Sophomoric Read Online Free Page A

hope that they could look past it.
    My parents weren’t really sympathetic to the lack of parties in my life. My mom kept suggesting that I make friends with the “nice girls” who were Untouchable like me. She failed to see the problem when I was in every Saturday: she kept telling me that it was an opportunity to get ahead on homework. Plus, as an added bonus, she had been home every Saturday night in high school too.
    I think it was supposed to be comforting, but I was mostly just even more terrified.
    Her only useful advice was to join a sports team. Swimming had always been my sport, and I came back from Christmas break with a tan and the hope that maybe now, the swim season would make it better.
    Do I even need to say it? I was wrong again. I didn’t even get invited to the end-of-season swim team party. They said they just forgot about me, but I got the feeling they hoped that I had climbed to my spot on the curve and jumped.
    Even before Icarian brochures arrived uninvited in our mailbox, some time in late November, I had to get out. It wasn’t even a question of going somewhere anymore, but just of leaving there.
    I guess I had just figured that it couldn’t really get much worse.

3.
    The first full week is always awful, and by the end of the week, I was running on Diet Mountain Dew and Starbucks in a can. Still, I hauled my reluctant self out of bed at eleven on Saturday. Abandoned by their girlfriends (Nicky was a coxswain at a crew regatta, Amie had a track meet), Cleo (mysterious plans) and Devin (sleep), Alec and Scott had convinced me to go to the movies in town.
    Town is really an exaggeration. The town ten minutes away has only Main Street, with the movie theatre, three restaurants, a coffee shop and a hardware store. Off Main Street, there is a Walgreens, a gas station and two B&Bs. An aerial view was a view into a snow globe, except that our winter snowstorms were the farthest thing from light and fluffy or pleasant. For civilization, also known as Walmart and possibly McDonald’s, you had to drive at least twenty minutes either way. A Marriott was half an hour down the interstate; for graduation, you had to make a reservation six months in advance. We were only allowed into town on weekends, but people snuck in all the time.
    We walked along the road from campus. A couple kids were smoking in the trees not too far from the sidewalk, but they ignored us as we walked past the gray tendrils hanging over the trail.
    Even though we were five minutes late, the movie theatre was practically empty. The only people were the three of us, three or four townies and two couples in the back row. We bought two fistfuls of Warheads and watched the only movie playing, the most recent comic-book-turned-movie. It was awful, and the fact that my lips were stuck in a permanent pucker for the second half of the movie didn’t really improve it. But Scott and Alec laughed through the whole thing, so I laughed too, the child at the table trying to hide her incomprehension of the adult conversation.
    Walking outside hurt my eyes after the darkness of the theatre, so I almost didn’t see Cleo walking toward us. It was impossible not to smell her once she was within a few feet, though: Febreeze and mint gum. Alec laughed and shook his head as he hugged her. Scott frowned. She pouted when he kept his distance. When she sloppily wrapped her arms around my waist, I smelled thick, sweet, pungent smoke faintly clinging to her hair, buried under the overwhelming smell of “Meadows and Rain.”
    “How was the movie?” she asked. The smell disappeared as she stepped away from me.
    “Awesome.” Alec grinned. “How’s David?”
    “He’s great.” Cleo refused to be embarrassed, though it may have simply been impossible at this point. I wondered who David was.
    Scott was standing stiffly next to me. After a few minutes, he cleared his throat. “I’m going to head back.”
    Alec shrugged. Cleo waved. I smiled, unsure, at his