The Graduation by Christopher Pike Read Free Book Online

her. God, she hated him!
    She ran into him the second she stepped outside. He was crouched on the curb feeding a pigeon a piece of chocolate doughnut, his duffel bag propped against a nearby fire hydrant. They had cut his hair short. They must have been keeping him inside; he had lost his bronze sheen. It didn’t matter. He looked incredible, simply incredible.
    “Where have you been?” he asked, glancing up.
    “Where have I been? You were supposed to be on that bus that just came in. You had me standing there waiting for you like some lost bag lady. You have a lot of nerve asking me where I’ve been.”
    He gave the bird the remainder of the doughnut and checked his watch. “It’s five past one and you only got here. I’ve been waiting around a couple of hours. I told you I was coming in at eleven.”
    “No, you didn’t.” She pulled his last letter from her bag—it was little more than a slip of paper—practically ripping the envelope in the process. “See, it says one o’clock. You wrote it yourself.”
    He stood and studied the paper. “There’re two ones there.”
    “What? No, that’s not another one. It’s just a scratch.”
    “No, I made it. It’s a one.”
    Now that he mentioned it, the scratch did bear a faint resemblance to a one. “Why didn’t you call, then?” she asked.
    “I didn’t have your number.”
    “Why not? What did you do with it?”
    “I didn’t do anything with it. I never had it memorized.”
    “Is that why you haven’t called me since you left?”
    “I couldn’t afford it.”
    “You could have called collect,” she began to yell.
    He stared at her a moment. “You look great.”
    “What do you mean? Do you mean my body or my face?”
    He shook his head. “Never mind.”
    She pouted. “How come you’re not being nice to me?”
    “How come you’re yelling at me?”
    “I’m not.” She wanted to reach over and brush a hair from his eyes as she used to, but she couldn’t see any hair long enough to give her an excuse. “I’m sorry if I am.”
    “It’s all right.” He paused. “Your body’s all right.”
    “It’s not great?”
    “No.”
    She started to sock him. but he grabbed her hands and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. A little too quick. She had been hoping for a lot more. As he stepped back and picked up his duffel bag, he averted his eyes. He didn’t want to talk, not about why he had been out drinking homecoming night at a bar he couldn’t remember. She had the feeling he didn’t really want to talk about what he thought of her, either.
    “The car’s over here,” she said. She wished she understood him better.

Chapter Seven
    The keys opened the door. Michael knew they would. Bubba was a master when it came to secretive preparations. Glancing down the McCoy’s’ long driveway to make sure no one was watching, Michael quickly slipped into the house and reclosed the door.
    I could get arrested for doing this.
    That would be a joke. He could share the same cell with Dale Jensen and the local paper could do an article on the shortage of good valedictorians this year. In reality, he wasn’t concerned about getting caught. The chances were against it, and even if someone did call the cops and he was carted down to the station, he didn’t care. It would give him an excuse not to go to graduation. He still hadn’t thought about what he was going to say. Not having gone to the rehearsal a couple of days earlier—he hadn’t been valedictorian back then—he didn’t even know when he was supposed to speak: first, last, or what.
    He had hit traffic returning from the coroner’s office and was running behind schedule. He would have to go to Clark’s house after the ceremony.
    The house was silent in the manner empty houses are prone to be. Yet it was not a comforting silence. It reminded him of the silence that hung in the air following a major argument or an explosion. It seemed to him that acts of violence somehow transcended time. He