Authors: Kate Spofford
Chapter Nineteen
They walked side by side down the sidewalk. The noon sun was hiding behind a thick layer of clouds. Bethany felt like a wall of ice separated her from the boy walking beside her. So far, he had remained true to his word and kept silent.
He followed her into her house and up to her parents’ room.
She sat on the bed and showed him the velvet-lined box in her father’s nightstand drawer. James put the gun away carefully, his fingers never going anywhere near the trigger. He slid the drawer closed and sat next to Bethany on the bed.
“You’re not going to pull that gun out and kill yourself after I leave, are you?” James asked.
“Maybe,” Bethany said. She knew she wouldn’t. She didn’t have the energy to get off the bed, never mind open a drawer and a box and lift out a gun and pull the trigger. She couldn’t have done it two hours ago in the school bathroom, she wouldn’t be able to do it now. She was a coward, like Shannon had been telling her for years.
“Bethany,” James said.
He took a deep breath like he needed to tell her something she wasn’t going to like.
“What’s the big deal?” Bethany said.
“You don’t love me. You said you did, but then I was still too depressed for you. I thought you understood me, but you don’t. I don’t have a reason to be depressed and that bothers you. I’m not going to kill myself, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I won’t kill myself. I wouldn’t want you to think I killed myself because you cheated on me. That’s not why I would kill myself. I hate myself, that’s why I want to commit suicide. I’m a coward and I’m not happy and I can’t see myself ever being happy. I keep trying to change my life and nothing happens. Okay? But I won’t do anything because I don’t want you to feel guilty. So go home. I want you to leave me alone.” It felt good to finally say all that she felt.
James wasn’t looking in her eyes as she spoke.
He kept staring at random parts of her face. “Okay,” he said. “Um, so, are you still going to be mad at me tomorrow?”
Bethany lay on her bed on her side, staring at the blank white wall in front of her.
She was having a hard time closing her eyes. Her brain felt vacated and her body too heavy to move.
Her thoughts kept returning to the gun.
She didn’t want to continue living. There wasn’t a single thing she could imagine living for, no single purpose that would make all this hell meaningful. With that gun she had somehow hoped to change her life. Set it on a different course than the one she dreaded. She had imagined so many different ways to use that gun, so many different ways her life could have changed. Instead, her life had not changed at all. James was not hers, school was hell, and she barely knew what the word “happy” meant.
Bethany knew she could never kill herself.
Not because she lacked courage, although that had been the one thing standing between her and death in the school bathroom. Somehow everything in her life always went along smoothly without stopping. Her depression was one of these problems that would be glazed over. Suicide would be too extreme, too much of an actual life-changing event for herself and those around her, to ever actually happen. No, she would probably go through years of therapy, trying different medications, Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, somehow dragging herself through every day that was exactly like the one before.
Maybe there was a life out there for her.
Maybe if she went to art school in a city, got out of the suburbs and stopped listening to everyone telling her she would never make it as an artist, telling her she needed financial security first, she could be happy. Maybe it took forcing hardships on herself to be happy. Maybe she needed to suffer before she could know “happy.” Maybe there was hope.
Maybe.
She rolled herself out of bed and pulled out her paints and canvas. She would start making her life different right now.
Epilogue: One Month Later
“The nonliteral self-portrait can express much more about an artist than a literal self-portrait,” Mr. Beck was saying. It was the beginning of March and the weather outside the art room window was clear and bright. Bethany sat at the end of one of the tables, alone. “As you can all see, most of you took the route of abstraction.” All the paintings looked to Bethany like scribbles, some of them more appealing than others. Bethany’s painting stood out dramatically, as did James’s.
Bethany sat through the boring explanations of half the class, trying to explain their scribbles as their personalities.
She tensed when Mr. Beck called on James.
James got up from his seat beside Veronica and slouched to the front of the classroom. She had never seen him do a critique in art class before.
She wondered what he would have to say about his art. He’d never explained his art to her before, not even when they were dating.
His painting depicted a black heart at the feet of a blond girl.
Because the painting was done in a crude way, with scribbles and clumps of paint, Bethany couldn’t tell if the blond girl was supposed to be her or Genn. Bethany suspected it was her, because it was similar to Bethany’s style–her old style, the one she herself had criticized for being fake.
“Yeah, so this is my self-portrait.
It’s, uh, how I’ve been feeling lately, you know, going through a break up and stuff,” James said.
“So you identify yourself by this breakup?” Mr. Beck asked.
“Well, I identify myself by my feelings, and this is how I was feeling at the time,” James said.
“So, in the context of this painting, would you consider yourself to be the black heart, or do you consider the entire painting to represent you?”
“Uh... the black heart?”
Bethany had to stop herself from smiling at James’s discomfort.
She had always thought of James as being an artist so good that he was beyond explanation. And now she could see from her objective view that his explanation wasn’t good enough. No one was perfect.
“Thank you, James,” Mr. Beck said, writing something on his clipboard.
“Bethany, how about you go next.”
Bethany approached her painting knowing exactly what she would say.
Even though Shannon wasn’t in her art class, Bethany had been nervous last night about speaking in front of everyone and James. She had worked out her whole speech before she fell asleep.
As she faced the class, she noted the looks on the faces of her classmates.
Jody and her nerdy friends looked horrified. James looked uneasy, like this painting had something to do with him.
Her painting was done in a highly realistic style.
She’d spent weeks carefully painting each detail of her father’s gun. The background was black, too. She thought it was beautiful. And it perfectly described who she was, and who she always would be, whether or not anyone accepted her.
She opened her mouth and the words came out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Spofford is a librarian in New Hampshire. Her short stories have been published in the anthologies
Monster Mash
(Pill Hill Press, 2010) and
I’ll Never Go Away
(Rainstorm Press, 2012). This is her first novel. Find out more about her and her work at
http://katespofford.wordpress.com
.