“Hang in there, bud.” Mr. Westman shakes my hand and heads into the kitchen.
Mrs. Westman throws both arms around me. “This is all going to be okay,” she whispers in my ear. “You’ll see.”
She takes my face in both her hands and stares directly into my eyes. Her look tells me that she’s sure this is the truth, and I desperately want to believe her.
I walk down the stairs to the front door. Bradley follows me out onto the front porch as my parents get into the car. We stand there, looking at each other. My hands are shoved in my jeans pockets. He punches my shoulder lightly.
“Oh man,” he whispers. “You must be in hell.”
If I say anything, I’m afraid I will cry. What’s worse, I’m afraid there isn’t anything to say. My parents will never let me come back here. I look at him, swallow the lump in my throat, and nod.
He holds out a hand. When I take it, he pulls me in for a hug. “Call me when the heat dies down?”
“Sure thing,” I whisper. “It’ll probably be when I get back from Brazil.”
“Cool,” he says.
And then there’s the moment when there’s too much to say to try to say anything at all. So, I shrug. It’s the best I can do. My dad starts the car. I look at Bradley one more time.
“Thanks for everything,” I say softly.
“You bet,” he says, and smiles.
I climb into the backseat and close my eyes. I can’t watch when we pull away. Since our friendship began, I never imagined it ending. I never imagined driving away from his house and not knowing when I would see him again. I never once imagined my life without him, or that it would hurt like this.
“You did an excellent job in there,” Dad says from the front seat. I turn my face toward the window so he can’t see the tears streaming down my cheeks. When I don’t respond, I hear him say my name.
“Aaron, are you okay?”
I’m getting used to telling him the truth, and I do it again. The honest answer slips from my lips in a single syllable:
“No.”
Megan’s hand grips my arm as I escort her to junior/senior banquet through the long corridors of the Ritz-Carlton on the Plaza. Her long chestnut curls are pulled back and slightly up. She is statuesque in a form-fitting gown of navy silk. The dress is simple and gorgeous, with a straight skirt—none of the poufy bows or garish colors that tend to make the average prom dress a tragedy.
“You look amazing,” I say as we wait for the elevator.
She does a slight turn from me so her leg slips out of the slit up the back of the gown. There are tiny seams whispering up the back of her stockings. Her heels are high, and she handles them expertly. I drop my jaw in response, and she turns back into my arm with a little laugh. “Had my mom stitch up the slit in the back about six inches before I brought it in for dress check.”
All girls have to take their dresses in to school to be approved for modesty by Mrs. Friesen or another teacher in a dress check before they can be worn to junior/senior. No strapless, no off-the-shoulder, all straps must be two inches wide, all skirts must cover the knee…. The requirements go on and on. Our combined armed forces have less stringent regulations for uniforms than the girls who must haul their dresses into the school in hanging bags to be modeled for a female teacher or Mrs. Friesen. Straps, hems and necklines are checked with a measuring tape to ensure compliance.
I lean back and steal another peek at the slit in Megan’s dress. “That’s a pretty big split.”
“Cut out the stitches after they approved it.” Megan smirks. “I figure I’ll be sitting on it most of the time we’re here. It’s not like we’ll be dancing or anything.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for Mrs. Friesen sneaking up with a tape measure.”
Megan laughs like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, and leans into my arm. It feels like none of the rest of this ever happened. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror between the elevators. My black tux is crisp and classic. I am seized by the urge to take Megan by the hand and lead her out of the hotel and into the Country Club Plaza; to get away from the room full of our friends waiting for us downstairs. I’m not sure I’m ready to face the whole senior class.
The limo was a few minutes late leaving her house because there were so many people to cram into the long black car. We all split the cost of the car, and there were so many pictures taken I still have purple splotches floating across my eyes from the endless series of flashes. I hadn’t seen anyone since the chapel service, so it was a big reunion of sorts. Megan and I hung back to make arrangements with the driver to pick us up after the banquet while everyone else went inside.
Now it’s only the two of us, making our way toward the ballroom. Our grand entrance is eminent.
“I can’t believe Dr. Spicer and Mr. Friesen let you come,” she says.
“It was contingent on my apology in chapel.”
“And how on earth did you get your parents to let you out of their sight for the evening?”
“For one night, can we not talk about my parents?” I ask.
An elevator finally arrives. We step inside, and as the doors close, she turns to face me, and pulls me toward her by my silk lapels.
“We don’t have to talk about anything at all,” she whispers.
We kiss long and hard. This is the only moment we’ve been alone together since I got kicked out of school, and we don’t pull away from each other until the elevator slows and stops on the ballroom level. We turn and straighten ourselves. Megan wipes at the edges of her lipstick with a perfectly manicured fingernail.
“Talking,” she says, sighing. “So overrated.”
I laugh as we step out of the elevator, and for the first time in weeks, I feel good. I’m glad Megan will be around this fall. We’ve both enrolled at the Bible college where my dad teaches. I move into the dorms at the end of August. I’ll only be twenty minutes away from home, but it’s a start.
As we walk toward the end of the hall, I can see the room full of our friends. I feel my stride begin to slow. I can hear music and see a flash of Erica’s blonde hair. Megan turns to look at me as I stare at the light from the doorway, spilling into the dimly lit hall.
“Are you okay?” she whispers.
I search myself for the answer.
What are they going to think of me? How will they look at me? Who am I now?
I don’t know how things will change when college starts this fall, but I know everything will change, and somehow, in this moment, that is enough. Like the light coming from the door at the end of this hallway, I see a light at the end of getting kicked out of high school. I don’t know what’s on the other side, but I know it will be different.
After all of the tears and frustration and hurt, there’s something inside me that remains unbroken. It’s strong, and whole; it’s the place where the best part of me resides, and that’s the part of me who is going to walk into the junior/senior banquet with my head held high in front of everyone two weeks after being expelled: the real me—the me who is learning not to hide anymore.
I turn to Megan and smile. She clasps my arm and smiles back.
“Showtime,” I whisper with a wink. Then we step through the door out of the dim hallway into the light, and turn every head in the room.
“You’re the only person on the planet who gets kicked out of high school, then goes to Brazil.”
Daphne has a point. It does seem odd.
“Dad accepted this speaking engagement a while back,” I explain. “A bunch of students at his Bible college have parents who are missionaries in Brazil. They’re all coming into the mission compound for a retreat and he’s going to speak every night.”
“Will you be near the beach?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“Sounds like a vacation to me.”
I wince and shift my weight on the chair I’m gingerly sitting on in the family room. “Well, the shots I got today are no vacation, let me tell you.”
�
��When will you get home?” Daphne wants to know. “I want to make sure we get to shop for college at least once when you get back.”
“We’ll be in Brazil for about a month, then we’re going to Memphis for a couple of weeks to see my grandmother.”
“Are you excited?” she asks.
I smile. “Yeah. Really excited. I’ve never been out of the country before. Well, once in Canada on a road trip to Oregon when I was little, but that doesn’t really count.”
“Do you have a book for the plane?”
“A couple, actually. I checked out those plays that the director at the Rep told me to read. I’m going to work on a couple of audition monologues while I’m there.”
“Please don’t drink anything out of a coconut on the beach,” she says.
“I promise.”
“When is Tri-City’s graduation?” she asks.
“Tomorrow.”
Daphne is quiet for a moment. “Does it feel weird knowing you won’t be there?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It does. They gave me my diploma and honor society chords in a cardboard box with the stuff from my locker. I stopped by school last week to pick it up. I hummed ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ on the way down the stairs to my car.”
“I wish you’d never left Blue Ridge.” Daphne sighs.
“But then I wouldn’t have this great story to tell my grandkids.”
Daphne laughs, and tells me good-bye.
I hang up the phone in the family room, then gather up the piano music I’ll be playing for the missionaries next week.
REVELATION
noun : communication of divine truth; an enlightening or astonishing disclosure
“The skies in northeastern Brazil are always ranked the most beautiful skies in the world,” says Luke. He’s the son of a missionary family here, and he’s showing us around. Luke is driving one of the two dune buggies we rented up the sloping side of a gigantic sand dune in a resort town called Jericoacoara. The sky is a gorgeous swath of blue crowded with cotton-ball clouds, the kind I used to search for shapes, and signs of Jesus.
When everyone piles out at the top of the dune, my brothers and sister race to peer over the top. Luke says it’s a 150-foot drop down to the flat beach below, but the fun part is that you can go running off the steep edge in a free fall until you land in the sandy slope.
Luke goes first to demonstrate, and my brothers and sister follow suit. With shrieks and whoops, they land in the steep sand after a twenty-foot free fall, their legs sinking up to their knees. I can hear them giggling and squealing as I watch them tumble and slide the rest of the way down to the beach to where Mom is waiting.
“Looks like it’s your turn, Aaron.”
I smile back at my dad. Things have been more normal this week. I’m glad that this trip was planned before I got kicked out of school. Watching Dad in his element, preaching and laughing, and talking in front of a large group of people has been good. It’s reminded me how much I love him; it’s reminded me that so many of my finest qualities are the ones I’ve learned from him. So many of the things I love—acting, singing, writing, drawing, playing the piano—are the things he taught me, and encouraged me to pursue and enjoy. I’ve realized how much I am like him as I watch him easily chat and laugh with our friends here. I’ve seen myself in his mannerisms and his humor and the way he winks and laughs when he tells a joke.
I’ve been worried that Dad and I don’t agree about everything anymore. More and more, I wonder if we agree about anything at all. Sometimes I worry that the guy I am growing up to be will wind up being impossible for him to love. Sometimes, I worry that I’ll never be able to be completely honest with him about who I really am in the deepest part of myself.
But today in the sun, under these endless skies, in a different hemisphere, a place where no one speaks English and the water circles down the drain in the opposite direction, it seems like anything may be possible. It feels like I might be able to be the person I really am right out in the open—without holding anything back. It feels like I might be able to let go of the lies that I’ve built around myself to protect Dad from the son that I actually am.
Maybe I can trust him to love me whether we agree or not.
“This is crazy,” I say, pointing at the edge.
“Sure looks like it to me.” He laughs. “But if you fall the wrong way and break your noggin, don’t worry. We’ll see you when we get to heaven.”
Dad says this with the funny country hick accent he uses when he’s kidding around, but I know he isn’t really joking. This is his truth, and always will be. He believes this with all his heart, and I’ll never change his mind.
What if you loved him just as he is?
It’s the first time I’ve ever turned the question on myself. I’ve been so focused on him accepting me I’ve never stopped to wonder what would happen if I accepted him.
In spite of the temperature, I feel a tiny chill run up my spine at this thought. I smile at Dad in the bright sun, and he grins back at me. It’s a smile I recognize, one that looks familiar because it’s so much like the one I see each morning in the mirror. My smile, my laugh, my height; all these things were his before they became my own.
Dad strolls over and puts his arm around me. He stands next to me, at the edge of the continent, staring out at the sky and sea.
Thousands of miles away from the place where we live our lives, I recognize something else in his smile, and in the tenderness of his arm on my shoulders—a new sort of understanding.
I understand that my father’s heart is full of answers about where we go when we die, and answers about how we should live before we do. He is sure of these things, as certain of them as he is that the sky is blue.
My heart is one full questions. I’m no longer certain about what will happen when I die, or if Jesus will really come back one day, bursting through clouds like the ones sailing over our heads right now. I have so many questions about living, too—one I’m so frightened to ask I’m not yet sure how to phrase it.
Yet somehow, as I stand here with my father in the sun, I understand that my heart full of questions and his heart full of answers, are both filled with something else:
Love.
This may be the one thing of which I am certain. I know this love will keep us working to understand each other no matter how hard it gets, or how long it takes. Whether we ever agree or not, we will always stand up to defend the things we believe, our truths—even if those truths are hard, even when those beliefs create more questions than answers.
This is the man Dad raised me to be.
We may disagree about where the truth lies, but somewhere in the midst of the questions, if we fight for each other instead of against each other, our love will bring us here; to a quiet place of transcendent beauty, to a simple moment of elegance—a moment I now understand has a name:
Grace.
I can’t find the words to share this with my dad. I’m not sure how to tell him all of these things inside my heart. I don’t know if he’ll ever understand them the way I do. Instead, I slip my arm around his waist and hold him, tightly.
“You going for it, Aaron?”
“Yes!” I shout into the tropical wind whipping up the dune from the water.
Dad steps back with a smile and I run as fast as I can toward the precipice. Sunlight bursts from the edges of towering clouds, and shoots dazzling beams across the surface of the water in both directions as far as my eyes can see.
The sand is warm against my feet, and as I reach the edge I feel my body take flight. My arms spread wide, and the sweet, humid breeze sweeps through my hair. I close my eyes as I leap, sailing in a high arc as the dune drops away beneath me.
Blastoff…
I reach toward the clouds and the azure sky beyond. For a split second, as I hang in the air, I feel the awe of true mystery, the wonder of not seeing where I will land, the thrill of knowing nothing for certain.
It’s a leap of faith.
It’s a rush of pure freedom.
It’s the feeling of rapture.
Acknowledgments
noun : a thing done or given in recognition of something received
Most first-time authors feel fortunate to find a single editor who believes in their writing. I was lucky enough to have two. Thank you to Jennifer Hunt, who adopted this snarling mutt of an idea, and to Kate Sullivan, who made it behave. No book is too much for Kate. She rehabilitates manuscripts; she trains authors. She is… the Book Whisperer.
Thanks also to the fantastic Little, Brown team who believed in this book and worked so tirelessly to make it the best it could be: Megan Tingley, Andrew Smith, Alvina Ling, Melanie Chang, Steve Scott, Victoria Stapleton, Zoe Luderitz, Leslie Shumate, Pamela Garfinkel, Barbara Bakowski, and Pamela Barricklow.
Thank you to my agent, Michael Bourret, for being fearless, frank, funny, and my friend.
David Lipsky once wrote, “A book, like a writer, has friends before it has readers.” Constrained by space (and under threat of the orchestra playing me off the stage), please forgive in advance this impersonal, alphabetical list of the best friends a book has ever had: Chad Allen, Gee Cee Bahador, Robin Benway, Stacie Chaiken, Rachel Cohn, Kathleen Dennehy, Anthony Glomski, Holly Goldberg Sloan, Brian Hedden, Sean Hetherington, Annie Jacobsen, Jenny Janisko, Allyn Johnston, David Levithan, Ian MacKinnon, Ken Madson, Jack Martin, John Ryan Martine, Sandy Matke, Peter McGuigan, Molly McIlvaine, Laura and Tom McNeal, Moira McMahon, Tim Miller, Michael Neely, David Ozanich, Rachel Parker, Gary Rosen, Francesco Sedita, Julie Strauss-Gabel, Kim Turrisi, Sam Wasson, Isaac Webster, Nicholas Weinstock, Jamie Weiss-Chilton, Tina Wexler, Alan Jay Williams, John Andrew Wolf, Sara Zarr, and John Ziffren. Each one of you has been pivotal at some point in the process.
Thank you to the authors whose books were my map for writing memoir: Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg, Anne Lamott, David Rakoff, David Sedaris, Ryan Van Meter, and Jeannette Walls. Your words were instructive whether you intended them to be or not.
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