Are You Sure You Can Trust Them? A reading response to: Where'd You Go Bernadette.

      How well can you say you know your best friend? Is it possible for you to say that you know every last detail? No, not really... The book Where'd You Go Bernadette? by Marie Semple is about Bee, a high school student who gets perfect grades for the sake of getting one wish, and that wish is a trip to Antarctica. But before that can happen, Bee's mother Bernadette, goes missing. In life, there are times when people can do the most unforgettable and surprising things at the quickest and unexpected moments.

      You meet new people everyday. On the street, at school, and on vacation new faces all around you. Some of those people you do know, quite well, but you may never know what your best friend is thinking. Unless of course your best friend clearly expresses how thy feel all the time. Bernadette is the kind of person in which you can never really know what to expect, she looks like the average housewife, but there are many secret that she holds. When Bee tells her parents that she wants to go on a trip to Antarctica, both parents seem to go along with it, but on the inside, Bernadette is slowly bubbling into insanity. In the book, Bernadette emails an online assistant saying, "Of the millions of reasons why I don't want to go to Antarctica, the main one is that it will require me to leave the house."-page 10. We really don't know anything about what happened to her or why she feels this way. It is possible that she was in some crazy accident and left her scarred forever, or merely  she just scared of going outside? For whatever reason, we may never know due to the fact that she is not the same person as yourself. Another reason it is truly impossible to know how others are feeling, is that in the book, Bernadette disappears. Just before the trip to Antarctica, Bernadette disappears from the face of the earth. Without telling anyone about anything, she left. She hated having to go anywhere that she left. On the outside, she seemed fine but with no one for her to open up to and tell them what she thought, she had everything that she worried about bottled up inside. So one day she poofed out of existence to leave everybody else to pick up the pieces.

      Next time you tell someone something, are you sure you can trust them? You may never know what their next move may be so it is better to take your time to get to know that person to really trust them. I know it might sound mean to say this about anyone, but everything in your life will influence you in some way; if there was an event that you were never told about that scarred that person. You could accidentally push that button and never know it, slowly chipping away at that person. Somethings in life are better to be said than left alone to rot away forever.