This Side of Salvation

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  “I confess, Kane gave me the hint for this one.” She handed me a rectangular, flexible package.

  I carefully pulled off the 100-percent-recycled gift wrap so that she could reuse it, pretending that I wasn’t completely blown away by the fact that I was sitting in her room, on her bed, no less. “Awesome. Coach Kopecki’s been bugging me to read this all year.” I flipped the pages of H. A. Dorfman’s Mental Game of Baseball. An envelope fell out from the chapter named “Concentration.”

  “But that gift was my idea,” she said proudly.

  I opened the envelope to see a gift certificate for a beginners’ yoga class. “Thanks? I mean, thanks!” I went to kiss her to convince her of my enthusiasm, but she stopped me.

  “You’ll love it, I promise. It’ll be great for your pitching. Yoga helps with balance and focus, and it teaches you how to breathe.”

  “I know how to breathe, though sometimes you do make me forget.”

  “Aw, David . . .” Her face softened, and this time she let me kiss her. While her eyes were closed, I placed the smaller of my two gifts on her knee. “Ooh, a plastic bag—fancy!”

  “It’s not wrapped because I just bought it tonight at Longwood Gardens. It’s the bonus impulse gift.” One that cleaned out my spending money for the next three weeks.

  She pulled the small box out of the green plastic bag, then opened it to reveal a silver snowflake necklace. “It’s beautiful! Put it on me?”

  Bailey turned her back, lifting her hair. There was her bare neck, warm and inviting.

  I knelt behind her on the bed, then drew the chain around the front of her, intensely aware of the fact that it would fall down her shirt if I let go.

  My thumbnail fumbled with the catch, and the silence became embarrassing. I glanced around for a conversation topic. “Who’s in those pictures on your wall?”

  “That’s my Gallery of Geekdom. Left to right, it’s Galileo, Newton, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, and of course Einstein.”

  “Yeah, I recognized that last one.”

  “I should have one of Gregor Mendel, the grandfather of genetics, but having a monk’s picture in my bedroom just seems wrong. How’s it going back there?”

  “Almost got it.” I leaned in, inhaling her scent, my mouth a few inches from her nape.

  Darwin had never seemed so correct, because in that moment I felt pure animal. All I wanted to do was bite Bailey’s neck, pin her down, and feel her writhe beneath me, mewling with pleasure. I wanted to bash in the head of every guy who looked at her. I wanted to hunt down a tasty creature and bring it home to feed our offspring, so they’d live long enough to pass on my genes to their offspring.

  Maybe not those last parts. No bludgeoning, no hunting, and no passing on genes.

  But definitely the biting.

  “There.” I let the necklace clasp click shut, but before she could drop her hair, I touched my lips to her neck, soft and brief.

  Bailey shivered, and didn’t let her hair down. “That was nice,” she whispered. “Do it again.”

  I rested my hand on her shoulder, as much to steady myself as anything, then pressed my mouth to her skin again, longer this time. My lips and tongue were nearly dry from nervousness, but Bailey didn’t seem to mind. She leaned back against my chest, resting her head on my shoulder, her body between my knees. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held her snug against me, almost like when we were watching the fountain show, except now we were alone. On her bed.

  Bailey lifted her chin, finally letting her hair fall. “So what’s the nonbonus present?”

  I placed the green-and-red–plaid gift bag in her lap. “Something your gallery would approve of.”

  She pulled out a pair of knitted puppetlike mittens, one decorated with round ears and whiskers, the other with horns, then read the tag. “Predator versus Prey mittens! A lion and a gazelle.” Bailey stuffed her hands inside the mittens and opened their mouths wide. “With teeth and tongues!”

  “You like them?”

  “This is the best gift! I mean, other than the necklace.” She growled as she made the two mitten animals fight, mouths locked together. “And they’re warm, too. Thank you so much.” She put one mitten to each of my cheeks and made a kissing sound. “You really know me.”

  I wondered if she really knew me. Looking past her, I saw that she’d written a quote under each photo in her Gallery of Geekdom. Darwin’s was “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

  “You remember that fight you had with Francis about evolution?”

  “In the soup kitchen? It wasn’t really a fight. Mostly just me yelling at him for being stupid.” She shook her head. “That’s mean. He’s not stupid, just misled, I guess. I don’t understand why creationists are so offended by evolution. Why can’t they just tell themselves God wrote all the laws of science, including evolution, or say that evolution is part of the divine plan? Whatever they need to feel better. But they want to claim that their beliefs are science.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly—”

  “They can dress up creationism and call it intelligent design, but it’s not based on facts. I just don’t get it. Is their faith so weak they need to support it with lies?” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m ranting again, aren’t I?”

  “If I try to explain, do you promise not to yell at me?”

  She appeared to ponder my question. “Okay, I promise.” Bailey moved away from me, pulled off her mittens, then set one of her pillows in her lap. “Go for it.” She patted the pillow.

  I hesitated, but for only half a second. If she wanted my head in her lap, I would share even something this dangerous.

  I lay down on the pillow, letting my legs dangle off the side of her bed. “First of all, in my head I have no problem with evolution. I’ve taken two years of bio, so I know the score.” Much to my parents’ chagrin. “But deep down there’s still one thing that bothers me. If everything that we are, even our souls, comes from random mutation, then life has no meaning.” Which means death has no meaning, especially one like my brother’s.

  “You can give your life meaning.” She stroked my forehead from the center to the temples, with just her fingertips. “We all can.”

  “No, because whatever we say our lives mean might not be true.” It was hard to concentrate with her touching me like that. “If I say baseball gives my life meaning, then what if it doesn’t work out? What if I get injured or I’m not good enough, or I remind a scout of his stepson, whose bio dad is a total dick to him?”

  “You have quite the catastrophic imagination, you know that?”

  With good reason, I thought.

  “David, you can make your life mean something that doesn’t depend on what other people do or think.” She dragged her nails over my scalp, ruffling my hair. “Maybe it’s helping others or just being a good person.”

  My entire body was starting to tingle. “Then what happens when I’m not a good person? What happens when I lie or cheat or I’m mean to my sister?” Or tear off all your clothes, like I want to do right now? “If my life is about being good, then it loses meaning when I’m bad. That’s the thing about God—He loves us no matter how much we screw up. Because He made us.”

  “Wait, you lost me.” Bailey’s fingers stopped moving. “Can’t God love you even if he didn’t personally create you and all the little fishies in the sea? What if he just watched you from afar and was like, ‘That David Cooper, he’s pretty awesome. Good job, evolution. You rock.’ ”

  “The problem with that”—I pointed to Darwin—“is that it makes this”—I pulled my cross out from under my shirt—“unnecessary.”

  “Unnecessary but not impossible. Besides, this”—Bailey slipped a finger under the cross’s thick silver chain—“has nothing to do with creation. This actually happened. There are historica
l records from the Roman Empire that say a guy named Jesus from East Nowhere, aka Nazareth, was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate. Whether he walked on water or brought Lazarus back to life or did the loaves-and-fishes—that could all be folklore. Unlike Adam and Eve, Jesus wasn’t a myth. He was a real person executed for a political crime. And if it’s important to you to remember that by wearing this”—she held the inch-long cross between her thumb and middle finger—“then your life has meaning. Because you made that choice. You decided it matters. And I think that’s pretty cool.”

  Bailey tucked the cross back inside my shirt. Her fingernails brushed the hollow of my throat as she withdrew her hand, sending a tremor down the rest of my body.

  I stared up at her, wondering how we could disagree on the meaning of life—the meaning of life!—and somehow still get each other. She didn’t shut me down every time I talked about God, or try to convert me, any more than I tried to convert her. And the look in her blue-gray eyes when she talked about science was like the one my Stony Hill friends had when they sang of faith and certainty. She got the same charge out of wondering as they did out of knowing.

  Yet as open-minded as she was, I still couldn’t bring myself to tell her about my parents and their End Times plans. Bailey could tolerate this cross around my neck and the fact that I said grace before eating so much as a snack. But the Rush was a whole other world of wackadoodle.

  Other Christians across the country, including those at our church, were starting to rail against Sophia Visser and her “cult.” I’d hoped it would make my parents realize how dangerous she was. Instead they’d rallied around her. Mom had said we should make the most of this Christmas, since it was the last one we would spend on earth.

  Determined to forget the doom, I reached up to take her hand. Instead of interlacing our fingers, I folded hers into a fist and gripped it gently but firmly. It soothed me to feel a hard, round object against my palm.

  She skimmed my knuckles with her pale-green-polished fingernails. “Which pitch is that?”

  “Fastball. If my fingers are gripping the two seams straight on”—I turned her fist inside mine, then traced imaginary stitchings over the back of her hand—“then it’s called a two-seam fastball. But if they lie crosswise over it, it’s a four-seamer.” I shifted my hand ninety degrees. “It changes the spin. Two-seamers sink, and four-seamers rise. But because of gravity, a four-seam fastball ends up being just a straight, level, blindingly fast throw.”

  “Cool, physics. What other pitches do you know?”

  “I know them all in my head, but I’ve only mastered the fastballs, and this.” I switched to my three-finger changeup, feeling her thumbnail scrape my palm. “This is my off-speed pitch, and next year I hope to add a knuckle curve.” I curled in my fingers, pressing my knuckles against hers.

  “So . . . this semester,” she said in a low, throaty voice, “before we were together, I used to sit there in class and stare at your hands. After seeing you pitch, I thought they must be really strong. I wondered what they’d feel like on . . . well, on me.” She licked her lips and let out a shaky breath. “You know?”

  I knew. Up to this point, I’d touched her shoulders and her waist, and held her hand, of course. But I’d never come close to venturing inside the Zones.

  I had no clue what to do—not that I let that stop me. I sat up, leaned over, and kissed her, deep and soft, so she’d know I was willing.

  Bailey kissed me back, then pulled me down onto the bed with her. We ended up on her other pillow, side by side, legs overlapping. My cheek rested on a thick layer of her hair, but she didn’t seem to mind. I was too nervous to meet her eyes, so I watched the lamplight glint off her silver snowflake necklace.

  Bailey’s mouth opened as she guided my hand to meet her breast for the first time. As amazing as it felt, warm and full and alive, it was her soft sigh that shot through me. I wanted to capture that noise, turn it into a text alert ringtone or put it on an endless loop to listen to while I fell asleep.

  It made me realize how wrong I was about girls. I’d been taught that they only wanted to be kissed and cuddled and bought stuff. Sex was something they gave away reluctantly in exchange for love or a sad sort of self-esteem. Horniness was a Guy Curse.

  But that one sigh, as her leg drifted up, knee pressing my thigh, toes tracing my shin, told me that Bailey wanted more than kissing and cuddling. She wanted sex.

  She wanted sex with me.

  CHAPTER 19

  NOW

  Still on my knees, I reach across John’s bed, where Mara has just tossed her phone.

  Mom’s message is five simple words: They said you’d be here.

  “Do you know what this means?” Mara bounces on her toes. “It means (a) they’re alive. And (b) they didn’t leave us on purpose!”

  “ ‘They said you’d be here.’ ” I show the phone to Bailey, who’s kneeling beside me now. Is my face as lust-flushed as hers? “But where is here?” I ask Mara.

  “I have no idea.”

  “What are you waiting for? Call her.” I toss the phone back across the bed, not yet daring to stand up and put my, um, excitement on display. Sweatpants have their downside.

  Mara touches the screen, then puts the phone to her ear. While she paces, Bailey surreptitiously slips a hand under her own shirt and tugs her bra back into place. I focus on John’s poster of the 2008 World Series Phillies lineup and start mentally reciting the team members, left to right. It has the intended effect.

  “Mom, it’s Mara. Please call me back. Or text me again, whatever. Are you okay? Where are you? Is Dad with you? Who is ‘they’? Just—just call me!” She hangs up. “Maybe she has bad cell coverage and can only text.” Mara thumbs in a new message. “Or her battery’s running too low to make a call.”

  She sets the phone down carefully on the bed, as if her hand will block the signal. We stare at it for almost a minute without speaking.

  Finally Bailey says, “So wherever they are, your parents must have thought you were meeting them there. Someone lied to them.”

  “To get them to leave voluntarily,” Mara muses, “so it wouldn’t count as kidnapping. Legally, I mean.”

  “Did you show the message to Kane?” Bailey asks her.

  “No, he went home, said he’d be back tonight.” She lowers her voice, though I’m not sure why. “We locked up the gun in the desk drawer until we could figure out what to do about it.”

  I keep my eyes on the phone, a thought rapping at the back of my brain.

  “What Kane said makes sense,” Bailey says. “If your dad had planned to kill himself when the Rush didn’t happen, he could’ve easily done it right here with the gun.” She puts a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry for that image. But he clearly didn’t do it, so they must’ve had some other plan that didn’t involve taking their own lives.”

  “Yeah.” I’m still searching my memory for the clue I know is there. Something to do with a phone’s lost connection or dead battery.

  Then it hits me. A blue man beside a blue blob.

  “My phone!” I jump up and head for the door, pushing past my sister.

  “I saw it downstairs. Maybe there’s a message for you, too!”

  “It’s not that.” I grab the doorjamb to slow myself enough to turn. “I know where Mom and Dad are.”

  CHAPTER 20

  TWO MONTHS (MORE OR LESS) BEFORE THE RUSH

  That winter, Bailey and I went on a mad spree of more-than-kissing. Her parents never came to her room to check on us, but I was always aware they were in the house, so I made sure all our clothes stayed on. That tended to be a lot of clothes, since the Brynns kept their thermostat at sixty degrees to save the environment.

  Besides, I wasn’t sure how far I was ready to take things. I didn’t plan to save my virginity for my wife, like a lot of guys from my church (supposedly) did. I wouldn’t wear a purity ring or take a pledge or join True Love Waits. After all, I planned to be at least twenty-five before ge
tting married, and being a twenty-five-year-old virgin was out of the question. At sixteen and four months, even eighteen seemed an eternity away.

  But once we had sex, we couldn’t un-have it. Maybe we’d expect to do it all the time, and never again be satisfied with just kissing or touching. Maybe I would fail her somehow.

  I struggled with the issue, prayed over it, lay awake almost every night, um, thinking about it (and was grateful I did my own laundry, if you know what I mean), and kept arriving at the same conclusion: It wasn’t time.

  Yet.

  • • •

  My birthday wish for my parents’ happiness came true, just not in the way that I’d hoped. Mom and Dad didn’t go back to normal that winter, but they seemed deeply serene, especially after he returned from his trips. Dad still spoke in Bible-ish, including while teaching me to drive (“The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom,” which I’m pretty sure had to do with defensive driving).

  Their improved demeanor made Dad’s suicide seem less likely, at least for the moment. Finding that gun in Dad’s desk was starting to feel like a dream. He never brought up that it was missing, though one evening after being out all day at exams and study group, I had the distinct impression that my room had been searched.

  Fall semester ended, and with it, the last chance for my sister and me to pretend the Rush was a harmless whim. Dad wouldn’t cough up money for spring community-college courses he said we’d never finish. Mara’s job at the garage—where she’d moved up to assistant mechanic—allowed her to pay her own tuition to fill graduation requirements. As a junior, I had more flexibility with classes, so I took homeschool courses that met NCAA standards.

  I didn’t let my parents’ plans for their nonfuture keep me from planning my own future—namely, baseball. I woke at six every morning to run in the dark, then spent hours lifting free weights and practicing yoga in our basement. I was like the Rocky of the Main Line.

  (Bailey was right about yoga: It helped my balance, letting me raise my leg higher in my windup to give my pitches more power. She was pissed that I was better at yoga than her, though.)