Joan Pearson was arguing with her mother in the lobby of my church.
“You misunderstood. I needed a ride because your father took my keys when he left this morning. He didn’t remember my key to his truck was also on that key ring, so I have no car. I wanted to come here this morning. I wanted to visit the group Reverend Luckie suggested for me. But no!” The whisper grew louder, more of a sharp hiss. “You slept the whole morning away, and I was kind when I shouldn’t have been. I did not wake you.”
“I know, Mother.” Joan said “Mother” in two cutting syllables with a space between them. I imagined her dark eyes turned upward in disgust, and I wished she’d used that voice when Wade made her cry outside the library. “So I gave you a ride tonight, and I’ll come back and pick you up after the service.”
“That was not the deal. I asked you to come with me. I want you to meet Reverend Luckie. I want you to meet the youth minister. He can help you.” Hmm … Mom must have suggested Mrs. Pearson get Matt to talk to Joan. I couldn’t picture it, Joan’s scowling face and Matt’s bright smile. She’d eat him alive.
“Seriously? What is this, an intervention? Help me with what? I’m not on drugs. I’m pissed off. I don’t want to talk to anyone except Dad, and you won’t let me talk to Dad.”
I knew I shouldn’t listen anymore. But I needed to cross the lobby to enter the main theater where the worship band was already playing, drums and guitars faint in the distance. If I crossed the lobby, Joan and her mother would see me and know I’d overheard their private argument.
I considered going back to the office and playing solitaire on Mom’s computer until the music was over and youth started. I was never going to do that though. For years Joan Pearson had fascinated me. And there I was with my own personal showing of the Pearson Family Circus.
In one ring, the Senior English teacher speaking with a sort of vulnerability henceforth never witnessed in teacher-kind. And in the second ring, tough girl Joan sounding selfish and also, maybe, a little like a lion facing a tamer she’d like to devour.
Finally, in the third ring, an absent father, gone who knows where with his wife’s car keys and the instigator of whatever brought these two prideful creatures to the point of public debacle.
“Joan,” Mrs. Pearson said, all attempts at whispering given up as hopeless. “Your dad won’t listen. I’m trying to survive this until he gets better.”
“He’s not getting better,” Joan snapped. “He’s only getting worse. Where the hell is he, Mom? Where did he drive off to this morning before the sun even came up?”
“He has a job interview. In Mississippi.” The explanation sounded weak, Mrs. Pearson’s voice devoid of the confidence it held in school hallways and assemblies. “His truck has been making funny noises. He can’t afford to take it in right now, so he took the Suburban.”
“I don’t believe that, and neither do you. He’s in no shape to go to a job interview.”
“Fine. You do not have to believe me. You do not have to do this thing for me, this one thing. Go on and leave. Go on and do what you want to do. I know what you get up to with the boys and the drinking. I’m not stupid. I know things you do not know I know.”
“No, Mother, I’ll stay. God forbid I have any life of my own. Whatever. I’ll wait for you. But I’m not going in there and listening to some crackpot preacher talk about a God who doesn’t give a shit about me.”
“Carrie Joan,” her mother gasped.
There was silence in the lobby. I almost peeked around the wall, but Joan sighed. “I’m sorry, Mom. I know you need to believe God cares. But I don’t.”
Then came the sound of high heels clicking across the tile. They moved in the direction of the theater. A door opened and loud music poured out. It got quiet again. I would’ve stayed hidden until Joan left, but she didn’t leave. Instead, there was a thump and soft sobbing.
For the second time that week, I was witness to a crying Joan. Talk about topping the list of things I never expected to happen.
Ever.
I was torn. Obviously, it was none of my business, and I seriously doubted I was the best person to handle Joan’s crisis of faith or lack of faith or whatever was going on there. My own religion was iffy. The God Joan’s mother believed in, the God my mother preached … He was the same God who made me … the God who made me have Tourette’s syndrome. Maybe there was some grand purpose, but most days it just sucked.
I did believe in God. Mostly because Jesus was a bit of a smart-ass, and he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about him. I was square with a guy like that, a guy who went around doing good things and pissing people off by not conforming to their stereotypes. I just wasn’t so good at dealing with his daddy, if you know what I mean. God and me had some differences of opinion.
If you judge by the Garden of Gethsemane scene in the gospels, I’d say Jesus and his daddy had some differences of opinion themselves.
But there was a girl crying on the floor of the theater lobby, and eventually some church member would need to use the bathroom. They would find Joan crying. She was exposed, and I knew what it was like to be exposed. Plus, she’d saved my rear once before. Even if it backfired and I wished she’d kept her damn fist to herself all those years ago.
I stepped from behind the wall and my foot kicked out, followed by a triple shoulder jerk and a grimace. Talking to a sobbing Joan was terrifying, and my body told me so in every way it could. No way could she miss my entrance, what with all the fanfare of a circus ringmaster my tics orchestrated.
She raised her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her cheeks were wet. They looked so soft, I thought about touching them with my fingertips.
“Stephen?” She wiped her eyes quickly.
“Hey, Joan. Sorry, I’m late for the service, and I heard you and your mom. I shouldn’t have listened, but I did, and maybe you’d rather not be out here in the lobby when people come out. They’ll dismiss all the teenagers for youth in a few minutes.” All of those words tumbled out of my mouth in a heap, each one rushing to get out faster than the one before it.
“Oh.” She glanced over her shoulder, toward the theater. “Right. I should go.”
“If you want to wait on your mom somewhere private, I know a place.” I could’ve let her leave. I could’ve watched her walk out the glass doors into the steamy August night.
There’s this theory I heard once, about changing the past. Something about dropping a rock into a river so the current parts, but as the river flows on, the current comes back together. It corrects itself. So, no matter how hard you try, the inevitable remains the inevitable.
“Thanks,” Joan said. “That’d be great. I’m a bit of a mess right now.”
I nodded and steeled my shoulders against another jerk. “Follow me.”
And she did. Joan hopped up off the tile floor and followed me down the hall, past the worship service in progress, to a locked door in a dimly lit corner.
“Where are we going?” Joan asked, leaning against the faded red wallpaper.
“You’ll see.” I pulled a key ring from my pocket and flipped keys until I found the one I wanted. The door opened with a low creak and I ushered Joan inside, where we were greeted by a narrow staircase. I used my phone as a flashlight to guide us up the steps.
“Can we turn on a light, maybe?” Joan whispered, sounding oddly reminiscent of her mother a few minutes earlier. I decided it was best not to point out any similarity between them.
“No,” I said. “The projection room has windows into all of the theaters. If we turn on the overhead lights, the windows will brighten and everyone in the worship service will turn to look.”
At the top of the stairs, there was a tiny lamp. I clicked it on only because it emitted about as much light as a birthday candle.
“That’s something at least,” Joan said.
“You can always go back to the lobby.” I questioned my sanity for offering to help her in the first place.
“No,
thanks. I’m not complaining. It’s just … going into a small pitch-black room with a guy usually means something other than what I think this means.”
“What do you think this means?” I shoved a pile of old cardboard boxes to one side and motioned for Joan to sit.
She chewed her lip a moment and studied my face. “I think it means you’re being nice. But I’m not sure why.”
“I’m a nice guy,” I said, turning to go.
“Hey, wait, where’re you going?” She toyed with an old projector wheel, empty of film, but her eyes were on me.
“To youth,” I told her. “You didn’t seem like you were in the mood for company.”
She patted the thick carpet beside her. “Stay. Please? It’s sort of creepy up here.”
I was torn again. Saving Joan from public humiliation was one thing. Hanging out with her in the projection room was another. On the one hand, Matt would notice my absence when it came time to make espresso over in the youth room. I was his best barista, master at doodling hearts in cappuccino foam, though he preferred I doodle crosses. To me, it was a bit morbid to draw the death penalty in a cup of coffee.
On the other hand, I was curious about Joan’s distress. Her mother had developed an attachment to my mother, which wasn’t strange by itself. Lots of people turned to Mom when they needed help, but I’d never seen Mrs. Pearson as anything but a teacher, someone who already knew everything. The voice in the lobby earlier had been broken and a little desperate. And here was Joan, who once punched Wade Bond in the face for me and later made him her boyfriend … and she was a wreck.
“Come on, Stephen. There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Stay a minute?”
“Okay,” I said. “For a bit.”
Her hands dropped to her sides. “I am obviously in distress here. I’m sure there are mascara streaks across my face, and I’m huddled on the floor of a dusty room.”
Her dark eyes shone with victory as I sat beside her on the floor, not sure if that was my choice or if I’d been expertly manipulated.
“What have you always wanted to ask me?”
She used the hem of her T-shirt to rub the mascara from her face. When she lifted it up, I couldn’t help but peek at the strip of skin showing above her jeans. It was a warm brown color, her belly button like a tiny eye winking at me.
She lowered her shirt. “Back when we were in middle school, why did you hate me so much?”
I crossed my arms and leaned my back against the wall, not looking at Joan. “I never hated you.”
“Yes, you did,” she said. “I tried to be your friend, and you were mean. If I sat by you at lunch, you moved. If I spoke to you in the hall, you ignored me. I got your phone number from Ballard and you hung up on me.”
She was right. I had done all of those things.
“So, tell me why.”
When I didn’t answer right away, she nudged my shoulder with hers.
I schooled my features, a grimace threatening, and sighed. “I can’t believe you don’t know.”
Something buzzed. Joan’s cell. It was in her pocket, and her hip was so close to mine the vibration hummed against me. She pulled out the phone and we both looked at the caller ID. It was my blond-haired nemesis in his football jersey. His name flashed cheerfully on the screen.
“Go on,” I said, almost a challenge. “Answer it.”
She shook her head and tapped ignore. The buzzing stopped. The screen went blank, and she slid the phone back into her pocket.
I wasn’t sure what to make of her choosing to skip Wade’s call and keep talking to me, but it was enough to convince me I may as well tell her the truth. “You punched Wade. In my defense, you punched Wade. You humiliated him.”
I snuck a look at Joan. Her eyes were pure confusion. “You care about Wade?”
“I don’t give a fuck about Wade,” I snapped. Lowering my voice, I said, “But I do care about me. And when you pulled that stunt in the hall, I never heard the end of it. ‘Stephen Luckie, lucky thing his girlfriend’s around to protect him’ and ‘Lucky his bodyguard showed up.’”
She shifted on the carpet and met my eyes. “You were mad at me for sticking up for you? Wade was being a jerk. Someone had to do something.”
I didn’t understand how she could not understand. “No, someone didn’t.”
“Well, Stephen, lucky for you, I never did it again.” Her mouth looked sort of like my grimace.
“Whatever.” A tic was looming and, sure enough, my shoulder jerked three times.
“Does that hurt?” she asked, the anger draining from her voice.
I preferred anger to pity, so I wasn’t thrilled with the change. “No. Does it hurt when you shrug?”
She shrugged her shoulders quickly and shook her head.
“It’s the same muscles,” I said. “Only I don’t choose when they move.”
“Are you ever still?” It was a genuine question. No one had asked me before. Unless you count an exasperated elementary school teacher throwing her hands up and saying, “Don’t you ever hold still?”
“Sometimes,” I said. I remembered kissing Sylvie and Pilar and the girls at the party. I didn’t tell Joan about those times though. I picked something safer. “When I’m nervous and the tics get bad, Mom will reach over and put her hand on my arm or my leg. It can calm my muscles for a while.”
Joan nodded. She slowly reached her right hand across the space between us and touched my jerky left shoulder. The angle forced her close to me, her body tilted forward.
I turned to look at her face, my shoulder alive with the heat of her warm fingers through my cotton shirt. That close, her eyes weren’t black. They were coffee brown. She’d missed a smudge of mascara and I instinctively wiped it away with my thumb. Our faces were so close I spotted an eyelash fallen on her cheek.
I could kiss her. She’d let me.
“Stephen!” Mom’s voice rang out at the bottom of the stairs. “Stephen, are you up there?”
For a split second, neither of us moved. Then, Joan took her hand from my shoulder and stood up. I stood up too.
“Yeah, Mom. I’ll be right down.”
“Matt needs your help,” Mom said, her steps quick on the stairs. I tried to think fast, but my shoulder was already shrugging and my foot kicked out. Mom appeared in the doorway. “Oh. You must be Joan.”
“Hi.” Joan gave a halfhearted wave. “Sorry, Reverend Luckie. My mom and I had a fight and Stephen offered to let me chill up here until I calmed down.”
I watched doubt flicker across Mom’s face. It was a new situation, catching me alone with a girl.
“I’ll go help Matt,” I said and darted past Mom, leaving her and Joan to work things out. Joan wasn’t my problem. Whatever seemed to be about to happen … I was imagining things. I blamed it on the experiment. With all that craziness, my brain must’ve decided every girl wanted to kiss me. They were all waiting to corner me in a dim projection room.
I was such an idiot, letting my guard down with Joan.
Not ten minutes after I started pulling espresso shots with Matt, we ran out of straws for the smoothies. I knew where the extra straws were stored, behind the old snack bar in the theater lobby. I crossed back through the offices and ducked behind the counter.
When I stood up, straws in hand, I caught sight of Joan. She was standing on the sidewalk outside the doors. The light of her phone screen illuminated her face. I wanted to apologize for running off like I had, leaving her with my mother. But as I approached the exit, a silver Lexus pulled to a stop at the curb. No one got out to open the door for her, so Joan did it herself and slid into the passenger seat. The windows were tinted, and the sun had long since gone down, so I couldn’t see the driver. It didn’t matter though. I knew the car.
While I stood in the bright lobby, holding straws and feeling like an idiot, Joan rode away with Wade, her knight in shining armor.
“Stephen?” Erin poked her head into the snack bar area and looked ar
ound until she spotted me.
“Yeah, sorry. I got the straws.”
“Cool, but that’s not why I was looking for you.”
I walked back around the counter. “What’s up?”
“A bunch of us are going to hang out at Matt and Kelly’s after youth. You want to come?”
I paused, considered going home and sitting alone in my bedroom, doing homework to distract myself from my anger over Joan and Wade. “Okay, yeah, I’ll come.”
“Good. You haven’t been around much lately. We miss you.”
I wasn’t so sure that was the truth. Erin might miss me, but I wasn’t tight with anyone in The Exchange’s youth group. Still, when Matt hosted hangout time at his house, it was always fun, whether we watched some old movie or played ridiculous board games.
I took Matt the straws and got back to work. Erin stayed nearby, sitting on the counter with her legs dangling. We were both quiet, and I should’ve paid attention. I should’ve at least talked to her, asked what was on her mind, but my own mind was too full of Joan.
When we left after church, Erin walked beside me, arm swinging close to mine. My dad was always on about being a gentleman so I made sure she got to her car safely.
Before opening the door, she paused, the parking lot lights illuminating her freckled shoulders. “Was that Joan Pearson you were talking to earlier?”
I blushed. Who knows why, nothing happened with Joan. “Yeah, she brought her mom to church.”
“Oh, well, that’s nice.” Erin was acting weird. She chewed her bottom lip and dropped her keys.
I bent over to pick up the keys, and she knelt beside me.
“You like Joan, don’t you?” she asked.
I froze. “What?”
“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, if you do.” She grabbed her keys and stood up. “It’s just, she isn’t exactly a Christian.”
I stood up as well, my brain screaming warning signals. “Joan’s just a friend, and I don’t care if she’s a Christian or not.”
“Okay.” Erin’s cheeks were pink, but maybe that was just a trick of the light. She fiddled with her keys and then turned to unlock her car door. “See you at Matt’s, right?”
Kiss and Repeat Page 7
