The Graduation by Christopher Pike Page A

boat!”
    “Of course not.”
    “You better not.”
    He laughed. “I’m just going to put a hole in it.” He crawled toward her, his leather-clad legs slithering over the grass like twin snakes. She thought he was going to grab her, kiss her—she didn’t want him to kiss her, not that much—but he halted shy of Alice’s grave.
    “You remember the party? All the kiddies were in the pool. They know how to swim.”
    “Not all of them.” Polly said.
    “Who doesn’t know?” he asked gleefully.
    “Jessie.” That was a fact. Jessica had grown up with a pool in her backyard and was going to Hawaii next week, but she had never learned to swim. She had almost drowned as a child. She was terrified of the water.
    “Who talked you into the party?” Clark asked.
    “Jessie. And Sara.”
    Clark glanced at his bag. There was something black and muddy inside that he had not unpacked. “Sara never did like you.”
    Polly put her hand to her head. She could feel the blood pounding beneath the skin. She had given blood all year—to different hospitals, more times than she was supposed to—and there was still so much pressure inside. Sometimes she honestly felt the only real way to let it all out would be to take a gun and put a hole in her skull the way Alice had.
    “How did you know Jessie couldn’t swim?” she whispered.
    Clark reached over with his bony left hand—he was left-handed, as Alice had been—and touched Polly’s lips with the nail of his index finger. He touched her teeth. He probably would have stuck his finger inside her if she had let him. He was trying to get inside her. He had been trying from the beginning although he had never wanted to make love to her. She had never been able to understand that. He was one way, and he was another way. She imagined his finger would have felt the same way the cold hard barrel of a gun would have felt inside her mouth. She knew it would have been just as deadly. But that might not be such a bad thing, not if it stopped the pain. Her head was killing her!
    “If I tell you that,” he said. “I will tell you everything.”
    He was asking for her permission. “No,” she said.
    “Are you sure?”
    “No.”
    “I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them all.”
    She set the roses down. For my sister . “He’ll stop you.”
    “Who?”
    “Michael.”
    “I very much doubt it.” Clark stood and put the explosives back in his bag. He held out his left hand. “Come along, Polly. It’s time.”
    She went with him.

Chapter Twelve
    Haven was her name, and she was at the end of a long and fun-filled career. In the sixties and seventies, she had been a popular choice for vacationers looking for an intimate cruise ship to take to Mexico’s Mazatlan. La Paz, or Acapulco. But that had been before a new generation of vessels—larger and more sophisticated—had pushed Haven into an uneconomical no-man’s-land; she was too plush to haul cargo, and she was too plain and small to attract parties of the rich and pretty. When Bubba had come to Sara in the spring with the idea of renting Haven for Tabb High’s all-night senior party, he had never spoken so truth-fully as he did when he said it was the chance of a lifetime. Her captain had just decided to rent her out as a party boat, making the trip between Catalina and the mainland. This class party was to be one of his first short cruises.
    Bubba had caught Sara at an anxious moment. She had been thinking hard and without success for a way to blow everybody’s extracurricular mind one last time, and thus forever ensure their fond memories of her leadership skills. Because neither side was aware of how desperate the other was, the negotiations between the captain of the Haven and Sara proceeded with remarkable smoothness. The captain didn’t even mind a postdated check.
    Yet the cost for the all-night party was unusually high—forty dollars per student, and that didn’t include a hotel room to recover in on Catalina. But you