What word best describes the overall tone of the following excerpt from "the school" by donald barthelme?

and the trees all died. they were orange trees. i don’t know why they died, they just died. something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. we complained about it. so we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. all these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

a) contemplative
b) disheartened
c) fearful
d) joyful