by Amy Gentry
The rest of church was confusing to me. The hallways were hung with felt banners showing scenes from the Bible: women putting babies in baskets and floating them down the river, women carrying water jugs on their heads, women washing Jesus’s feet with their hair. But the sermons were always about traffic or primetime television or an article in Newsweek, which didn’t seem to have anything to do with the banners and the hymns and the Bible readings. Candyce and I would tune out and write each other notes on the church bulletins using the golf pencils in the backs of the pews, make little cartoons with speech bubbles. Her parents didn’t care as long as we stayed quiet.
After the service, Candyce and I would link arms and walk down to the Sunday school room, which had sofas and a big-screen TV and posters on the wall that looked like graffiti but with Bible verses. There was no sermon in Sunday school, just goofy songs, and then what Charlie called “real talk,” where we sat on the floor in a circle.
Sometimes it would start with a Bible verse, but pretty soon kids would begin talking about their problems. A lot of the problems were about girls: what they wore, who they danced with, whether they were godly and how godly were they and how much did it matter. One week they spent the whole time debating if it was okay for a girl to lie and say she liked her friend’s outfit if she actually hated it. I remember one guy in the eighth grade wanted to ask a Jewish girl out, and they talked for an hour about whether or not Jews were going to hell and, if they were, whether it was their responsibility to share Jesus’s message with them. Some kids were concerned about the silver James Avery crosses that were popular, whether girls should be wearing them if they were wearing them only for looks.
I watched from the sidelines. In our house, my mom was all-knowing, and my dad could answer any question in a way I understood. But it turned out there were questions I didn’t even know needed asking, a whole world happening in another dimension, and my parents didn’t seem to know anything about it. It turned out there were battles being fought all around me, that every word and action had a deeper meaning, and even the jewelry that a person wore could be related to something called salvation.
Charlie didn’t egg them on; he just sat on the floor and listened, nodding when the arguments got more heated. Then, toward the end of the hour, he’d finally start talking, and everybody would shut up. He’d explain that God was watching us, and that He loved us more than we could possibly love ourselves, and that all we had to do was try to be worthy of that love. Jesus, he said, had become a man so He could understand what it was like. He understood how hard it was not to sin, and He paid the ultimate price so we wouldn’t have to. Class dismissed.
In other words, Charlie didn’t give us any answers at all.
Candyce was happy to supply the answers that Charlie wouldn’t. “No offense,” she said one day while we were walking down the hall after service, “but the Bible says your parents are going to hell.”
That was the day I cried in Sunday school. I was so embarrassed I couldn’t even speak when Charlie asked if I wanted to stay afterward and talk. But I nodded: Yes.
There’s no before anymore. Everything in my memory is colored by what happened, like one of those old photographs where the tints are all weird. His offer to drive me home after Candyce rolled her eyes and said her parents were waiting in the breezeway, so could I please hurry up? His smile when he said Candyce and I shouldn’t tell our parents or anyone else he was driving me home, because there was a lot of insurance paperwork he’d have to fill out first. His assurance, when Candyce left the room, that he was willing to risk it—because I was special.
I mean, he didn’t come out and say that, but he implied it. I was special. Me, Julie, unchurched child of unchurched parents. Not even Easter-and-Christmas parents but never-ever parents.
When Charlie and I sat together in his office with the door cracked open, and I asked how God could damn my parents and Jane to hell, he told me that only God could judge, and anyone who said anyone else was going to hell was trying to do God’s job. And that wasn’t right.
“But not believing in God isn’t right either,” I said. “The Bible says you have to believe in Jesus.”
“The Bible also says it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven,” he said with a smirk. I wasn’t sure whether we were rich or not, but I knew for certain Candyce was; I’d slept over at her house enough times.
Then he said the important thing wasn’t whether anyone else was damned but whether you yourself were saved. He said I was very brave to come to church on my own. He said I had the soul of a seeker.
My whole life, ever since I could remember, I’d always hated the thought that no one could ever know what anyone else was feeling or thinking. The fact that no one could ever be inside my head with me seemed like the loneliest thing in the world. I wanted so bad for there to be something that could make those boundaries just disappear. Something so big it was like air, a magic flowing across the planet, connecting everyone and everything.
When Charlie spoke to me, I saw the boundaries disappearing.
Now I see a careful distance narrowing.
Charlie drove me home from church three times. Each time he dropped me off in the parking lot at the CVS at Kirkwood, and I’d buy something cheap—candy or a magazine—so that when I walked the four blocks home, I’d have an explanation for why Candyce’s parents had dropped me off there. I had the answer all worked out, but my mom never asked. It was spring, and she was usually doing something in the yard when I got home with my plastic CVS bag. I guess she never thought about how uncomfortable it was to walk four blocks in church flats.
In the parking lot of the CVS, my conversations with Charlie went deeper than the ones we had in his little cubby in the church office, where the church secretary kept barging in to use the copier. In the CVS parking lot, Charlie told me that he wasn’t sure he even believed in hell. He told me everybody wants a rule book, that people want an instruction manual to life. They want to be told exactly what to do. But Jesus came to destroy all that. Jesus came to erase the laws that were written on the stone tablets and write them on our hearts instead. He told me Jesus wants us to feel what’s right, inside, when we pray to Him. “God sent Jesus as a man,” he said. “To teach us how to be men.”
His hand rested on the back of my seat, and I could smell that he used some kind of prickly aftershave and see that he had blue eyes and that his blond eyelashes were longer than I’d thought.
“Never forget this,” he told me, and I haven’t. “People will always let you down. Candyce will let you down. Your parents will let you down. I will let you down. Only God will always be there for you.”
I nodded, staring into his eyes. His thumb was touching my shoulder, just a little. He took his hand off the seat back, letting out his breath.
I’d been holding mine too.
Back in my bedroom, I changed out of church clothes, but instead of going downstairs, I crept into bed and pulled the covers over my head.
God sent Jesus as a man to teach us how to be men.
Who had God sent to teach me how to be a woman? Was it Charlie?
When I went back to Sunday school the next week, he was gone.
One of the church elders, a woman in her fifties, ran the Sunday school class. She told us that for personal reasons, Charlie had had to resign. It was unlikely he’d be able to return to the position, she said. They were already beginning the search for a new youth pastor, and in the meantime, fellowship would be suspended and Sunday school would be taught by members of the Christian Education committee.
“Can we say goodbye?” someone asked.
“I’ll get a card,” Candyce said. “We can all sign it.”
“That would be very nice,” the elder said. “Now, get out your Bibles and turn to First Corinthians, chapter thirteen.”
Even I knew that verse. It was printed on the church bulletins and embroidered on some of the tapestries
in the halls. But this time, the words seemed to be pointed straight at me: If I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
Charlie had said he would let me down. And he was right.
With Charlie gone, church got very boring, and I stopped sleeping over at Candyce’s house. At school, I went out for the track team and made it. I was not a good speed runner, but I could run distances, and I could propel myself into the air and sail over the hurdles with my legs in front of me. Looking around at the girls I’d be training with over the summer, all of us standing on the dusty track, our skinny legs sticking out of nylon shorts, I knew I didn’t need Candyce or church or Charlie anymore. In eighth grade, I would have friends, real girlfriends who would show me how to brush my hair, put on makeup, and talk to boys. The girls on the track team had sleepovers and away meets; they painted racing stripes and Nike swooshes on one another’s faces, finished each other’s sentences. They were a tribe. When I was in eighth grade, my life would finally begin.
A few months later, I got the chat invitation.
His name was John David. There was no picture, just an outline of a head with a question mark inside it. According to his Facebook page, he was sixteen, and he had zero friends on his profile.
I tried to think of all the people I knew who went to high school. My friend Angela had an older brother named John; I’d had a crush on him once. Or maybe John David was somebody I knew from school who was just lying about his age, or some mean girls playing a trick on me. Maybe I was going to get reeled in with some phony “secret admirer” plot, and then they would take screenshots and post them for the whole school to see. Something like that had happened to a girl I barely knew, Rebecca. There were other things that had happened to Rebecca too. I unfriended her on Facebook so I didn’t have to see them.
I refreshed the screen, half expecting to see the profile’s friends shoot up to the hundreds, so that I’d know he was fake, a bot, an empty outline. Nothing happened, except the question mark took a little longer to load the second time. He couldn’t contact me until I had accepted his offer, so I clicked on the question mark and a chat box popped up.
Hi. Who are you? I typed. I always spelled out words and added punctuation and capitals, even in chats with friends. I was reading The Diary of Anne Frank and couldn’t stand how ugly most of my and my friends’ writing looked in comparison with those sentences from a girl our age.
The chat box was blank for a few minutes. Then it started blinking as the person on the other end typed. The other person was not into spelling things correctly or capitalizing.
i don’t want to give my real name
Do I know you? I wrote back.
There was a long delay while he typed, long enough to make me think he was typing from a phone.
we had amazing conversations together
I started to type another question, and then the chat box blinked again:
soul of a seeker
A wave of heat went up my body, starting from my toes and rushing up to my face until it was burning.
I typed, Charlie? but stopped myself from pressing the Enter key just in time and deleted it.
julie? u there? I let out my breath slowly and typed: I think I know who you are. You gave me a ride home a few times. That sounded like I could be talking to a sixteen-year-old. I wondered how old he really was.
yes
Where are you now? You left without saying goodbye.
i had my reasons. u dont know my side of things
Side? I frowned and typed again: Where are you now?
i can’t see you right now or tell u where i am. i have reasons. u were always smarter than the others. wanted to get back in touch.
It’s nice to hear from you, I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
There was another pause.
god is with u all the time. i can see HIM all around u like a halo
My scalp prickled and I could feel his eyes on me suddenly, almost like I’d felt them on our last car ride home together. I wondered how far away he was.
Why did you leave? You left without saying goodbye.
i promise ill tell u the whole story soon but please for now just talk to me. i’m lonely
I tried to picture him in front of a computer screen or hunched over a phone somewhere, but I couldn’t. I typed out the words I miss you, but then I backed the cursor up over them until they were gone and typed Everyone misses you instead.
He responded, i miss u too, just as if he could hear the real sentence in my head. Something really important has happened to me since we talked. i’m going to tell u everything. god has a plan for me and for u too
This time he didn’t have to tell me not to tell my parents. He knew I wouldn’t, and I knew he knew, and although the word God sent the old thrill spiking through me, it was Charlie’s faith in me and the greatness of his need that caught the lightning-flash and amplified it, expanded it, made my entire body warm.
Go on, I wrote.
I saw the face of god, julie. he wants something from me. From you too.
From me? I could only retype the words.
from all of us, he wrote, after a long time.
The Plan felt like a special project we were working on together, or a game. Whenever I was chatting with Charlie—or John David, as I began to think of him—I existed in another dimension. In the beginning, I guarded the screen—my desktop monitor was visible from the doorway, and I jumped every time the floorboards creaked in the hall outside. But then I began to feel comfortable existing in both worlds at once: the ordinary world, which consisted of me eating dinner and finishing my homework and going to track meets after school, and the world of the Plan.
In the ordinary world, I was Julie, maker of As, runner of hurdle races. My grades stayed high, and I didn’t drop my afterschool activities. That was part of the Plan: No dramatic behavior changes. I worked hard to keep my weight from dropping too, but the pounds seemed to be falling off no matter how much of my dad’s lasagna I ate. My mom blamed track and gave me extra helpings at every meal, but I knew it was the Plan working in me, preparing me for something John David called “privations to come.”
In the ordinary world, I was ordinary Julie, but in the Plan, I was radiant. He told me that my loveliness was like a bruise in the exact center of a blinding light, like a sunspot. The fire of God shone around me. Even though we never met in person, never video-chatted—too dangerous, he said—I knew he could see me. He said he saw me when he closed his eyes and prayed; he said he saw me standing in front of the sun with it shining all around me. And there were things he seemed to know about me that he could not possibly have gotten from the Internet. He knew, for instance, when I started shaving my legs. I had to, for track; even though my leg hair was barely there, just a glimmer in the sunlight, really, the other girls would have thought I was strange if I didn’t shave. He didn’t like the thought of me taking a blade to my legs. He told me that afterward, I wouldn’t need to do things like that. Things to appease the world.
I didn’t know if he was close enough to be literally watching me or whether he was finding out some other way. I didn’t want to know. Instead, I started pretending he could see me all the time so I could wear his gaze like a secret under my clothes, against my skin. It made Ordinary Julie a more exciting role, somehow. I performed my ordinariness for him: putting on lip gloss in the bathroom, giggling with other girls, reading To Kill a Mockingbird with my feet propped up on the ottoman, helping Mom with the dishes after supper, brushing my hair, writing in my diary—all for him. I even made up some diary entries that were totally ordinary, just listing what I did during the day, things Ordinary Julie did. I pretended to have a crush on this guy at school, Aaron. I felt sure Charlie knew how well I was performing my role, and I began to slip in little hints and references that only he would understand. I drew sheep on my binder and imagined him laughing at the joke. At the pep rally I got a sun painted on my cheek so he�
�d see it and understand the message. No matter how much I looked like a teenage girl to the others, he was out there somewhere, and as long as he was watching, I was divine.
The only time the two worlds touched each other was under the covers at night. Then I would try to whisper “Jesus,” and “John David” would come out instead. Once I dreamed I was falling, flying apart, breaking into a million pieces, becoming the darkness at the center of the light. I clenched my teeth and waited for it to be over. When I opened my eyes, there were red stars.
That’s when I realized I’d been in love with Charlie. A wave of shame rushed over me. It was stupid, the whole thing; a crush too embarrassing even to think about on someone who could never think of me that way, because I was a stupid little kid.
Or at least, that’s how it had been—then. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. The image of Charlie, faded now, seemed smaller than it had before. It had been months since I’d even seen his face. I did not have a schoolgirl crush any longer, because I wasn’t a schoolgirl; that was Ordinary Julie. I was divine.
In our chats, the outline of a head and shoulders in the profile window reminded me of a blue shadow cast on the sidewalk by someone you can’t see. The shadow was John David, and the everyday, ordinary Charlie who cast the shadow was no more important than the ordinary, everyday Julie. The embarrassing feelings were all for Charlie. John David was different. He was part of the light, surrounded by light. Not a shadow, but a real person standing directly in front of the sun, a person whose shape you can barely make out when you squint, hidden in blinding brightness. Tears came to my eyes, and there was a warmth in my chest, burning in my heart. I closed my eyes and saw the form of John David shining, haloed, a bruise in the center of brightness. He had already changed me. Walking toward him on the road made by his shining, I melted into him, and our darkness became pure light.