Berkeley Hills

Chapter 4

Becca

Fifteen Years Earlier

“This is your third detention slip in a week, Rebecca. Are you proud of yourself?” Principal Franciosa asked me as I sat chomping gum in her office.

Gum wasn’t allowed at Beckman Prep. “No one wants to see you chewing like a cow,” she had explained at the first assembly of the school year. Given that it was now March, I knew better than to cave to my bovine instincts.

I was flaunting the rules.

Nervously.

Jutting my jaw forward, I spoke slowly. “No, actually, I’m disappointed. I was going for five.” My chin wobbled as I tried to maintain the stony façade of a warrior. After an uneventful two years as peppy cheerleader, disciplined straight-A student, and outgoing bestie, acting out felt kind of amazing—if a little daunting.

“Come on, Rebecca. I don’t think you mean that.” She smiled, trying to coax me back to the kind of behavior she could reprimand with a slap on the wrist. She wanted me to make her job easier, but I was going for broke.

“Whatever.”

I was manifesting a moody, entitled teenager, trying the attitude on like a glove, feeling my way through a meltdown that felt beyond my control.

The worst part was that no one would stand in my way or tell me to shape up.

Death had that effect on people.

My dad had passed away from an inoperable brain tumor less than two weeks earlier. It had been “expected,” but is death ever really expected? I knew he was sick, I hoped against hope that the chemo and therapies would work, and then the end came too quickly.

There was no way to prepare for the loss of my favorite person, no matter how much I anticipated it.

People chalked up my actions since then to grief. My closest friends avoided me like I might cry if they said the wrong thing—and because nothing freaked out invincible teenagers like the finality of death.

Poor Rebecca with the dead dad has gone off the rails because her mom’s busy dealing with her four other sisters and older brother—and who has that many kids anymore anyway? Eventually, Rebecca will figure out how to deal. She always does.

Poor Rebecca with the dead dad has gone off the rails because her mom’s busy dealing with her four other sisters and older brother—and who has that many kids anymore anyway? Eventually, Rebecca will figure out how to deal. She always does.In answer to Principal Franciosa’s question, nothing about my behavior made me proud. Not the fact that I’d been so unfocused in Spanish that I’d gotten a D on a test I should have aced. Not my messy hair that was somewhere between blond and pink because I was too impatient with the fuchsia dye and rinsed it out. Not my mixed-up brain that didn’t know if I really wanted to make a statement with pink hair or just disappear.

For crying out loud, I was failing at rebelling. That frustrated me even more.

As a disciplined student, there wasn’t a goal I couldn’t crush, given a little effort. And yet…I could already see that I—along with my pinkish hair—was headed back to class, and I probably wouldn’t even get dinged for being late.

I made a terrible warrior.

Principal Franciosa had seen plenty of temperamental teenagers before me and would see them long after I graduated these hallowed halls. She could tell the real delinquents from the ones who would dabble in petty rule infractions and eventually go back to the straight and narrow.

She steepled her hands on her desk and looked at me over the frames of her cat-eye glasses. I stared back, taking in her principal-appropriate, shoulder-length brown hair and pale peach lipstick. She wore a royal blue crew neck sweater under a navy blazer and had tied a paler blue scarf around her neck. No jewelry, nothing superfluous to her outfit. It was like she’d memorized a fashion manual for high school principals.

“Rebecca, I know you have a lot going on at home, so I’d like to be lenient. Please don’t make it difficult.”

“Okay. Sorry.” My sarcasm dripped, and from the scowl on Principal Franciosa’s face, I was succeeding at trying her patience. I felt emboldened. “I didn’t ask you to be lenient. You’re free to punish me, though, for the record, I would like to say I think the rules are stupid, and no one should be punished for breaking them.”

The rules were stupid.

wereWhite socks were okay, but white socks with a navy stripe—blasphemy. Uniforms were about leveling the playing field and taking the focus off of fashion but giving someone detention for a stripe was putting form over function.

I’d pushed the issue further by wearing an old pair of running shoes instead of the required loafers. Then I’d opted to wear my brother’s old Army-green coat instead of the navy sweater or gray blazer that was part of the uniform.

On the first day I’d come to school with my blond-pink-combo hair, I hadn’t been breaking any rules, per se, but it hadn’t endeared me to the faculty, who were already worried I was losing it.

I also hadn’t done a stitch of homework in two weeks and had doodled on two tests instead of writing an essay. All that seemed like it would add up to more than a date with the principal where she would offer to be lenient.

I wanted a full-blown suspension so I could hang out at home and figure out how to be okay without my dad.

My mom hadn’t allowed me to miss more than a day of school because she thought that feigning normalcy would help us all move on. What she didn’t understand was that I didn’t want to move on, not yet. And maybe I just needed to lose my s**t in whatever way came naturally so the consequences would hurt me in a different way than the sadness I couldn’t shake.

“I don’t want to punish you. I think you’re doing a pretty good job of punishing yourself,” the principal said.

I rolled my eyes. “Do they give you a manual on stupid things to say to students?” It felt freeing to say awful things. I couldn’t be awful to my family. They were hurting, too, so it needed to come out somewhere, and this woman—who barely knew me and was lobbing a few trite words my way—was an open target.

“Rebecca, please. I’m on your side. I don’t think you’re a bad person or a bad student, but I need you to meet me partway here, or I can’t help you.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” I was annoyed. Everything about Principal Franciosa grated on me, from her glasses, which weren’t as cool as she thought they were, to her overly neat desk with a collection of apple-shaped paperweights on it. They were irritating. She was irritating.

And on that note, it annoyed me that the plaid fabric on her office couch itched my bare legs below my skirt. It was beside the point that if I’d kept my skirt at the mandatory fingertip length, more of my legs would have been covered.

Principal Franciosa inhaled deeply and studied me. “Maybe I should just assign you a week of detention. You seem to want that.”

“I do. Detention sounds great.”

Since I hadn’t been able to push the boundaries enough to get a suspension, detention sounded like the next best option. Not that I had some Breakfast Club idea that detention would introduce me to new friends who would see me differently and produce epiphanies. I just felt drained. I wanted my meeting with the principal to be over.

Breakfast Club“Okay, three days next week and three the following, detention after school. You can pick the days,” she said, extending her hands like she was offering me a gift.

I nodded and waited to see if she planned to say more. Principal Franciosa stared at me.

“You can go back to class now, Rebecca. And I hope I’m not adding tea to your rebellion by saying you can do better than this. I think you know you should do better.”

I squinted at her weird metaphor, but she was right. Of course she was.

It wasn’t a matter of being capable of leaving the house in the correct shoes. I owned the loafers. I’d gotten up in the morning and made a choice. At that moment in my high school career, I was choosing sabotage. I was choosing to burn everything I cared about to the ground.

Even if no one noticed.

As I left the principal’s office, I felt a glimmer of satisfaction.

A parting gift from my dad was that for the first time, I was enjoying the freedom of not knowing what happened next. What did one Spanish test matter anyway when people could die, leaving a gaping soul chasm that would never be filled?

What did one Spanish test matter anyway when people could die, leaving a gaping soul chasm that would never be filled?I thought about that as I walked away from the main building and decided whether to go back to math class or pretend my principal meeting had lasted for the whole period. Then maybe I could have a moment to sit with my pinkish hair and fall apart.

The halls were empty because everyone was already in class. I’d been pulled out after the first few minutes by a student who was getting her community service credits by working in the school office. She seemed especially gratified to serve as my angel of doom. She probably had her own problems, but while I’d normally have been curious about them, today I couldn’t muster empathy.

I slumped against the wall outside the door to the math classroom, deciding whether or not to go in. A wave of exhaustion seeped deep into my bones. It was hard being angry at the world. Really tiring.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I acknowledged that I hadn’t really slept in two weeks. I’d tried. From sheer exhaustion, I’d drifted off for an hour here or there, but most nights, I lay awake, aware of my sisters living in the same house and unable to talk to any of them.

At first, I envisioned us working through our grief in a family kumbaya circle, but I soon realized I was alone. We each had to process the sadness in our own way, and I couldn’t disturb their process by making them deal with mine. I was the middle sister, neither old nor young, and I fended for myself.

“Hey, you okay?”

I didn’t recognize the voice, so I didn’t open my eyes, but I sensed he was talking to me. No one else was around. Maybe if I ignored him, he’d go away.

“Hey,” he said again.

I could feel his presence even with my eyes closed, and he didn’t seem to take the hint from the angry girl with the ridiculous hair who was ignoring him. I figured that made him a special kind of masochist, and I was all ready to tell him so when I opened my eyes.

But I didn’t speak.

Something about his face calmed me—the look of concern that wasn’t a look of pity, the sweetness behind his eyes, and the curiosity about me as a human, not a hot mess who was trying everyone’s patience.

I vaguely knew who Blake Fulton was, but we’d never spoken in almost two years at the same school. I’d had a class or two with him, but he was on the quiet side, and I didn’t know his friends.

Yet there he was, and there I was.

I couldn’t explain it at the time, and I struggled to understand it afterward, but for some reason, I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him everything.

And that was how it began.