Here's to You, Mrs. Oates

Joyce Carol Oates' "The Boy" is not The Graduate. 

 It is, as a matter of fact, a flash fiction piece consisting of one very long, rambling sentence, and the narrator is, frankly, a child molester, who is also a tired, desolate part-time teacher, who has given up, and who takes a boy who has been flirting with her at school to a hotel, and tries to give him what she thinks he wants, and she gets really into it, and really wants it, and kind of surprises herself, but he turns out not to want it, because he is just a kid, maybe fourteen, or maybe seventeen, and he is probably scared, and has probably never even seen a woman naked before, and once he sees her up-close maybe he thinks she's ugly, because she has bags under her eyes and is actually kind of old and tired looking, and she can't get him interested now that it comes down to it, and he starts to cry and she is worried the beer is getting warm, and the story ends with her cursing "you bastards," whoever they are, and you kind of think she means men, in general, but maybe not.