The Rules of Attraction

LAUREN Still no mail from Victor. Not a postcard. Not a phone call. Not a letter. No message. The bastard can rot in hell for all I care.

“The school is really going downhill,” Judy tells me, explaining that I should be grateful to be a Senior so I won’t have to come back next year. And I guess I have to agree with her. The Freshman band is called The Parents — that’s enough to send out some message to people’s feelers that something wrong is going down. October seems to last forever because of Judy’s assessment. Graduation seems impossibly far off.

Gina did win the prize for changing the school sign and with the prize money we bought some XTC, which I had never done before, not even with Victor, and it was pretty incredible. I don’t think Sean liked it though. He just got very sweaty and kept grinding his teeth, swaying back and forth, and later that night he was even hornier than usual, which was no fun at all. I start drinking a lot of beer because that and play video games is essentially all the boy wants to do. But he gets better-looking as time goes on and though the sex is only okay and even if he’s not so great in bed, at least he’s imaginative. Yet he doesn’t turn me on. No real orgasms. (Well, maybe a couple.) Just because he’s so damned insistent. (Contrary to popular belief, being eaten out for two hours straight is not my idea of a good time.) He also seems suspicious. I have the feeling that he’s the mastermind of the Young Conservatives Party that had that big dance in Greenwall last Saturday. Other than being on Rec Committee I have no idea what he does here, and in the end, like Judy says, I really don’t want to know. Just want December to arrive, just want to get out of this place. Because I don’t know how much longer I can keep drinking beer and watching him get the high score on Pole Position which he is superb at.

I asked him about this one night and he just grumbled some monosyllabic answer. But what else is one to do at college except drink beer or slash your wrists? I thought to myself as he got up, stalked over to the video machine, slipped in another quarter. I stopped complaining.

Girl who killed herself got the flyer the rest of us all got in her box, telling her that she was indeed dead and that there would be a memorial service for her in Tishman. I mentioned this one night when Sean and I were at The Pub having pre-party beers, and he looked at me and snorted, “Irony. Oh boy,” but he might as well have just snorted, “So?”

The poetry comes along. I haven’t stopped smoking. Judy tells me that Roxanne told her that Sean deals drugs. I tell her, “At least he doesn’t breakdance.”