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-BOOKS BY ROBYN-
| At elite Hilliard Prep School, the competition is fierce, the gossip is worse, and Blake has just arrived back on campus after an unexplained two-year absence. |
| Step behind the velvet rope with this powerful and hilarious field guide, and unlock the secrets to popularity and personality. |
COMING JUNE 26!
Blake
The fucking CD jams in my stereo every so often, like when I was driving home
from the memorial service, but I don’t burn a new one to replace it. If I
malfunctioned from time to time, would my parents decide that they needed a
new Blake?
So I deal with the CD. It’s Rooney, good driving music. Dave left it in my car
after the cops pulled us over on Pacific Coast Highway that night when we
were so high we almost reached the moon.
My car fit the description of the car some armed robber had been driving. If you
think about it, it’s pretty smart to rob people in Newport Beach if you drive a
BMW. They look suspiciously at the gardeners driving through in Astrovans
and Tacomas, never at the people who drive cars like theirs. But that’s what
happened. This brilliant robber had a white BMW and I got pulled over.
Dave, this kid I was taking home from some party, was all, “Dude, there’s this
cop gonna pull you over.”
I thought he was tripping or something. I was driving fine, so I kept going. The
cop followed us for miles down PCH until we were skimming by the water in
Corona Del Mar. We had all this weed in the car and I didn’t want to get busted
like that.
I’d taken some wigga’s Sean Jean jacket from the party when he draped it over
a chair because he looked like an idiot wearing the thing and I felt sort of sorry
for him. Really, I did the kid a favor lifting his jacket. I was wearing it, so I put
the dime bag in the pocket. The jacket was so baggy that it didn’t even make a
bulge.
The cop was great. Right out of the movies. He made us stand outside some
art gallery so he could search the car. I was cracking up by that time because
he didn’t bother to search me, and because Dave was wasted and the cop
didn’t suspect a thing. When he didn’t find anything in the car he scratched his
head and let us go.
I was laughing so hard that I pounded the steering wheel and the horn sort of
went off. The cop waved at us, as if the horn had been a goodbye
gesture.
Dave slipped a CD into my player and directed me to his house. We wound up
smoking the rest of the dime bag in some parking lot near his gated
community.
The party had sucked; there was no keg and we were only allowed in the
backyard, so I’d left early. I hardly even knew Dave. He was just this kid from
my Econ class who asked for a ride home from the keg-less suck-fest.
He was an okay guy because he wanted to pay me for his weed, and when I
told him I didn’t deal, he said I could keep the CD. I said thanks and then we
were quiet and just listened to the music, stoned, until the last track faded and
clicked off.
“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“You ever seen that movie, American Beauty?”
“The one about that cheerleader who wanted to screw her friend’s dad?”
“Uh huh, that’s the one.”
“Yeah, I saw it. What crap. There’s all this beauty in the world and stuff.
Whatever, man. The world’s about as beautiful as the frogs we dissected in
Biology last year.”
I stared at the street lamp, looking through it, remembering the frog we were
supposed to dissect, with its delicate fingers shimmering from the
formaldehyde. The curve of the back legs, the underbelly dripping liquid like
tears as my lab partner gutted the thing. It was beautiful, and as I sat there
next to this kid who didn’t get me, an empty dime bag on my lap, in some
parking lot wearing a jacket that wasn’t mine, I wondered if the frog ever felt
anything but gratitude for every single moment of its stupid little
life.
| -DELETED SCENES: BLAKE'S DORSEY'S SIDE OF THE STORY!- *bad language/spoiler warning* |
| In the original version of BETTER THAN YESTERDAY, written in 2003 (I was seventeen), Blake was one of the narrators. This deleted scene is from Blake's first chapter, about his life in California. --------------------------------------------------- |