Cokie Mason pinned her graduation cap on carefully. Today, she could say good riddance to the old high school. Sure, it had its charm. But there wasn't much to be missed. Not when so much lay ahead.
She would experience it all and more at NYU next fall. Cokie had resigned to start over there. She didn't know anyone from Stoneybrook going to NYU. Stacey McGill had considered it, but ended up going somewhere else. Thank goodness. Cokie didn't want anyone from high school following her there.
This was why: Cokie was going to start over in every sense of the word.
She wouldn't even be Cokie anymore. She would go by her middle name: Marie. Now that was the sweet kind of name that would get her into sororities. That was the kind of name to match her new identity that she had been working on for the past two years. And only now could she take hold of Marie, the person that Cokie had always wanted to be.
Around Cokie, all of the girls in her graduating class were putting the finishing touches on their hair and makeup or pining on their caps or taking pictures. Nearby were the girls formerly known as the BSC. Once upon a time, Cokie used to thrive upon making those girls miserable. Especially Mary Anne Spier.
"Oh, no!" Mary Anne screeched. "I forgot my camera!"
"I'll just give you copies of mine," Dawn Schafer said. "Besides, Mom and Richard will take pictures."
"You're right," she sighed. "Kristy, let me fix your hat. You've got it on crooked."
"Check it out, you guys," Claudia Kishi was giggling while modeling the Valedictorian medal. She had borrowed it from Pete Black, her boyfriend. Claudia was in the bottom half of the class, but Cokie figured that Claudia knew what she was doing by dating smart guys who would probably grow up to be doctors.
"Now, that would be pretty pathetic," Grace was now standing behind Cokie at the mirror. "If Claudia 'C' Kishi really was our class Valedictorian."
She was just talking to nobody in particular. It was the kind of thing that she would have whispered to Cokie at one time. But by the end of last year, everything between the two of them had changed. Cokie had decided that she was tired of her life. She wanted a new life. So she was changing things. A makeover from the inside out, she had said.
Grace had not wanted anything to change. But everything did.
Grace turned to the side to survey her profile in the mirror. Her belly stuck out considerably under the graduation gown as Grace was now in her ninth month of pregnancy. Cokie would have liked to have been there for her former friend during this time if things had been different.
But they weren't. So Cokie kept her distance.
Oddly enough, Grace seemed to be the only one who really cared when Cokie turned over a new leaf. For the rest, Cokie stood out when she was mean. But as a nicer, more considerate Cokie, she just sort of blended into the crowd as an ordinary girl.
Cokie had been okay with neither standing out nor fitting in. Blending in would work for now. At one time, though, it was unexceptable to just be another face in the crowd. Back in the days of SMS, Cokie was somewhat of a schadenfreude. (She did not have a word for it until she saw that word on a vocabulary list in the ninth grade.) She got her kicks in life out of watching others fail. The misfortunes of the relationship between Logan Bruno and Mary Anne Spier constantly satisfied this need of Cokie's. And the common knowledge of the entire student body that Cokie enjoyed this sort of thing was what made her stand out. That had been all she wanted.
And now... now all she wanted was to belong. But she couldn't belong here. They never gave her a chance. So the only thing to do was to get out and never look back.
"Graduates, time to line up."
