I started telling him everything, about doing a great job for several weeks and being one of the best people there, listening to Jenney, getting to know her. How I started to care for her a huge amount and said some things I shouldn’t have said. Then about Jenney getting more desperate, the pills, looking for Jenney, and the police finding her.
“It sounds like you blame yourself for what happened,” Gordy said, checking my face.
“I do,” I answered.
A foghorn sounded from the lighthouse. I had to admit that it was one of my favorite sounds.
“I’m trying to figure out who is responsible,” Gordy said, “but it’s pretty complicated. What do you think?”
“Her parents.”
“They don’t sound like the greatest. If what she said is true.”
“Her therapist, Melinda. I wonder if she feels the same way I do today. Like, if she can’t stop puzzling over everything she did and deciding what she should have done differently.”
“Maybe she played a part. But the full responsibility?”
“Her two friends?” I thought of Stacey and Rebecca falling apart at the funeral. How long had it been since they were real friends to Jenney?
“It doesn’t sound like it.”
“I think I have it,” I said.
“What do you have?”
“Jenney herself is responsible.”
“That’s what I think too. She made the final decision. Whether it was a good one or a bad one is on her shoulders. I think she made a bad call.”
“Because it was a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
We both listened to the foghorn a while more, and I started rolling my bike again.
Gordon and I stopped at his house for nachos and soda. I noticed Dad’s Three Dories hanging above the bookcase in the living room.
I rode home the long way, from Beauport back to Hawthorne past Murray into Intervale and back again. I wondered whether Jenney’s problems really had been temporary. The newspaper article made it sound like her parents may not have been as rich and important as she had made them out to be. If not, maybe what she said, or believed, about Tobey also was not true. Maybe that memory of Tobey would have tortured her for the rest of her life. Or maybe she would have let go of it, and some other problems would have come into her life. Maybe peace was never in the cards for Jenney.
I could have checked her stories by doing some research. But so what if Jenney hadn’t been telling the truth? Like the length of her legs, the color of her hair, and the size of her eyes in relation to her mouth, those facts didn’t really matter. They made no difference in how well I knew Jenney.
109.
improvements
I ran into Pep in, of all non-life-and-death places, Schneider Lumber, our town hardware store. She was with her roommate, shopping for plant hangers. I was doing errands with Mom, and I felt neutered by the parental presence even more than I did by Pep’s. Pep and I stared in different directions—we weren’t supposed to know each other, since our acquaintance stemmed from a secret organization—then met by intentional accident in front of the Venetian blinds.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
She adjusted one blind, opening and closing, letting light in, shutting it out.
“How are things at command central?” I asked.
“The same. Naturally I can’t reveal anything about any specific Incoming or Incomings.”
“Naturally. The same staffers there?”
“Pretty much the same.”
I flipped through a booklet of color samples. “Any promising new people?”
“Two recruits still in training. One looks like a hotshot. But you never know.”
“No one ever knows much. For sure. This is the most general conversation I’ve ever had in my life.” Heat rose to the back of my neck. I still didn’t entirely agree that I should have been let go.
Pep shrugged and glanced in the direction of her roommate.
“So, how will you spend your extra time now?” Pep asked, using her best Salton manners.
“Actually, I’m here to pick up some things for Habitat for Humanity.” I pulled a random paper from my pocket and brandished it.
“Is that woman with Habitat too?” she asked, angling her head toward Mom because she was too polite to point.
“That woman’s my mom. She’s the director of a museum and does a lot of good in her own way.”
“Well,” Pep said. “All’s well that ends well. Good luck with Habitat.”
Pep wandered off. Mom wheeled two wreaths and a box of Christmas ornaments toward the register. I don’t generally lie, so I used what little money I had on three tubs of spackling compound I could donate to Habitat for Humanity, as soon as I got their address.
110.
and i found myself thinking about her
I remembered my Grandma Pearl’s death from cancer, and how afterward I could recall her only as she was in the hospital. The hospital room doorway was the museum frame that held her image, until one day she came back to me, running water over a package of frozen strawberries. Do you choose the way you remember someone? No, you remember them the last way you saw them, until you make that go away and replace it with something else. And so, when I felt ready, I went to the main lobby at the end of a school day, when all the buses had left. I stood in front of the trophy case.
111.
below sea level
When I first met Jenney on the phone, I didn’t look for her trophy because I didn’t think I should find out facts she didn’t tell me, including her last name. If I happened to be in this part of the building, I would rush by so that I wouldn’t even be tempted. But now, I decided, I would find her award—and this hallway, not the cemetery, would be the place where I’d remember Jenney.
It’s funny how trophies show an idealized world. The first trophy case was like a miniature city with everyone living in penthouses. Bronze guys and flamingo-legged girls all posed on top of gold and silver skyscrapers. Many of the trophies were for cheerleading, but the sculptor didn’t get the pom-poms right. They looked solid and spherical, like basketballs with hair.
The second trophy case was full of plaques: wooden slabs like the kind steaks are served on, except that each slab held the outline of Massachusetts, rectangular on three sides, then hooking south onto Cape Cod and falling into disorder in the water. I wasn’t sure which sport these were for.
Next I passed a row of signs:
PLAY LIKE A CHAMPION TODAY!
OFFENSE WINS GAMES. DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS.
EXCELLENCE DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN—IT’S A DECISION YOU MAKE EVERY DAY.
Around the corner I found the Schooners Hall of Fame. The name “Schooners” is great material for sportswriters: SCHOONERS BLOW BY [DEFEATED TEAM], SCHOONERS SAIL PAST [DEFEATED TEAM], SCHOONERS SAIL TO VICTORY, or even SCHOONERS TORPEDO [DEFEATED TEAM]. (“What an anachronism,” Mom tsked.) Of course, the metaphors don’t work with some opponents’ names: SCHOONERS SAIL PAST PANTHERS. HORNETS STING SCHOONERS.
A new reporter tried to rename the girls’ teams Schoonerettes, but the girls and their mothers mounted a protest. My mom, who generally ignores organized sports, wrote a letter saying that all boats and ships are female anyway, so shouldn’t it be the boys’ teams that change their name? The “-ettes” name vanished, as did the reporter.
“That’s right, go,” Mom said when his departure was announced in the newspaper. “Run off with your tail between your legs.”
The Schooners Hall of Fame, I saw, was created in 1954. The first Hall of Famers were all male, clean-cut guys in checked jackets who looked forty but were probably eighteen. Division champions, MVPs, in multiple sports, of course—one for each season, because God forbid you should have time on your hands. Go-getters, every one.
Beyond the Hall of Fame stood a case of miscellaneous awards: a leather football helmet old enough for the Brooksbie, some ribbons faded from ivory to gray, and
three plaques with combinations of urns, scrolls, and laurel leaves that you would never see in nature. One of them said:
NORTH OF BOSTON SCHOLAR-ATHLETE OF THE YEAR
2009–2010
JENNEFER ALVES
HAWTHORNE HIGH SCHOOL
Sponsored by
Schneider Lumber
The Hawthorne Beacon-Times
Radio Station WSEA
Outside the school, two massive flagpoles had nothing to wave. Identical benches of local granite, given as a class gift each year, swarmed the front door like tombstones in a crowded cemetery. Couldn’t one class come up with something new, like a birdbath or a hitching post?
I unlocked Triumph from the bike rack and looked across the frozen mud of the football field.
There’s an empty chair here waiting for you.
There is?
For when you decide to come here and volunteer. Right next to me.
I thought the worst part of losing Jenney would be feeling responsible for her death. It wasn’t. A whole other kind of sadness waited for me: knowing that the future I imagined was not going to happen. Meeting her in person. Introducing her to my parents. Her beside me at Listeners, where we would graduate to overnights and race in the chairs. Her death and the end of my plans were related. It took a long time for my mind to accept that.
She was a girl talking to me in the dark. The first one. A darkness I created myself by closing my eyes. But still.
Jenney, I’m back outside by my bike now. I’ll lift Triumph from the bike rack, snap my helmet on, adjust my pack, swing my leg over the saddle, and schoon along. Then I’ll try an old route backward, or a new route forward. Two years from now I’ll leave for college, four years later for graduate school, and almost no one will remember the things we told each other.
But enough about me.
janet ruth young is the author of acclaimed teen novels The Opposite of Music and Things I Shouldn’t Think (originally published as The Babysitter Murders). She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Visit her online at janetruthyoung.com.
Jacket design by Debra Sfetsios-Conover
Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Gazimal/Getty Images
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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also by janet ruth young
The Opposite of Music
Things I Shouldn’t Think
(previously published as The Babysitter Murders)
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Janet Ruth Young
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Young, Janet Ruth, 1957–
My beautiful failure / Janet Ruth Young.
p. cm.
Summary: “While dealing with the recovery of his mentally ill father, sophomore in high school Billy volunteers at a suicide prevention line and falls for one of the incoming callers”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4169-5489-7
ISBN 978-1-4424-4669-4 (eBook)
[1. Hotlines (Counseling)—Fiction. 2. Mental illness—Fiction. 3. Artists—Fiction. 4. Family life—Massachusetts—Fiction. 5. Fathers and sons—Fiction.
6. Massachusetts—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.Y86528My 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2012012572
My Beautiful Failure Page 18
