Sara said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Which direction was he heading when he left you?”

“He went after Clair.”

“Clair’s here, too?”

“Yeah.”

She swallowed. “I don’t care.”

“Jessie, of course you care.”

“I don’t. So she’s got her stupid face on the cover of some stupid magazine?”

“We’re talking about Mike. You might be able to find him if you go look.”

“First period’s going to start in a minute. I don’t have time.” She shielded her eyes from the bright sun—it was going to be a cooker of an afternoon—searching harder. “Why was he here?”

“He came to pick up his yearbook. He’s going to be at the ceremony. He’s valedictorian.”

“
What?
When did this happen? What happened to Jensen?”

“All I know is Mike is going to be giving the speech.”

“Since when have you known this?” Jessica pressed.

“Since yesterday,” Sara said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“Why should I have to ask you?”

“Because you keep telling me you don’t care.”

“I don’t care. I mean, what’s there to care about? He left school early. He didn’t even say good-bye. I hardly knew him. How did he look?”

“Great.”

Jessica smiled. “Did he?”

Sara smiled, too. “Yeah. His hair’s longer. He’s got a tan.”

“I always wanted him to grow his hair.” She scratched her own hair. “He wasn’t with Clair, like in with her, was he?”

“No.”

Jessica bounced on her feet. “I’ve got to find him. Talk to you later.”

“Good luck.”

Unfortunately, she had no luck at all. She was hurrying down the first hallway when she ran into Bubba. He had on a straw hat so huge it was causing traffic jams.

“Bubba, have you seen Michael?” she asked casually.

“He left already.”

“But he’s coming back, right?”

Bubba showed a flicker of uncertainty. “I hope so.” Then he grinned and reached out his hand. “May I sign your yearbook, my dear?”

“Yeah.” She clasped it to her chest and looked at his fat ink-stained fingers. “Later.”