Bethany Caleb (5 page)

Bethany sat up, suddenly realizing that she had been staring at James’s fingers, with their three silver rings and black fingernail polish, for too long.
She returned to the lone, dead tree she had sketched and drew a crow perched on one of the long-fingered branches. Her eyes slipped back to James’s nimble fingers on the brush, seeming to caress the canvas with paint. His fingers reminded her of that time he had played his guitar for her in his basement. They had lit candles, and the air had been thick and fragrant. His silver rings and the guitar strings seemed to catch the light of all the small flames so that with every strum the music sparkled.

She tried to capture that silver sparkle on a new page in her sketchbook.
It came out like crap and she yanked the page out and crumpled it up, threw it toward the trash can but it ended up on the floor. What kind of self-portrait would that have been, she wondered. She hated those girls who defined themselves by their boyfriends, and here she was, doing the same thing. Who was she really? She stared at the blank page in front of her and wondered if that was it.

James’s canvas was her focus again.
Her canvases always looked like some six-year-old’s crude finger paintings next to anything of his. Then James looked up, and saw her looking at his work.

“What do you think?
It might be done,” he said, angling the canvas toward her.

“It’s beautiful,” Bethany said.
Now she could see that the red and black formed a heart inside a chest cavity. Only James could make human organs beautiful. “I thought you’d be working on that till Thanksgiving.”

              With no reply, James gathered up his brushes and palette and went to the sink to wash them off. Bethany had forgotten about her brushes. She picked at the red acrylic paint now dried to the brush fibers. And looked again at James’s painting. It was so beautiful she wanted to cry.

When James sat back at his seat, he listened to his
Walkman, drumming on the desk. “Aren’t you going to start the next assignment?” Bethany asked, feeling like a dork the second the words came out of her mouth.

“There’s only fifteen minutes left in class,” James pointed out.
“I already have an idea.”

“Don’t you need to sketch it out?” Bethany asked.

James shook his head and refocused on his music. He never needed to make sketches before he painted, like she did. He painted without planning, and somehow his paintings always came out beautiful. Bethany wondered what it would be like to spontaneously paint how she felt.

James always did his own thing, didn’t care what anyone else thought.
Neither did Genn. Bethany tried to pretend she didn’t care, but she did. She had to think about everything, and she wasn’t free with anything. When James broke up with her, he told her, “You need to be more free with your feelings. You keep all your emotions bottled up.” Since he said that, Bethany had become increasingly self-conscious about how much emotion she showed. Sometimes she tried to force herself to feel something, but it always felt fake. Like her art. That painting she’d done of hate was a good example. Who really believed she felt that much anger inside? She couldn’t say anything if she got mad. She swallowed it down, tried to ignore or avoid it. She thought about the gun in her bag.

Bethany flipped through the pages of her sketchbook.
Fake, fake, fake. She wanted to rip all those fake pages out and rip them up and hurl them at the trash can, but she didn’t feel like dealing with the consequence of all those staring faces.

When the bell rang, Bethany lingered.
“What are you doing after school?” she asked James, tracing her fingers over a carving on the desktop.
M.H.S. sucks
.

“Nothing much, hanging out with Genn I guess,” James said.

“Oh,” Bethany said. She started drifting toward the door.

“You could come, I guess,” James said.
“I mean, we’re just hanging out. Probably we’ll go over to the skate park with Chester and Mara or something.”

Once upon a time Bethany had been good friends with Chester and Mara and everyone else, and she would have dropped everything to go, even though she couldn’t ride a skateboard to save her life and she would have sat around all afternoon.
But Bethany couldn’t imagine spending an afternoon with James and Genn together, an outsider among her old friends.

“That’s alright,” she said.
She supposed it was a big deal that James had even attempted to invite her, but it didn’t feel that way.

Bethany left the art room and entered the hallway, aware of James walking away in the opposite direction.

Chapter Nine

Ever since James had broken up with her, Bethany had taken to packing an economy-sized bottle of Tums in her bag. She munched down three before heading off to her last class of the morning, gym. There was not one friendly face, no one to talk to while they were playing soccer or flag football or running track, no one to sit with waiting for class to begin.

Today she ended up standing by herself at the end of the line they formed along the wall at the beginning of class.
Beside her stood Robin Marchaud, a stooped over girl with a bowl cut who was legally blind. Robin never participated in any games where she had to worry about seeing things. Usually she walked or jogged laps around the perimeter of the field or court where gym class was held that day. Quite a few times this year Bethany had wished she was legally blind. Anything to not have to endure the humiliation of gym class.

“All right, everyone count off by twos,” Mr. Wheaton said, entering the gym with two bags of softball equipment.

Bethany found herself on the same team as Ben Simms and Caitlyn Trudeau.
She trudged behind them out to the baseball diamond.

The early November day was bright but cold.
Bethany put the hood of her black sweatshirt over her head. When Mr. Wheaton passed out gloves to her team, Bethany headed for the outfield where she could daydream unbothered.

Unfortunately, with Nick Lorden and his jock friends all on the other team, balls kept flying deep into the outfield.
“Get the ball, Caleb!” Ben Simms yelled over and over from his position as first baseman.

Most of the time Bethany could ignore him, since Gretchen Ingersol, who was on the girls’ varsity softball league, was playing the outfield too.
Once Bethany had to get the ball, though. “Run, Caleb, faster! Jesus Christ!” Ben screamed. Bethany’s throw to the infield fell several yards short. “What the hell,” Ben said, running up to get the ball.

Caitlyn pointed and laughed.

Bethany was somewhat relieved when it was time for their team to bat and she could sit on the bleachers. She thought about the email from Jana she’d received yesterday afternoon.

She wasn’t supposed to even be checking her email, because she was grounded from Friday.
On Friday, after her parents had gone out, Bethany had decided to get rid of all of the paintings on her wall that she thought sucked. Her first five paintings from her art class freshman year all had the typical realistic style she learned her parents liked, but all five featured subject matter her parents did not like. One painting was a face reflected in a knife. One showed a girl in an empty room; the shadows of icicles in the room’s window became bars that striped her face. The symbolism in these early paintings was so obvious it embarrassed her. Compared to how she felt now, her depression freshman year was nothing. Now that she thought about it, she had been lonely, rather than depressed. Back then, she was trying to be what she thought artists were. She hadn’t been depressed then. She had been a kid, trying to impress people with how mature her feelings were. Now they just looked stupid and fake.

Bethany had stared and stared at her paintings.
Then she took a utility knife out of her art box, and slashed every canvas that was fake. She crammed as much as she could in her wastebasket and brought the mutilated canvases outside. She had to make several trips, but finally she had the whole pile in the middle of the backyard. She found a can of gasoline in the garage and some matches. Then she lit the whole pile on fire.

The blaze
had cast red light on the landscaping. The backyard had a tiled walkway and stone benches and a birdbath, and wildflowers had been carefully planted to look wild. The blaze lit up the wilted, frozen flowers.

The heat made her back up only a little.
The fire hypnotized her: she watched well-memorized paintings curl and blacken into unrecognizable pulp. The stretcher boards kept the fire going. Occasionally she tossed a glug of gasoline into the fire to see it blaze up higher.

“Hey!
Hey!”

Bethany slowly turned to see who was calling.
It was her neighbor, Mr. Wilkins.

“Hey!
What the hell are you doing?” Mr. Wilkins yelled, coming into the backyard from the driveway.

“I’m just burning some stuff,” Bethany said.

“You can’t do that!
You have to have a permit to burn things like that,” he said, now close enough for Bethany to see that his face looked more scared than angry. “Where are your parents? Did they let you do this?”

“They’re out for the evening,” she said.

Mr. Wilkins looked around behind him, then stalked over and pulled out the garden hose. “Someone might think your house was on fire with this much smoke going up,” he yelled over the water gushing out of the hose.

Silently Bethany watched the water spray down the fire.
The once alive canvases wilted and dripped. The bright pile became black and dead. Now Bethany could see that a patch of brown grass was scorched.

“You’re lucky I saw you.
Someone could have called the police. I think you’d better clear this up before your parents see. I know your mother won’t be too happy about this mess.”

As Mr. Wilkins left, Bethany noticed he was barefoot, wearing silk pajamas and a flannel robe.
She turned back to the mess and giggled.

Bethany had been grounded for the damage done to the backyard, as well as the empty bottle of Peach Schnapps she had drunk before deciding to destroy all of her paintings.
“No TV, no internet, no friends,” Mrs. Caleb had said. She didn’t know that Bethany hardly ever watched TV and had no friends. And Mrs. Caleb wasn’t around in the afternoons, when Bethany usually checked her email. She also wasn’t around in the mornings. The punishment was a joke.

The email from Jana was short, saying simply, “How are things back at
Middlebury? I joined the drama club and I’m going to be in the fall play, a singing part. Who would’ve thought?”

Bethany couldn’t think of anything to write back to Jana.
“I’m so frustrated with school that I’m bringing in a gun tomorrow”? Jana probably still thought Bethany was a geek. It seemed pointless to keep up her friendship with Jana since she would probably never see Jana again. Instead of replying, she had deleted Jana’s email. Now there were no emails in her inbox. No one had written to her in a long time.

“Caleb!
Your turn to bat!” Mr. Wheaton called. Bethany snapped out of her thoughts and trudged over to home plate. She’d hoped that being last in the batting order would mean she never had to go up.

Three times Mr. Wheaton pitched the ball to her and three times she missed.
Each swing brought a torrent of giggles from Caitlyn and her friends. “You’re doing good, Caleb,” Mr. Wheaton called to her. “Here, let’s try a couple more.”

The last thing Bethany wanted was to try a couple more.
But she swung and missed a couple more times anyway, then Mr. Wheaton let her go sit down.

Now it was Ben Simms’s turn to bat.
He spat at the ground at her feet as he passed her. “Nice job,” he said sarcastically.

Nick Lorden on first base heard that comment and repeated, “Yeah, nice job, Caleb!
My team’s gonna kick your team’s ass, Simms!”

“Shut the fuck up, jockstrap,” Ben retorted, but under his breath so Mr. Wheaton wouldn’t hear.

On Mr. Wheaton’s first pitch, Ben hit a fly ball that soared past the outfield. It headed straight for Robin Marchaud, who was jogging laps around the field instead of playing, and hit her in the shoulder. She fell down over the edge of a small hill where no one could see her.

Everyone around Bethany on the bleachers immediately started laughing, although they tried to cover it up.
Mr. Wheaton seemed to be the only one concerned and ran over to help her up. Class was stopped for at least five minutes. It was the highlight of Bethany’s day.

On the way in from gym class, Bethany overheard a conversation between Gretchen and Robin.
“I’m planning on entering the Boston Marathon next year,” Robin replied, her eyes huge behind her glasses and a film of sweat on her upper lip.

“Wow,” Gretchen said.
“That’s really impressive.”

“You gonna be able to see where you’re going?” Ben Simms cracked to the amusement of his friends.
Robin pushed her glasses up on her nose and squinted around to see who had made the joke, which only made Ben and his friends laugh harder.

Bethany somehow didn’t notice Caitlyn walking behind her until they reached the locker room.
“Move it, freak,” Caitlyn said as she shoved past Bethany. Bethany fell on the floor outside the locker room. Laughs from down the hall rang in her ears.

After getting up, Bethany slammed into the locker room and walked into Robin, almost making her fall.

“Watch where you’re going, freak,” Robin said.