I'm the One That I Want Read Online Free Page A

way Korean men sometimes are. As his yellow Pinto puttered up the freeway, I must have fallen asleep because later, close to the camp, I woke up all sweaty.
    “You are very cute when you are sleeping.” Reverend Soo was always nice to me, in an uncreepy, comforting way. We got to the campsite around the middle of the day. It was hot and teeming with Korean kids. Ronny’s fine-ass brother had the door of his Trans Am open, and the stereo was blasting Chicago.
    “Everybody needs a little time away, just for the day . . .
    From each other . . .”
    The beautiful Jolie, who was a few grades above me, perfect in her cut-off jeans and ribbed purple tank, a red bandanna tied suggestively like a garter around her lean thigh, looked over at us and smiled. My heart beat faster. Jolie had never been mean to me, but she’d never spoken to me either. She was way too sophisticated for that. I had a crush on her, but I was too much in awe to even admit it to myself. Whatever Carl or Eugene did to me, it didn’t matter unless she saw it. If she was a witness, then the sting of humiliation would last for days. I think it was less that I wanted her, and more that I wanted to be her. With her taut brown body and baby face, she represented to me the glory of the ’80s, the idea that beauty was a powerful thing, that if you looked a certain way, you could have everything.
    Around 1985, Jolie turned preppy, and her beauty, her gleam, her youthful sensuality was lost in the translation. But back then, still in her slutty prime, she held all the boys at our church in the palm of her purple-nail-polished hand.
    She leaned over to Ronny’s brother and whispered something. He grabbed her face and they fell into each other laughing. Oh, to laugh like that, to be held by a boy and get lost in your own wondrous being. To be able to throw your head back like a pony while the boys admired you. To be the object of desire and the one doing the desiring . . . I wished that for myself. As I was lost in this reverie, someone threw a pine cone at my face.
    “Oh shit. MORON’S here!!!!”
    I tried not to cry as I looked for the perpetrator in the crowd of kids. Jolie stifled a chuckle, biting her tantalizingly glossed lip, and turned her head away. Unable to look at me because it was just too embarrassing, she nuzzled Ronny’s brother’s golden neck.
    The shards of pine cone made my eye blaze red. Half blind, I made it to the girl’s cabin without further incident.
    The cabins were made of logs. Inside, there were about ten bunk beds, which were exotic and exciting to me, as I’d never slept in one. I looked around for an unclaimed top bunk, but none was to be found. I unrolled my stained old sleeping bag that didn’t zip up all the way onto the bottom bunk near the back door.
    Jaclyn was in the bathroom complaining to no one in particular, “The food here is so baaaddd!!! I was sticking my finger down my throat trying to throw up. That didn’t work so I was on the toilet trying to crap it out. I want to go home!”
    I wanted to go home, too. This was going to be bad. I could just tell.
    Lotte came into the empty cabin and saw me. I was glad to see her and walked up.
    “Hi. I just got here. Where is your bunk? I want to be near you guys,” I said.
    She had a mean smile on her face, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye—kind of an “I can’t wait to tell my friends this . . .” expression.
    She said, “We’re over there. It’s too crowded already. I’m going to the canoes.”
    “Well, wait for me, I’m going to change and go down, too.”
    I ran over to my bunk to get my bathing suit, but she was already gone.
    I put on my orange one-piece and an oversize white T-shirt and walked down to the lake.
    Carl saw me first.
    “Oh shit. It’s Moron. Let’s drown her. Hey Moron. Why’d you come here? Nobody likes you. It’s going to be the worst three days of your life.”
    “Shut up!” I yelled.
    Carl’s brother Mike jumped