Bethie’s face was wide and round as a pie, greasy and studded with clusters of whiteheads, blackheads, and cysts in various stages of eruption. Her hair was lank and brown and hung limply on her shoulders. She wore argyle sweaters in unflattering pastels, and old-lady sneakers, wide and white, without the desirable Nike swoosh or the less popular but still acceptable Adidas stripes. Bethie met the world with a flat, incurious stare, and when she spoke, it was in an off-putting simper. Her nails were ragged, her cuticles frequently bloody. She’d waddle along the hallways of Clearview High School, her nylon pants swishing, her eyes fixed on nothing, a smirky smile plastered on her face.
Then there was her smell—awful, enveloping, and seemingly permanent, surrounding her like her own personal weather system. In elementary school, there’d been notes of urine mixed in with the scent of unclean flesh and unwashed clothing. As she’d gotten older, the pee had been replaced with eye-watering body odor, a stink that was like what Mark Twain said about the weather—everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything. In Bethie’s case, people had tried. Well-meaning teachers had pulled her aside, suggesting antiperspirant or deodorant or soap. Less kind classmates like Mikey Henderson or Joel Marx would say, “Jesus, Botts, take a shower! You fuckin’ reek!” One December, Rabbi Silver had given us all little Chanukah gifts, and Bethie’s was a collection of soaps and sample-size perfumes. None of it worked—not the gifts, not the insults. Bethie’s smile never wavered. She never looked hurt. But she never smelled any better.
“What’s her story?” Marissa had asked after her first week of junior high. Marissa had gone to a different elementary school than I had. We’d been assigned seats next to each other in homeroom on our first day of school, and we’d quickly become friends. “Is she retarded or something?”
I shook my head. “She’s not retarded. Just weird. And she’s always been like that,” I told Marissa. “She’s like Stonehenge, only stinkier. She never changes.”
Things might have been different if Bethie had been nice, if she’d made an effort with her appearance or her manner. Certainly there were other fat kids in Clearview, even a few other kids with bad skin or cheap clothes, but they had friends, a circle, a place to sit at lunch. Not Bethie, who was actively unpleasant. If you tried to start a conversation with her, she’d ignore you or answer your questions with non sequiturs or snotty replies.
“What are you reading?” Marissa asked Bethie that first morning in class.
Bethie looked up, that dumb smile in place, as always. “A book,” she said, in her incongruously sweet, girlish voice.
Marissa looked at me, to see if she was being mocked. I shrugged. With Bethie, you never knew.
At six o’clock, the bus pulled into KFC. The kids from Beth Am sat in groups of threes and fours, except for Bethie, who sat by herself until Rabbi Silver took the seat across from her. Back on the bus, Marissa and I polished off the spiked Gatorade. I leaned my head against the window. Marissa flipped open The Bridges of Madison County, which everyone was reading that spring. “Listen to this,” she said, and read, “ ‘The leopard swept over her, again and again and yet again, like a long prairie wind, and rolling beneath him, she rode on that wind like some temple virgin toward the sweet, compliant fires marking the soft curve of oblivion.’ ”
“Oh, puh-leeze,” I groaned. “How can a leopard be like a wind? Aren’t leopards, like, furry and heavy? And how can a fire be compliant? And—”
“Hush,” said Marissa, and continued. “ ‘This is why I’m here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.’”
I pursed my lips and made the whistling noise of a bomb plummeting to earth. “Falling for years. It’s going to hurt when he lands.”
“Have you considered the possibility that instead of fixing your heart, the doctors accidentally removed it?” Marissa asked, pulling out her lip gloss from her own Bermuda bag and using the wand to slide another coat of shiny pink over her lips. The bus groaned and lurched around a corner, then up a steep drive toward the plush green lawns and white-brick buildings of Emory University. We climbed off the bus, collected our duffels and suitcases and sleeping bags from the sidewalk where the driver had arranged them, and followed Rabbi Silver into the auditorium.