A black widow spider kills beauty every time it eats. But in itself, it’s beautiful. People who say that high school is the best time to live are too wrapped up in themselves to realize they are not the center of the world and too stupid to admit that they will not live forever!

Being a teenager is tough. Having to live in a world as a 17-year-old girl is even harder. Beth Davis and Marjorie Williams were best friends who began high school as teenagers, but only one would survive to be a woman. Beth was a Christian; Marjorie was not. When Beth succumbed to spinal meningitis, leaving behind a full and promising life, Marjorie began to learn that being popular and physically beautiful were all illusions that pass in time and end in death.

Growing up in the late 1970s was a life of polyester dresses, bell bottoms, and fake IDs. Kids experimented with marijuana, sex, and cocaine, which seemed to wait outside like the door prize on their 18th birthday. Disco was not a myth, and Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana” was a hit. Seeing young women at clubs in nice dresses and clean-cut boys with styled hair was a pleasant change from the hippie generation. As Neil Sedaka would later write, “They had groove, they had feeling!”

The perfect cloister inside the high school bubble shielded an aspiring generation from most of the heartaches of reality. Then death struck down Beth without warning, and youth was shattered, leaving an empty shell. Just like the spider devours the butterfly, leaving behind only beautiful wings, so does spinal meningitis leave a fallen little girl. As life goes on in nature, so do goodness and love survive the human heart. Marjorie learned she needed Jesus.