He nods, his face cloudy. “This is so fucked up.”
“I know.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I WATCH JACKSON SCURRY through my backyard and out the side gate before closing my window. I’m still exhausted and tuck myself under the covers to get more sleep just as I hear my parents stir and head down to the kitchen for coffee.
Usually on a Saturday we’d be at church by now. My dad would be in his office, busy prepping for the night service, the first in the succession of identical sermons that begins Saturday night and ends, after the fourth repetition, on Sunday night. My mom and I would be helping out with whatever else was going on. There’s always something on a Saturday: men’s prayer breakfasts, SonShine Kids troupe meetings, Brothers In Christ meetings, community Bible study groups, Women’s Ministry outreach programs, missions training. A couple weeks ago the whole place was crazy, prepping for the Easter service, which is always a big production. This year Pastor Pete played Jesus in the Passion Play, and when he rose from the dead, they flew him from the stage all the way over the audience. The seats were packed.
But there’s nothing happening there today. No church planned for tonight or tomorrow, just a vigil tomorrow night in the parking lot. Everything else was cancelled.
As of today, the police are still there, collecting evidence. But since they realized that June was the sole victim, that it wasn’t an active shooter, they seem to have limited the scope of their search. My dad expects to be able to open the administrative offices on Monday for regular business. And even with the cleanup once the police are finally gone, they’re thinking the church will be fully open by Wednesday for June’s funeral. June will be eulogized in the same room where she was killed. I try not to think about how messed up that is.
There’s a knock on my door.
“Come in.”
The knob jiggles, but doesn’t open, and I realize I forgot to unlock it. I dash out of bed and open the door, trying to think up an explanation.
“Em-bot?” Paige is standing there in her sweats, eyes red-rimmed, her curly hair mashed into a sloppy bun on top of her head.
“Paiger.” She attacks me with a huge hug, like the time when I was five and came back from visiting my grandparents in Texas for a month. She knocked me over with that one.
“I had to see you. I tried to call, but no one was answering,” she says, still clutching me tight, tears in her voice.
“We’ve had it off the hook. All the reporters.”
She finally lets go, wipes her eyes. “I figured. Our house is the same.” Of course it would be. The press is probably working their way down the staff list.
“And my cell’s still at church,” she says. “Did you get yours?”
“Yeah. I had it with me, but it’s dead.” We drift over to my bed and sit down.
“How are you? Have you been okay?” she asks.
“Yeah, I’m okay I guess. You?” I ask.
“Honestly? I’m kind of freaking out. This is all just so insane.”
“I know.”
“I feel kinda bad,” she says.
“About what?”
“Just…she always wanted to hang out, but I was always too busy.”
“You were nice to her, though,” I say, half to her and half to myself.
“Yeah. To her face. But that’s not the same as being someone’s friend, as really, truly caring for their soul.”
I lean my head over until it’s resting on hers. “We promised her we would talk to her that night.”
“I know.”
“But I completely forgot about it. I totally blew her off. Maybe if I hadn’t…”
Paige sits up, looks me in the eye. “Don’t think like that.”
“I can’t help it.”
“If it wasn’t for you June wouldn’t have had any friends at all. And, more importantly, she wouldn’t even be a Christian.”
That’s right. I had forgotten.
“You led her to Christ, Em. If it wasn’t for you she might be in hell right now.”
Or she might not have stayed at our church, never been shot.
“I mean, at least we know, no matter what,” Paige says, smiling through her tears, “…that June went to heaven.”
The thing is I don’t know that. What comforts Paige doesn’t comfort me. I don’t know if heaven exists at all, so all I can think about is how unfair it is for her life to end so quickly. So completely.
“Do you really believe that?” I ask.
“Of course I do. Don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I say. This isn’t the right time. And maybe it’s not a conversation I’m ready to have with her even if it was.
Paige stares at me. She’s wearing that face that she gets sometimes when we play tennis. Paige is the best at tennis in our whole school, better than all the boys. They won’t play her anymore because she destroys them. I’m just about the only one left who will, and I only do it because she’s my friend and because she lets me win a lot, and because she’s just that amazing to watch. In every game she gets this look on her face. It’s the moment when she’s decided whether to win or lose. Only I never know which it will be. I can only see that she’s decided. She has that look on her face right now.
“What were you going to talk to me about the other night?”
“Hmm?”
“Before everything happened? You asked me to get coffee, said we should talk?”
Mike. He hadn’t even crossed my mind until now. I was going to talk to her about breaking up with Mike.
“Honestly, I can’t even remember,” I say. Everything is so different now. It hurts to even think about it, but I can’t break up with him anymore. Not yet.
“You’re not having doubts are you, Emma?” she says.
“No. Of course not,” I say.
She pauses for a minute, then lifts herself up on her elbow and sighs, and I know she’s letting me win. “What if…,” she says quietly. “What if I was?”
I’m so stunned I don’t even know what to say. A glimmer of hope fires in my chest. What if she’s feeling the same way I am? “What do you mean?”
She looks up at me, and her expression completely changes. She rolls her eyes and crashes backward into the bed. “Stop looking at me like that, weirdo. I’m not about to go all atheist ninja on you or something.”
My glimmer dies out.
She continues, “I’ve just been thinking about, I don’t know, the way we do things around here, I guess. Sometimes I just…I have questions.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A lot of things. It’s not really important.”
“No. It is. Tell me.”
She nibbles on her cheek, takes her time before she speaks. “Like, for instance, June the other night? She felt so bad about her past, and it sort of feels like we were all responsible for that, the way we talked about, you know, sex around her. I hate thinking that she died feeling like she was less than anyone else.”
I grab her hand and squeeze it. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”
She squeezes me back. “I wish I could think about her any other way, but all I can picture is her crying. I wish I could just see her again, happy, like she usually was.”
Suddenly I realize I might be able to help. There is a way to see her again. I grab my computer.
“What are you doing?” Paige says.
“Remember when June gave her testimony?”
“Do you think it’s still up?”
“I don’t know.”
I bring up the church website and navigate to the youth group page—Elevate Youth Ministries. And there it is, under a heading that reads “Meet our Youth”—June’s smiling face, blonde and sweet and tissue-paper delicate.
We shift until my head is leaning against the headboard, Paige’s head on my stomach and the laptop in my lap. We’ve watched a million things together lying around like this. I click on June’s video, and Paige grabs my hand.
June
is on stage in the Youth Center, her dress faded and dingy, like it had been worn a thousand times. She takes the microphone from Pastor Pete and blinks, unaccustomed to the bright lights up there. It’s a Wednesday night service. I can just make out the shape of my own head in the audience, center section, third row, Paige on one side of me, Mike on the other. The date below the video says it was shot on February 26, just over a month ago.
June takes a deep breath and exhales it right into the microphone. The sound of her breath is a thundercloud across the space. Then she speaks.
“My sixth birthday party was at Six Flags. My birthday is on June first in case you want to buy me a present. It’s easy to remember because it’s my name too.”
It’s hard to hear her, so Pastor Pete motions for her to tip the mic closer to her mouth, and she does, but this time it’s so close it fuzzes her s’s so all her words feel cloudy. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“I can’t remember having a birthday party before that one, and I can’t remember having one since. My parents kind of do things all the way or not at all. But this was one of those times when we had money, so I knew it was gonna be amazing.”
She stretches out her left hand, working out the nerves.
“It was my first time there, so I was really excited. My sister had been once, and she told me all about it. I didn’t sleep the entire night before, but I wasn’t tired at all. The air smelled like funnel cake, and I was wearing my favorite pink dress, and there was a blister on my heel from my brand-new sandals. We rode so many rides and ate cotton candy and played all the games, and I remember I won this pink piggy at that one where you use a water gun to race horses on a track?”
Someone coughs, and it seems to throw her off. She looks confused, and pauses for a moment before starting again.
Paige is crying next to me on the bed.
“Everything was perfect, except for two things. The first is that I was only six and too short for a lot of the rides. The ride I wanted to ride most was that big, old-fashioned swing that raises up into the air and spins around and around. But I was way too short.”
“The second thing was that my dad was supposed to be there, but it was getting late and he hadn’t shown up yet because he was working. I could see it was making my mom mad every time I asked. I mean, what could she do? But I really wanted him to be there so I kept whining about it. She got so mad she shoved me and my sister off on our own so she could smoke with her friends.”
She stops again, looking a little stricken, like she hadn’t meant to say the thing about her mom smoking.
“I started to cry because it was getting really dark, and I knew we were gonna have to leave soon, and my dad still wasn’t there, and we had ridden all the kiddie rides a hundred times, but all I really wanted to do was ride that swing. I think I had gotten it into my head that if my dad showed up he could do something about it. So my sister came up with this plan. She was gonna distract the ride operator so I could sneak over the fence and get in.”
“I don’t know what she said to the operator, but it worked. I climbed over while she was talking and got a seat.”
She closes her eyes, shutting us all out, gathering her thoughts. You can see the concentration tightening her forehead. June wasn’t exactly a showy person. She could talk your head off, yeah, but not in front of everyone. The fear she must have felt being in front of all of us like that must have been intense.
Her silence goes on so long that Pastor Pete finally speaks up, “You’re doing great, June.”
She looks up at him and smiles that too-grateful smile of hers, then looks back to us. “Once I sat down the best thing happened! My dad sat down right next to me! We were so busy hugging that the ride operators didn’t even notice my height. They just hooked me in and started it up.
“I remember the ride spinning, then going up and up and up. I loved it so much! It was just so beautiful. I leaned my head back and watched the stars blur to streaks. My hair flew behind me like I was flying, and it really felt like I was. The wind pricked up goose bumps, and they felt like magic on my skin.”
Pastor Pete coughs, probably bothered by the magic comment and wondering where the story was going. We all were. You can see people shifting in the audience, losing patience.
“Then I did this stupid thing. I lifted my little pink piggy into the air, to make it fly. And it slipped out of my hands. And before I realized what I was doing I lunged for it and the swing twisted under me. I tried to wiggle to steady it, but my butt ended up slipping through the chain on the side of my seat.”
The room gets really quiet. People stop shuffling. I remember being there. In an instant, she had us all perched on the edge of our chairs.
“I don’t know how far off the ground I was at the time. But I was barely holding on. I was folded over in half, my head and hands and feet were still in the seat, but my bottom was dangling out like I was sitting inside an empty bucket.”
“I remember being scared and sorry and embarrassed that everyone could see my underwear. Which was stupid, because I was about to die, but I was six, so I guess that’s what you think about when you’re six.”
Next to me on the bed Paige’s breath hitches in her throat, and I know what she’s thinking because I’m thinking it too. It’s like June was doomed, destined in some way for tragedy.
“I remember trying to scream but not being able to. It seemed like my breath got caught in my throat for what felt like forever.”
Was that what it was like when she died? I’m crying now too, right along with Paige. I had just wanted to hear her voice, but this is too much.
“And then I remember my dad swinging over and grabbing me. First my ankle, then my hand. I remember him holding on to me so tight I thought my bones would break right off.”
“What I don’t remember is landing. I didn’t black out or anything, I just don’t remember it. I remember the moment after we landed, though. He pulled me out of the seat and held me really tight. He was breathing really hard, and his body was vibrating just like mine. But, somehow, we were both okay.”
Paige sniffles, wipes her face. This was harder to watch than I thought, but there’s only a little left. And June looks so alive, so normal. If I turn it off she’ll be gone again. Paige tucks her face into my stomach, and I put a hand on her head, gripping her close.
June keeps talking, “I know God sent my dad just in time to save me that night. God saved me before I even knew about Him, so that I could live long enough to meet Him.”
She looks stronger now. The color is back in her cheeks, and her voice is full and confident.
“Jesus had a plan for me. He had a plan for me to find this church and find Him and stand here tonight a whole person. So even on hard days I think about that night, and I remember God’s plan, and I remember that my future is in His hands too and that if I trust Him He’ll never let me fall. Thank you.”
She lowers the microphone, and the room explodes in applause and a chorus of hallelujahs. A smile runs across her face. She’s beaming, so happy to make us all so happy, so moved by her words. I decide to remember her exactly like this.
“Thank you,” Paige says. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
ON SUNDAY MORNING, THE police call and ask me to come in to answer more questions about the lock-in. Now my parents and I are sitting in a small beige conference room at the police station, just big enough for a table that seats all of us: my family plus the two detectives—Detective Boyer, the one I spoke to that night, and her partner, Detective Bud Simms, who looks like he could be a hundred years old.
It smells like armpits in here.
“So you used to date June’s boyfriend, Nicolas?” Detective Boyer asks.
“Yes.” I say, worried about answering questions about him. Of course he’d be their first suspect, but there’s no way I’m going to help indict him.
“Were you upset when he broke up with you?”
Her question is jarring. Why
would they care about how we broke up? “He didn’t break up with me. I broke up with him.”
Detective Simms perks up at that. “Oh? Why?”
“Because I wanted to date someone else.”
“Your current boyfriend, Michael Kent?”
“Yes.”
“Is all this personal information really necessary?” my mom asks, giving the detectives a smile that, if they knew her, they’d know wasn’t a smile at all. “With all the attention that comes from our work, we do our best to keep our daughter’s private life private.”
I have to keep myself from laughing. The only things sacred about my life are the things they don’t know.
“Exactly,” my dad pipes up. “I thought you needed Emma to help out with information about the lock-in because of her unique position in the youth community.”
“We’re just trying to get a clearer picture. Get to know everyone. All of this is helping a lot,” Detective Simms says, scratching his nose with the wrong end of his pen and accidentally drawing a blue line down the crease of it.
“So you broke up with Nicolas to date Michael. How long ago was that?” Detective Boyer seems to be in charge of asking the questions. She seems to be in charge of everything.
“Last spring.”
“When last spring?”
“Maybe April? It was before prom.”
“You don’t keep track of your anniversary?”
“I’m no good with dates,” I say, smiling.
Detective Boyer looks over to Simms with a frown and rubs her nose to let him know about the line. He rubs at it, but doesn’t get it off, leaving a blue smear where it used to be. Boyer seems annoyed but lets it go.
“Okay. Let’s talk about that night,” Boyer says. “When was the last time you saw June?”
“It was like I told you. I can’t remember for sure.”
“Give us your best guess.”
I sit up straight, fold my hands. “I know I saw her in the choir room after the Purity Ball. After that, I lost track of her.”
“Why weren’t you hanging out together? You were friends with her, right?”
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