Pastor Ken stopped the story at that point and said, “Now let’s take a look at how this can be a metaphor in our own lives, okay? Let’s take it beyond Susanna’s nakedness to search for what her nakedness really means.”
Kids offered suggestions, alternatives to nakedness, a richer and greater meaning from the Bible than the simple words suggested. Someone said virtue, someone else said honesty. Love for God was offered. So was devotion to the Ten Commandments. Derric tried to listen, but he didn’t participate. He kept his eyes fastened on whoever was speaking, but his awareness was only Courtney. Everything else was driven from his mind.
They took a break midway through the meeting: punch, cookies, and cupcakes. Then they talked more and then they prayed their special prayers. More than one of them prayed for chastity. Courtney did, too, but he was prepared this time, and when she’d finished asking for strength, he said fervently, “Me, too, Lord. Please. Me, too.” A couple of girls laughed at this, and a boy said, “I hear you, bro,” and Pastor Ken said, “We all need strength for a variety of things. Me, I need patience to deal with my kids. Eight and ten. Girls. Both going on twenty. Jesus Lord, please give me the strength to be a good dad to them.” And after that the meeting broke up. A few minutes later, and he and Courtney were on the road.
At first he thought maybe they didn’t need to talk. They’d turned a corner, he thought. They’d turned over a new leaf. But then Courtney said, “If you want, we could go some place for a while. There’s still forty-five minutes. Want to?” and without a thought of no in his brain at all, he said, “Goss Lake? Close to home and I know a place . . .” She flashed him a smile and off they went.
The swimming property was a forested lot that tumbled down an unbuildable hillside to the lake. It had been sold to someone years in the past as a picnic spot, a swimming spot, a place to launch a sailboat from a purpose-built dock. A trail led down to it from a narrow dirt lane. They fished in the trunk of Courtney’s car, found three blankets and a flashlight, and set off through the trees.
It was a perfect night. The moon was a Cheshire cat’s smile through the bare tree branches and the stars were bright. It was cold, but in the draping shelter of some hemlocks near the water, they laid out their blanket and wrapped themselves in the others.
Courtney shivered. “Colder than I thought,” she said.
“Probably not the best idea.” He scooted over and put his arm around her. She snuggled into him and sighed.
From beneath the sheltering branches of the trees, they could see the lake, still in the darkness, nothing breaking its surface and no wind blowing. An owl hooted somewhere in the trees and in the distance a coyote barked. Courtney shivered again. She moved closer to him. She murmured, “I know an even better way to stay warm.” She put her hand on his leg and ran it up his thigh. She said, “Derric, if it’s okay with you . . . I mean, I’ve got something I’d sort of like to say.”
“Sure,” he told her. “Fact is, I was sort of thinking the same thing. That we should talk. But the Bible thing . . . I don’t know. It made me feel like maybe we don’t need to after all.”
“Why?”
“The chastity thing. I can’t do it, Court, if we keep texting and sending pictures like we’ve been. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like to look at them. I mean, I really like to look at them. But it seems . . . I mean, I don’t see how we can talk about one thing and then do another. Which, it seems to me, is what we’ve been doing.”
He felt her turn her head to look at him. So he turned his. She kissed him. And then she put her hands on him. And then she eased him to the ground.
“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk about,” she said.
Only, at that point they didn’t talk at all.
• • •
AFTERWARD, HE DIDN’T feel the way he thought he would feel. Inside where he’d always figured he’d be all lit up, where he’d feel connected, where he’d know who he was, he was completely numb.
He was also an hour late. He knew his mom would be waiting for him, and he failed completely in his effort to slide into the house and into his room without her knowledge. He’d just got to his bedroom doorway when he heard her coming in his direction from the living room. It was pitch-dark in the hall, and she flipped on the lights. She took one look at him. She knew.
No lectures, he thought. For once in your life, please, Mom, no lectures. I used a condom, all right? Just like you taught me. That’s what you want to know, but don’t ask me now.
She looked at his face, mostly his eyes. Then she said the most unexpected thing. She said it quietly, totally without judgment. “It wasn’t like you thought it would be.”
He shook his head numbly, his throat getting tight and his vision clouding with tears like a six-year-old. It wasn’t like he thought it would be. It was wonderful and horrible all at once. It should have been a beginning. It felt like an end.
“I’m very sorry about that, sweetie.” She approached him, and he wanted to shrink away. “Want to talk about it?”
He shook his head.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “You try to sleep now.”
She passed him, then, and went to climb the stairs. He stood there alone in the quiet darkness till he heard the soft closing of her bedroom’s door.
• • •
HE DIDN’T SLEEP. It seemed to him that everything in his life had gone very wrong. In the hours that passed as he stared at his ceiling, he tried to come up with the first moment when he’d made the move that had set him on the path to where he found himself now, but he couldn’t even think straight enough to go back three weeks to whatever he had been doing then, let alone a month or two.
Courtney texted four times during the night.
Godgodgod!
And So hot babe.
And Cant B leve.
And finally No regret.
His answers came from him by rote.
!!!
U 2.
The best.
Not 1.
Then he just wanted her to go away. He wanted to think when he couldn’t think anyway, and having her there texting and texting him only made what he was going through worse.
He got up at his regular time, staggering to the shower. He stood beneath the water and felt it hit his head and sink into his hair, which he grasped as hard as he could and which he washed and scrubbed as hard as he could, as if washing and scrubbing could rid his skull of it as well as of the thoughts inside his head.
In the kitchen, his mom was scribbling into a notebook on the counter, and his dad was eating his usual bowl of instant oatmeal. When Dave Mathieson said to him, “How’s things cooking, sport?” Derric glanced at his mom and he understood that she hadn’t betrayed him. He said, “Okay,” and when Dave said, “You came in late. Don’t let that happen on a school night again, okay?” he said, “I won’t. Sorry. I should’ve phoned or something. I got caught up with Courtney after her Bible group’s discussion.”
Dave chuckled. “Now that’s something you don’t hear every day.” He scooped up the rest of his oatmeal, carried the bowl to the sink, and ran water into it. Then he was gone, after kissing Rhonda and giving Derric a one-armed hug. Then Derric and his mom were alone together.
And still she didn’t press him. It was only when he’d finished his own breakfast of cereal, orange juice, and toast that she turned from the counter where she’d been writing and said to him, “Seems like you discovered something about yourself last night.”
“I think maybe I did.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know.”
“It doesn’t feel good.”
“Got you,” she said. “But that’s the thing about growing. Going through what you have to go through to grow . . . It pretty much doesn’t feel good while you’re going through it.”
“This isn’t the y
ou’re-growing-up-now lecture, is it?” he asked her.
“What d’you mean?”
“You know. ‘My little boy is growing up.’”
She smiled although she looked a little sad. She said, “Honestly? I didn’t even think of it like that. I was thinking more of inner growing, if you know what I mean. Heart growing. Soul growing. Whatever you want to call it. That’s the tough stuff. But you’ll get through it.”
“Problem is, I don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”
“Yeah. That’s part of the growing,” she told him.
• • •
HE THOUGHT IT was strange. After her endless lectures about taking precautions and STDs and unwanted pregnancies and all the ways in which two kids could mess up their lives while they were still only adolescents, it came down to her knowing that he was trying to deal with consequences. He was trying to understand them first. Then maybe he could move on to doing something about how he felt about them.
It was completely backward, though. It seemed to him that of the two of them, Courtney should’ve been the one to feel tugged by conscience, tugged by desire, at war with herself without knowing why. She, after all, was the person who’d been pledging chastity. But she didn’t seem to feel anything but happiness and I luv U U U! became her regular message, sent once an hour by text or mouthed in the hallway between classes at school.
He didn’t understand her but that wasn’t so much a problem as was the fact that he didn’t understand himself. He needed to work this out, though. He needed the time to attend to . . . whatever the heck it was inside him that was eating at him.
So three of her I luv U U U messages he didn’t answer one day. He wasn’t surprised, then, to find her waiting for him after jazz band rehearsal.
She was sitting on the floor in the corridor, slim legs stretched out in front of her, her back to the wall, a textbook open on her lap. She got to her feet when he came out of the band room. She looked the same as always, good.
She said, “Don’t have your cell phone today? I texted you a bunch of times,” and she sounded a little nervous.
He said, “No. I got them. The messages. Sorry. I just figured . . .” He shrugged. “Hey, you know how I feel.”
The other band members were leaving the room and some of them glanced over and some said hi to Courtney. A couple of the guys laughed at something. Someone said, “Oh yeah. Big-time,” and Courtney looked from them to him, her eyes darkening to violet as she made an interpretation of this that she shouldn’t have made at all.
When they were alone, she said in a low voice, “You told them, didn’t you?”
He said, “What? No way!”
“Then how do they know?”
“Those guys? Court, I got no idea what they’re talking about.”
“You didn’t text back.”
“Because I already said. A thousand times I said.”
“It’s over, isn’t it?” She turned then and she walked away from him, and there was nothing for it but to follow, which was what he did.
He said, “Hey, nothing’s over,” but her reply told him that her mind had gone to another place. She said, “I shouldn’t have. I knew, I knew, but I did it anyway,” and to his horror she began to cry. He looked around the corridor and knew that, of all places, they couldn’t have this conversation here where anyone might walk by and then every soul in the school would know.
He took her arm. She jerked away. He took it again. “Come on,” he murmured.
They walked to the line of big double doors that served as entrance to the school, and they went outside. It was very cold, and rain had begun to fall.
“It’s like they always said.” She fumbled in her Star Wars purse. She dropped her textbook. He picked it up. She brought out a package of tissues but then she didn’t use them. She used her arm instead to wipe her eyes, the tissues in her hand ignored. “Boys want what they want and when they get it from you . . . It’s like they said.”
He swore soundly and he didn’t regret it. “That’s not how it is,” he said.
“I love you. That’s why I did it. I love you. I thought and I prayed and I thought. I read the Bible. And I prayed some more. I asked my heart and I asked my soul. My soul told me it was a kind of giving. D’you get that? I wanted to give to you. But all you wanted was . . . well, I guess we know, don’t we?”
“You’re not giving me a chance,” he said. “That’s not fair.”
“A chance to what?”
“To explain how I feel.” He walked away from the school, but he took her with him, into the parking lot where she had her car. He said, “Come on. Let’s get out of the rain.”
She said, “Why?”
“Because we need to talk.”
She cooperated with this. She unlocked her car. They got inside. She said, “The flowers should’ve told me and they did and I didn’t listen because I didn’t want to know.”
“That didn’t mean anything,” he said. “The flowers were flowers. That’s it. They didn’t mean . . .” He sighed and rubbed his head. He said, “Court, I didn’t want it to happen. Not like it happened.”
“Oh thanks,” she said bitterly.
“Please, please listen. I don’t even want to have this conversation now because I’m all twisted up inside and I don’t know why or what it means.”
“Good thing I do. It means you got what you wanted and you’re ready to move on.”
“It doesn’t mean that. It means I need time.”
“For what?”
“To figure out how I feel.”
“I thought you knew how you feel. You acted like it.”
“That was . . . before. Look, after we did it . . . It’s just that I didn’t expect . . . I mean, come on. We were reading the Bible and talking about those guys in the bushes and what they wanted from the bathtub lady and I can’t remember her name even because I’m so messed up about you. But what I’m trying to say is it doesn’t make sense to me. That’s what I want to tell you, Court. I can’t pretend to be praying and reading the Bible and making pledges to be pure and holy while all the time . . . Come on, Courtney. You know what I mean. I know you do.”
“You’re saying I’m a hypocrite,” she whispered. She’d gone so pale, he thought she might faint. “You got what you wanted and now you’re saying it’s over between us because I’m a hypocrite.”
He said in protest, “You’re not being fair. And that’s not what I’m saying at all.” But he understood suddenly and with perfect clarity that part of what she was saying was true. Only it wasn’t the hypocrite part. Or if it was, it really had nothing to do with her at all.
She seemed to read his dawning knowledge on his face. She turned her own away. She said, “Just go, okay?”
“Court, come on . . .”
“Go, okay? I need to get home.”
TWENTY-FIVE
From all the texting that was going on and all the whispering that accompanied it, Jenn figured out fast enough that Gossip Central was passing along a message of vital importance to the life of the South Whidbey student body. It turned out to be the big breakup of Derric Mathieson and Courtney Baker. Since she and Derric had once been friends, Jenn might have cared about this or even spoken to Derric about it, but he’d dumped her friendship for SmartAss FatBroad’s months ago, so she gave him ten seconds inside her head and then waved bye-bye to his heartbreak, or whatever it was. She had other things on her mind.
One of them was Annie Taylor. She’d been gone from her trailer two nights in a row, not all night but till really late. The sound of her car door closing when she’d arrived home had awakened Jenn. The clock said two-thirty when Jenn padded to the window to see Annie just going to her trailer’s door, and while Jenn knew it was none of her business, it felt like her business when Annie wasn’t there because it felt like Nera was the reason why.
The last meeting of the seal spotters had been only too insane. Once it ended, Annie had doubled and tripled her intentions toward the seal. She had to contain her, she had to have pictures, she had to score a bit of her DNA. She talked nonstop about it and how she was going to do it and why it had to be done N-O-W. People were totally crazy because of that seal, Jenn thought. There had to be a reason beyond the obvious ones: To Langley she was a moneymaker and to Annie she was her ticket to finishing a PhD. Jenn could accept these as reasons for part of the craziness, but she sure as heck couldn’t accept them as reasons for all of it.
It seemed to her that everything started and finished with the coal black seal, so that was what she did, too. After gagging down a PBJ on stale bread with inadequate J and way too much PB, she headed for the school library, where she accessed a computer. As luck would have it, the only other people in the place were SmartAss FatBroad Becca King and Extra Underpants Schuman, who were whispering fiercely in a corner. Jenn smiled to herself when she saw them at it because she knew that whatever they were up to, it had to do with the Western Civ project that was looming ahead of them. That would be the same Western Civ project that promised her an A and promised FatBroad something much less than an A. Extra Underpants Schuman would sink their ship. It was, after all, what he did best.
Jenn went for the computers under the watchful eye of the PTA volunteer mom. She said to Jenn, “Watch yourself because I’ll be watching you,” which Jenn took to meant that the computers were for serious users and not for kids wanting to surf the Net. Whatever, she thought. She said, “Science project on seals,” and the volunteer mom said, “Make sure of that please.”
Suck on a few rotten eggs, Jenn thought. But she smiled and nodded and got down to work.