Don't Ever Change Read Free Page B

always a DVD playing, like The Sopranos: Season One , but the volume’s muted and no one really watches it. And there’s also always a stereo on, turned up loud—usually some Velvet Underground album, she says, rolling her eyes—so the video and audio overlap in this particular mashed-up cliché that Courtney swears has been reenacted in similar dorms in similar colleges across the country since basically the beginning of time. It’s part of this “sucking black hole” she calls the Generic College Experience, which also includes stuff like Taxi Driver posters, shower shoes, standard-issue single beds, Nag Champa incense, one Great Book (like The Iliad or Ulysses or Moby-Dick ), clove smoke, and lots of spilled beer.
    Still, Courtney loves going and never says no when invited. I assume that’s how I’ll be one day, especially once I institute my new motto: Walk Through Every Open Door. It’s actually something Jesus did, and although I’m not that interested in him, I’m pretty impressed by his dedication to Making It.
    The last high school party I remember going to was Derek Hoff’s Anti-Prom Prom my junior year, so I’m definitely not the most qualified person to identify the Generic High School Experience, but it seems like it’s way less Classic somehow. Courtney says the difference is that in high school everyone still mainly likes what they like. They haven’t started worrying about what they should like, which happens later. This is why high school parties are sort of a little more genuine: people still get really excited and enthusiastic because it’s not cool yet to act numb and blasé about everything.
    Tonight is my first door, and it’s open, and it’s fake to pretend you don’t want to walk through it.
    Later, at the graduation party, the Usual do come and they’re mixed in with the Unusual, yet overall everyone seems pretty happy to be together.
    “Remember when you tutored me?” our class treasurer, Hayley Rubin, asks. We’re by the iPod dock. She’s scrolling through songs impatiently.
    “I tutored you for two summers,” I say.
    “Yeah, remember?”
    I laugh. It’s mindless chitchat, but I don’t mind.
    “Remember all your flash cards?” she asks.
    “Uh-huh,” I say.
    “You always held them too low. I could see all the answers.”
    “Yeah, that was on purpose.”
    “No.”
    “I thought if you could read the answers they’d be easier to memorize than if you just guessed and got them wrong and then waited for me to give them to you.”
    Hayley looks up from the iPod with thankful eyes. “Aww,” she says, hand over heart, “you were trying to trick me into thinking I was smarter than you.”
    “Something like that.”
    “Awwwww,” she says again, and grabs me for a hug. “I love you, Eva,” she tells me, and then—spying a few members of our student council approaching, quickly dropping her arms—“But only as a friend.”
    I expect to see Shelby here, basically running things, since she’s single now and avoiding Zack, but she’s a no-show, which is also very Shelby, always having cooler plans. Michelle texts that she’ll be there soon and so does Steph, but while I’m waiting for them I chat with some random classmates I haven’t interacted with since freshman year. I’m the only one who brought their yearbook, which makes me feel like an insane dork, but everyone’s cool about it, and I get it signed, like, a hundred times and hear a hundred stories about which college everybody’s going to and what they’re doing this summer to save money. Most of them are applying for jobs at the mall (with a heavy emphasis on ice cream/frozen yogurt places, for some reason) or interning with their dad or a family member—except for Foster, who blows my mind when he tells me this’ll be his fourth summer in a row as a camp counselor at Sunny Skies Day Camp.
    The fact that Foster’s plans are identical to mine makes me think originality is basically dead, because