My Beautiful Failure (23 page)

W
hen 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.

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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OOKS FOR
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EADERS
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Book design by Debra Sfetsios-Conover

The text for this book is set in Adobe Caslon.

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