What I Did Last Summer

There is a long-standing tradition at Beauneville Latin: on the last day of summer each student writes an essay about their activities since June. The English faculty read all of the essays and publish the best. They mock and make fun of the worst examples.

In Mr. Cooper's class, Roderick began his essay:

This summer, I worked for Mr. Armstrong at the boathouse. It was a lot of fun, and I made some money. Lots of my friends went canoeing, and it was nice to see them.

Molly and I slept together a lot. Sometimes we slept in my bed and sometimes we slept in her bed and once we went to Lake City where we slept together in a big hotel.

Megan Cupcake and I fooled around a lot, too.

Bibi Ericson gave me a massage. Also, we spent time in the sauna and hot tub. Bibi likes to spent a lot of time nude. She has nicely shaped breasts. People in Sweden like to eat smelly rotten fish and they use funny toilets that don't flush.

Molly, sitting next to Roderick, wrote:

Beethoven wrote the Diabelli Variations between 1819 and 1823 in response to a challenge from the publisher Anton Diabelli. Diabelli wrote a simple waltz tune and sent it to the best-known composers of his day and asked each to write one variation. As a joke, Beethoven responded with a set of thirty-two variations and a fugue.

Though written in jest, the great music historian Donald Francis Tovey called the Diabelli Variations 'the greatest set of variations ever written'. Pianist Alfred Brendel describes the work as "the greatest of all piano works'.

My piano teacher, Mrs. Gabrielli, suggested I start working on the piece a year ago, but this summer as soon as school was out I stopped working on other pieces and spent all my time on the Diabelli. Then, in July, Maestro Adolph Chickarina invited me to play for him at his apartment in Lake City.

Roderick and I went there to see him and I played. He yelled at me, but then let me play the piece all the way through. His coaching was really helpful, but he put his hand up my dress, which was a little distracting. Fortunately, I was wearing underwear, which I don't ordinarily do.

Megan Cupcake wrote:

Your obedient servant, the authoress Megan Cupcake, who aspires to be the next Jane Austen, spent her summer observing relationships and interactions amongst the denizens of this town, and recording such events in her detailed journal together with wry commentary.

The very solicitous Miss Cupcake also devoted considerable time and attention to the pursuit of Master Roderick Smith, a most refined young citizen of the town. Though he is pledged to Miss Molly Bloom, Miss Cupcake is not deterred, for her dowry and her bosom are ample.

Relations at the Cupcake Manor, however, were strained when the elder Mr. Cupcake discovered the Misses Cupcake and Ericson in a rather compromising position, which is to say naked and passionately engaged in a Sapphic embrace. Suffice to say that Mr. Cupcake does not fully appreciate the pleasures of Bilitis, at least in regards to his daughter. Gunshots were avoided through the intervention of Mrs. Cupcake, who pointed out that however unnatural the practice it posed no threat to Miss Cupcake's maidenly virtue. Under the circumstances, and in the presence of Mr. Cupcake's .38 Police Special, Miss Cupcake deemed it unwise to remind Mr. and Mrs. Cupcake that her maidenly virtue left town some time ago.

Natasha, ever pensive, wrote:

This summer, my parents took their annual cruise of the Mediterranean and Adriatic, then spent August on their island near Corfu. I stayed home and got pregnant with Henry Witherspoon. Don't tell my parents, because I want to tell them myself when they get home.

Thanks to the loving support of Henry, I came out of the closet as a KulturPunk, and am now proud to say that I worship Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and his sister, Fanny. If our baby is a boy, we will name him Felix; and if it is a girl, we will name her Fanny.

In Mr. Swift's class, Mary Bloom shivered slightly as she thought about her summer, then wrote:

In June, I signed up for the National Virgin Society's Virgin Pledge, because sex before marriage is sinful unless the person is punished, in which case it is still sinful but everyone is happy because the sinful person is punished, except the sinful person is not happy because they were hoping to get away with it.

About a week after I signed the Pledge I met an older boy at the Stapleton Bowl-A-Drome who told me that the Pledge doesn't say anything about oral sex. I didn't know what he meant so he told me to look it up in Wikipedia, so I went home and looked it up and then I read the Pledge and sure enough he was right, it doesn't say anything about that. So the next night we did oral sex in the back of his car. At least, I did it to him, because he said the other kind -- you know, where he does it to me -- isn't safe and I might lose my cherry. I wasn't sure what he meant by "lose my cherry", so I looked it up in Wikipedia when I got home and it was just about fruit, but I asked my sister Margaret -- she's really smart -- and she explained that it was a nice way to say "lose my virginity", which I certainly didn't want to lose because I just found it.

Anyway, the boy introduced me to another boy who he said wanted me to be his girlfriend, so I met him down by the Mill Pond and he just comes out and says he wants to have oral sex. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather! I mean, this boy I hardly met seems to know all about me!

So, we did that, and it was fun, but the we sort of accidentally did the other thing, too and it was 'good-bye cherry'. But the boy says that since I didn't do it on purpose it doesn't count, and he knows some other boys who might help me find my cherry, and would I like to meet them? Well, I wasn't too sure about that -- I didn't want him to think I was one of those 'easy' girls -- so I asked him if I was his girlfriend now and he said no way, that I was just a whore. I didn't know what that meant so I looked it up in Wikipedia, and it says that prostitution is the world's oldest profession. That made me feel proud because my Dad says he wants his daughters to be professional women.

This is our little secret, okay? Because my next essay might be about a poor innocent underage girl who goes to see her English teacher for help and he molests her totally against her will, and when she goes back again the following Sunday he does it again, and the next week too, and the week after that...

Mary handed in her essay at the end of class, and smiled shyly to Mr. Swift, who did not respond.

After lunch, Mary had Science class with Miss Agassiz. She checked her homework from the weekend and considered whether or not to correct problem three, the one Roderick showed her was incorrect. Fingering her "V" necklace nervously, she placed the paper in the bin uncorrected.