Prom Read Free Page A

french fries have?”
     
    “My dad said I have to take a white guy or . . . ”
     
    “How many calories do they have without salt?”
     
    “Shaun isn’t sweet, he’s skinny. Ask him . . . ”
     
    “ . . . eight more pounds till the zipper will go all the way.”
     
    “ . . . definitely need a bra with it . . . ”
     
    “ . . . still can’t find shoes.”
     
    “ . . . you know she’ll get wasted . . . ”
     
    “ . . . can’t believe it’s so close!”
     
    “Are those sirens coming here?”
    I opened my eyes.
    Three fire trucks pulled up in front of the building. The fireguys dragged their hoses inside. This was not a drill. This was real. Really real. We might be stuck outside for hours.
    I could hear my skin frying. I covered my ankles with open textbooks. “I’m gonna get burned if they don’t let us in.”
    “You’d get burned worse in there,” Lauren pointed out.
    “There isn’t any smoke,” I said. “I bet a teacher pulled the alarm ’cause he was sick of us.”
    “Maybe it was that coach,” Monica said.
    “What coach?” asked Lauren.
    Monica said her cousin Lily was in the nurse’s office with a bad stomach, and she heard the nurse talking to a secretary about a lot of money being missing from some account. Vendors were calling the school, and the cops were investigating.
    I pulled up the hood on the sweatshirt even though it was eighty degrees. My friends argued about which coach was the kind of jackass who would rip off the school like that. I thought about snow.
    Eventually, the fireguys came out of the building, rolled up their hoses and drove away. When we went back inside, the Consumer Ed teacher made my girls cover everything back up. They were very anti-sex at Carceras.

18.
    Spanish was boring except for the note that got passed around. It said the kid who started the fire was caught on a security camera. He didn’t want to take an algebra test, so he lit a roll of toilet paper. Then he felt bad and pulled the alarm.
    The security cameras on the second floor actually worked. That’s the kind of thing you needed to know to get by.
    After Spanish, I had Study Hall. I hid under a desk in the back row and used Lauren’s cell phone to call TJ. He never picked up.
    I was over being mad at him. I was nervous.
    To be honest, I was hungry, too. TJ was right. Breakfast at Burger King had been a good idea. Ma was always saying I should eat toast before I left the house. She was big on toast. If I had eaten toast, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a bitch, and then TJ and me could have had a nice time at Burger King with hash browns and a sausage biscuit, and he’d answer his phone.

19.
    Nat caught up with Lauren and me outside Study. She heard that the kid who started the fire was a Nazi wacko, and he had wired the whole building to explode when the bell rang at the end of the day. But she didn’t think it was true, because if it was, the school district would get sued for making us go to class and all.
    We dropped Lauren off at Calculus. She was such a kick-ass student, she was going to Drexel on a full ride for her brains, not sports.
    Nat and me kept walking to the end of the hall, to the class for normal students: Applied Mathematics for Life, aka Slacker Math. It was one step up from Retard Math and one step down from State College Math. It was a million miles and five doors down from Calculus.

20.
    Miss Crane was our Math teacher, a rookie. Back in the fall, she tried to be our friend by telling us everything that sucked about her life. We had to listen about her college loans and how she had to pay her parents back for her car and how her roommates both moved out (maybe she bored them to death) and on and on. The only thing that shut her up was when a couple of the guys in class got real interested in her apartment, where it was, did it have a sliding glass door, did she sleep with the windows open, did she sleep nude . . . you know.
    When she stopped trying to