Bethany Caleb Read Online Free PDF Page B

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