Thou Shalt Not Road Trip

by Antony John

  Unfortunately, they’ve guessed right.

  I take a detour along another alley and approach the church from the back. There are about a dozen news vans in the parking lot, but everyone is so busy that they don’t even glance at me as I weave through them. I even filch a clipboard from a deck chair, and when I barge through the throngs outside the church office door, scribbling on the clipboard, no one stops me.

  I knock on the door, and Andy opens it immediately. He looks flustered—his robes are too heavy for a sticky summer day—and when he sees me his eyes grow wide. Before he can say my name, I hand him the clipboard. “I need your signature,” I say. “Maybe you could do it inside?”

  He nods blankly. “We’ll, uh, go into my office.”

  I’m through the door before the words are out of his mouth, and it’s not until I turn around to close it that someone recognizes me. The door shuts with a resounding clunk, followed by a chorus of frustrated shouts outside.

  “Wow,” says Andy. “You’re pretty cool about this, huh?”

  “No. I just can’t let them win.”

  He gives me a hug, but pulls away quickly. “Do you smell something?” he asks.

  “It’s me. Sorry. There wasn’t time to shower.”

  “To shower? How long do you take? And why is there writing on your arm? Never mind, the important thing is that you’re here. Your publicist said you were having second thoughts, but that you wouldn’t let us down.”

  Huh. Score one for Colin.

  We walk to the church office. The dark oak cabinets and the tiny squares of glass in the window look so familiar, but somehow so different. I always felt as though I belonged here; now I feel like an imposter. I don’t even sit down until he points to the armchair beside his desk, on which a copy of Hallelujah has pride of place.

  “It’s good to see you, Luke. Kind of a crazy week, huh?”

  I actually laugh at that—a wry, angry laugh. “Yeah. Crazy is right.”

  He sits across the desk from me and presses his palms together in prayer pose. “During your interview with Pastor Mike, why did you say everything in Hallelujah is true?” he asks.

  “I don’t remember the interview. I was really nervous, so before I went onto the set, I prayed; after that I got into this kind of zone where everything just happened.”

  “But you’ve seen it since, right?”

  “No. But you obviously have, so why didn’t you call me out on it?”

  “How could I? I didn’t know it was made up.”

  “You thought I’d spent a month alone in the desert?”

  “No. I just didn’t know that was in the book.” Andy picks up a pen, spins it around, and puts it down again. “See, I didn’t actually get around to reading Hallelujah until this week.”

  “What? But you gave it to Pastor Mike.”

  “Because of the response it got from our youth groups. They loved those first few pages, and I thought Pastor Mike would too. He took it from there.”

  “You critiqued the whole of the first part—covered it in red pen. You practically rewrote it.”

  His expression is caught between amusement and concern. “That wasn’t me.”

  “Then who was it?”

  He may only be in his thirties, but his expression makes him seem a hundred years older and wiser than me. “It was Fran.”

  It takes me a moment to remember to breathe; even then, I don’t understand. It makes no sense. And yet it makes total sense.

  “When you gave me the first part of the book, I passed it along to her,” he continues. “I knew something weird was going on with you two when she bailed on the church retreat, so I didn’t really expect her to read it. But she did. Liked it too. Said it was funny and heartfelt, but there were problems. So I told her to fix them. I had this plan that when she was done we’d all meet and discuss it. Then she told me she wouldn’t even hand over the manuscript if you knew she’d had anything to do with it.”

  He takes a sip from a tall glass of water on his desk. Then he runs it across his forehead.

  “I told her I wasn’t going to lie to you,” he continues. “But then you never asked who’d made the comments, and so I respected her wishes and didn’t tell you. I figured sooner or later you’d come back to me and follow up on the ones you disagreed with, and then I’d be able to tell you I had nothing to do with them. But you never did.”

  “That’s ’cause they were great changes.” I stare at the copy of Hallelujah just in front of me. How many of the phrases in it are Fran’s, not mine? “What about the second part? You didn’t give her that too, did you?”

  “Yeah. But she didn’t critique it. I’m not even sure she read it.” He shrugs. “It was around the end of the summer, and things had gotten bad for her, remember?”

  Yes, I remember. I remember everything. And now I think I understand everything too—not Fran’s fictional version of events, or even her father’s simplified account, but the cold, hard truth.

  “Hey, Luke.” Andy interrupts my thoughts. “It’s a good book, okay? I read it this week. Haven’t laughed so hard in years, and I mean that in a good way. What you said in the interview with Pastor Mike was the mistake, not writing Hallelujah. The context may have changed, but the text is the same. Don’t lose sight of that.” He pats my hand. “I’m going to check on things in the church. I’ll come back when it’s time.”

  I’m already sobbing by the time he closes the door—big, fierce tears that shake me. I thought the puzzle had been solved, but I was only seeing half the picture. Now that the picture is complete, I can hardly bear to look.

  But if I’m going to change, I must look: at the day I turned away from her at the church retreat, and showed her I was no different than her parents; at the day she read the first part of Hallelujah, and saw in verse after verse just how happy she made me; at the day she read the second part—an angry monologue aimed like an arrow at her heart. What could her parents have said that would’ve hurt as much as those words? Nothing at all. No, if I want to uncover the culprit here—the one who drove Fran to hurt herself over and over—all I have to do is look in the mirror.

  I take off Matt’s T-shirt and look for something less pungent to wear, but I can’t find anything. So I put it back on correctly, my chest proudly proclaiming that beer is not just for breakfast. At the very least, it’ll distract people from all the other reasons they hate me.

  With nothing to do but wait, I open Hallelujah and begin to read. I expect to loathe it—almost want to—but instead a strange thing happens: I laugh through the tears. I recall how great it felt to write during those first inspired days. A few pages later, the mood shifts, and I remember how this felt too—the confusion and frustration. It’s painful to read, and even more painful to know that Fran read it too, but I still find myself nodding after every few sentences, as though what I wrote in that fevered state a year ago still hits home today. I’m older now, sure. Wiser too, I hope. But I can’t help feeling that my fifteen-year-old self has something to tell me: perfect or not, this is all just life. And whether or not I face up to my critics, life will always be beautiful and messy. Always.

  Maybe that’s a lesson worth sharing.

  12:50 P.M.

  United Christian Church, St. Louis, Missouri

  The door flies open and Andy bursts in. “Sorry, Luke, but I need you to start now.”

  The clock on the wall reads 12:50.

  He follows my eyes. “I know it’s early, but the church is already full. Police are holding back the crowd outside. And… well, there’s a problem.” He tries to smile, but just looks deranged. “A serious problem.”

  I’d figured that police trying to hold people back was a problem. If there’s something worse than that, I’m not sure I want to hear it.

  “Look, just go in there and do your stuff, okay?” he says. “Will you? Please?”

  It takes more than a little effort to stand up. At the doorway I hear the first telltale signs that things aren�
��t going well.

  “I love this church,” says Andy. “It’s been here a hundred and eight years. I really don’t want it destroyed.”

  “Destroyed?”

  “You know… pews broken, stained-glass windows shattered, hymnals on fire.”

  I try to stop dead in my tracks, but he wraps an arm around my shoulders and presses me onward. Above the door there’s a painting of Jesus carrying His cross to Calvary. I hope it’s not an omen.

  Beyond the door the noise is extraordinary, and I’m still only in a corridor; I haven’t entered the main church yet. I figured no one would bother to show up, but instead a lynch mob has been summoned.

  “I’m praying for you, Luke,” he says.

  If that’s supposed to reassure me, it’s not working. I’m even a little ashamed at my lack of faith, but really, I’m just being realistic. I mean, it’s not like things got a whole lot better for Jesus when they finally nailed Him to that cross He’d been carrying all around Jerusalem.

  At the end of the corridor, Andy opens the door with two hands, knuckles white as though he’s fighting a stiff breeze. “Nice T-shirt, by the way,” he says, but I can barely hear him now. In the church the rumbling noise shifts to booing.

  There’s a raised platform at the front, and I focus on not falling over as I walk toward it. It distracts me from the verbal assault, these words that have no place in a house of God. But I still catch occasional highlights: “Liar!” “Disgrace!” “Traitor!” “Satanist!” That last one puzzles me. Would a Satanist really hold an event in a church?

  The crowd falls silent as I take my place behind the lectern. A copy of Hallelujah is sitting on it like a joke that’s fallen flat. It’s mocking me, this book, but Fran was right when she said the problem was with me. So I hold it up for everyone to see, and elicit a fresh round of booing.

  I wait for the noise to die down, which takes a long time since there are a thousand people here, quite a few of them from the press.

  “Um… this is, uh… difficult,” I mumble, my words amplified by the microphone just in front of me. “Awkward, you know? I think… no, I know that some of you are really annoyed at me right now.”

  I expect to hear people murmuring agreement, but most of them are laughing maniacally instead. It’s not a good sign.

  “Yeah, so… to start with, I don’t know exactly what I said on The Pastor Mike Show because I haven’t actually seen it.”

  The crowd boos. A projectile flies through the air, lands on the front of the platform and bounces harmlessly toward me. I pick it up and spread it out. It’s just a piece of paper—specifically, a page from Hallelujah. Why anyone would try to take me out with a page from my own book is beyond me, but I’ll need to be on my guard from now on.

  I raise my hands and wait for the noise to settle back into a low-level drone. Before I can continue, a man I don’t recognize stands: “Did you really empty your hotel minibars?”

  Halfway down the church, Matt is shaking his head from side to side.

  “Well,” I begin, “it’s true that alcohol was taken from a hotel minibar. But I never actually drank any of it. Honestly.”

  More laughter. It’s clear no one believes me. Matt just rolls his eyes.

  “And what about that photo in the paper?” someone else shouts. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  I pretend to give this some thought. “That it was the best night of my life.”

  Predictably, several people cry out at once—such a melodramatic response, but I’m getting used to it.

  Another woman leaps up. “You’re a hypocrite! On the radio you promoted abstinence. Now we see you rolling around with a girl you say you don’t know.”

  “It’s true. And I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it.”

  “I wasn’t apologizing to you. I was apologizing to her. I’d do anything for her forgiveness. Yours I can live without.”

  The woman slaps her hand across her mouth like I’ve committed blasphemy, and I wonder why she doesn’t just leave. Maybe she wants to hang around in case everyone starts rioting. Who can afford to miss out on something like that?

  There’s a bottle of water by my feet, so I take a swig. “I think I know what I must’ve meant when I told Pastor Mike the book was truthful,” I explain. “See, it started out as a five-page assignment, but I was living every page. And so it grew. And when it was over a hundred pages long, it kept growing. I was in every moment, every situation. I was living it, breathing it, feeling it. It felt so real. Now for some of you, that won’t be enough. But before you cast the first stone”—I look at the creased page—“okay, the second stone, remember this: Faith means trusting in things you can’t know for sure.”

  The debater in me knows I’m on solid ground here, but I’m beginning to think that people don’t want an explanation or apology at all; they just want me to know that they hate me.

  A new projectile flies toward me: another torn-out page from Hallelujah; the same page, in fact. Someone must really hate that page. There’s even a message scrawled along the margin: Read this, silly boy.

  A few rows back, Fran is waving her hand. She’s wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt instead of the dress, and her purple hair hangs loose around her shoulders, which makes me really happy.

  Fran mimes reading from a book, so I flatten the page and read: “For though they had heard, they had not listened. And though they had read, they had not understood. And so did the boy grasp the book and say ‘This once was mine, but now is yours.’ And he held it aloft and waited for someone to take it from him, to claim it as their own. Yet no one did, because they all knew that the story ended somewhat inconclusively, and was thus really, really irritating.”

  I chuckle at that last bit, and in the quiet that has suddenly enveloped the church I feel something shift. Everyone is still on edge, withholding judgment rather than forgiving me, but as the sun pours through the stained-glass windows to my left, I feel… something. A peacefulness, maybe.

  That’s when it hits me: I’m in a church. And not just any church—my church. This is my home away from home, a place where I belong, where I should always feel welcome. And the people who know me best—Fran, my parents, Matt, Andy—are still here for me, rooting for me. One week—even the worst possible week—hasn’t changed that. As for the other people here, they didn’t know me before, and they don’t really know me now. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay.

  I throw another glance Fran’s way and hold up the piece of paper. This time I’m actually smiling, because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m ready to embrace it.

  “That passage I just read reminds me of something really important—something I need everyone to know.” I crumple the paper between my fingers and feel the crisp edges of the page digging into my palms. “The boy in this book isn’t really me. You all know that by now. He’s similar, sure, but better, because the things he says and does have been edited over and over. I’m not him. I’m going to need to screw up sometimes. And I’m going to feel bad about it, and ask for forgiveness. But not from you… from the person I actually hurt.”

  There’s a faint murmuring, like this sort of makes sense, so I afford myself a moment to scan the church. My parents are smiling and holding hands. Matt is beside them, looking bored but awake. Best of all, Fran is nodding. That, more than anything else, tells me I’m doing okay.

  “But we also need forgiveness,” I continue. “Over the past twenty-four hours I’ve betrayed my best friend, and let down the people I love most. But they’re still here now, supporting me. And I ask you: What can be better than that?”

  More murmuring—louder this time—but no consensus, I think. This is a lot for everyone to digest. I’m not even sure it makes sense to me yet. But I have to keep trying.

  “I may not be the boy in this book, but I think I know what he’d want me to say to you today. He’d say: Tell them, read the book or don’t read the book
. Like it or loathe it. Just make sure that idiot Luke doesn’t profit from it.”

  Someone twitches to life in the front row: Colin, startled and clearly confused.

  “I’m serious,” I continue. “This project was never about making money; it was just something for the kids in Sunday school. Now, I can see that most of you already have copies of Hallelujah, but if there’s anyone left who actually wants to buy one, I’ll be donating all royalties to the downtown homeless shelter.”

  Colin leans forward so far that he topples over and ends up kneeling. It’s a highly appropriate gesture, though when he rolls his eyes he looks far from reverent.

  I stare down the aisle at the thousand-strong congregation. I don’t really believe I’ve won them over, but then, I don’t care either. I just squeeze Fran’s page in my fist one last time and launch it into the crowd. I want to return to them what was theirs all along. It’s a symbolic gesture—and probably pointless—but it makes me feel better.

  “Ow!” A boy my age is rubbing his eye. “What the heck was that for?” he yells.

  “I’m sorry,” I shout, but he’s already throwing the paper back at me—a direct hit on my left arm.

  As soon as the shock passes, I can’t help myself: I bust out laughing. And when I’m over it, I pick up the paper ball and toss it toward Fran, who sniggers as she lobs it straight back. Another throw from me, and suddenly the air is filled with the sound of laughter and tearing paper, and a barrage of fist-sized paper balls are arcing toward me. Everyone wanted a riot, and for once, I haven’t let them down.

  I hadn’t realized how many copies of Hallelujah were out there, but I don’t mind this new use for a worn-out book. And so I spread my arms wide and let the pages rain down.

  3:10 P.M.

  United Christian Church, St. Louis, Missouri

  Incredibly, at least two hundred people ask me to sign their copy of Hallelujah, and I don’t complain even once about my aching hand. At least three hundred more line up for the privilege of hurling their copy on the floor and saying just what they think of me, and I accept that too. Amid the noise and confusion, I’m still at peace in this place, and it’s enough to pull me through.