since everyone else was in class. Bethany sat on one, feeling the cold through the cloth of her skirt.
Her hands brushed against the engraving on the seat. In Loving Memory of Jessica Lynn Granger, Oct. 5, 1983 - Aug. 23, 2000 . The day Jessica died was the day James had broken up with her.
A seventeen-year-old girl, destroyed by a drunk driver. It had been all over the papers. So tragic. Half of Middlebury turned out for her funeral. Jessica had been popular, a cheerleader, about to start her senior year. Just that night, her longtime boyfriend Mark Bowden had proposed to her. Now Mark was in a wheelchair.
This was the sort of tragedy that was memorialized with stone benches. Bethany remembered a student who died last spring. He had put a shotgun to his head and killed himself. No one could remember his name, because he hadn’t had many friends. Everyone had blamed it on the music he listened to or something stupid like that. “At least he just took his life instead of gunning down the school like those Columbine kids,” her father had said at the dinner table a few days after it happened. There had been a huge article about detecting if your child was depressed and the warning signs of suicide. Mr. Caleb had read off the list, then said, “That doesn’t sound like either of our girls,” smiling at her and Darlene like he wasn’t even seeing them there.
That boy’s name wasn’t engraved on stone benches in front of the school. His photo wasn’t part of some ongoing shrine in the trophy case in the front hall of the school. His name and photo weren’t anywhere. He was just gone. And it seemed like no one cared.
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
Her hands brushed against the engraving on the seat. In Loving Memory of Jessica Lynn Granger, Oct. 5, 1983 - Aug. 23, 2000 . The day Jessica died was the day James had broken up with her.
A seventeen-year-old girl, destroyed by a drunk driver. It had been all over the papers. So tragic. Half of Middlebury turned out for her funeral. Jessica had been popular, a cheerleader, about to start her senior year. Just that night, her longtime boyfriend Mark Bowden had proposed to her. Now Mark was in a wheelchair.
This was the sort of tragedy that was memorialized with stone benches. Bethany remembered a student who died last spring. He had put a shotgun to his head and killed himself. No one could remember his name, because he hadn’t had many friends. Everyone had blamed it on the music he listened to or something stupid like that. “At least he just took his life instead of gunning down the school like those Columbine kids,” her father had said at the dinner table a few days after it happened. There had been a huge article about detecting if your child was depressed and the warning signs of suicide. Mr. Caleb had read off the list, then said, “That doesn’t sound like either of our girls,” smiling at her and Darlene like he wasn’t even seeing them there.
That boy’s name wasn’t engraved on stone benches in front of the school. His photo wasn’t part of some ongoing shrine in the trophy case in the front hall of the school. His name and photo weren’t anywhere. He was just gone. And it seemed like no one cared.
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
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