54Chapter 3: Screwed
The rest of the morning passed reasonably uneventful for Rebecca. She knew she was supposed to be learning something at school, but today she didn't. She daydreamed and doodled her way through the morning classes and at last, much to the relief of Becca's grumbling stomach, lunch arrived. Rebecca entered the cafeteria and sat down at the same old table, the one that Cleo had written the word "Smelly" on at the beginning of the year. Becca smiled at the thought. It was good to have friends.
Becca took out her parmesan bagel (her favorite) and began to nibble at its edges as she watched her fellow teenagers pour into the lunchroom, looking like ants must as they enter their colony. So many, she thought, all stuck here for seven hours a day and for what? Why were they here? It had been routine for so long that no one even wondered.
Out of the sea of faces, two familiar ones suddenly popped out. Sybil and Cleo. Becca waved. Sybil spread her arms wide and yelled as Cleo hugged her lunch, which was wrapped in her sweatshirt.
"Aaaa!" said Sybil as she sat down.
"Ssssss," replied Becca, grinning.
Cleo rolled her eyes. "You guys are dorks."
Becca and Sybil just smiled and laughed.
Grace approached with her lunch. It must have been spaghetti day at the self-serve bar because Grace's tray was piled high with the stuff. Becca despised school food. That same spaghetti had taken the designs of the floor tiles last year when it spilled; Becca had seen it with her own eyes. She grimaced at the thought.
"Hey yo!" greeted Grace.
"What the dealio?" said Leila, coming up behind her with Gwen. Leila and Gwen were having the same old school sandwiches they always did. Becca didn't like those, either. She'd found a hair in one once.
"Hey, it's you!" said Becca.
"Yeah, it is," Leila replied.
"Guess what."
"What?"
"Seventh period!" Leila and Becca had Art seventh period. "That's right, " laughed Leila
Gwen just shook her head.
"Anyway." Sybil said, trailing off.
They ate in awkward silence for about three seconds before they started chattering about anything and everything anyone would ever want to talk about. Anyone who had the patience to listen sure could pick up some interesting things.
". But then someone said it wouldn't hurt that much because all of the nerves in your tongue are on the edges so."
". Did you see him today? He looks so depressed."
". Math is so annoying, we have to do all this crap with imaginary numbers."
Conversation at Becca's table often went on in this matter. Nothing was really connected to anything else, but that was okay. Life is kind of like that. To Becca and her friends, life is just a long string of random stories.
The lunch bell rang. Oh, goody, thought Becca, Art, my favorite. And she was serious. Art was her favorite. But some of the people in that class.
Becca grabbed her binder from her locker and headed down to the Art room, which was located under the cafeteria. As she entered the room, Raphael, a short, spiky-haired eighth grader, gave her his fake smile and waved. She smiled back sarcastically. She put her stuff down at her table and went to her cubby to get her current project. The class was doing enlargements. She was sitting down just as Leila came in (Leila always seemed to be one of the last people to get to wherever she was going).
Mrs. Leypas, the art teacher, tried frantically to get the class's attention. Three minutes later, when the noise had been subdued to a dull roar, she gave a thirty-second speech about what they would be working on today (the enlargements) and when they were due (Friday). This was all she really said, it only took her thirty seconds to say it because she had to keep waiting for a reasonably quiet time to speak. When she was done, the class returned to its usual chatty manner.
Becca stared at the lily she was enlarging. She looked from it to the original picture and grimaced. Raphael leaned over and looked over Becca's shoulder.
"That looks like crap," he said quietly with mock disgust. Becca looked at him. "Oh, I mean, it's lovely, Leila!" Leila and Becca both gave him blank looks. He looked away and started singing. "Are you listening? Whoa-o-o-o-o-o-o!"
Becca got back to work on her drawing. "You'd think he'd get tired of the same old songs after awhile," she said.
Leila glanced at Raphael, who was now dancing in his chair. "My neck, my back, lick my butt just like that," he sang.
"You'd think so," Leila said. "At least he stopped singing that one song."
Raphael had apparently heard this, because he immediately began singing Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi". "He was a sk8er boi, she said seeya later boi, he wasn't good enough for her!"
Becca ignored him. "So anyway. How's life, Leila?"
"It's wonderful, how's yours?"
"It's just fine."
"Really? I am supremely happy for you."
They stopped talking then because Raphael had stopped singing, which meant that they could safely get back to work. The quiet, however, was short lived. It was not long before Peter, who sat opposite of Raphael, started singing.
"Down by the bay, where the watermelons grow, back to my home, I dare not go."
Leila sighed. "It's just another day in art, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh," Becca agreed. She went back to focusing on her drawing. The rest of the period passed quickly for her. There were more fake conversations, more singing, and Beth, one of Raphael's eighth grade friends, passed around some gossip. The bell rang and Becca sighed. She had history eighth period.
History was probably her least favorite class. It wouldn't be so bad if it were European history; that was actually pretty interesting. The problem was that Becca had to take American history, which she thought was pretty boring. She struggled to keep her eyes open through a video the class was watching on Ben Franklin. At last school was over and a short bus ride later, Becca was home.
Becca didn't have much time to relax that afternoon. She barely had enough time to feed her rabbit, Xanadu. She had gotten nearly nothing done in her classes that day and she had Youth Symphony practice for two and a half hours that night. Becca loved her Youth Symphony. It was basically like a Philharmonic for high school students. It didn't matter that she was second chair because Becca was up there with the best of the best, and she loved it. She could be a bit egotistical about her playing sometimes.
Her dad dropped Becca at Symphony practice at 6:15, just as the sun was beginning to set. One of Becca's favorite things about Youth Symphony was watching the sunset. She couldn't see the sky from inside, but the sunlight shone through onto the wall behind the conductor's podium and as time wore on, Becca watched the light change from white to yellow to golden to orange to a bloody red and then fade out altogether, leaving no light in the room but the cold, white, artificial light of humming, fluorescent tubes. Trina, the first chair clarinet, came in a few minutes before Dr. Fuller, the director, called the room to attention. Trina was one of those over-bubbly people that Becca had a hard time tolerating for long periods of time. Becca was sure that Trina was short for Katrina, but that the senior cheerleader was just too bubbly to go by "Kat".
After a few brief announcements, Dr. Fuller began the practice in earnest. It was all Rebecca could do to keep herself from yawning. The second clarinet part could be so boring. When counting out rests grew unbearably boring, Becca listened to the individual parts in the melee of sound or watched the first chair cellist's idiosyncratic head bob. His name was Joseph. Melanie, Leila's and Gwen's sophomore friend, went to high school with Joe. Mel also played the cello, and swore that Joe was God. She had even started a religion devoted to him. Honestly, some people, thought Becca.
She broke out of her reverie and wet her reed. Finally, something interesting was coming up: a rare, but long-awaited second clarinet solo. Becca took a deep breath and prepared to blow.
All that came out of her mouth was a barely audible "Crap!"
With that simple word came a sinking feeling in the pit of Becca's stomach. She had just remembered the 300-page book they had gotten four weeks ago to read for history. There was a 50-point quiz on the very book on Thursday (which for Becca, was tomorrow). A quiz on the same book that had sat (and at that very moment was still sitting) in the bottom of Becca's locker for the entirety of the month she had had it in her possession. "Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!"
Becca realized then that the entire orchestra had stopped and Dr. Fuller was talking to her, telling her once again how important the second clarinet part was and how much the audience really, really needed to hear her at the entrance she had just missed. He instructed her to pick it up there, and she did, and she played it beautifully, but in all she heard were the words "I'm screwed, I'm screwed, I'm so friggin screwed," repeated over and over in her mind.
It seemed like eternity to Becca, but in roughly an hour Becca could go home (she didn't play in two songs the symphony was performing). She hastily cleaned Jimmy and shoved him into his black faux-leather case and then rushed out to where her father's old, box-like, yellow VW Golf was waiting in the dark parking lot. She was silent during most of the ride home; the only noises she made were slight acknowledging ones in response to all of the annoying, parent-type questions her father felt he had to ask. Her heart sank once again when he asked the fateful question: "Have you done all your homework?"
Rebecca Welkinson swallowed hard and blinked, looking out the window at the city lights streaming by. "Yeah," she breathed. "Yeah, it's done." And inside she was saying, yeah, yeah, it's done, at least it was, until about an hour ago.
Becca tried to do something useful when she got home, but she couldn't. All she could do was sit and fret. She did nothing but feel empty for a while and then it was time for bed. She lay between the covers in the dark, the cold air of her poorly-heated house biting at her exposed ears, feeling the pounding of her deeply distressed heart. She waited for sleep to come, but it refused. She tried closing her eyes, rolling over, but nothing worked. She looked at her clock for the millionth time that night just in time to see its digital red numbers turn from 11:59 to 12:00. Becca sighed and, giving up, slowly got out of bed.
She crept down the dark stairs to the deserted kitchen. Her parents had gone to bed long ago. She quietly fixed herself a cup of chamomile tea and sat on the couch, her icy feet curled under her, drinking and thinking. When she finished the tea, she sat there for a while longer, just shivering. Then she climbed back upstairs and back into her bed, which was quite cold by now. She glanced at the clock again. 12:34. She turned to face the wall. Why, she thought, why me, I'm such an idiot, how could I be so damn stupid. And with that thought slowly drifting out of her head, she sunk into shallow sleep.
***
The radio was blaring. Rebecca groaned. She looked at the clock. It was 5:30. She was so tired. She was blissfully forgetful for a moment but then she realized why she shouldn't be so happy. She had that quiz today. She felt suddenly sick. It took a lot of effort to pull herself from the bed. This was going to be a long day.
Becca moved through life that day with the groaning, half-brained determination of a zombie. The day was a blur and things went quickly, probably because most of the time she was half-asleep. She tried to cram some reading in between all of the other things she was supposed to be doing, but she soon gave up.
Then eighth period history arrived.
She walked into that room with a fierce determination not to fail.
But she knew it was desperately hopeless.
A's were rare occurrences in Becca's history class; even she didn't get them too often on tests, and that was when she knew the subject. She was, in a word, screwed, and she knew it.
The test was multiple choice. Rebecca made her best guesses and when she didn't have the slightest inkling, she made her answers spell out little words, something she had always wanted to do but never got the chance because she wouldn't be able to stand herself if she knew she could've done better.
Becca turned in her test. The teacher, Mrs. Hall, barely glanced up. I'm gonna fail, Becca thought, I'm so gonna fail.
When she got home that afternoon, Becca tried to forget about the whole thing. It worked pretty well. Which was why she was so shocked when they got the graded tests back the next day. Mrs. Hall walked around the classroom like Death itself, passing out slips of certain doom. When she got to Becca's desk, she made a tsk-ing sound under her breath, gave Becca that you-could-have-done-much-better-than-that-how-the-hell-could-you-be-so- dumb look that teachers gave all the time, and laid the test face-down. Becca stared at it for a moment as if it were a bomb ready to go off. Then she slowly turned it over.
57%. An F.
The grade sheet came around. Becca ran a trembling finger down the list, searching for her number. When she found it she followed the line of assignments to her current grade in the class. She had a C, her first ever.
Becca sighed hard. There goes my Friday, she thought. I'm so screwed, my God, I'm so screwed.