Beyond the Break

by Heather Buchta

  Still kissing me, he holds up his hands and whispers, “I surrender.” We hear lots of muffled running outside the door, so I pull him down under the table, the same one I hid beneath in ninth grade with Tim Rainsforth.

  I crawl on top of Jake, the two of us still kissing so silently—ninja-like—and the thought makes me grin.

  “What?” He can feel my smile through the kiss.

  I shake my head, pull away for a moment to put a finger to his lips—shh—and then my lips travel back to his.

  There’s this teeny voice, like a one-inch-high person shouting from the bottom of a well, reminding me that there’s a verse on the wall, that this is where people come before God with their worries and heartache, but my head’s swimmy and I’m exhausted from the day and nothing feels better than lying on top of Jake and kissing until the sun comes up. Which I would gladly do, if pot patrol wasn’t going to take roll at midnight.

  His fingers trace my sides again, but this time go higher, and I suck in my breath.

  I think back to when a guy last touched my bra—ironically, in this same room. I remember feeling nothing. This time, I definitely feel something. Electricity shoots from my fingertips to my toes.

  “Sorry,” he whispers. He moves his hand away.

  “Don’t be,” I whisper, and I move it back. He pauses, unsure, and then he becomes totally sure, and his hand moves freely.

  I lose myself in the moment, the line between right and wrong growing hazier by the second, and then I’m jolted awake by a startling awareness. I roll off of him and sit straight up.

  “What is it?” He crawls out from underneath the table. “What’s wrong?”

  The reality of what I’ve just done hits me. What I’ve done in the prayer room. “You don’t have, like, a Bible with you? Like in your pocket.”

  I’m speaking in code, hoping he gets it without me having to explain. It takes him a minute, he looks down at his jeans, and then he chuckles.

  “How can you laugh about that?” I hiss.

  “Well, I’m kind of used to it. You see, there’s this natural reaction—”

  “Can’t you control it?”

  “Uhh . . . I don’t really know how to answer that.”

  “That can’t happen. That’s, like, bad. That’s like bad bad.”

  “It happens every time we make out, Lovette.”

  “Then how come I never noticed?”

  “Because it’s trapped in a wetsuit! And between your wetsuit and mine, it’s like inches of padding.”

  “Millimeters,” I correct.

  “How many times do I shift off of you or move to the side? Come on, you seriously didn’t know?”

  I look up and see the cross, next to it the verse on the wall: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God. Romans 8:28.”

  “We shouldn’t have done this.” I stand up and walk out of the prayer room. No sooner than I get out, Carrie tags me. “Yes!” she squeals. “You’re on my team now!” She pulls me by the arm, half running to the nearest exit. I look behind me. Jake has exited the prayer room too, but he doesn’t follow. He watches me go, his shadow getting darker as we travel down the hallway.

  Chapter Forty-One

  After midnight, we’re into the second ’80s movie, something about a tomboy drummer girl who discovers she’s got the hots for her best friend when he starts dating this popular girl. We’re all in our sleeping bags, girls on one side of the youth room and guys on the other. A large glow-in-the-dark strip of tape runs down the middle of the linoleum carpet and the leaders park their pillows there, in case anyone thinks of “accidentally rolling” in their sleep. I can’t get what happened in the prayer room out of my head, so I’m searching through my Bible with my phone flashlight.

  “Sorry, Lovette, it’s lights-out.”

  Candy appears in my face like a pop-up card. It’s like she has sin sniffers.

  “Sorry.” I close my Bible.

  She sees my phone flashlight against the pages of scripture, and her face drops. “Were you having your quiet time? Well geez, Louise, Holy Spirit breeze, I can’t believe that I just told you to stop reading His word.”

  “No, it’s fine. I was looking up some passages. It can wait.”

  “Like H-E-double hockey sticks it can.” She leans in close. “Okay, top secret, just for you. Head to the women’s restroom. The one with the three stalls, not the single. That’s my patrol area.”

  I don’t want to get out of my warm sleeping bag, but Candy’s breaking rules for Jesus, so I feel a responsibility to her faith to go study scriptures in a cold bathroom. I shimmy out of my sleeping bag, and she stops me.

  “I heard you’re dating Jake.”

  I gulp. Nod once.

  She smiles wide, her teeth bright in the moonlight, which reminds me that we’re gonna have a full moon in two days.

  “That’s so wonderful! No one can even tell. You’re an example to our youth group on how to act in a relationship.”

  I see a flash of me and Jake making out in the prayer room, mauling each other like we were wild animals on National Geographic. “Thanks.”

  “I’m talking to the youth group in two weeks on purity. Why don’t you share? Just like five minutes or so.”

  My palms are sweating and clammy. I need air. “Uh, I’ll pray about it.”

  “Great!” As I crouch-walk toward the doors, she motions at me to hide my Bible under my shirt.

  * * *

  After a quick check under the bathroom stalls to make sure no one’s there, I sit, legs crossed, on the bathroom tile. Purity? What a joke. I look up one of the verses I studied last week: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.” That’s a rough one. I definitely didn’t remember that in the prayer room. God exchanged my ugliness for His beauty. But it was done on the cross, not through some happy hand-holding kumbaya campfire. It came at a price. And if I felt the weight of that, I’d probably listen more to the conclusion: “Therefore honor God with your bodies.”

  I skip back to the top of the paragraph: “Flee from sexual immorality.” Flee. So funny how everything’s about fighting the good fight, standing firm in our love for God, being proud and not ashamed of the gospel, but this verse says to run. Get outta Dodge. In terms of fight or flight, it says flight. Not fight. I think to the prayer room when I lost myself in the moment, and I get it. I think God gets it. We can’t fight. I look up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. But why would You make our passions so strong if You only wanted us to resist? It doesn’t add up.

  Kelly pushes the door open and startles when she sees me on the floor. “Hey. How’s the weather down there?” Her voice sounds different, slurred. She stumbles into one of the stalls. Over the sound of her peeing, I hear her curse.

  “Kell?”

  “What do you want?” she snaps.

  The toilet flushes, and I stand when she emerges. Before I can say anything, she throws her arms around me. She smells like the patrons at the Venue after two hours in front of a bartender. “Kelly, are you drunk?”

  “Phhhhsssh.” Then she laughs. “That’s the sound of a fish with no eye. Phhhhhsssh.”

  Oh boy. “Does this have to do with Dave?”

  She throws her head back. “Dayyyyve! My bro.” She says “bro” like it’s two syllables, bah-roh. “I’m his sis. ‘Hey, sis.’ ‘What up, sis?’”

  She leans against the wall and slides to the floor.

  “These tiles are cold.” She slaps the wall, but she’s done talking about tiles. “You know we didn’t even kiss when we dated?” I squat down beside her so we’re eye level again. “Then he broke up with me, and I was crying and he felt bad, so he kissed me to make me feel better. And then he was like, ‘Babe, we can’t do that, nah, nah,’ so then we didn’t talk. But then he’d say he missed me and then, then we’
d just do more”—she motions with her hand in a circle to demonstrate more—“and then he’d cry after because he felt guilty.” She grabs my head and presses her forehead against mine. “Don’t tell him I said he cried.” Then she pulls away, and I’m grateful because the fumes of whatever she drank are pouring out of her mouth like dragon fire. “And then we’d pray and we’d both cry. But later, we’d just do more again.”

  She starts to cry. I’m missing some of this booze-muddled story. Gosh, I wonder how much she drank. She sniffles, whips up her head.

  “So he’s like, ‘She’s my sis.’ ‘Hey, everyone, this is my sis.’ ‘Sister from another mister.’ ‘Meet my favorite sis.’”

  I sigh. “Yeah, it’s funny he calls you that. After you dated.”

  “Funny. You know what’s funny?” She opens her purse and pulls out a tampon. “This is funny.” She holds the tampon like a cigar between her fingers. “I needed this, like, six days ago. But magic trick. I still don’t need it!”

  Oh. Ohhhh.

  That’s what she meant by “more.” Geez, that’s quite a few steps past kissing. All this time these past few months after they ended things, when she was pulling me aside—her Jake misgivings, the disapproving looks, the intervention at Martha’s—all that time she and Dave were having sex.

  Oh man.

  She puts her head on her knees and begins sobbing, big, heaving sobs. I try to shush her quiet. The last thing I need is Candy coming into the bathroom and smelling the liquor. She wouldn’t be offering any “Be blessed!” exclamations. There’s so much wrong with this scene, not the least of all that Kelly’s drunk while possibly pregnant.

  “What am I gonna tell my parents?” she says, hiccuping.

  “Slow down.”

  “And God must hate me.”

  Whoa. Now that’s something I never thought I’d hear from Kelly. “What? Kelly, you’re letting the alcohol talk.” I reach for her hand, but she recoils.

  “No! He does. He’s getting back at me. For this. For Dave. For you.”

  “For me?”

  “Duh, Lovette, how do you think Cecilia knew what you wrote on your essay?” she snaps. I see a stream of spittle spray from her mouth like aerosol perfume. “Who do you think stole it and helped her make copies?”

  I’m stunned. Mouth slightly parted, eyes unblinking, body stiff with disbelief. Jake would be proud of my mannequin skills. Betrayal courses through me, a cold, mean animal that leaves my heart limp, my spirit deflated. Not my best friend. Please not my best friend. I think back to my tears, the rotten emptiness in the pit of my stomach, the shame that the school saw me as a laughingstock.

  “You,” I can barely whisper. “But why would—”

  “Because I was mad! Because I don’t know! Because why do we do anything?”

  Wait, now she’s getting philosophical? Anger builds, a slow roiling boil. “That doesn’t even make sense—”

  “Of course it doesn’t!” she growls. “All you see is your perfect life. I kept trying to warn you about Jake, and you were like whatever, whatever, and I wanted him to stop messing with you because I knew he was gonna break your heart.”

  I sigh. This is about Dave.

  “So I thought if I made you not so perfect, he’d be embarrassed by you, or not want to be seen with you or something because I figured that was the way he was.”

  Because that’s the way Dave was. She pulls on her hair and shakes her head.

  “But then the joke went further than I expected and I felt so bad and I wanted it to stop and I told Cecilia don’t write those things, but she already made copies and said she’d snitch on me if I didn’t help her.” Her eyes plead with mine for mercy. “But I helped afterward. Remember?”

  I do. She was with my friends, helping clean up the mess. Turns out she made the mess too.

  I want to scream at her. I open my mouth to tell her how she’s controlling and horrible and spiteful and worthless and cruel.

  But I look at her, this broken shell, face puffy, confused, afraid, completely alone. Something triggers in me, and I see that’s how I probably look to God most days. Still, so much in me wants to lay into Kelly right now. My brother would call it “ripping her a new one.” I’m forming words, but they’re mean. Mean like Cecilia’s tongue. And that’s when I hear God ask me, “Are you any different?”

  People talk about standing up for Jesus. Is this one of those moments? Not standing on a street corner with a Bible and a microphone. Maybe it’s all about standing in the face of betrayal on the cold bathroom floor and choosing forgiveness when you have every right to choose wrath.

  It’s not about me. Isn’t that what He’s always trying to teach me? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. I have this single moment to be what He would be to me. What He has been to me. What He is now.

  My love for her is bigger than my anger. Not by much, but one of them’s got to win out if this friendship is worth saving. I take the deepest breath of my life, deeper than when I’ve been tumbled by back-to-back waves and finally came up for air, the kind of breath that reaches beyond my lungs and into my soul. My arms stretch up toward Him and then out to wrap around her, drawing her whole crumpled body into my embrace. She hides herself in me like a burrowing bunny, hiding in the folds of my compassion, and says sorry over and over.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” I whisper. “No matter what.”

  “You promise? I’ve messed up so bad.”

  “Welcome to the club. He knows. He knew before the cross.”

  She exhales like I just poured bathwater with lavender over her. I don’t know if He’s going to erase the aftermath, like the stuff that might already be set in motion. But she’ll be okay. She’s loved by Him.

  * * *

  When she calms down, she falls asleep on my shoulder and doesn’t stir for thirty minutes. When my arm’s asleep, I nudge her awake, make her stand, and lead her back to the youth room. I tuck her in her sleeping bag next to mine.

  I think she’s out, but then she says, “How do you do that?” Someone nearby shushes her. The movie’s almost over.

  “What?” I whisper.

  “That’s why people like you. You put them first. It’s never about you.”

  I think of making out in the prayer room. Swimming at night. Surfing with Jake. Keeping it all from my parents. Never about me?

  “Hardly.”

  “Hmmph.” She reaches out her hand, light as a pixie, and rests it on my cheek. It’s sweet at first, like being touched by a fairy, until she falls asleep and her hand becomes dead weight across my face. She may think it was my words that did the trick, but I think we’re both a little different after tonight.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Sunday morning, Jake leaves before I wake up, so I don’t get a chance to say goodbye, which would’ve been nice, considering how we left things last night. Everyone’s waking up. The volume in the youth room has gone from silent to roar in less than five minutes. Kelly opens her eyes and touches her head gingerly. I hand her a water bottle as feet zigzag between our sleeping bags. The smell of doughnuts wafts through the room, and Kelly turns pale.

  “You okay?”

  She shakes her head, peers up at me with sleepy eyes. “You mad?”

  She’s talking about Cecilia, not the drinking. “Yeah. A little.”

  She tucks her chin down. I should hug her, but I hug my knees instead. It still stings. Sober Kelly hurt me.

  “The All Wave Open is tomorrow. Presidents’ Day.”

  “Yeah.” I roll up my sleeping bag. She fidgets with the zipper on her purse.

  Most kids are staying for big church, but I need to skip service today and take care of some things before I lose my nerve. I grab my belongings, but she keeps her head down. Guilt stabs me as I reach the double doors. Above the exit it says, Welcome to your mission field. />
  “Hey,” I say, and she looks up. “You’ll text me if you”—I motion to a certain item in her purse—“find out anything?”

  She swallows and nods. I jog back and kiss her on the top of the head, then race out, praying it’s a false alarm. Oh, Kelly.

  Once outside, I’m awake and aware that it’s the day before competition. My nerves are one of Dave’s guitar strings ready to snap with the first strum. Jake texts: Hey can we talk?

  I call him. He picks up without a hello.

  “Hey, you,” I say.

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Jake?”

  “Hey, Lovey.” His voice is sandpaper. “What’s up?”

  “I dunno. You just texted if we could talk.”

  “Right,” he says. “I meant in person.”

  “Oh. You okay?”

  “It’s my mom.”

  My shoulders tense against my neck. “Oh my gosh, what happened? Is she okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  My whole body exhales, not just my lungs. “I’ll stop by,” I offer.

  “I’m down at the base.”

  “Already?”

  “Uh-huh.” He probably had to take care of some things before the competition tomorrow. “I’ll be up by you later today.”

  “Yeah, of course. I’m gonna go for a run anyway. My stomach’s having major butterflies.”

  “I’ll bet. You’re gonna do great.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got a great coach.”

  Again, silence.

  “Jake?”

  “I love you.”

  My brain halts. I think my blood stops flowing. My heart’s the only thing working, pounding like a steel drum. So loud in my ears. So fast.

  “You can’t say that over the phone,” I whisper. “Not the first time you say it.”