Bethany Caleb (7 page)

Chapter Twelve

No one had ever really cared about Bethany Caleb. Back in middle school, Bethany hadn’t known that. She thought people would care about her and want to be her friend if she wore all the right clothes, developed crushes on the appropriate unattainable boys, went to all the school dances, and followed all the instructions in
Seventeen
. She thought it was that easy.

Popularity eluded her throughout middle school.
She supposed it had something to do with the glasses she had to wear for reading. For a while she even thought it was because she was friends with Jana, because Jana was fat.

By the end of eighth grade, however, she knew it wasn’t some outer appearance thing that kept her from being popular.
Slowly she had stopped trying so hard. She had even made other plans on the night of the eighth grade graduation dance. Then Mrs. Caleb came home one day with a beautiful dress for her to wear, and Mrs. Caleb didn’t spend $120 on a dress for it to hang in a closet. So Bethany cancelled her plans with Jana, put on the dress, allowed Mrs. Caleb and Darlene to do her hair and makeup, and she went to the dance.

At the dance Bethany stood near the bleachers, too shy to move along to the music and too afraid of gaining weight to stand near the food table.
Nicole Georgette had the same dress as Bethany, which would have made the dance especially embarrassing, but the red dress complemented Bethany’s complexion better than Nicole’s cover-up encrusted skin and grayish-brown hair. Yet Nicole was dancing with Jeff Dupry, who was cute in a boring way. Even Melissa Barry, a bookish girl with long brown hair, was dancing with a boy.

“If my looks aren’t preventing me from being popular,” Bethany thought, “it must be because I have a horrible personality that repels everyone.”

This revelation made it difficult to stand against the wall, waiting for anyone to approach her. She knew no one would, because they all thought she was a weird freak. And so she spent most of the eighth grade graduation dance in a bathroom stall, alternately wiping streaked mascara off her cheeks and blowing her nose. The back of her dress hung into the toilet bowl, and she didn’t care. She wanted to rip the dress off and flush it. She wanted to put on a black dress and paint “loser” on her forehead so her mother would know never to force her to go to another dance.

Her mother didn’t understand.
“Don’t be antisocial, Bethany,” Mrs. Caleb said when Bethany tried her excuses. That was how, in the last two weeks of middle school, Bethany was forced to go to every special eighth grade function. The awards ceremony. The class barbeque. Field day. Orientation. Now, instead of wishing she could join Brittany Bowden and the Young twins and the rest of the popular kids, she sat there feeling sad. She would never be popular.

In Bethany’s thirteen-year-old eyes, a person was either popular or unpopular.
She couldn’t imagine it any other way. There were the perfect, socially normal people with lots of friends at the top, then some people who were fairly successful at the friendship game in the middle. Then there were the slugs at the bottom, the disgusting creeps no one wanted to be near, never mind be friends with. Nathan Javovich was one. And Bethany was another. She didn’t want to think of her best friend as a slug, but Jana was kind of geeky and fat and therefore at the bottom of the popularity ladder with her.

Bethany had a diary back in those days, a fancy one with blank pages and a drawing of an artist’s palette and brushes on the front that someone had given to her because they knew she liked art.
She remembered writing in it, “I’ve tried to be like them, and they rejected me. Fuck them. I’ll be what they hate.” It was the first time she’d used the f-word ever. After writing that, she’d ripped out all the pages and threw the journal away. Fourteen ninety-five at Barnes & Noble, in the trash. Along with it went her ability to communicate with words.

Jana moved two weeks after the end of eighth grade, and Mrs. Caleb became irritated with Bethany “moping around the house” all the time.
“Why don’t you call up Brittany Bowden and get together,” Mrs. Caleb suggested one day. In response Bethany went up to her room and blasted heavy metal music. After several days of similar incidents, Bethany began to like the music she had started playing solely to annoy her mother.

Soon Bethany began to wonder if her parents noticed any strangeness about her behavior at all.
She was pretty sure she was acting differently than before, but her parents seemed to be ignoring it. Darlene didn’t even seem to notice, but she was gone almost every day, having gotten her license and a new car on her seventeenth birthday. One day Bethany decided to only wear black and see her parents noticed that. They didn’t. Most days she wore a black tank top and a long black skirt with a pair of combat boots, despite it being the hottest summer in five years. She wanted to suffer.

She bought dark gray eye shadow and heavily outlined her eyes with black eyeliner.
That got some attention. “Honey, with that much makeup you look like a whore. Go wash it off,” Mrs. Caleb had said at dinner that day. Mr. Caleb glared at her until she left the table.

The next day Bethany went out and bought black hair dye, and after she dyed her hair and applied her heavy eye makeup, she went down to dinner.
Mrs. Caleb didn’t say anything about it. Bethany had won. But her parents still never mentioned the metamorphosis she had undergone. It seemed to be a taboo subject.

Bethany refused to go on Mrs. Caleb’s annual school shopping trip and instead browsed the church thrift store in the center of town, finding clothes that looked anything but preppy or fashionable for the school year to come.
She decided that if she was going to be unpopular, it would be on her terms, not for some personality flaw everyone else saw in her. They would hate her for looking like a freak, for looking different.

Mrs. Caleb bought Bethany an entire fall wardrobe at Abercrombie & Fitch, spending almost six hundred dollars.
She left the bags outside of Bethany’s perpetually closed bedroom door. After a few days Bethany took the clothes into her room, but put the bags in her closet and forgot about them. Wearing the right clothes had never helped Bethany to be popular before.

Bethany was prepared to be lonely the first day she set foot in the high school.
In her bag she had a book to read during lunch, a new black sketchbook and plenty of pens and pencils to draw with, and her CD Walkman. Without Jana, Bethany assumed she’d have no one to sit with at lunch and she was ready to ignore everyone.

In history, her first class of the day, Bethany put a new CD in and closed her eyes to ignore everyone walking in, sharing stories of their wonderful summer vacations.
She was succeeding, too, when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

The tapper was a slightly overweight girl with long blond hair.
She was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and a long brightly printed skirt in different colors than the T-shirt, colors the old Bethany might have criticized for clashing. “Hi, I’m Genn Neveu,” she said, taking the seat beside Bethany.

Bethany wasn’t sure what to do.
Obviously this girl was new, and wanted to be friends with her, but Bethany hadn’t planned on having any friends. “Hi,” she said.

“You’re the first cool person I’ve seen all day. I’ve never seen so many Abercrombie labels in my entire life.”
Genn was still smiling.

“Yeah, the people are kind of preppy here,” Bethany said.

“So what music are you listening to?” Genn asked, pointing to Bethany’s CD player.

“Smashing Pumpkins,” Bethany replied.

“I love them, too!” Genn said. “I have all their CDs. Have you listened to Zwan yet?”

Bethany shook her head.

“So
, what classes do you have?” Genn whipped out her schedule. Bethany slowly got hers out. “Hey, we have English, science, and gym together!”

Despite everything she and Genn had in common, Bethany thought she’d be sitting alone at lunch.
She didn’t expect Genn to latch onto the first person she met.

She was sitting at a table near the window
s by herself, listening to her Walkman, when Genn arrived at her table. Mara Wozniak and Emily Soeul were with her. And that was the beginning.

Bethany hadn’t known Emily, who was a junior, but she had gone to school with Mara her entire life.
Mara had pale skin and dark brown hair that she always pulled back into a short ponytail, and she dressed like a tomboy in grungy jeans with holes and plaid flannel shirts. Today she looked the same, except she didn’t look as quiet and shy and Bethany was used to seeing. With Genn she was alive and talkative, and Bethany found out more about Mara from that one lunch period than she had going to school with Mara for eight years.

That day, Bethany found out there was a whole group of people who didn’t want to be perfect and popular like Shannon Lavoie or Brittany Bowden.
In high school people weren’t so afraid to oppose the norm. And Bethany finally had a lot of friends.

That hadn’t lasted long.
Because those friends didn’t really care about her. She was still the same weird person no one wanted to be friends with, and she still couldn’t understand why. A year of being a freak and she was still trying hard to fit in. She didn’t want to have to try anymore.

From outside the building, the bell was muffled, but she heard it.
She picked up her loaded bag and shuffled back into the school building.

Chapter Thirteen

As Bethany walked to her science class, the scars on her wrists consumed her thoughts. So what if she had cut herself a couple times? The scars were barely visible, and she never wore short sleeved shirts anymore. Mr. Peterson’s voice kept asking that question in her mind.

“Do you feel like cutting your wrists again?”

That was when she walked into, slammed into some girl’s back. The girl fell, dropping all of her books. Bethany almost tripped herself, but sidestepped in time.

“Jesus, get out of the way!” Bethany said, her voice erupting out of her before she knew who she was yelling at.
For a moment she was proud of herself, speaking up like that.

Then Shannon’s shocked face looked up, and Bethany turned cold.
It would be Shannon. That was how her life was. It would be Shannon, because Shannon was the one person other than Genn Neveu who Bethany didn’t want to confront, and because Shannon was in another one of Bethany’s classes this afternoon. Bethany stared down at the disheveled black hair, the legs splayed out. She could see the blond disciples on either side, slowly realizing their leader had fallen.

Bethany pushed by and hurried down the hallway.
She faintly heard one of the disciples say, “What a fucking freak,” as she escaped.

Now Shannon took center stage in Bethany’s thoughts.
Shannon was going to do something. An insult like that could not go undefended.

Bethany ducked into her classroom and hurried to a seat near the back, finding refuge behind her open textbook.
Her hands were shaking as she turned to
Chapter Four: Mesopotamia
.

Why couldn’t she tell someone off for once in her life?

Genn and Chester shared this class with her, which meant there was no relief. Four long minutes passed before Bethany decided to get the Tums out from her bag and chew a few more. Her hands were still shaking as she pulled the zipper closed. The black metal of the gun winked at her from deep within the pocket.

She tried to focus on reading the chapter about Ancient Mesopotamia she was supposed to have read last night.
Her eyes kept darting to the bag at her feet. She could almost hear the gun asking, “Why did you bring me if you weren’t going to use me?”

By the time the bell had rung, Mr. Quinn hadn’t yet arrived, nor had Genn or Chester.
Everyone else talked with each other, their voices rising louder and louder. Liz Hutchinson walked in with her fellow cheerleaders, Sara and Sandy Young. She glared at Bethany before sitting down. Carolyn Kingsley and Jeff Dupry sat near Bethany, so she could hear their conversation clearest. “We’re going to hang blue and white crepe paper and get blue and white balloons too. But mostly we haven’t gotten further than that,” Carolyn was saying.

“The homecoming dance isn’t until next month anyway,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, in like two weeks! We’re never going to be ready.”

Genn and Chester walked in five minutes late.
They sat at their seats directly behind Bethany, seemingly unbothered by the fact that there was no teacher supervising the classroom.

“Hey, Chester, remember that time we all went to Chili’s and pretended it was my birthday so we could get free cake?” Genn said suddenly, her voice loud enough to hear all over the classroom.

“Yeah?”

“Wasn’t that fun?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Bethany’s hands shook as she turned a page in her history book.
She willed them to stop but they only shook harder. What if she pulled out the gun now and blew Genn’s face off? Would her hands stop shaking long enough for her to hit a target two feet away?

For a long time Bethany and Genn had pretended to be friends.
Genn always pretended like there was nothing wrong. Bethany always avoided things she didn’t want to deal with. So as long as neither of them talked about the bracelet Genn had stolen from Bethany, it was okay. They only actively stopped talking to each other when Bethany and James broke up. Bethany avoided James for several weeks. And since Genn had attached herself to his side, she ended up avoiding both of them, as well as all of her other friends who had known James longer and paid their loyalties to him.

Bethany’s mind still had a hard time grasping the fact that she had no best friend.
She and Jana had been inseparable since kindergarten. There was that lonely summer after Jana moved, and then Genn filled in the gap. It wasn’t quite the same, but when she started dating James she finally felt the hole close. Then Bethany had someone, be it a best friend or a boyfriend, to be around whenever she wanted to do something.

And now there was no one.

Bethany wished Jana hadn’t moved away. Jana had always known what she was feeling. Sometimes they didn’t even have to talk to know, but of course they always talked nonstop. They never got bored of each other. Every weekend they went over each other’s houses, went shopping or to the movies, had sleepovers. No one interfered with their plans. Jana never cancelled to do something with someone else, nor did Bethany. They didn’t need anyone else.

So many things wouldn’t have changed had Jana stayed.
Bethany might not have even become depressed, or started wearing black, or focused all of her attention on painting. She would be one of those geeky girls in her art class. She would be in the honors-level classes. But she would probably be happy.

The summer after Jana moved was the loneliest summer.
Bethany remembered hours spent lying on her bed crying after her parents went out for the evening and Darlene took off to the mall in her new car with a bunch of her friends. A few times Darlene had asked Bethany to go to the mall with her, when none of Darlene’s friends were around. But that wasn’t often, and after Bethany began wearing all black, it never happened again. “Look, my sister’s a little Goth girl now,” Darlene said once as she was leaving the house with her boyfriend Matt. Darlene pretended like it was cool, but Bethany knew her sister didn’t want to be seen hanging around with a freak.

It was only when Bethany became friends with Genn in the fall that she started to feel connected again.
Finally she had someone to do things with. Of course, she had to share Genn with Emily and Mara and Chester, but at least she wasn’t sitting at home alone. Then when she and James started going out, it was like having a best friend like Jana again. They shared everything.

Freshman year passed in a blur of activity.
They went to amusement parks and concerts and the drive-in and the beach, they went bowling and rock climbing and skiing. There was never a shortage of things to do. Even on week nights they would always do something, even if it was just going to McDonald’s or the skate park or smoking pot at somebody’s house. All of freshman year was like that. Even after Bethany started dating James, they still did stuff with the group. It wasn’t like James and Genn were now, isolating themselves from everyone. Everyone got along.

It all ended over a bracelet.

The year Bethany and Jana were in sixth grade, they had made each other friendship bracelets as birthday presents. They had celebrated their birthdays on the same day that year, since they were born only two weeks apart. They thought they would be friends forever.

Genn was wearing the bracelet one day when they walked downtown to get ice cream.
Maybe Bethany only noticed the bracelet because she and Jana used to walk downtown to the ice cream place all the time, and this was the first time she’d gone since Jana moved. She didn’t even know why she was looking at Genn’s wrist. But there it was, the bright woven stripes Bethany had memorized from two years of wear.

At first Bethany tried to ignore it, shrug it off as paranoia.
She stole glances at it, and became increasingly convinced that it was the same one. The last time she had seen it was in her jewelry box in her room, where she had put it after Jana moved. Genn had gone through her jewelry box a few times.

“Where did you get that?” Bethany had asked as casually as she could.

“What?”

“That bracelet.”

“Oh, this?
I got it at the mall last week,” Genn had replied, avoiding Bethany’s eyes.

Bethany knew it was a lie.
Genn hated the mall. “A breeding ground for materialism,” she called it. Not to mention that Genn never bought jewelry–it was the easiest thing to steal. Actually, Bethany and Genn had gone on several shoplifting excursions together, but Bethany never imagined that Genn would steal from someone she knew.

For once Bethany was able to take a deep breath and say, “Well, I have one just like it, and it’s missing.”

Genn met her gaze when she answered, “I didn’t take it.”

The accusation stood between them like a wall.
Bethany never invited Genn over to her house again.

Ever since it was little comments designed to make Bethany feel left out, all talk of things Genn had done with her other friends.
“Hey, Chester, aren’t you excited for that concert Friday night?”

“Sure.”

“Who else is going? Me, James, you, Emily, Chris, Jon, Mara... is that it? Yeah, I guess that’s everybody.” Bethany’s hands tightened on the pages of her textbook, crumpling the paper.

Then Mr. Quinn rushed in the door, his arms full of photocopies.
Bethany sighed and her jaw relaxed. The page smoothed under her palm.