Searching for Normal

by C. J. Darlington

  Another text came in from Tessa. Hey, do you want to go to youth group with me and Izzy on Wednesday? I can pick you up.

  A tiny zip of panic hit me at the prospect of attending her church again. I’d liked the service well enough, but I hadn’t felt like I fit in. Would youth group be any different? I remembered Zoe and her down-to-earth personality. If all the leaders had her same qualities, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad.

  Sure, I texted.

  We signed off, her to head out to her swim meet, me to wallow in my bedroom. I ended up watching Mason King videos, trying not to spaz out over my chance to see him next week.

  As planned, Tessa and Izzy picked me up Wednesday night. Izzy’s sister, Claire, drove us, and somehow we all managed to squeeze into her truck—me and Tessa in the cramped back cab, Izzy and Claire in the front. I’d met Claire a few times, and she was always cool and left us mostly alone.

  “If I ever start a band, I’m going to name us Probity,” Izzy said.

  I fastened my seatbelt. I’d decided to just wear my favorite clothes: jeans, hoodie, cowboy boots, and my warm Carhartt jacket. It made me feel more confident, and I decided that was important tonight.

  “Uh . . . that’s an interesting name,” I said.

  Tessa laughed. “Do you want to tell us what it means?”

  “Of course!” Izzy said as she whipped out her phone. “Probity means adherence to the highest principles and ideals.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said.

  “Basically . . . integrity,” Izzy added.

  “Wait a minute. Band? Do you play an instrument?”

  “Yes, she does,” Claire said, pulling out onto the street. “Guitar. Pretty well, in fact.”

  “I’ve been trying to get her to join the worship team,” Tessa said.

  “Why don’t you?” I asked.

  Izzy rested her phone in her lap. “I love to listen to music. If I’m playing it, I can’t enjoy it as much.”

  “You could do both.”

  She shrugged.

  Izzy twisted around in her seat. Her face was in the shadows. “I’m really sorry about Stanley.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Will your aunt get another one?”

  I wasn’t positive I could go through this again, but I hadn’t asked her. “Not sure,” I finally said. “I hope not.”

  Izzy seemed to get it. I felt bad she’d only gotten to meet Stanley once. She loved animals, but with her brother’s allergies, she didn’t get to be around them nearly as much as she liked. That would be practically torture for me. I couldn’t imagine not being able to pet a dog or ride a horse.

  “Shay, what happened today?”

  There was nothing wrong with Izzy’s question, but it still made me uncomfortable.

  “She might not want to talk about it,” Tessa said softly.

  “Amelia thinks you rocked it.”

  Tessa was right. I really didn’t want to talk about it.

  “We’re almost there anyway,” Tessa added.

  Izzy seemed to take the hint. “I baked some yummy snickerdoodles today after school.”

  “Speaking of names,” I said. “Snickerdoodle. What’s up with that?”

  Izzy gave a little bounce in her seat. “Joy of Cooking says it’s probably based on the German word Schneckennudeln, which means ‘snail dumpling.’”

  “Ew, what?”

  “They kinda look like snails.”

  “They do not.”

  By the time Claire pulled up to the church, we were all laughing, and I welcomed it. It was great to have friends you could be honest and real with, but sometimes you just needed to laugh, too.

  We parted with Claire, checked in our phones, and found seats together. Tessa and Izzy introduced me to a few other girls, and even though I tried to brand their names on my mind, I knew I’d probably forget. It’s not like I was planning on attending regularly, so I wasn’t even sure I’d have the chance to meet them again, but I wanted to think I could.

  Zoe found us right before the Bible study was supposed to start.

  “Hi, girls!” She gave me an extra-wide smile and looked like she was going to hug me, but I wasn’t ready for that and reached out my hand. Zoe shook it firmly. “So glad to see you here, Shay.”

  I wondered what she’d thought of me in the coffee shop. Did I seem as desperate as I felt? Would she single me out sometime during the study?

  It turns out the group had just finished a study in the book of Ephesians, and next week they were starting something else, so this week Zoe wanted to keep things casual. She read 1 Corinthians 13, what some people called the love chapter, and I inwardly winced a little bit thinking she’d be talking about dating relationships, something I wasn’t interested in right now.

  “When you think of true love, what do you think about?” Zoe asked.

  A few of the girls giggled and gave each other conspiratorial looks. I guessed they were imagining their current crushes.

  “I think about my parents,” one girl chimed in.

  Zoe nodded, her large, gold hoop earrings swinging. “That’s wonderful.”

  Someone else said she thought about the characters in a recent movie she’d seen where the guy and girl fall in love and live happily ever after.

  Crossing her legs, Zoe held her worn, turquoise Bible in her lap. I thought about mine slipped into the drawer of my dresser. When was the last time I pulled it out? I knew God didn’t care if I held an actual paper Bible or read a Scripture off my phone, but I remembered a time when I kept my Bible on my nightstand. I knew reading it didn’t earn me God’s approval or anything like that, but a bit of guilt ate at me over my lack of attention to my spiritual growth.

  “Here’s the thing,” Zoe said, gathering her braids and pulling them over her shoulder. “We’ve let the world define our view of love. I mean, let’s be real, girls. Society has hypersexualized just about everything.”

  My friends nodded in agreement.

  “The world has reduced love to romantic love.” Zoe closed her Bible on her finger. “And they’ve reduced romantic love to sex.”

  Okay . . . I don’t know about the rest of the girls, but these sort of talks make me uncomfortable. Had I picked the wrong night to attend?

  Zoe seemed to wait for us to digest her point.

  “Am I right?” she asked.

  The collective of youth group girls nodded their heads, but I thought I heard Tessa huff beside me. Yeah, my Christian dad cheating on my mom would make me a little cynical too. I hoped Zoe was going to be sensitive to that. But she was right, I had to admit. Even the girls who went to the Christian school weren’t immune. Just pulling up YouTube on my phone sometimes exposed me to stuff I wish I could erase from my brain.

  “You don’t have to have a boyfriend to experience true, deep love,” Zoe said. “You can love your friends, your family, your pets even. Jesus said that ‘greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.’”

  I wondered if I would ever have friends who would be willing to give their lives for me. I glanced down at my hands in my lap. Izzy sat on my right, Tessa on my left. I hoped they loved me, but sometimes I didn’t feel all that lovable.

  “Think about this,” Zoe continued. “Jesus was never married, and yet would we dare to say He didn’t live a life full of love? That He wasn’t an example we can follow?”

  The room was strangely quiet, and I wondered what the other girls were thinking. I thought about Tessa and Alex and how their romantic attraction for each other actually came out of a friendship that came first. Maybe that’s the way it should be.

  “Don’t ever let anyone pressure you to hurry up and get a guy,” Zoe said. “Or that you’re somehow going to be lacking love if you don’t date or even if you never get married. Because guess what? God has a different plan for each of us. For some it might be finding a husband and having a huge family. For others it might be working hard and being a good aunt, or daughter, or friend. N
either one is better than the other. We’re all meant to be examples of God’s love to the world. Period. And luckily there are so many awesome ways for us to do that.”

  I found myself listening closely to her words. This wasn’t at all what I’d expected to hear, but I found it strangely comforting. It reminded me of the conversation I’d had with my friends in the cafeteria the other week, about Ms. Larkin being happy, and how I wasn’t really interested in pursuing guys the way Izzy and Amelia seemed to be. I had to admit that when Kelsey and Jade had hit me with their zingers, I’d struggled to shake them off.

  “When we show pure, Christian love to our friends and family, we’re an example to the world of what real love is,” Zoe continued, leaning forward, like she really wanted us to get her point. “Girls, don’t let the world define love for you. God has already done that by sending His Son.”

  Chapter 26

  I THOUGHT ABOUT ZOE’S WORDS long after I got home, and I thought about them as I lay in bed without Stanley, tears streaming down my face. I know love for an animal is in a different category than love for people, but after hearing Zoe, I felt as though God would at least understand my sadness. Maybe I still didn’t fully understand His love for me, but I was trying.

  Somehow I managed to get through school the rest of the week without running into Jade or Kelsey, and I even got through drama class without any more “incidents.” I’d hoped to catch up with Wilson and finish our conversation about backstage work, but whenever I tried to catch his eye, Amelia or Izzy or someone else would start talking to me. Amelia was especially intent on taking me under her wing, and while it annoyed me in some respects, I could admit she knew a lot about theater and was just trying to help a friend.

  But every day I came home to an empty apartment.

  I didn’t want to ask my aunt how Stanley was doing in his new home. It would hurt too much.

  On Saturday I took another shift in the bookstore, this time straightening all the shelves and restocking some of the more popular titles. I was glad for the busywork because I could barely keep myself from stressing about next week’s Mason King clinic. By the time school started on Monday, I had psyched myself up and gotten more excited about the event than I felt I could admit to my aunt.

  I ran into the bathroom for a pit stop before my first class. I’d had two cups of hot tea, one on the walk over, and had to go pretty badly. I did my business and exited the stall, only to come face-to-face with Kelsey touching up her makeup.

  She quickly wiped an errant smudge of lipstick from her teeth and threw the tissue in the trash can. “So I talked with my brother,” Kelsey said. “He’s a cop.”

  My pulse jumped.

  “He said I could press charges.”

  I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I decided to play dumb so I wouldn’t give her an advantage.

  “For what?”

  “I had a bruise from where you hit me.”

  I can’t exactly deny I touched her, but a bruise?

  “How’s it feel never knowing when the cops are gonna come knocking on your door?” Kelsey popped her lips and checked herself in the mirror again.

  The bathroom door burst open, and three other girls ran into the stalls, probably hoping, like me, not to be late to their classes. I left Kelsey standing at the mirror, but I felt her presence with me all during World History.

  Whenever I really missed my dad, I searched for his name online. It surprisingly yielded a lot of hits. From book covers he’d created to an award named in his honor, there was much to find online about his work as a graphic artist. Sometimes I would be smiling after browsing his pages. Other times I would cry.

  Tonight, lying in bed, it was something in between. I pulled up my favorite picture of him on my phone, the one where he was holding my dog, Panda, in his lap. I wondered if he’d be proud of me. I didn’t feel proud of myself, but good dads had a way of boosting your self-esteem. They could take your fears and anxieties and somehow lessen them. Sometimes my dad would crack a joke, and it was enough to pull me out of any funk I might be in.

  “I miss you,” I whispered, swiping to a photo I’d saved of Mason King.

  I stared at his face and tried to see myself. It wasn’t too hard. My friends had been right. The shared genetics were real. But what would my dad think about me chasing down this man?

  In the photo, Mason was wearing a gray cowboy hat and a plaid, western shirt, and he rested his arm around a horse’s neck. He had just enough flash to seem cool, yet not enough that he looked as if he was trying too hard. He seemed like the real deal, and everything I’d watched confirmed it.

  A knock came to my bedroom door, which was still open a crack.

  “Come in,” I said to my aunt.

  She was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. I thought she’d already gone to bed, but maybe she’d stayed up answering emails or reading a book she was considering stocking in the store. Sitting on the foot of my bed, my aunt handed me a photograph.

  “I thought you might like to have that,” she said.

  I stared down at the picture of my parents. Both had their arms around each other and were somehow holding a baby, too.

  “That’s you,” my aunt said.

  I obviously didn’t remember this moment, but I wished I could. I had no memories of my mom, though sometimes in my dreams I thought for the briefest moments I at least could remember her voice. It was probably just me wishing I could.

  “I never want to learn how to drive,” I said, swiping at my eyes. “They’re both gone because of stupid car crashes.”

  An odd look flashed across my aunt’s face. Then it disappeared, and she gave me an understanding smile.

  “You’re going to do just fine,” Aunt Laura said. “No need to rush it, but you’ll be ready someday.”

  I decided to share the photos of Mason King. I turned my phone toward her.

  “Do I look like him?”

  My aunt took the phone and sighed.

  “What?”

  “You still want to go?”

  I straightened the pillow behind my back. “I have to.”

  “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  We already had this conversation, right? Is my aunt backing down and changing her mind?

  “Your grandparents were not happy.”

  Great. She told them. “What did they say?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Were they angry?”

  Aunt Laura fingered my bedspread, the light from the hall hitting her face and keeping half of it in shadows. I felt like I was seeing a different side of her. She seemed tired, and it hit me that she was experiencing a completely different aspect of all this. I hoped I wasn’t creating havoc in her life, but I knew I was.

  “When did they first contact you about me?” I asked.

  Aunt Laura seemed to know I was referring to my grandparents.

  “I didn’t find out about your accident until a month after,” Aunt Laura said softly. “Your father and I occasionally talked, and I’d tried to call him about something book related. I don’t even remember what. But his voicemail was full.” Aunt Laura stared off into space for a second. “And you know your dad. He never let that happen.”

  That was totally true. My dad wasn’t much of a phone guy in general, but he never let voicemails go unanswered for more than a day or two.

  “I got worried,” Aunt Laura said. “So I contacted your grandparents. They told me what happened.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It would’ve been upsetting either way.” My aunt rested her hand on mine for a second. “But that’s why I didn’t reach out to you sooner. I would have, Shay.”

  I nodded. I wanted to open up to her, but part of me was ashamed. I didn’t really know what my aunt thought about my screwups. Sure, she took me in, but was it out of obligation? Because she didn’t want me to end up in the foster system? She seemed to care, and in my heart I knew she did, but my doubts got t
he better of me sometimes.

  “I feel like a failure,” I finally said.

  “Why in the world would you think that?”

  I made a sound of disbelief. “Just look at my life.”

  “Shay.”

  “No, seriously. Everything has been thrown upside down. I hate school, I’m a burden to you, I keep getting into trouble, and now I’ve messed things up again by even wanting to go to that stupid clinic.”

  Aunt Laura tilted her head. “Is that how you really feel?”

  “It’s true.”

  I could tell my aunt was thinking hard. Her forehead scrunched up a little, and she reached over to pet Matilda, who was sleeping on my bed. The cat stretched into her touch.

  “I can refute all of those things, Shay.”

  A big part of me wanted her to do just that, but I couldn’t really say it.

  “I’m going to be totally honest with you,” Aunt Laura said. “When your grandmother first asked me if you could stay here permanently, I wasn’t at all sure I was ready for something like that.” She waved her hand to indicate the apartment. “I mean, I’m rather set in my ways, I had a routine, I was happy. Sharing my space with someone else, especially a teenager, wasn’t on the top of my list of life goals.”

  Her words stabbed me in the heart.

  “But.” My aunt looked me right in the eyes. “You have been a great joy to me. I was actually stuck in my ways, and I needed someone to remind me there’s a lot more to life than familiar routines and binge-watching Netflix. In case you didn’t realize, that someone was you.”

  I picked up the photo and just stared at it, only I wasn’t really looking at either of my parents. I reached to pet Matilda too. “I miss my dad.”

  “I know, kid.”

  “I feel like I’m letting him down.”

  “He would be proud of you.”

  I wasn’t at all sure that was true, but I let her say it.

  “And I don’t care what you feel or think, you’re not a burden.” Aunt Laura stood up. “As far as the clinic, you need to go. If you don’t, it’s something you’ll regret for a long time, and I don’t want that for you either. Now get some rest.”