Life Before Read Online Free Page A

settle around the campfire with a group of her friends and my soccer buddies. The logs are perfect benches for those of us who aren’t drunk. Everyone around my campfire has a red plastic cup. Mine is half-full of Cola. Not Coke. Not Pepsi. Turns out, if you’re feeding a hundred teenagers, you go generic.
    Someone plays guitar nearby, because someone is always playing a guitar. Play a measure, stop. Play a measure, stop. I think the musician is going for Modest Mouse. The harder he tries, the harder I cringe.
    No one else notices the party melting all around us. People are slurring their speech or losing their thoughts in the allure of open flame. Being the only sober one in a huge group of drunk people is … sobering. I can’t alter the slippery slope; I can only watch as everyone else slides down it.
    Unfortunately, Jill has slid right down with everyone else. “In two months, you will disappear for good. I know you will, Xander. You will never come back from New Orleans or your new best friends, Mr. Mardi Gras and Little Miss Beignets. Tucker will go to Ohio State and find ten thousand new friends. I’m just not ready for it to end.”
    Managing Jill is my job. God knows she’s done far more for me—letting me stay at her house during the really bad times with my parents and sharing her mom’s amazing breakfasts every Saturday—but it’s still a drag. While Grant Blakely plots his midnight soccer scheme and Tuck pitches a tent of one kind or another with Ashley, I slide from the log to the grass and put my arm around Jill.
    “You get to stretch out the end as long as you like,” I promise. “And then you also will make ten thousand new friends, at Oberlin.”
    Jill’s heavy head falls onto my shoulder.
    We’re all silent for a while, the drunk ones mesmerized by the fire and I by their vacant stares. I have known these people all my life, and soon our paths will diverge into the world.
    “Take a walk, Xander?”
    Gretchen is standing right behind me. The firelight catches her hair and she is literally luminous. She should have posed for senior portraits right here.
    “Xander?” Gretchen often has to address me twice, apparently. “Will you walk with me?”
    Grant Blakely kindly—blessedly—puts his arm around Jill. “Go ahead, Xander. I got this.”
    Is our whole class aware of my affection for Gretchen? Does it really matter? Grant is totally responsible. Jill is in good hands. I realize I’m making Gretchen wait again.
    “Yes, sorry. A walk, yes.” In my attempt to seem blasé, I catch my toe on the huge log and fall into several stargazers.
    A million apologies later, I walk into the void of night with Gretchen.
    “It took me forever to find you in the dark,” she says as we abandon the drunken civilization of our senior class.
    Gretchen and I talk all the time. Every day, almost. But we’ve never talked in the dark. Alone. When her inhibitions might be stifled by a few beers. What would Gretchen say if completely uninhibited? What would she do?
    She guides me through a small opening in the trees at the edge of the lawn and reaches for my hand. “I found a path.”
    I am completely calm. Completely. Calm .
    Within minutes, we are lightyears away from everyone else. And, somehow, I’ve left my nausea with them. It’s just us out here.
    She leads me deeper into the mini-forest. “Did you bring a tent tonight?”
    “Sleeping bag.”
    “Me, too. I don’t think anyone is actually going to sleep, though, do you?”
    “Probably not.” Just as well. I’ve felt crawly about my sleeping bag since the fateful night with Jill in my parents’ bedroom. Gary would be thrilled to know his actions have so crippled me. Maybe that’s why he’s coming to graduation: to inflict a little more psychological damage.
    Freaking Gary! Even when he’s not around, he gets inside my head. Alone in the dark with Gretchen, I can’t even pay attention.
    I’ve lost the thread of our conversation. Gretchen is