I asked if I could write about her, and she liked the idea. She told her friends I was her biographer, and she called me in various states of drug, alcohol and broken-heart-induced crises. We drank coffee at Denny’s, where one time she told me she had lost her virginity in the bathroom of a Chevron the summer of her 15th year. She invited me to play pool with her friends at the bowling alley and to a couple of punk shows. She told me what to wear (black, safety pins, no brand names), what to say (I like the Dead Kennedys and the Sex Pistols) and what not to say (I’m a teacher. I like the Dave Mathews Band). It was like going undercover into a world I could never be a part of. I was married. I had a mortgage and household appliances that needed to be replaced when they broke down.

She called one spring afternoon and asked if I could come over right away. “I’m cutting myself,” she said, “and there’s a lot of blood,”

“Shit,” I said. “I’m calling 9-1-1.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not that bad. And don’t call my parents, either.”

She knew I would come. And I did.

I could hear Bad Religion from the driveway. I passed the row of rhododendrons and let myself in to her parents’ one story ranch-style house. Betty was in the bathroom crying and looking at herself in the mirror. She hugged me, and the tears and the blood soaked into my sweater.

There were twenty or so cuts on her wrist and forearm, all superficial. After we cleaned them up, I turned the music down and told her to get ready for school. We shoved the towels we had used to clean up the bathroom deep in her family’s hamper. We wrapped her arm in an Ace bandage, and she put on a long-sleeved shirt. I bought her a sandwich and took her to school.

Betty went outside to smoke. I told the head teacher what had happened, and he and I went for a drive and a smoke—even though I wasn’t a smoker. We decided to call Betty’s mom. When we got back to school, Betty looked me in the eye and asked, “You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?” When her mom showed up, Betty told me to fuck off.

She skipped school more often than usual after that. The head teacher told her she ought to take a break from school, and I think she liked that. It was all part of her pattern. She’d teeter on the edge of something resembling a small success for only a moment, and then she’d fall on purpose. She liked the falling. She liked the attention, and she liked the exile. It was more interesting, and more seductive, than the achieving.

It felt like an ending, and I was mostly relieved. I was confused about my role in Betty’s life. I liked being Big Sister; I was flattered I was cool enough. But as a teacher, even an uncertified teacher, I felt like a failure for getting so involved in a student’s life. As an adult, I was a failure, too, for not being more critical of, or more helpful with, her self-destructive behavior. As a writer, I was proud of my work at slipping into a subculture of one. But I was also sheepish about my over-attachment to Betty. I had worked in newspapers where we were to get in, get out and lead with the blood.

I’d spent most of my life avoiding a fall. Betty had made a career of it. I couldn’t imagine how I could help.

The thing that she and the me-at-her-age had in common was that we were both trying to grow up as fast as we could. We both wanted to get out of high school early and get on with adultdom. Me, because I had been told I was mature for my age so often that I started believing it, and Betty because she was bored and nagged at by something I couldn’t understand. I had done it, had left high school a year early to attend college. Betty was already begging the head teacher to graduate early. We had both lost ourselves in the process of trying so hard to be someone we weren’t.

That summer, I heard Betty was working telephone sales jobs and struggling in her relationships with her friends and parents. She was wearing a wig—a sleek black bob. I knew this because I saw her walking slowly by my house. She started calling again. I listened. She dropped by. I gave her coffee and pesto pasta and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. One evening, I was outside watering my garden and she stopped by to complain to me what bitches her friends were being to her. She was loud. My neighbors closed their windows. The next time I heard from her she had moved to Salem with a boy. Then she moved to Portland. She stopped calling. I lost track.