Chapter Sixty-Two
Jess had told herself she wouldn’t go, but she had to know how the team was playing without her. She peeked through the double glass doors to the gym to watch. Kelly was taking the ball down the court most of the time and missing the shot more often than not. She looked at the scoreboard and winced. The Green Machine girls were trailing far behind the Fullerton Falcons.
Her gaze shifted next to the bleachers, to where Stephanie was watching the game with Mike. The moment Jess glanced her way, Stephanie spotted her, and next thing she saw was a flash of brunette hair as she began climbing down the bleachers and heading her way. Jess took off like a bullet through the hallway, racing to get outside into the brisk night air.
Outside she watched her shadow stretch into a thin, ambiguous shape under the streetlights. Her hands were stuffed in the pockets of her own denim jacket—she’d tossed her basketball jacket into a Dumpster outside the school the day she cleaned out her gym locker. Tonight she shuffled down the sidewalk, her head down, her gait uneven, as she made her way into the parking lot. Behind her, she heard boots sinking into the gravel of the lot, getting closer and faster with every step.
Stephanie followed her all the way to the farthest end of the school parking lot. She finally caught up to her and took hold of her arm. “Why aren’t you in there? And don’t tell me you hurt your Achilles tendon.”
She whipped around, jerking her arm away. “Is that what the coach told everyone?”
“She said you’d be out for the rest of the season,” Stephanie said. “But you look like you’re walkin’ fine to me.”
Achilles tendon, Jess thought bitterly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t!”
“Could you please…quit? Quit caring? Quit watchin’ what I do? Please, let me go.” She tried to show conviction, even though she knew it was obvious that she was still carrying a torch for her.
“I can’t.” After a moment, she said, “Tell me what’s goin’ on.”
“Kelly won’t be botherin’ us anymore.” Jess kicked the gravel.
“No!”
“I don’t care if they talk about me,” Jess said. “I didn’t want her to ruin your life too.”
“You love basketball. She can’t do this!” Stephanie was fierce. She held Jess’s shoulders. “You’re goin’ back in there and playing. We’ll deal with Kelly.”
“Don’t you get it? The coach is on her side! She’s not goin’ to let me play even if I want to!” She broke away from Stephanie. Hopelessness permeated the air. Everything had been taken from her.
Stephanie leaned against one of the cars. “So that’s it?”
“Haven’t you been listenin’?”
“Yeah.” Stephanie folded her arms. “You won’t fight for anything you care about. You’re a coward.” She started to walk away.
“Hold on! Who are you to tell me that? You have no idea how it is for me!”
“Same here.” Her eyes flashed under the parking lot lights. “Yeah, you just go on back to Daddy and believe everything he tells you, so you can get into heaven.” She was oddly combative.
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” Jess shouted. “You don’t have a clue!”
Stephanie came back to her. “I’m sorry.” She seemed to want to say something more, but held back.
“It’s so easy for you.” Jess lowered her eyes.
“Yeah, real easy.” There was a long pause. “Tell me, you still think what we did was a sin?”
“I don’t know.” Jess had nothing left. She faced her and said, “Sometimes bein’ with you feels like the only thing right in my life. But what feels right isn’t always good for you.”
“I’ve always been a bad influence.”
Their eyes locked, and Jess had a familiar feeling, that they weren’t really fighting with each other but with the world.
“I love you,” Jess said plainly, almost apologetically. “I love chocolate too, but too much of that could kill a person.”
“So I’m a chocolate bar? At least tell me what kind.” Her lips turned upward in the beginning of a smile.
“I’m serious. They’ve done studies on chocolate.”
Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Will you shut up and kiss me?”
“Just because I want you doesn’t mean I should have you,” Jess said.
“That’s your dad talking.”
For some reason, that criticism registered more deeply than it ever had before. Could it be that she’d adopted the beliefs of the same man who thought some AIDS patients deserved to die? Her family had always been her moral compass. Realizing that all of those things she had relied upon might only be illusions had her head spinning.
Jess stared helplessly at her. “I don’t know what I think anymore.”
“Well, if we’re such sinners, we might as well act the part. Let’s go in there and kiss in front of everyone. How’s that?”
Jess shook her head. “Ha ha.”
“Why not? They’ll already be callin’ us freaks.” Stephanie crossed her arms in defiance. “I can’t sit by while you quit the only thing you love ’cause you don’t want me to get a bad reputation. For one thing, I don’t know that I trust Kelly to keep quiet about us. For another…did it ever occur to you that I don’t care?”
Jess smiled. “I like that about you.” But the town in which they lived was too small for them to be really free, and Jess knew it. “Alex was Mike’s best friend. The school would crucify you.” She reached for her arm and glided her hand along her jacket sleeve. “We gotta say goodbye.”
“I thought you already did at the cemetery,” Stephanie said.
Jess looked away, remembering that day. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Now you do?”
Jess wouldn’t answer.
Stephanie’s half-smile suggested she didn’t buy what she was hearing. And why would she? Jess thought, knowing that her face was probably filled with all sorts of contradictions, including all the admiration she felt for her. Stephanie’s defiance in the face of authority was one of her most attractive qualities.
Stephanie returned her gaze, her black hair quivering in the breeze. Neither of them seemed to notice how cold it was.
“You know what I think?” Stephanie held her hands. “I believe God made me who I am. And I figure God doesn’t make mistakes. I’m supposed to love you, and I do.”
“Simple as that, huh?” Jess smiled to herself. “Can you take me home?”
“Okay. But I have to know something first.” Stephanie took a deep breath, trying to mask her vulnerability. “Do you blame me for what happened to Alex?”
“No.” It never occurred to Jess that she might think she blamed her for that night. “I don’t blame you for anything. I blame myself.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Stephanie said. “But I know you’re too stubborn to be talked out of anything.”
The drive to Jess’s house was too short. When they parked in the driveway, Jess looked at Stephanie with loving eyes. “You should get married and have kids. You’re so beautiful. Your kids would be beautiful.” She started to get out of the car.
Stephanie held her arm. “I don’t know how to say goodbye to you.”
“Don’t.” Jess looked gravely at her. “Ivy got kicked out of the house for bein’ pregnant. I can’t even imagine what he’d do to me.”
“So she’s not studying overseas?”
“Hell, no. The preacher can’t have the town knowin’ something so…”
“Scandalous.” Stephanie seemed to understand the gravity of the situation.
“You have no idea what he’s like. He’d kill us both.”
Jess wished that Stephanie could make it all better, that they could live in their own fantasy world, a bubble that protected them from all of the forces outside pulling them apart. But now, with a single slam of the car door, the real world was crowding in, threatening to destroy them. The house stared her down as she walked to t
he front porch, daring her to confront reality once again.
Chapter Sixty-Three
When Carolyn was faced with major emotional conflicts, she threw herself into housework. Lately the house had been spotless. It was also the reason why she was doing the laundry at eight o’clock at night. With Dan at a Bible conference in the neighboring town of Cherry and Danny hanging out with his heavy metal friend Wade at the garage, she had a rare night with the house to herself. Jess hadn’t said where she was going tonight but indicated she was meeting “some friends.” Carolyn was relieved to hear that some of her friends weren’t too jealous of her; she hoped they’d be able to cheer her up.
She flipped on the light to Ivy’s bedroom, looking at the pile of neatly folded clothes on the bed, clothes that her oldest daughter wouldn’t be wearing. She wanted to cry, especially now that she was alone, but the tears wouldn’t come. Her emotional armor was so strong, she couldn’t feel anything at the moment. Her mother could be the same way, she remembered, suddenly ice-cold whenever things became too traumatic to bear.
She delivered the last of the fresh-smelling clothes to Jess’s room. She switched on the light, set the clothes down and looked around. Things were unusually sterile. Many of the posters were gone, as well as the basketball team photos that used to clutter the sides of her mirror. Even the trophies were missing.
Carolyn sat on the bed, an eerie sensation creeping over her. After Alex’s death, Jess had been deeply depressed. Carolyn knew her daughter well enough to know that giving up basketball was never a consideration. She’d been gone a long time tonight. And she didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Carolyn had been so distracted by Ivy’s departure and her fighting with Dan, she hadn’t noticed how dark Jess had gotten. She worried now that she might be teetering on the edge of an emotional cliff.
Though she didn’t believe in prying, due to the circumstances, she decided to search Jess’s room for clues as to where she might have gone tonight or what her mental state might be.
She opened several bureau drawers, finding nothing but clothes. Then she turned her attention to the nightstand. She slowly slid open its drawer. What she found wasn’t a big surprise, except for maybe the Bible. It was one she hadn’t seen before. Jess never seemed like the praying type, so it made Carolyn pause, but she wasn’t alarmed, because, she reasoned, Jess might be looking for answers after her boyfriend’s death. And before that she had mentioned going to the woods to pray and meditate. Carolyn just didn’t believe she really had been doing it. Until now.
She took out the Bible to find underneath it a mess of basketball cards. She was about to close the drawer when a white ribbon toward the back caught her eye. Jess didn’t own anything that was overtly feminine, including lace or, as she put it, “girly jewelry.” So a ribbon in her drawer immediately signaled something.
Carolyn dug deeper and saw that the ribbon was tying together a thick bundle of folded papers. It didn’t take long to realize they were notes, all written on similar pieces of notebook paper. Carolyn slid the top note out, feeling apprehensive—partly guilty for invading her daughter’s privacy and partly afraid of what she might find. She expected to see notes from Alex.
She quickly scanned a note in a girl’s handwriting, her eyes focusing on the bottom sentences: “I love you, Jess. I didn’t mean to, but I do – Stephanie.”
The blood drained from Carolyn’s body. She let go, and the note dropped to the floor. It all made sense now—the hiking trips, the hours they’d spent together in the afternoons. Jess saw Stephanie more than she did Alex.
One by one, Carolyn tore into the notes, reading expressions of love and affection. Her hand covering her mouth, she didn’t want it to be true, but she discovered that she had suspected something deep down for a long time. She had always feared for Jess in a way she couldn’t explain, knowing that she would be different in a small town where it wasn’t okay to be different. She thought things had changed when Jess met Alex. As it turned out, all of her efforts to protect her daughter were useless. What upset her most of all was that Jess had never confided in her. She’d kept her locked out of her life.
Was it her fault? she wondered. Of course it was. How could Jess confide in her when all she did was support the dictatorship of her husband? She couldn’t tell whom she was angrier at—Jess, her husband or herself. In a dizzying rage, she pulled each note out of the bundle, skimmed it and threw it onto the bed. It was a complete mess.
Headlights flashed in the mirror, and she quickly snapped off the light. Her mind was reeling. She wasn’t sure what she was doing exactly, sitting on Jess’s bed in the dark and holding her breath. Maybe hoping to wake up and discover it was all a dream?
* * *
Jess came inside the darkened house. There was a small line of light under her parents’ bedroom door, but otherwise the place seemed empty. She slouched into the bathroom, eyed herself critically in the mirror and closed her eyes as she listened to Stephanie’s car engine growing fainter in the distance. The lump in her throat grew; she was already missing her again.
When she came into her room and snapped on the light, she was startled to find her dazed-looking mother sitting on her bed, evidence all around her of the secret Jess had been keeping. Stephanie’s notes—intimate thoughts, feelings, precious treasures—had been flung about like the contents of an emptied trash can. She recoiled in shock.
“That’s private!” she yelled hoarsely.
Carolyn’s face was ashen as she waved the most damning note in Jess’s face. “How long has this been going on?” she screeched in a tone Jess had never heard before. It made her feel sick.
“It ended, Mom! I swear!”
“Then why are you holding on to these?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. I didn’t get around to throwin’ ’em out, I guess.” She scrambled to gather and fold each one as she spoke. Her heart was exploding in her chest. “Please don’t tell Daddy,” she begged. It wasn’t working. She tried to appear casual, that the notes were no big deal, yet she was refolding each one with great care and smoothing out the wrinkles in the ones that her mother had obviously crumpled up in her hand.
“Your father and I don’t keep secrets from each other,” her mother said coldly.
“No!” Jess wailed. She was so loud, her cry so horrific, it would have alerted the neighbors, if they’d had any.
Her mother looked at her with confusion. “I thought you and Alex…?”
“It’s complicated. I promise you, this is over!” Jess waved one of the notes, insisting on this point over and over, thinking it would erase whatever negative reaction her mother had had. “It’s over.”
Carolyn looked at the size of the bundle of notes Jess was holding in her hand. “It doesn’t look over.”
“It is,” she repeated. “I swear.”
“I’m glad.” Carolyn rose, walked to the doorway and stood there unmoving. “Your father will be home soon,” she said stiffly.
“No.” Jess kept shaking her head. Her mother had to understand or at least be willing to keep her secret. “You saw what he did to Ivy. Please, Mom! There’s no need to tell him about something that isn’t even happening. I told you, it’s over!”
Her mother seemed to be thinking about this. What is there to think about? Wasn’t it obvious what this would mean for Jess’s life?
“We’ll see.”
Those haunting words were the last thing Jess heard as her mother carefully shut her door. She stared at it in utter disbelief. For some misguided reason, she had thought there was a special kinship or understanding between herself and her mother, that they shared a sort of different perspective, a different way of being in the world. She had never considered the possibility that her mother’s desire to protect her marriage might outweigh her concern for her daughter’s happiness.
Jess walked slowly to her window. It was her go-to place whenever anything major was happening in her life. She’d stand there, look out at the valley
and try to find answers somewhere on the horizon. Tonight, of course, there was nothing to see but pitch blackness, the kind found only in the country. There were no streetlights here. Sometimes she found the darkness that surrounded the house comforting. Tonight, though, it was menacing…but not as menacing as the glow of headlights she could now make out in the distance. The sight sent her heart plummeting to her stomach.
She considered the possibility that she might have to run away. She grabbed her duffel bag from her closet and scanned her room for things she’d want to take with her. Just in case.
She gathered Stephanie’s notes first. After throwing some of her favorite shirts and jeans in the bag, she grabbed the photo of the two of them as kids and placed it on top before zipping it up. As she sat on the bed, she realized that, besides these few things, nothing else mattered. If she was going to get a fresh start somewhere else, she wouldn’t take anything that reminded her of the past. Except those notes, that photo. She’d never part with those. She wondered if Ivy, in her emotional state, had left anything behind that she wanted to keep. If only she knew where her sister was…
The headlights shone brighter through her bedroom window, flashing across her walls. The lights were followed all too soon by the slam of a car door in front of the house. She slid the duffel bag underneath her bed and peered out the window.
It was her father. She recognized the shape of the sedan just before the headlights were cut off. It reminded her of her daydream in church, about the four horsemen of the apocalypse coming for her…in this case, one horseman in a sedan was going to be quite enough.
She listened as he trudged upstairs and then, minutes seeming to last as long as hours, until she heard the scary sound of conversation in her parents’ bedroom. She couldn’t make out the words, but felt a certain relief that there was no yelling. Of course her father often didn’t yell as he was sharpening the blade, so to speak. She propped herself up on the pillows on her bed, her mind a mess of racing thoughts. They could kick her out, she supposed, but it would look suspicious, wouldn’t it? Her father would have to invent some major Christian Outreach Exchange program in England or someplace where no one could check. Bangladesh…
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