“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said. “Why aren’t you in Crossroads?”
Becky frowned. “Why would I be?”
“Um, because it’s an incredible experience? Because you’re a member of First Reformed?”
She was not, in fact, a member of the church. She was so obviously not a religious person that her parents hadn’t bothered to pressure her to join.
“Even if I wanted to be in Crossroads, which I don’t,” she said, “I wouldn’t do that to my father.”
“What does your father have to do with it?”
“The group kicked him out?”
Tanner winced. “I know. That scene was messed up. But I’m asking about you, not him. Why don’t you want to be in Crossroads?”
It was true that Clem had joined the youth group, before it was called Crossroads, and that he was even less religious than she was. But Clem enjoyed service to poor people, the Arizona trip especially, and was naturally generous (or willfully perverse) in his choice of companions. Becky was turned off by the Crossroads look, the painter’s pants and flannel shirts, and by the superior air of Crossroads people at their tables in the high-school cafeteria, their ostentatious closeness, their indifference to the hierarchy. Though Clem had dismissed the hierarchy himself, he’d never seemed smug about it. The Crossroads people did.
“I just don’t,” she told Tanner. “It’s not my kind of thing.”
“How do you know it’s not your kind of thing if you haven’t tried it?”
“Why do you care if I try it?”
Tanner shrugged, stirring his suede fringes. “I heard Perry’s been going. I thought, ‘That’s cool, but what about Becky?’ It seemed weird that you weren’t in the group.”
“Perry and I are very different.”
“Right. You’re Becky Hildebrandt. You’re the queen of the soshies. What would all your friends say?”
It was nice that he’d paid enough attention to know her social standing. But she’d always hated being teased. “I’m not going to Crossroads. I don’t have to tell you why.”
“It’s not because you’re afraid of what you might learn about yourself.”
“Nope.”
“Really? It sounds to me like you’re afraid.”
“I am what I am.”
“That’s what God said, too.”
“You believe in God?”
“I think so.” Tanner leaned back in his chair. “I think He’s there in our relationships, if they’re honest. And the first place I ever had honest relationships, and felt close to God, was in Crossroads.”
“Then why did it kick my dad out?”
Tanner seemed genuinely pained. “Your dad is great,” he said. “I love your dad. But people couldn’t relate to him.”
“I can relate to him. So I guess there’s something wrong with me, too.”
“Whoa. That is, like, textbook passive aggression. You wouldn’t get away with that for five minutes in Crossroads.”
“Perry’s a total bullshitter, and he seems to be doing great there.”
“When I look at you, I see the girl who’s got everything, the girl everybody wishes they could be. But inside you’re so scared you can hardly breathe.”
“Maybe I’m holding my breath until I can get away from this town.”
“You were chosen for bigger and better things.”
She wasn’t accustomed to being mocked. Everywhere at New Prospect Township, the mere threat of her disdain carried weight. “Just so you know,” she said, in a frosty tone she rarely found it necessary to use outside her family, “I don’t enjoy being teased.”
“Sorry about that,” Tanner said. “It just seems like a waste, to hold your breath for a year. You’re supposed to be living. That’s the way we honor God—by being present in the moment.”
As Becky tried to think of a tart comeback, Laura Dobrinsky reappeared. Her cumulus of hair reeked of pot smoked in chill autumn air, which had hardened the nipples clearly visible through the crepe of her blouse, beneath her unzipped biker jacket. She sat down backward on Tanner, straddling one of his thighs.
“I’ve been telling Becky she needs to go to Crossroads,” Tanner said.
Laura appeared only then to notice Becky. “It’s not for everyone,” she said.
“You loved it,” Tanner said, his beautiful hands clasped low on Laura’s belly.
“I liked the intensity. Not everyone does. There were people who got fucked up by it.”
“Like who?”
“Like Brenda Maser. She had a nervous breakdown on the spring retreat.”
“She had a freakout,” Tanner said, “because Glen Kiel dumped her for Marcie Ackerman the day before the retreat.”
Laura asked Becky if she could imagine someone bawling for twenty hours straight. “It started with a screaming exercise,” she said. “You scream and then you stop, except that Brenda didn’t. I was in Ambrose’s car with her on the drive home. You could hug her, you could leave her alone, it didn’t matter. We ended up just sitting there listening to her cry. Kind of wanting to strangle her to make it stop. We got to her house, and Ambrose took her inside and handed her off to her parents. Like, here’s your daughter, there seems to be a problem, uh, we don’t know anything else about it.”
Becky tried to imagine Clem on a retreat, screaming, and could not.
“It wasn’t a nervous breakdown,” Tanner said. “Brenda was in school the next morning.”
“Oh, well, then.” Laura gave Becky a funny overbright smile. “Only twenty hours of crying. What’s not to like?”
Another thing Becky had enjoyed about her aunt was her disdain. Shirley had exercised it constantly, often with salty language. After she died and Becky’s mother pronounced her judgment, Becky understood what a survival mechanism disdain had been for her aunt, who had few other defenses against an uncaring world. For Becky herself, disdain was more of an emergency measure, taken only when someone directly tried to make her feel bad. Leaving the Grove that night, rattled by an unaccustomed sense of inferiority, she tried to summon it, but there was nothing to disdain about Laura Dobrinsky except her shortness, which Becky, even in an emergency, could see wasn’t fair. Laura was the Natural Woman that Becky had heard her sing about being made to feel like, in her giant voice, and there was no disdaining Tanner for anything. She went to bed that night wondering if Tanner had been right about her—if she really was afraid of life. The boredom she felt at her birthday party, the following night, was another sign that she needed to start living.
If Shirley hadn’t left her thirteen thousand dollars, she might not have chosen Crossroads as the place to start. She did have an instinct that showing up at Crossroads would be a delicious kind of shock to those who paid attention to such things. If she happened to like it, Tanner would be more respectful of her, and if she thought it was stupid, well, then she would have something to disdain. But she knew how her father loathed Rick Ambrose. She wasn’t exactly forbidden to go to Crossroads, but she might as well have been.
Only after he’d lectured her about Shirley’s money did she decide to defy him. It wasn’t that she thought he was wrong. She got that her loony aunt had played favorites and that it was up to her to make things right, by sharing her money. And yet she felt betrayed, in a way that hurt no less for being childish. How many times had her mother told her how specially dear she was to her father? How many stupid walks had she taken on the assumption that the walks were super-important to him? If she’d known he was going to yank away her inheritance before she could even be excited about it, she would never have gone on so many walks. What was the point if all she got out of it was a sermon about fairness? He couldn’t even wait for her to find her own way to a generous impulse. It was wham, bam, share the money with your brothers. Who, speaking of fairness, had never done anything for Shirley, never written her, never sacrificed valuable days of summer vacation for her, never lain awake on her convertible with eyes and nose
assaulted by smoke. If her father was so fond of her, shouldn’t he at least have acknowledged that?
She invited Jeannie Cross to come with her to Crossroads. Jeannie would have run through a hail of bullets for Becky, and might have preferred it to visiting a Christian youth group, but Becky explained that Tanner Evans had dared her to go. Jeannie was duly impressed. “You’ve been hanging out with Tanner Evans?”
“Just casually. We talk.”
“Isn’t he with what’s her face?”
“Laura, yeah. She’s cool.”
“So…”
“I said. It’s just casual.”
“Would you go out with him if he asked you?”
“He’s not going to ask me.”
“I can actually sort of see it,” Jeannie said. “You and him together.”
“You haven’t seen the way he is with Laura.”
“You know what I mean, though. You’re going to be with someone, sometime. And, Jesus—Tanner Evans? I can really almost see it.”
So, now, suddenly, could Becky. She had only to picture it as it would appear to people like Jeannie, as a crowning confirmation of her status, a punishing lesson to every lesser boy who’d imagined he could date her, and the thought became lodged in her head. Why, after all, had Tanner challenged her to try Crossroads? Wasn’t this evidence of interest in her? Even his teasing—maybe especially his teasing—was evidence.
From Clem’s involvement with the group, she knew enough to dress down for it, but she wasn’t Jeannie’s keeper. When Jeannie picked her up, in the silver Mustang her parents had given her, she was wearing dress slacks, an expensive brocade vest, and a lot of makeup. Becky felt sorry for her, but she didn’t mind having an overdressed friend to feel cooler than. The Crossroads meeting room was shockingly crowded with people she knew the names of, had given many a congenial smile to in classrooms and hallways, and would never have dreamed of seeing socially. In a far corner was a tangle of bodies like a collapsed game of Twister with her brother Perry at the bottom of it, fighting a battle of tickles with a fat girl in bib overalls, his face red with happiness, quite a bizarre sight. Becky and Jeannie sat down with two former friends from Lifton Central. One of them, Kim Perkins, a cheerleader who’d strayed into promiscuity and drugs, gave Becky a welcoming hug and petted her head as if it were she, not Kim, who had strayed. Kim tried to hug Jeannie as well, but Jeannie raised a hand to ward her off.
And so it went. Downstairs, in the function hall, Becky opened herself to the activities because Jeannie couldn’t. When people taped a sheet of newsprint to their back and wrote messages on other backs with felt-tip pens, Becky scrawled Looking forward to getting to know you! Becky on back after back, stopping only to be scrawled upon, while Jeannie, looking miserable in her dress slacks, stood to the side and frowned at her pen as if its workings were a mystery. The group then formed a circle of crosshatched bodies, everyone’s head resting on their neighbor’s belly. There was no obvious point to the exercise except to start laughing as a group and feel your head bouncing on a laughing belly and another head bouncing on yours, but to Becky, positioned between two boys she’d never spoken to, it seemed strange that she’d spent her life surrounded by bellies, all of them as familiar to their owners as her own belly was to her, all of them potentially touchable, and yet they were almost never touched. Strange that a possibility constantly present was so seldom acted on. She was sorry when the exercise ended.
“We’re going to break into groups of six,” Rick Ambrose said. “I want each of us in the group to talk about something we’ve done that was wrong. Something we’re ashamed of. And then I want each of us to talk about something we’ve done that we’re proud of. The point here is to listen, all right? Really listen. We’ll meet back here at nine.”
Not wanting to be in a group where she knew nobody, Becky pounced on the one Kim Perkins was forming and left Jeannie to fend for herself. A friend of Perry’s, David Goya, tried to join Kim’s group, but Rick Ambrose stepped in front of him and blocked him out. Becky hadn’t expected that Ambrose himself would participate in the exercise. She and the others followed him upstairs and sat down in the hallway outside her father’s office. At the sight of her father’s name on the door, her chest constricted with the consequence of what she was doing to him. She’d had every right to try Crossroads, but a betrayal was a betrayal.
Rick Ambrose was smaller than he loomed in her parents’ demonology. He was like a little black-mustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves. Following his own instructions, he listened intently while a tough kid Becky had known only by face told the story of breaking windows at Lifton Central with a slingshot after he’d gotten a D-minus in physical science, Kim Perkins the story of having sex with a summer-camp counselor whose girlfriend was the counselor in her cabin.
“And you think that was wrong,” Ambrose said.
“Definitely it was shitty of me,” Kim said.
“But I’m listening to you,” Ambrose said, “and what I’m hearing is more like bragging. Is anyone else hearing that?”
What Becky was hearing was more like statutory rape. Kim had long had a bad reputation, but at some level Becky hadn’t quite believed the rumors about her. Becky was three years older than Kim had been at summer camp, and she hadn’t even kissed anyone. What story could she tell when it was her turn? Behaving irresponsibly had never been her thing.
“I liked that I could have him,” Kim said. “Like, how easy it was. Maybe I was proud of that. But when I went back to my cabin and saw his girlfriend, I felt awful. I still feel awful. I hate that I was ever the kind of person who would do that to someone, just because I could.”
“That, I’m hearing,” Ambrose said. “Becky?”
“I’m hearing it, too.”
“Do you want to tell us something about yourself?”
She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Ambrose and the others waited.
“Actually,” she said, “right now I’m feeling bad about my friend Jeannie. I made her come with me tonight, and I don’t know where she went.”
She looked down at her hands. The church was very quiet, the other groups dispersed, their guilty disclosures a distant murmur.
“I think she might have gone home,” Kim said.
“Okay, now I’m feeling really bad,” Becky said. “She’s my best friend, and I … I think I’m a bad friend. Everywhere I go, I want everyone to like me, and this is my first time here—I want to be liked. But I should have been taking care of Jeannie.”
The girl next to her, whose back she’d scrawled on without learning her name, put a soft hand on her arm. Becky shuddered and sort of sobbed. It was more emotion than the situation perhaps called for, but something about Crossroads brought emotion to the surface. I want to be liked might have been the most honest words she’d ever uttered. Recognizing the truth of them, she bent forward and surrendered to her emotion, and now other hands were on her, hands of comfort and acceptance.
Only Ambrose held back. “What are you waiting for?” he said.
She wiped her nose. “What do you mean?”
“Why aren’t you looking for your friend?”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
The silver Mustang was still in the parking lot. As Becky approached the driver’s side, Jeannie started the engine and turned down the radio, which was tuned to WLS and playing “Save the Country.” She lowered the window.
“I’m sorry,” Becky said. “You don’t have to wait for me.”
“You’re staying?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back inside? I’ll stick close to you.”
Come on down to the glory river, the radio said. Jeannie shook her head. “I thought you were only doing this because Tanner dared you.”
“He dared me to try it. Not just go for one hour.”
“One hour was plenty for me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re forgiven,” Jeannie said. “I swear to
God, though, Bex. You’d better not go religious on me.”
To her own surprise, she went religious. It began with being bored and wanting to be liked, but even on her first night she was forced into interactions with kids less fortunate than she was, forced to listen to them, forced in turn to account for the person she really was, undefended by status, and thereby, just as Tanner had promised, forced to learn things about herself, not all of them flattering. Crossroads didn’t look religious—there was nary a Bible in sight, and whole evenings went by without reference to Jesus—but here again Tanner had been right: simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality. She could feel herself vindicating Clem’s long-standing faith in her, as a person of substance.
A hundred and twenty kids were in Crossroads, and only one exciting leader. In two hours on a Sunday night, every member could hope for one minute of Ambrose’s attention. Becky, in the weeks that followed, averaged a lot more than that. Ambrose twice chose her as a dyad partner, praised her for her guts in joining the group, and called her out in larger discussions, praising her honesty. She would have been more self-conscious about hogging him if she hadn’t felt a natural affinity with him. She, too, had been a person other people measured and compared their time with; she knew the pleasure but also the burden of that. Plus she’d come painfully late to Crossroads—she had two years of lost time with Ambrose to make up for.
Her father, meanwhile, was barely speaking to her. She was theoretically sorry to have hurt him, but she didn’t miss the charade of closeness. He’d needed to be shown that she was eighteen years old and had a right to her own life. The ancient edict needed punishing as well.
The action that had truly taken guts occurred in the school cafeteria some weeks later. She’d already stopped putting on makeup in the morning and taken to wearing only jeans, never skirts, but she didn’t think she’d ever felt more glaringly visible than the day she plunked her sack lunch down between Kim Perkins and David Goya. They acted like it was nothing, but every eye at Becky’s usual table was on her, especially Jeannie Cross’s. Though Jeannie should arguably have been grateful to her, for vacating a rung on the ladder that she herself could then ascend to, Jeannie didn’t see it that way. She continued to give Becky rides to school in her Mustang, and Becky still enjoyed hearing her gossip, but a line had been crossed when she sat down at a Crossroads table. Jeannie referred to Crossroads as Kumbaya, which wasn’t funny even the first time she said it, and Becky, although she couldn’t prove it, sensed that Jeannie was no longer telling her every secret she learned.
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