Bethany Caleb (4 page)

Chapter Eight

Last year Bethany had looked forward to art class.
She was good at art. Talented. All of her friends last year were in her art class. It was a fun break from the rest of her day.

This year she dreaded art class.
James was in her art class.

Last year, Jon Whitaker might have greeted her on his way into class.
Today, Jon walked past, his eyes skimming over her. She was part of the corridor, part of the gray lockers. Jon’s friends, who were once Bethany’s friends too, continued walking down the hall. Chris Smith even brushed up against her. She wasn’t even part of the lockers. She was air. Invisible air.

Her black combat boots dragged along the gray and blue tiled floor, all the way across to the far side of the classroom.
The bell rang a moment later. Even though the class period had begun, James was not in the classroom.

She dropped her backpack on the ground, relishing the heavy thump it made.
She dropped herself into a chair at a desk in the corner. For a moment she just sat in the chair and stared at the graffiti on the desk. She felt no desire to get out the painting she was supposed to be working on. She wished she could spend her art class drawing in her sketchbook.

A group of seniors walked into the classroom and sat at the middle row of desks.
They always sat there, taking up the entire row. Last year Bethany had hung out with a few of them at her friend Emily Soeul’s house. Emily was a senior too.

But that was last year.
She wasn’t invited to hang out at Emily’s house anymore. The seniors in the middle row seemed so cool and popular and self-absorbed. They didn’t need her.

And she didn’t need them.
She pulled out her sketchbook and her Sharpie. Her pen hovered over the blank page. As the moments lacking inspiration passed, her eyes drifted upward to watch the remainder of the students enter the classroom.

One of the senior
s, Paul Hoffman, stood up and went over to the battered radio on Mr. Beck’s desk. His blue-haired head and lanky frame bent over, and suddenly heavy industrial music filled the room. Paul looked up with a grin. Bethany immediately looked toward Jody Skinner, a nerdy girl with glasses. Jody’s face was contorted into a scowl, but she appeared engrossed in her work.

Mr. Beck finally arrived, a sheaf of papers under one arm.
Bethany decided she ought to get out her painting and at least pretend like she was working on it.

She pulled her canvas from the drying rack and selected a few brushes from the cans on the radiator, noticing when James and Genn arrived in the doorway to the art room and started making out.
She noticed, and tried not to.

Veronica Resmini had to push by them to get through the doorway.
With her black leather skirt, tight black shirt, and knee-high boots, Veronica looked like a friend of Bethany’s. However, Veronica and her friends Amy Vaughn and Frank Price believed themselves to be vampires. The pointy caps on her canine teeth poking through her black lipstick disproved this belief. Veronica wore the caps on her teeth almost every day and often talked to Bethany in art class and study hall about how she was going to get dental surgery to make her teeth pointier. Bethany didn’t understand how someone could believe they were a vampire and need to make their teeth look pointy. Wouldn’t an actual vampire already have fangs?

Bethany did not believe they were actually vampires.
She had been in Amy Vaughn’s second grade class. Mrs. Caleb kept the class photo carefully preserved in a scrapbook. Second-grade Amy had long mousy brown hair held back by barrettes. She was wearing a jean skirt and pink sweater with a white turtleneck underneath. Her forced smile was missing several front teeth. Second-grade Bethany was wearing a brown corduroy jumper with a pink shirt, and her then-dirty blonde hair was braided and tied with pink bows.

Amy’s hair had gone from mousy brown to bleached blond in eighth grade,
at the same time the all-black attire appeared. But Amy had always been deathly pale and unfriendly-looking. Bethany’s transformation took place around the time of her transition to high school. She wondered if people thought she had always been weird-looking too. Probably.

James came then, and Bethany stopped wondering about vampire teeth.

“I hate school,” he said, throwing his bag on the floor. Bethany’s head snapped up. James was looking intense. He didn’t even sit down.

Bethany waited for him to continue.
When he didn’t, she asked, “Why?”

“I got called down to the school counselor’s office a couple days ago, because some ‘concerned student’ thought I was cutting myself.
The guy tried to get me to roll up my sleeves and everything, but I told him to fuck off and left. I mean, what the hell? They don’t have any right to examine me.”

Bethany’s face turned red
, but the pale foundation Bethany applied every morning concealed it. James walked off to get his canvas and supplies, still talking. Bethany followed him. This was all new information to her. James hadn’t been in school since last Wednesday.

“Then today, I get called down to the principal’s office, he says some students had reported me for planning to blow up the school.
I said I hadn’t, but I had to go to the school counselor anyway. You know what he said to me? ‘I know you say you don’t have any plans, but I know how hard it is for people like you’—people like me, I mean, why didn’t he just come out and say, for freaks like you. Christ! ‘I know how hard it is for people like you, and I certainly don’t want another Columbine.’”

“That sucks,” Bethany said.

“And there’s always people pushing me in the hallway. You know, like there’s not enough room to walk by and they shoulder you? And every time it happens it’s some big jock like Ruben Miller or Nick Lorden or Tony Pellegrini. I mean, it happened a lot before, but it feels more serious. You know what I mean? It’s like they want to push me over the edge.”

Bethany nodded and poured paint into her paint tray.
Her elbow brushed up against James’s sweater. “I know.”

“You don’t know what it’s like, though.
I mean, Shannon can’t do anything except talk behind your back.”

Bethany wondered if James had ever actually met Shannon.

“These guys, they could beat the shit out of me.
Put me in the hospital. I’ve gotten beat up before, and that sucked ass. Knowing that they won some big battle in the war of high school. God, what a stupid metaphor.”

“I think it’s a good metaphor,” Bethany said slowly, still hurt from James’s assertion that the harassment she endured wasn’t as bad.
“Most of the time I feel like it’s a battle to make it through the day at school.” She wondered if she should tell him about the gun.

“Maybe,” James said.
They went back to their seats. James immediately began working on his painting, which Bethany knew was an illustration of love in black and red. It was from their first assignment, to paint an abstract idea. Bethany had done hate in black and red. After two days of thinking about it, James had decided to paint love, just to see how different their paintings would be. Bethany was on her fourth assignment, a monochromatic landscape. None of Mr. Beck’s assignments this year had inspired her, and she had finished them all sloppily. Her painting of hate, a lumpy black canvas with three slashes of red, still remained ungraded in the drying rack. There were still several students working on the first assignment, James included.

Finally James said, “I wish I did have a plan to blow up the school.”

Bethany looked at him, her breath stopped.

“Do you know how great that would be?
Everybody who bugs us would be dead, and we wouldn’t have to go to school for a while, at least. I’m sure it would take them a while to find a place for us to go, all the people we didn’t kill. If we did it right, no one would know who did it.”

Bethany listened without comprehending.
Her head felt cloudy and she had to stare at James in the dim light to concentrate on what he was saying. The only part of his speech she could focus on was James’s use of the words “us” and “we.”

“I never thought of it before those kids said I had plans.
Part of me thinks they want me to blow up the school. Why else would they give me the idea?”

“I don’t know,” Bethany said.
Her voice felt a million miles away, like she was a ventriloquist throwing it into a black hole. She wished she could tell James about her fantasies of gunning down people at school. Not that she had a concrete plan. Suddenly it seemed possible to act on her fantasies. She had an ally. Someone who thought the same. Someone to plan with. James could forget all about Genn. Bethany imagined herself and James together in his basement with the plans spread out on his coffee table, leaned toward each other so intensely Genn barely existed.

James’s next words erased that hope.

“But I could never do that. Kill people. Like, say if I decided to blow up the gym during a school dance or something, knowing that none of my friends would be there. What about those people who never did anything to me? You know, the people who want to be popular so they go to school dances, but they’re always nice if you ask about homework or something? I couldn’t do it. But then I don’t know what to do. I hate school because of those guys. And every day that I don’t do anything I hate myself. So now I feel really depressed.”

James face was blurring in front of her.
“I’m also really depressed,” Bethany heard herself say. Her voice sounded childish. “We can be depressed together.”

James looked at her quickly, then stared at his painting.
“Yeah,” he said.

The words disconnected him from her.
She wanted him to look at her, to care about how she felt. The distance of the past few months still spanned between them.

She turned to her canvas.
Suddenly she wanted to paint a slash of red across the whole thing. Genn kept him distant from her. Of course. Just then Genn poked her head into the doorway again and James went over to give her one last kiss good-bye.

In his absence, Bethany returned to the paint table and poured a glob of bright red onto the plastic palette.
She went back in her seat, slapping the palette down on the desk.

The music suddenly stopped.
Bethany looked up to see one of the nerdy girls, Jody Skinner, standing by the radio like a squirrel watching a truck racing toward her. “Sorry, it was really loud,” Jody said in practically a whisper, then scurried off to her seat.

“What the hell,” Paul said, glaring at Jody as she hurried past.

Bethany had gone to school with Jody since kindergarten, had even sort been friends with her in fifth grade. Bethany stared at her canvas, wondering why high school had fucked everything up. Sometimes she looked at middle school life and marveled at how normal she had been, and how abnormal at the same time. And how incredibly abnormal she was now. Even people who had known her for ten years now looked at her like a complete freak of nature.

She dipped her brush in the red paint and eased it across the horizon line of the painting.
The red line jagged over sharp, protruding mountains, then circled down to bisect the landscape’s foreground. The paint filled in that angry streak she felt. The brush became her sole focus, each stroke intensifying the color. Dark, dark red, like a river of blood. When she finally couldn’t find an area of red she needed to reinforce, she stared at the painting until she realized she was finished. She painted her initials in the lower right-hand corner.
B.C.

The red line had taken such concentration and deliberation that Bethany hadn’t noticed Mr. Beck and James watching her.
“Cool,” James said from beside her. She hadn’t noticed when he had returned from making out with Genn, and congratulated herself.

“Nice use of complimentary colors,” said Mr. Beck.
“Are you ready for the next assignment?”

Mr. Beck put Bethany’s painting on the drying rack and handed Bethany a photocopied packet.
“A non-literal self-portrait,” she read. There were some blurry photocopied artworks to illustrate. Bethany took out her sketchbook and began working on some designs.

Mostly her mind was blank.
Then negative thoughts began creeping in, about how she wasn’t good enough to be in this class, how she wasn’t a real artist at all. It was pretty rare for sophomores to be in the advanced painting class. Only Bethany, Jon Whitaker, and Jody Skinner were sophomores. Bethany could see Jody’s painting from where she sat, and it was good enough to be a gallery. She was beginning to think her acceptance into the class wasn’t based on talent at all. Maybe there really weren’t that many sophomores who even wanted to take advanced painting.

Bethany’s eyes drifted toward James’s painting.

James was a junior, but he was taking the class for a second time. He had failed the first time because he hadn’t gotten all of his assignments in before the end of the year. Bethany remembered at the end of last year trying to encourage James to get his projects done.

“Inspiration cannot be hurried,” he had told her,
lying on his bed with a joint between his fingers. It was one of those moments where Bethany felt as she had all through middle school, like a dork because she actually cared about a grade. It was really important to her that her only A come from art class, so maybe her parents would see that she should go to art school at the end of high school.