Drag Teen Read Online Free Page A

way for me to avoid Seth’s drag teen proposal was to find another way to afford college. To that end, I decided to take the Kingston National Bank Academic Scholarship exam. It took place early on a Saturday morning, the weirdest time to be inside a school. There were about thirty of us in the classroom taking the exam, which was basically an SAT rip-off. Long essay prompts, multiple choice questions, and, the worst part of all, lots of math problems. One of my biggest goals for when I grew up was to never have to do math problems ever again. I just had to get through these, I told myself, and I could get a scholarship, go off to college, and get a job that didn’t leave me smelling like unleaded gasoline. And when I needed to do math, there would be apps for it.
    I’d always wanted to write. I used to write in a journal every night, starting in second grade. The early entries were silly stuff—lists of food I ate that day, a poem about how pooping works, whatever. But they got deeper as I got older, and I wished so badly I still had them. My mother threw them out because they were taking up too much shelf space that she needed for the dolls she collected from the Home Shopping Network. She swore they would someday be worth the millions of dollars that would pay for retirement somewhere exotic, like Tampa.
    “Pencils down,” Mrs. Bogart, a birdlike woman who worked in the school’s office, instructed at the end of the exam. “We will announce the three selected students first thing Monday morning.”
    The idea of waiting until Monday was nauseating. This was my last shot. The last possible scholarship, really. I’d applied for each one I could find—even one for Native American students, because my great-great-great-grandmother’s ex-husband may or may not have been part Cherokee. My grade point average wasn’t horrible but my math scores barred me from the Hope Scholarship and anything else based on academic merit. Other than that, I had no real skills (i.e., sports) to get me into a school’s good financial graces. To make matters even more frustrating, I’d applied and gotten into a few schools, and some of them were even ones I wanted to go to. However, the situation was simple: Unless my name was one of the three called out on Monday, the next year of my life would be the start of a really depressing future stuck in Clearwater. I’d have to distract myself until Monday. So I did what I always did when I needed to clear my mind. I went for a long drive with Heather and Seth.

    “Doesn’t it feel like they play the same five songs on the radio over and over, all day long?” Heather asked, not so much as a question but as a declaration of our times.
    “Do you think it’s because there are only five good songs out at a time?” Seth fired from the backseat, his face lit in the glow of his iPhone like somebody telling a campfire ghost story.
    “No,” Heather snapped. “There are way more than five good songs out at a time. But the world is full of basic people like you, who don’t hear about a song unless it’s from somebody with three million followers on Twitter.”
    We were taking our usual drive down the coast, along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s pretty, even though no matter how long we drove, we still ended up in Florida. No matter how sick of Florida I got, I could never get sick of the water at night. I suspected this was the case with all oceans. I’d only seen the Atlantic a few times, since it was on the other side of the state, but I still felt there was something magical about bodies of water that large, something that said there’s more than you and me, more than college scholarships, more than grim futures at gas stations. Sometimes I felt like the rest of the world was getting to see the big picture, and that I was the only one missing out. But the ocean? The ocean was something none of us would ever understand, and that was oddly comforting.
    “How do you think the exam went?”