Bethany Caleb (2 page)

Chapter Four

Bethany scuffed into Room 34, avoiding the eyes of her classmates with her hair. She sat in the back and watched her classmates pile in as the bell rang.

A group of boys in nice shirts and ties entered, football players dressed up in honor of the game tonight, all thick necks and mean laughs.
There was Nick Lorden, Shannon Lavoie’s boyfriend, and his lackeys Devon Granger and Tony Pellegrini. Last year those three had cornered James in a hallway after school, knocked him down, then kicked him until blood came out of his mouth. Bethany hadn’t even found out until the next day at school, when James wasn’t there and she heard Nick bragging about it. “Yeah, beat the shit outta that fag yesterday,” Nick had been telling Shannon. “Caught him coming out of that goddamn Rainbow Alliance meeting.” Nick probably didn’t know that James went to those meetings not because he was gay. James went with his cousin Julie O’Connell, who was.

Nathan Javovich waddled into the classroom, breathing heavy.
He sat at a desk in the middle of the classroom. On the first day of school, a similar desk in the same spot had buckled beneath his weight, then collapsed. Everyone had laughed. Bethany hadn’t said a word.

A couple of girls whose names Bethany always confused with other people came in.
They sat near her and started talking about how much they enjoyed the book they were reading for class.

Bethany watched all these people with blank eyes.
Her mind was on James.

It had been a month since he told her he was dating Genn.
On that afternoon, they’d all been hanging around in the parking lot behind Middlebury House of Pizza, watching the guys and Mara try to do skateboarding tricks. Bethany was sitting alone avoiding Genn, who was talking to Emily. She remembered being slightly suspicious about James and Genn, but she hadn’t known for sure until James came over and sat down beside her on the curb.

“Hey,” he said.
His voice was so familiar. She remembered hoping he wanted to get back together with her even though she knew he was going to tell her something bad. Her jaw muscles tightened to restrict any emotional reaction to what he was about to say.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but Genn and I are kind of going out now, and I wanted to make sure you were okay with it.”
Bethany could remember exactly what he had said. She had obsessed over every nuance of that sentence. What did “kind of going out” mean? Why did he need her to be okay with it?

She couldn’t remember her own reply with such great accuracy, only that she had said something to the effect of, “Why should I care what you do, we’re not going out anymore.”

Now, a month later, it still bothered her that she had been so sarcastic and mean. James didn’t deserve that. He hadn’t been mean to her either when they broke up or when he started dating Genn. Every time she thought about it she felt like a bitch.

Bethany was not so lost in her thoughts about James that she didn’t notice a certain group of five girls stroll in.
She pulled out the book assigned for English and pretended to be reading.

The girls sat down next to the football players.
Their various shades of brown hair highlighted to look naturally blond rendered them indistinguishable from one another, except for the one with the hair like smooth black glass. This was Shannon Lavoie. She immediately sat upon Nick Lorden’s lap.

It seemed like Shannon had always made Bethany forget to how to speak.
Bethany knew it had started in sixth grade. She had been in line for lunch behind Jana. Because Jana was overweight, she couldn’t take too long to choose a dessert without people complaining and teasing. Kids had teased Jana more than once in the lunch line, and today it happened to be Shannon Lavoie.

“Like you need any more cake, piggy,” Shannon said loudly from behind Bethany.
Alison Richards, who had perfectly highlighted blond hair even at age eleven, started oinking.

Kids had always called Jana “Piggy.”
Bethany could remember a boy in their kindergarten class calling Jana an oinker. Even Jana’s own mother called her Piggy and oinked at her when she took seconds at dinner. Bethany was only thinking about her friend when she opened her mouth to tell Shannon off. She wasn’t thinking about Shannon being the most popular girl in her grade.

Shannon saw Bethany open her mouth, and immediately looked Bethany over.
“What, are you going to say something? Come on, geek. Let’s hear it.”

And Bethany hadn’t been able to say anything.
She’d never had a problem with talking, giving speeches or oral reports or talking to a large crowd of people until after that small incident. “Wait, let’s hear what Bethany has to say,” Shannon said in eighth grade when Bethany stood up in their English class to give an oral report on
To Kill a Mockingbird
. “What’s on your mind, Bethany? Come on, just say it.” That was all Shannon would have to say to make Bethany cringe inside, forget anything she might have wanted to express, and send her running away from the stares, giggles, and outright laughter of half the school.

Shannon and Nick, the king and queen of the school, kept their dictatorship by publicly humiliating people once and never letting them forget about it.
For every fat, weird, too smart, too ugly, too whatever kid in their grade, Shannon and Nick knew how exactly to humiliate them. Until Shannon had muted her, Bethany was called Geek. But that wasn’t as bad as this new thing. Sometimes Bethany wondered if she had changed her appearance because Shannon gave her this new image of a girl who glared and couldn’t say anything, a girl who was angry and dark.

Bethany hoped she was who she was for her own reasons.

As the popular kids talked and laughed and seemed to ignore her, Bethany concentrated on the book in her hands.
It was Dickens’
Great Expectations
, and she couldn’t understand a word on the page. Every day started like this, with Shannon as a constant reminder of Bethany’s cowardice. She had been a coward at that moment, unable to stick up for her best friend, and ever since. Even now she stared at the pages in her book, occasionally turning them, just so Shannon wouldn’t notice her doing something weird. Bethany was always relieved when class started and she had been invisible on Shannon’s radar.

The relief of invisibility was tempered by the fact that she was chicken shit and had been since sixth grade.
She wondered which would be more pleasant: taking out Shannon and watching blood splash the faces of all her snotty friends surrounding her, or putting the gun in her own mouth and blasting her cowardly self out of existence.

Mrs. Greenbaum entered the room and jerked Bethany out of her self-loathing.
The fifty-something-year-old woman with her graying hair bleached an orangey-blond faced the class. “Good morning, class,” Mrs. Greenbaum said loudly. The talking died down, and Shannon slipped off of Nick’s lap and into her own desk.

Today’s class started with a rapid-fire interrogation on the chapters everyone was supposed to have read the night before.
As Bethany hadn’t read the chapters assigned, and hadn’t read past the first two chapters of
Great Expectations
, her attention quickly moved elsewhere.

One of the windows in the classroom was open, letting in the autumn air.
Somewhere, someone was burning leaves. And Bethany’s mind turned again to James, to time they spent together back in July.

Chapter Five

The air blowing from the Oldsmobile’s vents smelled like burning.
Bethany was pretty sure it wasn’t from the brush pile they had passed at the Klaski farm, or from the blunt in James’s hand.

Bethany sat in the passenger seat, her legs curled up under a musty blanket from the backseat.
Even though it was July, the night air was still almost cold, reminiscent of autumn, which for Bethany was approaching too quickly. James had the radio on, loud, a mix tape of punk bands. In the dark, only the music and the small area illuminated by the headlights seemed to exist.

James was driving fast considering it was dark and he had only one hand on the steering wheel.
He kept taking fast, nervous hits off the blunt in his other hand. They were driving to meet Mara and Chester at a concert in Worcester. Bethany didn’t even know what bands were playing. Every time she had asked James, he started rambling about some hardcore band who was the opening act.

They were on the 190 on-ramp when Bethany realized James really hadn’t spoken to her all night.
He’d come to her house to pick her up, maybe said hi, then the radio went on. The music filled the space reserved for conversation. Now Bethany couldn’t have a conversation with James if she wanted to—she’d have to scream over the music. But she didn’t really want to talk to him. She didn’t even know how she felt about him at this point.

So Bethany let the over-loud music push her far into her own thoughts.
She thought about how uninspired she’d been lately. Every day she painted over whatever she had painted the day before. It was never good enough. Who would ever see it, anyway? And if someone did see it, who would think of it as more than a fifteen-year-old girl’s art project? If she wanted her art to hang in a gallery someday, it would have to be good, better than anyone else’s. If her work wasn’t the best, it was pointless. She wasn’t even a better artist than James. She couldn’t be the best in her own small school, she wouldn’t be able to stand up against the best from all over the country. She was an inevitable failure as an artist.

The highway street lamps flashed by monotonously.
Bethany became almost hypnotized by them.

She tried to imagine a future without art.
Always her dream had been to live in some loft apartment with James or whoever her lover was at the time. They would paint together and make love and dress up to go to new gallery exhibits. Now... now, she knew James wouldn’t be around forever. She could feel him drifting away from her, and she from him. And without James, without art, there was nothing.

Somehow, other people were happy.
Happy despite nine to five jobs, despite boring marriages and the burdens of children and bills. Bethany tried to imagine herself in a regular job. She couldn’t think of one she’d be interested in. It didn’t matter. The effort of dragging herself into any office would slowly stifle her, as school was now suffocating her. But it would be worse. She knew without knowing exactly how that it would be worse. She dreaded it with every bone in her body.

The streetlights slowed, and she came out of her trance to see that James was on an off-ramp.
The road at the end of the off-ramp was quiet, empty except for a gas station. Bethany wanted to ask why they weren’t going to Worcester, why they were stopping at a gas station when the tank was still half-full. But the music was still on.

James pulled up to a gas pump and shut off the car.
Bethany’s ears buzzed with the silence. James got out and slammed the driver’s side door, sealing Bethany inside.

Bethany heard the sounds of James putting gas into the car.
She watched through the windshield as people came and went form the gas station. A pickup truck with hay bales in the back drove up. Its driver put air in the tires then bought a coffee inside, chatting with the clerk. A woman from a new red minivan pulled two whining children and one crying toddler into the gas station store. They emerged minutes later, each child smiling with candy in their grubby hands. All of their actions seemed hopelessly pointless. It was surreal when James walked into view and into the gas station. He said a few words to the cashier, handed over some folded up bills, walked out, looking at the ground.

The car door opened and brought a sudden contact with reality that jarred her.
James sat in his seat heavily; the door slammed shut. She looked at his hands, which were already gripped around the steering wheel. “Let’s skip the concert,” he said.

“Okay,” Bethany said.
She didn’t ask why, she didn’t ask what they would do instead, even though she wondered. She remained silent as he started up the car and drove off, music blaring, heading away from Worcester on the highway. Somehow it comforted her to let James take control of where they were going, what they would do. She didn’t want to know.

Her eyes were having trouble focusing. She couldn’t keep herself in this car racing through the dark.

She didn’t know what she wanted out of life.
It didn’t help that her family wasn’t particularly religious–she didn’t believe in heaven or hell. Sometimes she wondered if she even loved anyone. Except James. She was pretty sure she was in love with James. But that didn’t make her feel any better about the rest of her life. She still wasn’t happy, and she hadn’t been happy for a long time.

She tried to remember exactly when her depression had started.
It might have been right around the time she couldn’t count Genn as her best friend. No, before that even. It was in May. She could remember that much. It had felt weird, being depressed in the spring. But suddenly all the bright pastel colors, all the flowers, all the people out jogging and walking and riding bikes, all of that had suddenly annoyed her. She didn’t understand why they were so fucking happy. What did they have to be happy about? What did they look forward to that she didn’t? She still couldn’t figure it out.

With winter approaching, Bethany was afraid her depression would get worse than it already was.
Even normal people got depressed in the winter. Seasonal affective disorder. Her mother had it. During the winter she took Zoloft and sat for an hour under a bright light, reading, every day. Her mother barely even seemed depressed. Bethany wondered if she could ask her mom why she was depressed. She wondered what her mother would say.

The Oldsmobile devoured the road in front of them.
Bethany looked out over the random bright lights beyond the guardrail, the sad, small houses beside the highway. It looked almost pretty at night.

After they had gotten on 495, James put on his blinker and got off the highway.
He drove up to a Bickford’s and parked. They silently went inside.

The restaurant was nearly empty and garishly lit.
A family sat at a booth near the door. Eventually a waitress came and seated them. Bethany opened the plastic-coated menu. The waitress came back. They both ordered breakfast food. After the waitress brought out the coffee, Bethany kept her hands around the hot mug. She was sitting across from James and put her feet up on the seat beside him. He put a hand on her ankle and kept it there. James looked around dreamily at the art on the walls, color-coordinated to match the wallpaper. Bethany wondered what it must be like, to know that something you created was hanging in a Bickford’s because it matched the wallpaper.