Asher chuckles. “Okay. So, you know that the media coverage surrounding the whole Pink Pony business has died down and now everyone’s focused on why you’ve disappeared?”
“I’ve hardly disappeared.”
“Just no phone or social media presence,” he counters, looking pleased with himself.
I shrug. “Social media is lame,” I answer. I tired of it well before this incident, given what happened with the original Photogate, when my classmate, Joy, assumed Roland and I were sleeping together. This just sealed the deal. I closed all of my accounts the day The Pink Pony story broke and I haven’t looked back.
I’ve never felt so alone in my entire life.
Asher looks around. “So you live here now?”
I pull my eyebrows in. “No. I’m just… staying here.”
“How’d your dad agree to this place?
“Interfaith initiative. And he was worried I’d be hounded at his. And at my mom’s too. My mom agreed this place was far enough away from CU in more ways than just distance.” I sigh, recalling the resigned look on Roland’s face when he realized my mom was right—I’d have to go away for a while. Until things died down.
“Why didn’t you come back when the media lost interest in the story?” Asher questions, seeming to read my thoughts.
I set down my fork. “That was a week after spring break. I may have been able to catch up in my classes, but socially? That would have been nearly impossible.”
Eden and Jonah kept texting me for a while, until I got an apologetic response from each of them a couple of days apart. Jonah’s simply said, I can’t talk with you right now. Soon, I hope. Eden’s was clearer. Angrier. She said her parents were stupid and couldn’t see facts in front of them. That Matt had struggled long before I’d showed up and I wasn’t even with him when he chose to go to the strip club. I told both of them I understood. Every once in a while Eden still emails me from a random account she only accesses from a public library downtown, whenever she can get there. I don’t tell Asher that, though. I know I should, but I don’t trust anyone right now.
“I don’t buy it,” is all he says.
“I’m not selling anything,” I spit back, pushing my plate away from me.
“Cut the shit, Kennedy,” Asher says. It startles me to hear him cuss.
“Excuse me?” I reply, rather indignantly.
He offers an unamused squint of his eyes.
“What is it you’re really hiding from?”
CHAPTER TWO
The Hurt and the Healer
Kennedy
The football player.
I want to say it. To tell Asher that he’s right. That the weight of everything that went down between me and Matt over the last year is too much for me to bear, so I’m hiding. From Matt, even if it means from everything else I’d set out to do at Carter.
“I didn’t expect everyone at CU to be perfect,” I start with a shaky voice. “I just expected them to try a little harder to fake it, I guess.”
Liar. You wanted them to be perfect and you wanted them to fail. At least until you fell in love with all of them.
I think about Joy and her very early betrayal. About the tension between Jonah and his father, and the red rage Matt felt toward his. The way Matt fell apart in front of me again and again and demanded he was no good for me. Even as a friend. How my RA Maggie, who I thought I’d be close with, didn’t really seem to know how to handle me, even though she’d once lauded me for my “potential.” I even look back at Jonah and Eden and how obviously perfect they were for each other, and how they didn’t pretend when it was over. Even if it meant an awkward car ride with me and Roland.
“You make it easy for people to be themselves around you, Kennedy,” Asher says, looking a little vulnerable for him. “Seems to me like you made some actual friends. Ones who didn’t feel like they had to pretend around you. You told me you wanted to come to CU to learn about Roland and about his life, and maybe a little about yourself. But, you can’t deny to me for even a second that you didn’t think you could swoop in and teach these simple-hearted-Jesus-freaks a thing or two about the real world.”
I pull my head back, my mouth gaping open. “Well, what a refreshing taste of judgment.” I push back my chair and stand, discarding my trash before exiting to an outdoor path. I know he’s going to follow me, so I choose somewhere that will give us some privacy.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he commands in a normal tone, but one that sounds so loud in this sacred space. He catches up to me on an uneven stone path and puts a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. I face him and his eyes are electrified. “Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll apologize. It wasn’t a judgment, Kennedy. It was an observation. Those are two different things. I think you can understand that,” he tests me. He’s been watching me all year. He knows how I watch people, filing away their interactions for later review. I’ve even told him as much in conversation.
I cross my arms in front of me. “So what if that’s what I thought. That’s not what I think now. I just wanted some friends. Some semblance of people to tether me to the earth while my family life was shaken apart. And my best friend, the football player, couldn’t be bothered.”
“Did you ever stop to think,” Asher starts in a sagely mellow voice, “that it’s not about you? Didn’t that become clear to you the night you found him carelessly drunk in a strip club? Did it ever occur to you that he might need you more than you need him?”
I hold out my arms. “I tried to help him, Asher!” I nearly shout. The little yellow birds nearby flutter away in startled displeasure. “I tried to get him to talk to me, but he wouldn’t even look at me, let alone listen to anything I had to say. And I did a good job of blowing any trust he had in me when I called my dad. Or when I followed him there in the first place, I guess. I don’t know…” I trail off into tears, grabbing the edge of the bench behind me and sitting on its cool stone.
Asher sits next to me with a heavy sigh. “I was afraid of that.”
“Of what?” I sniff.
“That you were trying to help him.”
I stare at him, gape-mouthed once again.
He takes mercy on me. “You,” he repeats. “Not Him.” Asher points to the shocking deep blue sky definitively.
“Matt doesn’t want Him,” I state. “He’s so angry.”
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t need Him. Hey, what has Roland said about all this?”
“Nothing,” I answer honestly. “He comes to the city, we hang out, we eat, he goes back to Asheville.” It’s been so refreshing spending time with Roland away from everything. It’s just been nice to be away.
Asher grins and gives a slight nod. “I like his style.”
“You’re weird,” I say. “And that doesn’t help explain how I’m supposed to use—” I cut myself off because there’s a question more pressing than the one I was about to ask. One I haven’t even brought myself to ask Eden.
“What?” Asher nudges me.
“How is he?” I force out in a tiny whisper, lowering my eyes to the tiny sprigs of grass poking through cracks in the hard stone of the path
“The football player?”
I nod. “Matt,” I confirm. It stings to say his name out loud.
Asher wraps his arm around my shoulders, giving them a light squeeze, but not answering.
“It’s not even that I liked him like that,” I start. “Even when he turned me down, we were still friends. Best friends. I felt like we’d be those decades-long friends no matter what, if anything, happened… romantically.”
“Maybe you will.”
I chuckle. “That would take a miracle.”
Asher takes his arm back. “Maybe. Maybe it’ll also take time.”
“You haven’t answered my question. How is he?”
Asher twists his lips around like he’s working out an appropriate answer. “Angry,” he says in a deep breath.
“Self destructing?”
He shakes his he
ad. “Doesn’t seem to be. He actually looks better than the last time I saw him before… everything. His hair is cut, face shaved. He’s working out a lot, getting in killer shape for what’s promising to be a heck of a football season. He’s their star,” Asher says with a wistful smile.
“But you say he’s angry. Have you talked to him?” Asher gives me a long look. “Come on, Asher. Throw me a bone,” I press.
“He still comes into the shop all the time. Even since the year ended. He’s taking a few classes this summer, I guess. To catch up on the nosedive his grades took.” Asher wipes his hands on his jeans. An anxious move I haven’t seen him exhibit before.
I look between Asher’s eyes and his hands. “What?”
“Consider coming to volunteer for my prison ministry this summer. I could help you arrange on-campus housing, or you could always just live with your dad,” he throws me a wink that doesn’t match the nervous hand-wiping habit. “I think it would be good for you, and it would help fill community service hours.”
“For students of CU,” I state flatly.
Asher pales slightly, his Adam’s apple bobbing once against a hard swallow. “You’re considering not coming back?”
“I thought that was just kind of a foregone conclusion,” I admit, without admitting I have no backup plan. Yet.
He shakes his head. “No one is a foregone conclusion, Kennedy. No one.” He says this with the intensity of someone saving a life. Maybe literally.
He stands and walks down a winding garden path. The monastery takes up almost a full city block, but it seems even bigger given the extra architectural design. The way the paths are sculpted into the landscape allows you to walk for far more than one block’s length. Confused, I follow him through the rich greens, trees cloaked with knotted vines, and past wrought-iron gates that lead to nowhere, covered in aggressive ivy.
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask, rather gruffly. “Just go back and face all the naysayers again?”
Asher stops and turns abruptly on his heels. “Kennedy, do you want to follow Jesus?”
“Yes,” I answer quickly. Without thinking.
Interesting development…
“I mean really follow him. Like walk away from all the crap, all the expectations, and into a life with Him?” He’s moving his arms around to illustrate all the throwing out of old things.
I swallow hard. “I don’t know,” I answer honestly this time. “I don’t know what it means,” I admit.
Asher’s shoulders sink, but not in defeat. He looks relieved as he puts his hands on my shoulders. “Then take the time to figure it out. Let me help you. Let Roland help you. Jesus never said following him would be easy. Just that it would be worth it.”
I sigh, resuming our walk forward. “What did he say about it? The church I grew up in did a great job of painting a picture of Christianity as a magic eraser for our trials.”
He chuckles, giving me a light squeeze which causes our bodies to bump into each other as we cross a small bridge over some bright white and orange koi swirling through the pond. Frogs dart past them and leap onto real, live lily pads.
“I have said these things to you,” Asher starts, “that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
“Bible quote, I assume?” I hardly feel bad about asking this question around Asher. I’m not fluent in scripture.
He nods. “John sixteen, thirty-three.” He stops, pausing to look around, realizing we’ve walked in a large loop. He gestures to the door to the atrium dining area.
“That hardly seems reassuring. It also doesn’t give an answer.”
He grins broadly. “It gives the answer, Kennedy. I’ll text you tomorrow and we can talk about the volunteer stuff, okay?”
“Okay. Hey, tell me you didn’t come all the way to NYC just to talk to me. I have a phone.”
He winks, shrugging. “Not the same. It’s good to see you, Kid. Think about it, okay?”
There were lots of “its” we discussed this afternoon, but I nod anyway. He means all of them.
I watch Asher turn on his heels and cross toward the parking lot in a few long strides. “Hey,” I call after him.
He turns around and shouts back. “Yeah?”
“How old are you? For real.”
Asher laughs. “Why?”
I shrug. “You seem wise. I need to know how much time I have for all the catching up I need to do to get on your level.”
“Wisdom and age aren’t the same thing. You’ve got plenty of wisdom, Kennedy. Right on track, I’d say.”
“Come on,” I plead.
“Twenty-three,” he answers without a fight.
I jog to catch up to him “So you’ve only been out of CU for a year?”
“Something like that,” he says with a weird look in his eyes.
“And you’ve opened the coffee shop and started the ministry in that time?”
“Took over the coffee shop, actually. And, yeah about the ministry.”
I shake my head and back slowly off the sidewalk. “You’re wrong,” I say. “I’ve got lots of catching up to do, spiritually and missionarily speaking.”
“Missionarily?” He calls me out on my made up word. “This isn’t a contest, you know.”
I laugh. “I’m from the greater Manhattan area. Everything is a contest.”
“You’re like forty-five minutes away from Manhattan.”
I stick out my tongue. “Not at the moment.” I gesture to our surroundings. “Asher?” I ask before he leaves.
“Yeah?”
“I think I might need them more than they need me,” I say of my friends at CU.
He shrugs. “Maybe you all just need each other. You’ll never know if you keep hiding.” He treks toward his car without a word, while I turn and make my way to my room with some sort of electrifying energy inside me.
Could I really go back to Carter University?
***
“I’m happy you’re all here,” I say, taking a long breath. Staring at the faces of my mom, Dan, and Roland, I know I just have to dive in. “Thank you for taking the time to come see me here. It seemed like the most neutral place.”
A mom, a stepdad, and a preacher walk into a temple…
“Of course, honey,” Dan says. “Anything for you, you know that.”
I know he means it, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him say anything like that before and can’t help but wonder if Roland’s presence affects Dan’s feelings of paternity with me. The facts are there: he’s been more of a father to me than Roland has, but none of us live in denial as far as I know, so I don’t think we need any reminders.
“I want to thank you guys for giving me the space… and finances… to spend the last couple of months decompressing. It’s given me a lot of time to think about things.” I cast a glance around my dorm-style room. It’s always felt spacious. Lots of natural light, muted walls decorated with intricate wall hangings in languages I can’t read. Spacious before I crowded it with three parents. I should be grateful that I have three whole people who want the best for me in this life. I am.
“What’s up, Kennedy?” Mom says with an air of irritation in her voice. She’s more a forgive and forget kind of person, and all the blowups we had over the phone in the past several weeks are as good as swept under the rug with her. I’m sure this waiting is making her uncomfortable.
“You love seeing Roland and my friends under fire, don’t you?” I’d accused of her on the drive to the temple. “Even if it means I’m shit on, too.”
“Nice language,” was all she’d replied.
“Christians swear, too, you know.”
“Yes, and they also apparently throw money at naked women.”
I didn’t even let her up into my room the day we got here, and she hasn’t visited me since. I told her not to and I actually meant it. I’m thankful for the space she gave me for once. Maybe she needed some, too.
“Asher came to see me last week,” I start. “My boss from Word,” I remind my mom and Dan, who look confused. They nod, slowly. “He’s got a prison ministry he runs just outside of Asheville, and he thought it might be a good experience for me to volunteer there this summer…” I trail off with the arch of Mom’s eyebrow.
No one is saying anything. Not even Roland, who’s been disturbingly quiet since this quaint gathering began.
“I know I could stay on campus if I wanted to, but I was—”
“Nope, not campus,” Mom cuts me off. “Absolutely not.”
“Buuuut,” I accentuate my irritation that she’s being all jumpy-to-conclusions, “if I do it, I was thinking it might be a better idea to stay at Roland’s.” I eye Roland, who looks up from his hands.
He’s being weird.
“I would be one-hundred-percent okay with that. You know that,” he says as if he’d prepared the sentence over a couple of days. He gives me a warm smile and I calm down a little.
“Have you checked your email?” Mom asks. I shake my head, and she hands me a few pieces of mail. “Here.”
My stomach sinks. In a moment of frantic emotions in the three weeks I was at home before heading to the temple, I’d written Cornell and Yale, explaining my “circumstances,” and asking if they’d consider my previous acceptances should I want to transfer for the fall.
“Open them,” she says.
“Wendy…” Dan seems to caution, as if they’d “been over this” already.
I don’t need to open them. It’s obvious by her calm expression that they are letters telling me my acceptances from over a year ago are as good as new.
“If you do the volunteer thing over the summer, you’ll want to make sure you leave time to visit those campuses again, and meet with—”
“I’m not going to either of them,” I blurt out, really grabbing everyone’s attention this time.
My mom sighs, as if I’ve exasperated her. “What’s your plan? A year off? I’m not sure if the schools will grant you another year deferment. Unless you spend the next year curing cancer or something.”
The Broken Ones (Jesus Freaks #3) Page 2