“It will take about one more hour for the rest of the tribes to assemble,” he informed us, his eyes scanning the families around him.
I stopped looking around at the Israelites and stared at Jedidah. “How long have your people been waiting for this land?”
“Forty years,” Jedidah answered solemnly. “This is all Udom and I have ever known. I was not born into nothing but wilderness and wandering.”
Joshua’s words from the first night echoed in my head. He’d said the same.
I was speechless. Why would the god of these people do something like this? To allow them to live aimlessly after everything? Nomads in the sand.
I grabbed her arm and pulled Jedidah aside. Her face was creased with worry lines and brown eyes scanned my face.
“He promised us we would make it through,” she spoke quietly. “We will make it through.”
“Who promised you?”
“Our Lord Almighty. We have suffered, yes, but not in vain. It cannot be in vain. That would mean we have waited all of these years for nothing…” Her voice trailed off, as if she wasn’t speaking to me anymore but was trying to reassure herself more than anything. I reached out my arms and embraced her. She welcomed them immediately.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Because I was. I knew what lay ahead of us and a part of me realized many of the Israelites knew it too. And yet, they still packed up everything without a word or complaint, fear in their eyes but faith in their hearts.
These were truly people of God.
A few miles before we reached the Jordan River, all of the Israelites set up camp. The journey had been slow. We were moving as one colossal beast, slinking across the desert as the day dragged on behind us.
With about a mile left, the river appeared over the ridge, its raging, glorious self in view. Its banks were more swollen than they were a few days ago, and its once calmer waters were already violent with an invisible power controlling deep within.
A hush had fallen over the crowd as we took in the obstacle slithering before us. A massive, watery serpent. My heart was running frantic circles in my chest and Jedidah broke into soft tears next to me, grasping my hand tightly.
A man with a silver beard and wrinkled face turned to the group of people standing near him. “Once we get closer to the banks, set up camp. We will be here for three days. Joshua’s orders.”
Murmurs spread throughout the crowd as the Israelites passed the information along, their expressions grim. Many had already begun to wheel their belongings down the slope, a sense of urgency spreading over the group. Although the future was unknown and the current situation had developed into an impending doom, there was excitement smoldering like burning embers behind every step and movement. The Promised Land was coming, and now, it was nearly within reach.
Jedidah stood quietly by the river’s edge, her hair blowing in the breeze like wispy raven feathers. I left the tent I was patching up and approached her silently. She glanced at me once as I came up next to her but didn’t say anything to me. She was deep in thought.
After a couple of moments of silence, she picked up a rock near her foot and chucked it into the water, the splash only a tiny noise against the roar of the river.
“Do you believe in a perfect world, Genesis?”
I stared at the spot where the rock had fallen and disappeared in the water. “No, I don’t.”
“Me either. But this, this world,” she gestured to the grassy hills on the opposite of us. “It was supposed to be perfect. At least, perfect for us.”
“What happened?”
She exhaled slowly and looked down at her fingers.
“We…used to be slaves. My ancestors. They were Hebrews. The Egyptians were cruel masters who used us to build their homes, cook their meals, and wash their clothes. They even stole our children from us and killed them for the sake of keeping the pharaoh in power.” She looked up and brushed her hair behind her ear. “There was one boy who survived. He was discovered by the pharaoh’s daughter when the boy’s mother tried to save him by putting him in a basket and letting him float down another large river called the Nile. The daughter decided to take care of him, and he ended up growing to become the pharaoh’s son.”
“What was his name?” I asked her.
“He was called Moses.”
I heard a crackling sound and a baby’s cry pierced my ears with a scream. I jumped and frantically looked around to see where the sound had come from before meeting Jedidah’s confused gaze.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” she asked, looking around and frowning.
I shook my head and waved it off, “Never mind. So, his name was Moses?”
“Yes, and the pharaoh loved him as his own. But Moses was a Hebrew no matter what place he was raised in. It was one day when he was older that he did something that caused him to flee Egypt.”
“What did he do?”
“He was watching a group of Hebrews working when he saw an Egyptian slave driver beating a Hebrew. It must have latched on somewhere deep within him because he killed the Egyptian and tried to hide what he did. It was too late. Too many people had seen what he had done, so he left, living in the mountains with a family of sheep herders in a place called Midian.”
She continued. “One day, God spoke to Moses through a bush that was being engulfed by flames and told him that he needed to go back to Egypt to save the rest of the Israelites. Moses did not know why he was chosen, but he followed what God told him to do. Moses was supposed to go back to Egypt and ask the pharaoh to let his slaves go.”
I scoffed and kicked a pile of pebbles into the bank. “He was just supposed to go back and ask?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but God was with him. He performed miracles like changing water into blood and turning a staff into a snake. Afterwards, he warned the pharaoh about the ten plagues that would be sent upon the Egyptians if the pharaoh didn’t set the slaves free. Pharaoh refused to believe him.”
“What kind of plagues?”
Her face went dark and her voice seemed to change into one that was not her own, the strange echo enveloping her words. “Terrible ones. Darkness like you’ve never seen.”
The last of her words were barely finished before I was pitched into darkness, a fizzing sound crackling in my ears. I shielded them until it stopped, then I tried to look at my surroundings.
There wasn’t anything to look at. I was swimming in the dark, only air inhabiting the space around me. It reminded me of the dark ocean in the beginning when I found the book.
A drop of water landed on my forehead with a heavy splat, and I looked up in the direction it fell from. Another landed on my cheek, thick and smelling faintly of something I recognized but couldn’t quite pinpoint. I squinted my eyes to try to see any source of light, tilting my head just enough that the drop started to roll down to my lips, landing in the corner of my mouth.
That was when I realized how I recognized the smell.
The drop wasn’t water.
It was blood.
The red stain on the carpet wouldn’t come out with carpet cleaner, even when I rubbed the rag over the spot until my hands burned. My tongue, still with the metallic taste of blood, felt heavy in my mouth, and my eyes tried to blink away the crust in their corners.
I sat back on my feet with my legs bent underneath me, staring defeatedly at the drop of blood soaked into the floor of the attic. Wondering how it got there. Hoping it didn’t mean what I thought it meant. Which really wasn’t much. What I knew about this ancient world was nothing much compared to what I knew before I came across it.
What I did know, undoubtedly, was that I was going to be late for school. That was if being unnecessarily early could be counted as late for me.
The library was open again, not much to my surprise. But this time, I didn’t expect to see Jace there, although I couldn’t imagine a repeat of my last run-in with him at the school library would be all that unpl
easant. My fervent dislike towards him had softened its violent rampage through my brain.
I took my time looking through the books, not really searching for anything specific but not completely ignoring the titles that stuck out to me. There was something about idling between the shelves of a library, hiding in the labyrinth it created with words and pictures and pages.
There was an empty spot where a volume in a book collection was supposed to be, creating a nine-hundred-page wide gaping hole that could allow someone to see into the adjacent shelves. I was eye level with it as I walked past and could peer into the nonfiction section through the gap if I stood still. A book about manatees was hanging precariously out of the nonfiction shelf, its spine jutting out like a crimson raincoat in a rain storm.
I rolled my eyes. Little kids.
Intent on fixing it, I made a sharp turn into the next aisle, my schoolbag slung over one shoulder.
That was when I landed smack into Mrs. Whitaker.
She gave a slight yelp and stuck out her hands involuntarily, bumping my bag so that it got knocked off my shoulder.
“That’s my fault Mrs. Whitaker. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” I picked up my bag from the floor.
She adjusted her glasses and smiled politely. “Oh, that’s alright. I’m used to it.”
She cleared her throat. “By the way, how is your project coming? Got anything interesting yet?” She looked at me over her nose, a smirk playing at the left corner of her mouth.
“We still have a lot to do, but we’ve gotten a really good start,” I responded carefully. I knew she wasn’t a fan of our choice, but did she have to be so condescending?
She pursed her glossy lips and raised her angular eyebrows. “In my opinion…”
Oh boy, here we go.
“You and Jace are wasting your time.”
“And why do you say that?” And why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut? Stupid. Stupid.
Her mouth twisted as she narrowed her eyes. “There is absolutely no history that can attest for what you want to accomplish, Genesis. I’m sorry, but it’s all just Sunday school gibberish. I honestly expected better from you and Jace. I figured you both would put more thought into your studies than try to bring religion into your schoolwork.”
“It’s not just a religion. It’s a history lesson we all should learn to know.” My voice had never come out so whiny before, and I cringed at the sound of it.
Mrs. Whitaker shook her head. “I was looking forward to a good year with you. If you can’t take any of this seriously, we might have to cut you both out of the program.”
My stomach contorted into a tight ball.
“I don’t mean to cause you stress, but this project is that one final push that could send you off the edge if you do not execute it properly.” She continued, “I was nice to you both before, but the truth is, we don’t tolerate this kind of thing in this school. That is just the way things are here.” And with that, she was gone, her low heels padding softly across the library’s carpet.
But before she could exit the library, out popped a green blob from behind the bookshelf. Its four webbed feet and lumpy skin glistened a sickly green color against the already olive carpet.
I was about to shout at her to stop, since she was headed straight for the hoppy critter, when I stopped myself.
The floor. It was writhing with thousands of frog bodies, the carpet I once thought I saw now a mass of wiggling creatures.
Then I blinked, and they were gone.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Jace was the second person I had run into that day. This time, I was dashing out of the school library.
“Woah there.” He grabbed my shoulders to keep me from crashing into him.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, dazed.
“Are you okay? You look…really pale.”
“Uh yeah, it’s nothing. Never mind about that.” I blinked my eyes to clear my vision. “Jace, Mrs. Whitaker is threatening to take us out of Honors.”
He looked taken aback. “What? What do you mean?”
“I mean, this project determines whether we will be cut from the program or not.”
“That can’t be right.”
“It’s true. She literally just told me.”
He let out a heavy breath. “It doesn’t matter.” Jace’s expression switched from shocked to determined in less than a second. “We are doing this. This is the only way I can…” He couldn’t finish.
“What?”
“I mean, the Bible is such a huge part of me. This is something I want to share.” He was staring at a fifth grader’s poster hanging on the wall. His expression changed, and he looked almost startled. I frowned as he closed his eyes and rubbed them.
“You good?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied with his eyes still closed.
“Did you work on the speech?” I said. He opened his eyes and blinked them.
“Yeah, I did.” His eyes shifted back to me, then the poster.
“Do we have an angle yet?”
He shifted his eyes towards me, confused. “What do you mean?”
“How are we going to do this? It has to be historical.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“After school?” I asked him.
He nodded. “I’ll meet you at the bus stop. We can ride to your house and work on it there.”
“Sounds good.”
He nodded again, lost in thought, continuing down the hallway towards the lockers. I watched him go, wondering what price we were about to pay.
Aven didn’t even glance at me at lunch, too busy enveloping herself into Alex’s entourage in the back corner of the cafeteria. It was her new table now apparently. My other friend, Maurice, moved over to make more room for me at our table, but it was not the same. Hurt sat in my stomach like a squirming snake, coiled at the bottom in a tight knot.
I felt a pinch at the base of my neck. My hand flew up to the spot and rubbed it, catching whatever it was that bit me. Between my fingers was a squashed fly, a tiny streak of blood staining my thumb. Another sting pierced my hand and my arm. I slapped the flies frantically, trying to get them off of my skin. They buzzed into my face, avoiding my vicious swats.
Another girl named Anna stared at me inquisitively from across the table. “What…exactly are you doing?”
“These flies. How are you not getting bit?” I stood up out of my seat, trying to keep them away. There was a miniature swarm circling my head.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Are you sure they are flies? Maybe they are small spiders or red ants,” added Maurice. “I don’t see anything.”
The swarm had already accumulated more flies, and now gnats, the swarm growing into a shadowy shifting mass.
“How are you not seeing this?!” I was shouting. The tables near us in the cafeteria were giving me curious glances.
The girls at my table gave each other worried looks, making sure they weren’t the only ones who thought my spontaneous outrage was bizarre. But I knew what I was seeing. The only thing I wasn’t sure of was how they weren’t seeing it.
I picked up my tray and dashed to the garbage cans, dumping my trash and setting the tray in the washing window before taking off down the hallway to the restrooms. The incessant humming of the swarm was bouncing around in my head, my skin crawling with fly bites. Swarms of gnats curled up in the corners of my eyes.
I thrust open the handle on one of the sinks and cupped a handful of water, propelling it at the swarm of insects gathering at the entrance to the bathroom. The water hit the wall behind the swarm.
They’d disappeared.
It took me five minutes to make sure all of the insects were off of me. It took another ten to calm myself down. By now, I was leaning against the garbage can, trying to find a way to slow my breathing down.
How could something so real be so imaginary? The insects were gone, but the fly bites were still there. My flesh was swollen and red. The shrill ring
of the bell interrupted my thoughts. I stood up and went to find my backpack in the cafeteria. Most of the kids were on their way to their classes and my table was empty.
I realized at that moment that no one came to check on me. It made me wonder whether Aven would have run after me.
My head screamed a violent “no” at me.
Didn’t think so.
“Genesis!”
Jace’s voice echoed from down the hall as he waved to get my attention. The hallway was crowded as the rest of the school pushed their way to the front doors to get to the buses. It had taken the rest of the day for the bites to go away, but a few of them were still there. I was thankful no one had asked about them because I really didn’t feel like explaining. I wouldn’t have known how to.
I slipped into a teacher’s doorway to avoid getting trampled and waited for him. He finally caught up, panting from the effort.
“You gonna survive?” I cocked an eyebrow at him, an amused grin playing at the edges of my lips.
He smiled and rolled his eyes. “Just come on.”
We found a seat in the back, away from the commotion going on somewhere in the middle of the bus. I sat closest to the window, hugging my backpack against my chest to give Jace room. The bus sputtered and lurched forward, a fume of exhaust seeping through the cracks of the open windows.
Jace reached into his pocket for his phone and typed on the screen, most likely texting his mom about when he was going to be home.
I turned to Jace when I saw her name at the top of his screen. “Did you…tell her it’s me you’re working on the project with?”
Jace looked up from his phone. “Yeah. She doesn’t have a problem with it.”
I shifted in my seat.
“Does your Dad have a problem with me coming over?” he said after a moment.
I fiddled with my backpack zipper. “I haven’t told him yet. He always gets home late so he honestly doesn’t even know you’re there.”
Jace nodded slowly. “That’s…alright, I guess. I just…I don’t want to make him mad.”
I shrugged. “I’ll tell him eventually.”
Worthy of Rain Page 23
