Author's Note: Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental. All characters are over the age of 18 and are all fictional.
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Most will agree that the most beautiful period in high school is the last month before you graduate. I don't know how it is today, but in the early nineties, that was the case. The grading is concluded earlier, allowing students to prepare for graduation at their own pace, providing more free time--only having to attend a few "consultations" at the school. I can say with certainty that the students are still given some concessions--I don't remember anyone failing their last grade unless they were a total jerk. In fact, not only the last month but the whole last year had been more relaxed than any of the previous ones. Everyone is an "adult", being over 18 already--so most were trying out things that were considered "grown-up" actions and indulgences. This sometimes led to disagreements between students and teaching staff, as well as parents and their kids.
Apart from the fact that this was the first year that I didn't worry about whether I would take remedial exams or not to make up for failing grades. It was an all-around surprise that I had no failing grades this semester, which has never been the case before. It was also in that year that I started changing the way I handled my relationships as well. I was still friendly with everyone, but unlike before, I didn't wander from one group to the next. Instead, I chose a narrow circle of people whom I socialized with both at school and outside of it. While everyone at school was divided into rappers, hard rock, alternative and metal rock, my preferred group of friends never decided on just one side. We did not go to extremes but balanced somewhere between rock concerts and disco clubs.
Jadranko, my best friend from school. I could count on his friendship and on having a good time when I joined him in his escapades. We had known each other since freshman year in school, and although we did not attend the same classes for the first two years, we knew each other by sharing stories during lunchtimes and bumping into each other in the halls. I knew him as a teenager who did not like to expose himself too much, so I was very glad when I saw at the beginning of my senior years that we would be in the same class for the last 2 years.
We had been sharing some classes, but we only became real friends when we met by chance on a night out. Since then we had many common subjects in school and sat together in every class. Jadranko is a few months older than me, so he used the opportunity to apply for a driver's license, and having passed the exams, he regularly came to school by car. Yes, here in Europe we have to wait until 18 to get a driver's license, but we don't need to wait until 21 to drink a beer. Like many boys from the suburbs at that time, Jadranko was obsessed with cars and motorbikes, so he spent a lot of time fixing his motorized pets. As a result of this, his yard was sporting one of the most beautifully arranged car and motor shows in the city. The biggest problem was the empty gas tank, so we spent all our lunch money on gas just to drive around in town after school and pretend to be classy dudes.
Two weeks before the end of the senior year, as I've said before, is the best period of school when most of the grades have been finalized, and for the rest, I didn't care as long as I passed. We had math for the first two hours, and while we were waiting for electrical engineering, the head teacher came and said that the professor was sick and that we were free for the next two hours. There was only one more period after that on "work organization", which really wasn't that essential. Jadranko and I just looked at each other and nodded.
"Do you have gasoline?" I asked Jadranko.
"Do you have any money?" He replied with a question.
I pulled out a bus pass from my back pocket. The money that my mother gave me every day so that I could eat something was sticking out of it.
Jadranko was jolted into action, saying, "Great, let's go!"
We got into the car and headed towards the city. The sound of the shortened exhaust was overpowered by the blaring of Guns'n Roses, and the looks of the passersby seemed as if everyone was looking at us with envy and admiration. Now I know they were looking at us like that because we were jerks. We soon parked in front of the café and ran onto the terrace, convinced that everyone was seeing us as cool dudes. Every teenager knows that feeling when, instead of sitting at a school desk, they are sitting on the terrace of a café in the sun: free and on the top of the world. It was the blazing sun that gave us the idea to go outside the city to the beach. We counted our money, calculated how much gas we could buy to have enough left over for beer, and set off.
After about twenty minutes, we parked on the side of the road and in a nearby store counted the change with which we bought two beers with the promise that we would return the bottles. We started slowly towards the beach. At the end of May, there were only a few people on the beach: some taking a stroll, and a few who wanted to get a head start on their summer tans. We went down to the sea to a place where there was no one, stripped down to our boxers, and lay down on the stones like lizards that had just come out of hiding to warm themselves. A few sips of beer and the warmth of the sun contributed to the fact that we both fell asleep for a while.
When we woke up, there were two people ten meters away from us. An elderly man was sitting on a towel in shorts and a T-shirt, but next to him lay a woman whose age was an absolute mystery to us. The woman was lying in a bathing suit, and her body was akin to ones displayed on the covers of erotic magazines, which confused us. It was difficult to determine her age based on her body, and when she took off her hat and we saw her face, we were even more confused. Her face looked completely unnatural, without a single wrinkle, as if she were a statue. When she spoke, we could only see the movement of her lips, while her cheeks were frozen in place, unmoving.
"Fuck, she's like a robot," Jadranko commented quietly.
"Um. It looks more like a doll to me," I countered.
We stopped looking at them for a moment because it was becoming obvious that we were staring at them. After a while, she got up and started walking towards the sea. When her ankles were in the water, she stood there, and we stared at her again.
"She has a perfect body," I said.
