Bethany Caleb (3 page)

“Do you ever wonder why we’re here?” Bethany asked.

“What do you mean?” James said. Finally he was looking at her. She wasn’t blending with the wallpaper.

“I mean, what’s the point of living?
Why do people keep living instead of killing themselves?”

“You really don’t know?”

“No.”

“Do you ever wonder why you’re still living and not killing yourself?” James asked.

Bethany didn’t answer right away.
“I sometimes think about killing myself.”

“What’s stopping you?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. I keep thinking something will get better. I’ll find out why no one else is committing suicide. But I haven’t yet. I see all these people and their lives are so depressing, even more depressing than mine. I think, if I were that person, I’d want to die. But that person doesn’t kill himself. He keeps living. I don’t know what he’s living for. Maybe if I knew what he was living for, I wouldn’t feel like killing myself so much.”

“Are you talking about me?”

“No,” Bethany said, surprised. She looked at him, and he looked away.

“Oh.”

Chapter Six

“Miss Caleb? Did you manage to do any of the reading assigned for today?”

Bethany finally realized she was being called upon.
Slowly she moved her head back and forth. This way, her black hair whispered against her pale cheeks. She liked the whisper. Mrs. Greenbaum’s voice cut through the soft sound, shredding it.

“Perhaps, Miss Caleb, if you spent nearly as much time on your homework as you do on your extensive makeup regime, you might actually have something to say during class discussions.”

A snicker escaped from amongst her classmates. Bethany let her waves of hair fall over her face. This way she didn’t have to see who thought her teacher’s insults were funny. She knew who it was. Only one student was bold enough. Shannon.

The class went on around her.
She paid no attention. Instead she thought about the gun

She pictured the muzzle of her father’s gun pressed between Mrs. Greenbaum’s strangely perky breasts and pulling the trigger.
Bloody fleshy pulp and bits of bone would spray across the blackboard, clumps of it coming to rest in the chalk tray.

Then Bethany would turn to the rest of the class.
She would send a bullet splintering through Shannon’s perfect button nose, her face breaking apart like pieces of porcelain. Then she would take careful aim at each gaping mouth. After the massacre was complete, she would survey the now-silent classroom, then step over Carolyn Kingsley’s limp, dead legs on her way out the door.

It was as she was walking in slow motion down the school hallway, the gun shoved nonchalantly into the waistband of her skirt, that she remembered her gun could only hold six bullets and she could therefore only kill six people.
Bethany came out of this fantasy grinding her teeth so hard they squeaked.

She watched the minute hand of the clock inch forward to two lines past the two.
The bell rang. Despite Mrs. Greenbaum’s continued commands, students stood, slamming notebooks shut and shoving books into their backpacks.

Bethany moved slowly.
Her body felt lethargic. There seemed no point in moving quickly. If she arrived at her next class late, she would get a tardy mark. She had received several tardy marks already this year, and they had amounted to nothing. Whenever she arrived early, she had to occupy herself, as she had no one she wanted to talk to.

The piercing voice of her teacher stopped her dead at the doorway.

“Miss Caleb, may I have a word with you?”

She turned toward the voice, her head still down with her hair in her face, a prisoner facing the firing squad.
She knew her crime already. She had faced this trial before.

This time, however, Mrs. Greenbaum stared and said nothing, her thin lips pressed together and her eyes distorted behind her thick glasses.
Students from the second period class began to trickle in.

“I need to get to my Geometry class,” Bethany said, her voice rising from her throat like a foreign language.
She waited for what her teacher had to say. Last time it had been something about her not wearing pantyhose.

“I’m going to place a call to your parents,” Mrs. Greenbaum stated, the shrillness of her voice quelled by a need for confidentiality.
“Your choice of clothing is becoming an increased distraction. Your clothes are completely inappropriate for a school setting–”

“I’ve worn this outfit in class before,” Bethany said.
She could clearly see her choice of attire, as her eyes were focused downward.

“Fishnet stockings are hardly appropriate.”
Mrs. Greenbaum closed her eyes as if to block out the horrible fashion choices before her. “And the lack of a supportive undergarment is... is... entirely shocking and cannot be tolerated.”

A few moments later she realized her teacher meant she wasn’t wearing a bra.
By that time Mrs. Greenbaum had barreled ahead. “There is also the matter of the short story assignment you turned in last week.”

“What’s wrong with it?
I made sure it was three pages, like you said.”

Mrs. Greenbaum stared at Bethany through her glasses, her eyes magnified by the thick lenses.
“This story is highly disturbing.” Bethany noticed that Mrs. Greenbaum held the offending paper in her hand like evidence.

“I’ve already made an appointment for you to see the school counselor during your fifth period, when I believe you have a study hall?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think you realize how disruptive it is for your fellow students to look around and see some kind of death-figure in their midst.
I was planning to have everyone read their stories aloud in class, but obviously...” Mrs. Greenbaum looked down at the paper. “Obviously you can’t read this aloud. I’ll be making a call to your parents regarding these matters. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

She knew that her old friends, upon hearing this exchange, would be doubled over in hysterical laughter.
Once she would have thought it funny herself. Now it was one more thing that weighed down her movements, one more breath of stale air.

Chapter Seven

“Caleb, Bethany?”

“Here.”
Her voice again, like a monotone. The substitute in her Geometry class moved onto the next name.

Bethany opened her sketchbook.
The drawings inside were hints of words she might say someday. The first drawing depicted a deer with an arrow through its heart, floating in a tangle of trees. She’d drawn that the day James told her they needed a break from each other. “I have no idea how you really feel about me,” he said. “Maybe if we spent some time apart you’ll know how you feel.”

The time apart had grown into two months and a new relationship for James.
The deer drawing depressed her. The black lines of the drawing mocked the seriousness of her feelings.

“Why do you always draw scary dead things?”

Raina Sunderman was peering at Bethany’s sketchbook through the glasses that, as usual, had slid down to the tip of her nose. Bethany slammed the cover shut. Raina sat back, pushed her glasses up her nose, and returned to the math assignment the substitute had written on the chalkboard.

Bethany opened her sketchbook again.
She browsed through her “Forest of Suicides” drawings that involved bleeding trees being eaten by vultures with human heads closely resembling her mother. Finally, a blank page.

Her uncapped pen waited in her hand.
The classroom was no source of inspiration: axioms and theorems decorated the orange and blue bulletin boards. As a last resort her eyes scanned the people in the room. Portraits weren’t her forte, but she could always use the practice.

The substitute teacher was a man in his thirties reading a Sports Illustrated magazine.
Half of his face was hidden behind the magazine. Bethany’s eyes moved toward a group of girls talking in the corner. Bethany couldn’t remember any of their names. She wondered if they knew hers. They didn’t interest her at all.

Lastly her eyes came to rest on Raina Sunderman.
Raina’s head was bent over her math notebook, her bushy blonde hair almost completely obscuring her face. There was something about Raina that made Bethany think of the teen movies where an unpopular girl takes off her glasses and is suddenly beautiful.

Lines flowed from the Sharpie in her hand.
The profile of Raina’s slightly curved nose. The thin upper lip and full lower lip. Her round chin, her long neck. Then the eyes, weak behind her glasses. The bushy eyebrows that matched her hair. And then the hair, a mane filling the rest of the page.

She was right.
Raina was beautiful beyond any high school conception of beautiful. She began to feel depressed as she drew in more and more hair, shaded the contours of the face. Her face wasn’t this beautiful. Her own nose had a bump on the bridge and was pointy. There was no hint of cheekbones. Her teeth were perfectly straight from three years of braces, but stained a yellowish color. Back before she started wearing all black, her father used to say things like, “You’re only going to get more beautiful as you get older” and “When you get older, all the boys will be chasing you.” Bethany had always known Darlene was the pretty one in the family, and her father’s words felt false. She didn’t know how James could have thought she was beautiful.

The boy sitting next to her sneezed and startled her.
A stray line now marred the drawing. Bethany flipped the page over before Raina or anyone else could see. It wouldn’t be the first time Bethany was accused of being a lesbian.

She tapped the pen against the page, a steady sound.
Inspiration struck. She drew a girl wearing the same outfit Shannon had worn today, a girl with the same smooth black hair. This girl was frantically trying to catch the blood that spurted from a pair of scissors jammed in her neck.

Shannon was the first person Bethany wanted to kill with the gun.
But she didn’t know how she could do it. She imagined herself walking up to Shannon with the gun in her hand. “You got something to say?” Shannon would say. “You got someone to shoot?” And those words would steal Bethany’s ability to speak as well as kill. She would remain powerless.

“You could get expelled for that, you know,” Raina said.

Raina was looking at her sketchbook again.
Bethany slammed it shut and pulled her CD Walkman out of her backpack. She could see the gun in there, the black metal gleaming from underneath the tissues. Her hand froze for a second, then she quickly zipped the pocket up. She could get expelled for that, too, and she didn’t want that to happen unless she had killed several people first.

“Go ahead and ignore me, I’m just letting you know,” Raina said right as the heavy sounds of Slipknot blasted into Bethany’s ears.

With her eyes closed, Bethany’s mind drifted. She thought about her friends who were no longer her friends. She thought about how really, it was all her fault.

A few Fridays ago, James was waiting at her locker after her last class.
He’d been absent from school all week. “Where have you been?” she asked when she got close enough. She liked that he waited for her, because the week before he had told her he was dating Genn. It meant he still cared.

“I slept in,” he said, shrugging.
The smell of marijuana practically rolled off of him. As she reached into her locker to get her jacket, he leaned in and she could smell the sweetness on his breath. “You wanna go to McDonald’s? I’m hungry.”

“Sure,” she said.

She slammed her locker shut and they walked into the cool air. Bethany buttoned all the buttons on her coat and jammed her hands in her pockets as they crossed the busy Main Street.

The inside of McDonald’s wasn’t much warmer than outside.
James and Bethany stepped into line behind Alison Richards and Lea Blauser. When they turned around, Alison said, “Oh, hi, Bethany. You’re looking quite... gloomy today.” She and Lea giggled and walked away.

Bethany glared after them.
James stepped up to the counter to order, appearing not to notice what had just happened. Bethany ordered fries and a Diet Coke and followed James to a small table by the window.

“So how was your week?” James said.

“It was okay,” Bethany said, wishing she could tell him how terrible it was. “What have you been up to?”

Outside the window, Genn, Emily, and Chester were crossing the street.
“Not much, practicing with the guys, hanging out... that’s about it, nothing major,” James said. “Hey, you want to know something funny that happened at the movies the other day? Well, this guy sitting in front of me and Genn...”

Bethany watched Genn cross the street, walk along the sidewalk toward McDonald’s.
She was beautiful, big and full of life in comparison to tiny Emily and bony-beneath-baggy- clothes Chester. Last year felt like a long time ago, even last spring when she and Genn were still best friends. Now Emily was really Genn’s best friend. Genn was so much like Emily, attracting everyone to her happiness. Bethany suddenly felt like her depression repelled everyone, not only James.

“
I mean, can you believe that guy?” James said, looking at her with an expectant smile.

“
Funny,” Bethany said. She was looking at an empty sidewalk. Genn, Emily, and Chester burst into the McDonald’s like a gust of wind.

“
Oh, hey guys!” James said.

Bethany turned to greet them, noting the disgusted glares of Alison and Lea.
“I don’t know why they let freaks like that in here,” Lea said, looking toward the group now dragging up chairs around Bethany’s table. No one but Bethany seemed to hear her. Genn didn’t bother with a chair. She sat in James’s lap and gave him a long kiss.

“
Get a room,” Bethany muttered.

She hadn
’t said it loudly, but Emily and Chester stared at her. “Why do you always have to be so bitchy,” Chester said, opening a ketchup packet and squeezing it out onto a napkin for no apparent reason. “Jesus, crack a smile every now and then.”

Now James and Genn were staring at her.
Emily giggled nervously.

“
Sorry,” Bethany said sarcastically, looking out the window.

“
You can leave, you know,” Genn said. “If you’re so unhappy being here, you can leave.”

Bethany looked at her.
She grabbed her bag and scraped back her chair, shoved her way past Emily and Chester, blindly heading for the door. She could barely see, because she was crying.

“
What’s her problem?” she heard Chester say, then the cold air hit her like a slap to the face.

Her house was about five miles away, but she
had started walking quickly down Main Street. Maybe James will drive by, looking for me, checking on me, give me a ride home, she thought. Almost immediately she erased the thought with a swipe of her hand to her wet eyes. He hadn’t done anything when Genn told her to leave. He wouldn’t do anything as long as Genn was around. He was faithful like that.

Back in Geometry class, Bethany blinked away tears.
It didn’t matter that her friends had avoided her. In the end, she had walked out on them. She had walked out on James. She had no one blame but herself.

The bell rang, and Bethany left quickly, wanting to escape before anyone could see the unshed tears.