I looked at the ground. Was she making fun of us?
Jace glanced at me and said, “We aren’t sure what we are going to focus on.”
“Well, you two should have had that decided already,” she responded harshly. She shook her head and wrote “the Bible” in the blank. “I’d like to see you two after class.”
My heart curled up in my throat a little and we left to sit down. I couldn’t get Jace to look at me for the rest of the class period. I wondered what Mrs. Whitaker had to say to us.
But if I was being truthful, I was a tiny bit more excited than I was scared. It seemed too coincidental for him to pick the very topic I’d wanted yesterday. I would have never guessed Jace read the Bible.
All I knew was I might possibly have more in common with this kid than I thought.
Lost in thought, I barely heard the bell ring at the end of the class. It took the whole hour to get the project explained to the rest of the class and get the other groups’ projects written down. My heart picked up pace again as we waited by her desk until the rest of the class filed out.
She looked up from the papers she was grading and set down her pen. Her hands were folded on the desk in front of her.
“Look,” she began. “I understand you two are trying to be…creative…but this project is strictly nonreligious. Honestly, I have no idea how you are going to manage to put Christianity into a history project.” She chuckled.
For the second time already, I had nothing to say.
“We are aware, Mrs. Whitaker. But can we still have the topic?”
Mrs. Whitaker shifted in her seat.
“Well, yes, I suppose.” She didn’t look happy about it at all. “You can go now,” she said quickly, returning to her papers.
The classroom was already starting to fill up with students for the next class. I grabbed my bag quickly and raced out the door. I didn’t bother waiting for Jace.
My friends barely noticed my sour mood at lunch since it had been a common mood of mine lately. Mrs. Whitaker’s little talk bothered me. As excited as I was, she managed to dampen my enthusiasm within five minutes. Why did the Bible have to be so secretive? Why didn’t anyone else talk about it? And why was Jace, the egotistical jerk, so interested in it?
I needed water. My head was throbbing.
I pushed past the developing lunch line to get to the water fountains over by the restrooms.
“Ugh, can people just let me through? I’m not going to take your spot, for goodness’ sake,” I grumbled to myself. I rounded the corner quickly, hoping to get out of the chaotic cafeteria.
“Ow!” I smashed into another person coming around the corner.
“Sorry, I—” I began, but then I saw who it was.
“What is it with you and corners?” Jace glared at me.
“What is it with you in general?” I muttered under my breath. His emotions were up and down.
Jace started to walk away but then stopped. “What was that?”
I exhaled. “Nothing.” I started towards the water fountain but I heard Jace’s footsteps as he followed me.
“No. If you’ve got something to say to me, say it to my face.”
I rolled my eyes and turned to him. “Alright. Maybe if you didn’t act like you hated me all the time, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
Jace’s eyes blazed. “What do you mean if I didn’t act like I hated you? You’re such a hypocrite.”
My stomach felt like a pot of boiled water. The anger was rising to the surface like hot bubbles.
“No, I’m not! If you didn’t have such a lousy attitude all the time, we wouldn’t have our teacher bearing down our backs!”
“Maybe if you had actually come up with something decent, I wouldn’t have had to think of something last minute.”
“Oh, come on,” I whined. “You completely forgot it was even due today.” Last minute? So he didn’t really want to do this project?
“That’s because I could care less about anything that has to do with you,” he shot back.
“See?! I was right. You do hate me.”
“What’s your problem?”
“Nothing. What’s your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem!”
“Yes, you do.”
“Um…Jace?”
We both spun around to see Camron, one of Jace’s friends, peering over at us from the crowded lunch line. The silent crowded lunch line.
“Oh…” I breathed. The entire lunchroom had gone quiet. Someone dropped their fork.
Jace cleared his throat and nodded to a group of girls staring at him. He didn’t give me so much as a backwards glance before he disappeared somewhere in the mess. He left me in the middle of the hallway.
I scurried over to the bathrooms to vanish behind a restroom stall.
When I got home, my Dad was already lying on the couch, an old episode of I Love Lucy playing on our TV. He was staring at the screen like he wasn’t watching it at all.
“Dad?” I set my backpack down and kicked off my shoes. “How long have you been home?”
“Since 8:00 a.m.”
“Did you even go to work?”
He didn’t answer me. I walked over and sat next to him on the couch. “Are you okay?”
He sighed. He had bags under his eyes, and he looked tired. “I’m fine, Gen. Don’t worry about me.”
“I thought you weren’t going to stay home anymore…”
“Don’t worry about me,” he repeated.
I sat next to him quietly, Lucy’s laugh interrupting the silence.
I loved my dad’s laugh. It was thick and wonderful, and it made me want to laugh with him every time I heard it.
But that was just it. I hadn’t heard it. Not for a while anyway. He used to laugh a lot when Mom was around, but ever since the accident, his smile hardly reached his eyes. We were just…living…living a dead life.
You’d think a couple years of space in between would fix everything, but it didn’t.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dad always told me I wore my heart on my sleeve. Hiding yesterday’s messiness was more difficult than I could handle. But I really didn’t want Aven to ask about Jace or Dad, so I avoided her as much as I could.
The final bell rang after last period, and I was the first out the classroom door. I couldn’t wait to get out of here and go home. The stampede in the hallway only irritated me even more. I stumbled behind a large mass of fifth graders blocking the hallway.
A shoulder rammed into my backpack that was slung over my right arm. I turned around to glare at them, but they already had a hand on my wrist and were dragging me towards the locker rooms. The door slammed behind us as they shoved me inside.
Okay, now I was really mad.
“What are you do—” I spun around and stopped.
Jace?
He dropped the hood from his head and tufts of hair stuck in different directions. “Look, okay, can you just hear me out before you go all insane on me?”
I glared at him for the second time. “Alright, but you started it.”
Jace dropped his hands at his sides. “Can we go five seconds without arguing?”
I shut my mouth and shuffled my feet. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Okay then, goodness.” He rolled his eyes.
I crossed my arms. “Can you please tell me why you shoved me into the boys’ locker room?”
“I had nowhere else to take you. Besides, team sports don’t meet today.”
This was not the person I wanted to talk to right now. “Okay, so? What do you want?” My voice sounded way more annoyed than I wanted it to sound.
Jace cringed and put his hands in his pockets. “I guess I deserve that.” His gaze faltered a little. He sighed. “I really think we got off on the wrong foot.”
I raised my eyebrows as if I was saying, “You think?”
He leaned forward and rocked on his heels, his hands still in his pockets.
&n
bsp; “Annnnd I want to be better. Not only because I’m sick of fighting, but because we need to be able to work together if we are going to pull off this project.”
I paused. “So…you still want to do it?”
Jace frowned at me. “What do you mean? Of course I do.”
“You told me it was a last-minute choice. You blamed me for it right in front of the whole cafeteria.”
Jace ran his hand through his hair. “I know…but that’s not how I really feel. Look, can we just try? We’re already this far into it.”
I glanced at him warily and pressed my lips together, thinking. “Okay…we can try. But if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what else to tell you. This stuff has high stakes. We could lose Honors—”
“I know I know,” he put his hands up to interrupt me. “Just…thanks for doing this with me. It’s a lot to ask.”
Or was it? Perhaps he didn’t know I wanted to do this as much as he did.
Jace sidestepped to open up the entryway so that I could get through.
“After you,” he said awkwardly and I nodded and pushed open the door to the locker room. The hallway was almost empty as the last of the students ran to the buses.
“See you around,” he called after me as I sprinted down the hallway. We ran in opposite directions.
Once I reached the bus, I shook my head to clear it. “See you around,” I whispered to myself, and the bus lurched forward as the doors closed behind me.
Chapter Forty
“His face turned pale and he was
so frightened that his legs became weak
and his knees were knocking.”
Daniel 5:6 NIV
I was nervous to go to class the next morning. I’d seen such a different side of Jace yesterday. I didn’t know what to think of him anymore, and he was far from the boy I thought I knew.
Aven hustled past me in the hallway, barely noticing I was there.
“Aven!”
She stopped, slinging her other backpack strap over her shoulder. “Oh hey.”
I knew I had been kind of avoiding her lately, but it didn’t mean I didn’t want to talk to her. There was just a lot that was going on. I didn’t want to drag her into it.
I wanted to tell Aven all of this, but I didn’t. Instead, I said, “How’s it going?”
“Good, good,” she said. “How’ve you been?”
“Not bad. Could be better. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But hey, we should catch up soon, okay?”
I smiled. “Yeah, we should.” And I meant it.
“I’ll catch you at lunch. I gotta go find Alex.”
My stomach knotted. Of course. Alex.
I got a drink from the water fountain and walked into first period not knowing what to expect.
“So, what did you have in mind?” I set my books down and plopped into my seat. Jace looked different today. More…alive. The situation with Aven this morning instantly left my mind as Jace started talking.
“A diorama,” he answered immediately. “Of the first chapter of Genesis.”
I glanced at him carefully. “You mean, the whole ‘God creates the world’ thing?”
“Exactly that.”
He slid a sketch only halfway finished across the table to me. The part that was done looked complicated. The elephant I saw on his paper a few days ago was now finished and shaded. It was only a small part of the detailed drawing. I barely knew what I was looking at. But I said, “Let’s do it,” despite the anxiety growing in my stomach.
Maybe I had cold feet for a reason. And that wasn’t the only thing that was odd this morning. Jace was…nice. All hostility from yesterday had left his eyes. I didn’t understand how a person could go from hating me to being normal in so short of a time. Jace was a puzzle to me. A 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
“What?” Jace frowned at me.
I was staring at him, mentally piecing him together. “Nothing,” I shook my head. “When do we start?”
My head was spinning and my stomach dropped like a stone in a bottomless pit. The sensation lasted a moment but felt like a century, and I closed my eyes tight.
The sound of laughter and music was the only thing that made me open them. It took a moment for my eyes to focus, but I could tell the room was massive before I saw it. Voices echoed against the marble and absorbed into the thick tapestries hanging from the ceiling to the floor. A long table stretched across the room, seating noblemen in velvet robes and women wearing braided cocoons of hair intertwined with gold and jewelry.
It was a banquet hall.
My reflection caught in a shining goblet placed in front of me. My hair was done up, showing off the gold necklaces draping from my neck and the matching earrings hanging as far as my shoulders. The burgundy dress was soft against my skin and fitted every curve in my body. But while servants scurried to and from hidden hallways with plates of roasted lamb and baked apples, I noticed an energy in the room that seemed to contradict the merry laughter spreading throughout the crowd.
Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
I moved to get up, but in my haste, I knocked over a miniature golden statue sitting on the tablecloth at my plate. I reached to pick it up from the ground. It was a cow with wings and a snake tail. An idol.
I had to get out of here.
A voice booming above the noise froze me in my tracks. I quickly sat back down again as the crowd quieted. Now was not the time to make a conspicuous exit.
“Welcome, fellow nobles, wives, and concubines. Welcome.”
I turned towards the head of the table on the other side of the room. A man adorned in robes, silks, and gold beamed at the rest of the audience.
He continued. “It is a true honor for you all to be present and partake in the feast set before us. We shall drink from the cups of the temple of Jerusalem and praise our gods tonight. There may never be another feast you remember.”
The dinner guests cheered and a chant rose in the room.
“King Belshazzar! King Belshazzar!”
A parade of servants appeared from the hallways carrying silver trays of wine. They gleamed under the torchlight. One servant handed a goblet to the king and its contents splashed over the edges as he raised his glass above the table.
“May we drink away the stars—for prosperity, wealth, and to the gods.”
“For prosperity, wealth, and to the gods.”
I watched him bring his goblet down to the table and sit down. The guests erupted in a noisy chatter. Some of their conversations were already slurred from alcohol.
Okay, now was my chance. I had to leave now.
But as I rose, my eye caught a change in the king’s expression. His eyes shifted to the left by a slight centimeter, but it only took that much for his face to pale instantaneously. His eyes turned into two matching moons and terror froze his mouth open. My body went rigid and someone in the crowd screamed.
A woman with the face of a ghost shouted above the feast and pointed a shaking finger to the wall behind the king. I didn’t have to look. The whole room seemed to turn in unison, as dead as if it had been shot in the head and rolled over with its dark, unseeing eyes.
My heart nearly stopped.
Chapter Forty-One
“Suddenly the fingers of a human hand
appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall.”
Daniel 5:5 NIV
A hand—connected to nothing but stale air and a silent room. It had its index finger pointed out towards the stone, moving in slow circular movements. Only when it moved to the right did I see what was left in its wake.
Letters.
It was writing on the wall.
I had never seen anything like it. A magician’s trick, it seemed, but suspended so high in the air, illuminated by nothing but torchlight that passed through its translucent skin, and in a time period that barely knew how to understand science?
No, this wasn’t magic. This was real. Which made it that muc
h more frightening.
The hand kept tracing slowly across the wall, finishing a letter and then moving on to a different one. Then, when the last letter seemed to be completed, the hand vanished in the air as if it had never been there in the first place.
A man seated next to me whispered, “What does it say?”
I shook my head, squinting in the dimness of the torchlight.
“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin,” a soft voice from the table spoke into the silence.
The lights went out.
My stomach lunged in my throat as I started to free fall; my body and mind lost track of the space around me as darkness closed out the light. I flipped over several times, a human caught in a black, swirling current. But then my body hit cold stone, and my senses went dark once again.
I don’t know how long I’d been lying there, but it was long enough for the warmth in my body to seep into the icy floor below me. I was shivering uncontrollably. I tried to blink to adjust my eyes to the darkness, but there was barely a lick of light to combat it.
I sat up, slowly, careful to check every part of my body in case something was throbbing or bleeding or worse. The air was musty and dank, as if I was underground.
Was I underground? I couldn’t see a thing. I turned my head to scan the blackness around me, searching for any sign of light. And then, there it was. A small slit in the black sky above let in a sliver of light onto the stone floor several yards ahead of me.
I rose to a crouch. My eyes were set on that little hint of light, but the atmosphere felt…wrong. My spine tickled and the hairs on my arm sent a domino effect of goose bumps up my arms.
I may…or may not…be alone.
I crawled a few steps forward and paused. Waiting, listening. When nothing happened, I took a few more tentative movements towards the light.
And then a soft body brushed past me.
I froze, fear rising in my throat and paralyzing my heart as it tried to beat. Images burst into my mind. Monsters with white fangs slicing their way through my skin or a bony hand grabbing my arm. It took everything in me not to shudder. My ears tuned in to the sounds around me, my senses now sounding alarms in my head.
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