CHAPTER 2
“I've developed a new philosophy...only dread one day at a time.” Charlie Brown
Elizabeth sat with her legs outstretched in front of her locker, reading the latest issue of People Magazine. She felt better about herself knowing Lindsay Lohan was headed back to rehab, Paris Hilton was arrested again for illegal drug possession and Kate Bosworth had given up food for cigarettes. Elizabeth wondered if she was rich and famous with lots of fake friends, no parents to rule her life, and unlimited amounts of money if she would be even more screwed up like most of the celebrities she read about.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Jack Bennett’s swagger approaching. Since preschool, when Elizabeth’s family relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina from New York City, Jack Bennett had been her neighbor. They were locker neighbors and had sat next to each other in almost every class for the last twelve years, thanks to alphabetical order seating. Jack Bennett was a popular, good-looking African American who also happened to be the captain of the Football team.
After all these years, Elizabeth had given up on even speaking to him. He never replied. They didn’t have any mutual friends. He was popular and she was average. She was smart and he was average. He played sports and she was athletically challenged. Neither of them existed in each other’s worlds. Their realms intersected through classes, school plays, and dances but they never linked. Life was strange like that.
Elizabeth tried to concentrate on her magazine. He was practically touching her as he fumbled through his locker. They were the only two people in the hallway, a half hour before school started and he still was incapable of making any sort of conversation. Elizabeth moved her legs to sit Indian style.
“Ahhh,” she yelped as she grabbed on to her leg.
The blood from her freshest cut had dried to her skirt. Jack stopped fumbling through his locker and looked down at her. Embarrassed, she stood up, swung her grape colored North Face backpack over her shoulder and ran down the hallway towards the women’s locker room.
Safely alone, she sat down in front of her gym locker, lifted her skirt and carefully unwrapped the gauze. The blood had soaked right through. She pulled out a thicker pad and wrapped the cotton mesh tighter around the cut. Most of the time, her cutting was under control. Excessive bleeding was unusual. She had cut too deep and now she was suffering the consequences of her irresponsible actions.
When she was finished cleaning and redressing the wound, she headed to her first period class and pulled out her Calculus book and notebook. With her pencil, she bubbled the word, “Hate” and started filling it in. In a year, she would be in college and her new life, away from her family, would be perfect. Jack took his assigned seat next to her and started to converse with his friends. Ms. Petrova, the long, stringy haired, teacher shuffled into the classroom wearing one of the three colored corduroy jump-suit dresses she owned. The class immediately quieted down and faced forward. There was no tolerance for classroom misbehavior at Charlotte Academy.
“It’s week two,” Ms. Petrova said in her thick Russian accent. “We are ready to start chapter three.” She looked around the classroom ensuring all books were on the student’s desks. “Okay, we start derivatives of functions and exponentials. A function is a relationship between pairs of numbers, you can draw a graph, and when you look at the graph there's only one Y value for any given X value. A continuous function doesn't have any gaps. A continuously differentiable function doesn't have any sharp points.” She picked up a marker and wrote on the dry erase board, “The derivative of Xn is nXn-1.”
Elizabeth looked around the classroom. With Ms. Petrova’s accent, it was hard to follow what she was teaching. However, Elizabeth was smart and it was easy for her to mildly pay attention in Calculus, go home and read the book, use a couple of websites as teaching tools, and ace her homework. Jack was holding his pen to his notebook but he wasn’t writing a single thing down. Some students were actively taking notes on everything Ms. Petrova was saying, others were paying no attention to her, and the rest of the class was simply listening.
“First, derivatives are linear. This means d/dx (A + B) = dA/dx + dB/dx. This is sometimes called the distributive law, but we just call it linear. This rule means if a function has several parts added together, you can differentiate them one part at a time, and add the results.”
Elizabeth picked up her pencil and jotted down a few words. The simpler her notes were, the easier it was to self-teach herself after school. She went back to filling in the word “Hate” on the side of the notebook page. When she was done, she started making a list of the items she would need to purchase for college. Elizabeth focused on two things in life. She either dwelled on the past and let the pain eat her from the inside out, or she dreamed of a happy future. It was the present that she physically tortured her body over.
“The derivative of 1 is zero. The derivative of X is 1, and so on. Here's the result…”
The bell finally rang saving Elizabeth from her boredom. Ms. Petrova shouted out the homework assignment as most of the class was darting into the hallway to get to their next class in four minutes. Her schedule was jam packed with difficult classes that allowed no room for error if she was going to achieve her dream of getting into Duke University. Besides Calculus, she was taking AP Senior Composition, Physics, Government, AP Spanish, Drawing and had one free study hall period which she managed to get at least half of her homework finished before going home. She had everything planned out. Duke was approximately two and a half hours from her home in Charlotte, which was far enough away from her family, but close enough that she could come home, whenever she wanted to. She was going to major in Sociology and minor in English so she could write books about people.
After her fifth period study hall, she took her lunch outside and sat on the bench across the garden from her favorite tree, a Tuscarora Crape Myrtle. From the spring to fall seasons, the Tuscarora Crape Myrtle trees bloom hundreds of coral pink flowers. Elizabeth found the color and fullness of the tree absolutely alluring. She took a bite into her crisp Fiji apple and wiped a drip of juice off her chin. It wasn’t that Elizabeth didn’t have friends. She had a few good friends, especially Kate Mason and Angela de Paulo. She just preferred the solitude, lately. Especially, because, she didn’t want them to know how lonely and depressed she was.