Story of a Girl Read Online Free Page A

watching her head bob to a rap song cranked to ten on her stereo. “She does realize that she’s white, right?”
    “Jettas and rap music,” Lee said, “the perennial favorite of the suburban oxymoron. My first car will probably be my stepdad’s El Camino. Now that’s a car you can rap in.”
    I finished off my chocolate old-fashioned and showed my teeth to Lee. “Any chocolate droppings?”
    “Nope. You’re frosting free. You look nice,” she said, getting up. “Like a serious job applicant.”
    “That’s good. Because I feel like a loser.” I’d dressed like some kind of conservative sorority girl in black pants and an actual blouse instead of my usual jeans and T-shirt. Suddenly I was nervous. I didn’t know how it worked, this whole being hireable thing. Like, how do you convince someone you’re not going to steal everything or drive away customers? This had to work; I didn’t have time to waste.
    We stopped at Walgreens first and I handed my application to a skinny young guy at the register.
    “Someone will call you to set up an interview,” he said, glancing at the application. He started to turn back to his register. “Wait. Deanna Lambert . . . I know that name.”
    Right, I thought. Which version of Deanna Lambert do you think you know? “When will they call me?”
    He studied my face and I felt the donut in my stomach like a rock. I didn’t recognize him from school, but he could have been some nameless geek from Tommy’s year.
    “We get a lot of applications,” he said. “It might be a week. Do you go to Terra Nova?”
    “Yeah,” Lee said, her voice startling me. “Hey, I think you were in my drama class last year, right?” Lee didn’t even go to Terra Nova then.
    “I never took drama,” he said, staring at me.
    Lee leaned over the counter and got louder. “Were you on the swim team?”
    “Can you just put on there for them to call me as soon as possible?” I grabbed Lee’s arm. “Let’s
go
.”
    When we got outside, she said, “Okay, next?”
    “He knew about me. I could tell.”
    “You’re paranoid.” She pulled me along past the boarded-up stationery store, and the shoe place that had been having a going-out-of-business sale since I was in sixth grade. Lee lowered her voice to say, “One of these days you should just look one of them in the eye and say, yeah, that’s me, and so what? At my school in San Francisco, no one would even care.”
    “Yeah, well, this is Pacifica. One high school, one grapevine, one feature story: me.”
    “What about Dax Leonard getting caught with that love letter to Madame Rodriguez in French?”
    I shook my head. “Not the same. Nothing actually happened. Besides, he’s a guy and she’s a hot teacher. If something
had
happened, he’d be a hero. Not a slut.”
    “Okay. Coach Waters finding Julie Archer and Tucker Bradford in the girls’ locker room on Celebrate Abstinence Day. That was back in October and people are still talking about it.”
    “You don’t get it,” I said. “Julie is, like,
proud
of that story. She tells it as much as Tucker.”
    “I know. Sorry. I know you don’t like to talk about it.”
    I’d already detached from the conversation. In my head I saw the girl on the waves, bobbing along, thinking my thoughts, feeling my feelings, swimming away.
    A lady at Subway took my application and asked if I had any experience, as if making sandwiches was rocket science or something. After one minute in Wendy’s watching the manager yell at an employee about cleaning the bathroom, I decided not to apply.
    “This sucks,” I said. “I want another donut.”
    “There’s still Picasso’s,” Lee said, straightening my hair. “
Then
you can have another donut.”
    We walked over to Picasso’s Pizza, this complete dump that’s been at Beach Front longer than anything else. It’s the last pizza place in town that isn’t part of a chain, and they don’t deliver, and it’s basically a hangout for