Avagadro’s number and the concept of the mole. Every once in a while, Mr. Olsen would stare up at a poster with Avagadro’s portrait and boom, “Thank you, Avagadro, for making chemistry simple. Not easy, but simple.” She remembered trying to feel grateful for 6.022 X 10 23 and pondering the difference between “easy” and “simple.” She noticed that Adam gave very good massages. After Leslie’s party, Mandy joined Adam in his hot tub, sitting close enough to feel the press of his thighs. She discovered that he did indeed give good massages.
…
By senior year, Mandy was becoming more comfortable in this new school and place. She had lived her entire life nestled in Salt Lake City’s Wasatch Mountain range until the summer before her sophomore year. The California school was strange, with its hallways and lockers open to the outside. The girls she met were different from her Mormon friends. They were not focused on dieting and “moral cleanliness.” They were cracking dirty jokes as they gulped nondiet Coke at lunch and ate turkey sandwiches dripping in mayonnaise. They were out on the softball field shouting obscenities with sweat dripping off their faces. A few were preparing their applications for the Ivy League and talking openly of their plans to attend medical school. Mandy was happy to have moved to a place with seaweedy beaches and curling ocean waves, a place with massive redwoods poking through the fog, a place where bands like the Grateful Dead regularly played, a place she could become a “California Girl” just like the Beach Boys song. She was thinking about getting drunk tonight in Wunderlich Park. In Utah, drinking was a way to show she never wanted to become a bowtie-blouse-wearing Stepford wife. Her Mormon girl friends needed to stay pure so that they could get married in the Temple and have an eternal union in the Celestial Kingdom. Her California friends did not know her wild Utah ways. They would say that she was a good, quiet student who helped decorate the class’s homecoming float. Her best friend was just named class Valedictorian. These California friends did not know she had gotten drunk for the first time in sixth grade with her bad friend Celeste. They did not know that the previous winter she and her black
HVWP COMMONPLACE 11
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