Free The Graduation by Christopher Pike Page A

handed out, one by one, with Mr. Smith shaking everybody’s hand and wishing each one well. When that was done, Sara squealed something ridiculous into the mike and the class sprang to its feet and cheered. Then five hundred caps sailed into the air, the largest of which was Bubba’s huge straw sombrero, complete with gold tassel.
    Jessica hugged Polly. They had made it. School was over, and if they wanted, it could be over for good. Sara burst through the crowd and embraced them both. And then they laughed and insulted one another, and it was just as it always had been between them and, she hoped, always would be. Michael didn’t know everything after all. Jessica meant it when she had told Polly they would be friends forever.
    Jessica didn’t find Michael in the crowd, though she looked long and hard. He seemed to have disappeared.
    Michael had indeed left the school, but Carl Barber, better known as Kats, had not. He stood in the middle of the joyous crowd, watching everybody hug and kiss, a wide grin on his face, but a scowl in his heart. Nothing really changed, he thought bitterly. He had his diploma. He had earned it attending hours of tedious night classes. He was as good as the rest of them. But how many of them wanted to shake his hand? As many as had shaken his hand last June when he had failed to graduate because of a few lousy grades. Nobody cared about him. Nobody ever had and nobody ever would.
    After tonight, though, they would remember him, if they remembered anything at all. Almost the entire senior class would be on that cruise ship when it left the dock for Catalina. But if he had his way—and he would, he swore it—not a single one of them would be on board when it reached its destination. That ship would be a ghost ship.

Chapter Nine
    Michael parked down the street from Clark Halley’s house and removed the gun from the glove compartment. Checking again to be sure it was fully loaded, he stuffed it inside his sports-jacket pocket. Clark’s huge black Harley-Davidson sat at the end of the crumbling asphalt driveway, fuming in the boiling sun from recent exertion. Clark was home. If the place could be called a home. It looked more like a chicken coop, out at the far east end of San Bernardino Valley, where the desert began and the rents plummeted. The place stunk, yet when Michael had finally located the house a month earlier—after a great deal of effort and an equal amount of luck—he had celebrated.
    And then I did nothing but watch and wait.
    A last name is not the same as an address. Michael discovered that soon after he had found Clark’s ugly picture and full name in the Temple High yearbook. The Monday after Maria’s accident, he had revisited Temple High and asked to speak to Clark Halley. Turned out the guy no longer went there. He should have been in the middle of his senior year, but he had unexpectedly dropped out at the beginning of October. He had, in fact, disappeared just after Alice had died.
    No sweat to find him, Michael had figured. He would get Clark’s family address and catch up with him there. Easier said than done. Clark didn’t have a family. He lived alone. He was an orphan or his parents had died or something; the secretary at Temple High wasn’t sure what the situation was. Using the best of his charm, and a couple of tricks Bubba had taught him, Michael was able to obtain from the secretary—the same woman who had given him the yearbook during his original visit—the address Clark had had his mail sent to while at the school. It proved to be phony—a closed Laundromat.
    Michael went back to Temple High at lunchtime, again and again. He mingled, made friends, asked questions, and listened. He led the other kids to believe he went to Temple. He began to build up a picture of Clark Halley, and it matched the one he already had—the guy was a creep.
    Clark had kept mostly to himself, but when he did speak up, it had usually been to insult somebody. One girl