The crowd was packed so tightly, I could barely walk a few feet in front of me. I considered walking through the trail left for whoever was supposed to be coming down the street, but something told me I wouldn’t get a warm welcome if I did that.
After ten minutes of fighting the crowd, I finally broke into an open spot beneath a massive sycamore. I tried to crane my neck to see over the people. It was no use. There was a tall guy standing right in front of me.
I heaved a sigh. Jace could come find me for all I cared. I was not going to try to get through that. I leaned against the tree again, crossing my arms.
“You kind of look like a bug from up here.”
I screamed and jumped to my feet. Jace’s laugh rang out from the branches. I caught sight of him perching on a limb above me.
“You gave me a heart attack. Don’t do that!”
He smiled and shook his head. “Oh, come on. You can be a cute bug.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Help me up,” I ordered, reaching my hand up. He leaned down, locked his hand around my forearm, and hoisted me up into the tree. I grabbed on to the limb before I could fall back down.
“How’d you even get up here?” I gripped the branch with my fingers and prayed I wouldn’t fall over backwards.
“There’s a notch in the back of the tree that I climbed on.” He said, gesturing with his head. “Where did you land?”
“In the center of a marketplace.” I rolled my eyes. “Pretty much right in the middle of a chicken stack. You?”
“Inside someone’s house. They kicked me out as soon as they saw me.” He frowned. “It was really weird. I’ve never landed in such a random place before.”
“Yeah, me either.” I looked out over the crowd now that I was several feet in the air. I could see everything, even farther up the street. “I wonder if it has something to do with us…you know…pagejumping together.”
Jace looked at me. “I never thought of that.”
“Are you kids going to keep blabbering or are you going to move? I found this spot first.”
I screamed and jumped up again, which was a mistake since I was sitting on a tree branch. Jace tried to grab me but he missed, and I went tumbling down the tree with my butt sliding against the trunk.
“Who are you?” I heard Jace ask the voice. They were hidden somewhere in the canopy. I glared into the green leaves and moved to the back of the tree.
“Zacchaeus,” he said tentatively. “But it’s none of your business. Now, move. I was here first.”
I used the notch to climb back up to Jace’s branch.
“We’re both here for the same thing,” Jace answered. “Maybe you can sit here with us so you can see better.”
Zacchaeus grumbled and said something under his breath.
Now, I could see the body connected to the voice above me. It was an older man. A chubby face and hawk-like nose peered out at me from between the leaves. Two stubby legs hung over the branch he was clutching.
“No, no. I will stay here. I can see well enough, I suppose,” he muttered.
Jace shrugged and turned back to me.
“Oh well.”
I frowned. “What did you mean by ‘we’re both here for the same thing’? What are we here for?”
Jace grinned at me. “You’ll see.”
I gazed over the crowd. There seemed to be a mix of emotions. Some were murmuring excitedly, while others were whispering to each other deep in argument.
Farther up the street, the crowd suddenly cheered. They leaned over each other in excitement, waving handkerchiefs and brightly colored scarves. I leaned over and tried to get a better look of whoever was coming down the street.
That was when I caught sight of him.
He was ordinary looking. Wavy brown hair, tanned face, a cashew-colored tunic with a rope tight around his torso. I would be able to recognize him anywhere.
He was the man from the furnace.
I glanced over at Jace. Recognition was sprinkled in his eyes. He watched the man, smiling, clutching the tree so he wouldn’t fall.
“Jace?” I said softly. “Who is that?”
Jace sighed through his nose, his eyes watering in the corners. “That’s Jesus.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
“Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through.”
Luke 19:1 NIV
Jesus stopped right below our tree and looked straight up at us. We both froze.
“Zacchaeus,” he called out. His voice rang strong through the murmuring of the excited crowd. “Come down from there.”
We heard a scrambling above us, and the stubby man from above climbed down. Jace and I watched, hidden behind the leaves, as Zacchaeus walked up tentatively to the man with a kind face.
“Jesus,” I whispered beneath my breath. He was in front of me now, and I remembered him laying his hand on my shoulder in the middle of the flames.
“Would you be so kind as to allow me to stay and feast in your home?” Jesus smiled at the little man, ignoring the angry mumbles of the people around him. Many tried to clutch his cloak and get his attention. His eyes were set on Zacchaeus.
“M-m-m-me? Are y-you certain?” Zacchaeus fumbled for his words.
“He is an evil tax collector!” someone from the crowd shouted.
“He does not deserve special treatment!”
“He steals our money!”
Jesus dipped his head towards Zacchaeus and finally acknowledged the crowd.
“And does not every child on earth deserve to know the love of God?” Most of the people fell silent. Zacchaeus started to lead the way through the streets. The crowd parted, some spitting at the little man as he passed by.
Jace watched the two of them disappear into the crowd. “If Jesus can see Zacchaeus, the despised tax collector, and love him, he can do it for the rest of us.”
“Wow.”
The clearing looked the same as when we left it. It was still just as empty as ever, the forest alive and waiting around the edges.
“Cool, huh?” Jace looked at me. His eyes were wide and full.
I looked down at the Bible still lying on his lap. “Who…who was that?”
Jace closed the Bible slowly and put it back in his bag. “That was the Son of God. Jesus Christ.”
“God has a son? What? How—”
Jace puts up his hands to stop me. “I know it’s confusing. It’s a lot to take in. But I can explain everything.” Jace slung his bag over his shoulder and scratched his head nervously as he stood up. “That is, only if you want me to.” He glanced my way, then looked back at the ground quickly.
I stood up and grabbed my bag. “I guess you’re in luck. Because it’s just that. I want to know everything.”
One corner of Jace’s mouth turned up. The crease in his smile dug deep.
“I know just the place.”
I could see the church’s vine-covered front and stone steps from down the street. It seemed like an odd time to be going to a church, but I followed Jace anyway.
He led the way up the steps and opened the front doors. I expected them to be locked, like any ordinary public building, but they weren’t. We walked right inside.
Besides us, the room was vacant. The pews felt weird when they were empty. Our footsteps echoed on the wood, and Jace led me down the center aisle. We stopped at the front and gazed at the man suspended against the cross hanging behind the pastor’s platform. His body was bare except for a cloth wrapped around his torso. Most of his weight hung from his wrists, his body sagging, and head bowed. My stomach coiled when I saw the nails in his flesh.
“Jesus wasn’t loved by everyone. In fact, while many people truly saw him as the Son of God, just as many other people saw him as a fraud. So they gave him one of the worst punishments known at the time. Public death,” Jace began. His voice was somber.
“Criminals would be up there for hours. The soldiers would even nail a small piece of wood to the cross to act as a seat to prolong their d
eath. They made sure it was gruesome and agonizing. And family members had to look on as their loved ones slowly died in front of them.”
I stared at the cross and imagined crowds of people gathered around Jesus. His wrists and feet dripped with blood and his body was blue and dying.
“Jesus didn’t deserve to die, Genesis. He knew he didn’t deserve it, but he died anyway. For all of us. He did it so he could pay the price for our sins.”
Jace paused to scan the cross above us. “But people still didn’t believe in him. They put him on a cross. They didn’t believe he came back to life three days later. They didn’t believe he was the savior of us all. They didn’t believe because sin and evil still exists in this world.”
And suddenly, my mind went back to the serpent coiled around the tree. His eyes blue as the sky and speckled with crimson.
“Genesis,” Jace turned to me. “Bad things still happen on earth, even to good people. People still die. But that’s not because of the absence of God, it’s because of the presence of sin.”
He turned back to the cross, searching it, almost like he was looking for words hidden somewhere in it. “I wanted to tell you that before, when you were asking me why bad things happen. God gives us a choice. Follow Him, or follow the world. And part of following Him includes trusting Him.”
He closed his eyes. “The world hates us because we are Christians. It says in John 15 that the world hates us because we don’t belong in it. But just as a candle is lit in a dark room, one day, our lights will go out. And sometimes the world snuffs it out earlier than we want it to.”
I’d never seen him like this before. So sure. So passionate.
So alive.
“But I don’t want to live in fear of death anymore.” He opened his eyes, but this time, he looked up at the colorful images painted on the ceiling.
“I want to fear never experiencing life.”
The house was quiet. I stepped lightly across the floorboards and opened the front door, spreading a blanket on the porch steps. The town lights flooded out most of the stars, but a few bright ones shone through the light pollution valiantly. Brave.
Jace’s words wouldn’t leave me. They seemed so true and honest. For the first time, everything that didn’t seem right fell so quickly into place. I thought back to my mom. I wondered if she knew about God before she died. If she had any idea what I was going through, what would she say to me?
My heart jolted. What would Dad say to me?
There would be a time when I would tell him. I would explain everything. Everything I believed in, everything I’d seen, felt, experienced, touched, tasted, lived.
I would, but not now. A part of me was afraid that as soon as I told him, I would look into his practical face and eat his practical words, and I would devour the lies all over again. The lies this world seemed to be feeding us. That there was nothing else beyond living a good life and raising a good family and dying a good death. The lie that we lived in a world without God.
No, he couldn’t know. Not now.
Chapter Sixty-Three
“Ugh,” I deleted the whole paragraph I had just written. This was useless.
Jace peered over my shoulder and made a face. “Why’d you do that? It looked fine to me.”
“Fine? Fine isn’t good.” My laptop had now been replacing my lunch for the last few days. Jace, on the other hand, took the liberty of getting food for me and then proceeded to eat everything in sight.
“Get anything on this computer and I will kill you. Mrs. Henton did me a favor by letting me borrow it and take it to lunch.”
“I don’t see the point,” he responded, a burger bun stuffed in his cheek. “Everything looks great. You keep changing it.”
“There’s something missing.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and stared at the screen.
Jace looked around the lunchroom. We had resorted to sitting by ourselves in the corner. People stopped being surprised after the first couple days, but we would still get a few whispers directed our way. I guess I couldn’t blame them. We did blow up on each other here not that long ago, and now we were sitting next to each other? I couldn’t even tell you the point in time when we went from enemies to friends. We just did.
Jace suddenly cleared his throat and mumbled “incoming.”
I looked up.
Aven was heading our way, a fake smile plastered on her face.
“Ohhhhh no,” I muttered under my breath.
“Hey, girl,” she sat next to me and draped an arm over my shoulder. “How’s it going? We haven’t talked in a while.”
“I wonder why.”
“Me too,” she pouted, ignoring my sarcasm. “We’ve both been so busy.”
Had I noticed how different she looked? Now, I didn’t even recognize who she was. Why was she over here anyway?
“I didn’t know you two were so close now.” She glanced over at Jace and smiled at him.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Jace gave her a side smile but looked at me warily.
“I heard you two are quite the talk of the school.” She brushed her hair to the side with her fingers.
Now I was interested. “What?” I looked at Jace who seemed to be just as confused as I was.
“Oh, you know,” she shrugged. “Word got out that you two might be kicked out of that advanced program. For some kind of project…” she waved her hand, dismissing it. “But, I mean, who cares right?” She laughed loudly, getting the attention of the table next to us.
“It does matter,” I glared at her. “And none of that is true. Mrs. Whitaker said we could do the project.”
Aven rolled her eyes. “Not what I heard.”
I was about to get really angry. She hadn’t talked to me in days and now she was over here trying to start up gossip?
Jace gave me a look that said, “Don’t you dare blow up.”
I really wanted to.
“Well,” she got up and moved around to Jace’s other side. “We should totally hang out sometime. All three of us. Just like old times.”
“Yeah, totally.” My voice sounded flat.
“Awesome,” she squealed. “See ya, guys.” She returned to the other side of the lunchroom, likely sitting back at Alex’s table.
Jace snorted. “Just like old times? I’ve never hung out with her in my life.”
I rolled my eyes. “She just came over so she could talk to you.”
Jace looked genuinely confused. “Why would she do that?”
I gave him a look and returned back to my screen.
“No, really.” He closed my laptop.
I folded my arms. “Jace, seriously? You’re popular, you have so many friends, and it’s not like you’re bad looking or anything.” I sighed and tried to lift the lid to type a sentence.
He scrunched his face up.
“They are all fake, though. I’ve never felt completely comfortable with anyone.”
I glanced at him. He was looking down at his uneaten salad.
“They don’t really get me. And they never truly ask me how I am or what I’m doing. They only care because everyone else seems to care, but if they actually knew me, they would know I’m a Christian.”
“So, nobody knows?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “But I’m tired of hiding. I shouldn’t have to hide in plain sight and act like someone I’m not.”
I closed the laptop and nodded. “Well, I guess after tomorrow, you won’t have to.”
“I have a theory.”
I erased the jagged end of my lower case “q” and added another piece of lead into my pencil.
“You really need to stop doing that,” I sighed, rewriting the word again. If Jace kept scaring me, I would be out of pencil lead soon.
“Sorry,” he added quickly. “But don’t you want to hear my theory?” His bike was leaning against the tree I was sitting against. “That looks so uncomfortable, by the way.”
I stretched and adjusted my position. “
It is.” I set my pencil down. “So, what’s this theory?”
“Alright,” Jace crouched in front of me. “So you know how we keep being thrown to different spots in the story? Cracks in the sky, real things like frogs and horses from the Bible coming out of the past…”
I nodded. “Go on.”
Jace scratched his chin. “Okay, so hear me out, but…what if that was our fault?”
I frowned and sat up. “What do you mean?”
“You see, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and this started happening, when? Around when we first saw each other in Jericho.” He paused.
I looked at him blankly. “I’m not following…”
Jace cleared his throat and gestured to both of us. “When we traveled into the Bible together, it glitched. It wasn’t meant to sustain two travelers at the same time. And in real life, it seems like the two of us together causes things to come back out. Things only we can see.”
My eyes opened wide. “And that’s why everything was going haywire.”
“Exactly.”
“So…what does this mean exactly? Can we ever go back?”
Jace looked at the ground. “Genesis, we both know this can’t last forever. I mean, have you ever been able to go back into a story twice?”
I thought about that for a moment. “No, I guess not.”
I didn’t want it to end. But if we were messing with time, I didn’t want everyone else to suffer the consequences.
Jace held out his hand.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Maybe we can go back together in the story one more time. I wanted to show you one more thing.”
Once we got to the attic, Jace sat next to me on the floor, opening his Bible. The afternoon light shone through the windows.
“What is it?”
He leafed through the golden pages. “It’s a surprise again.”
“You sure that’s a good idea? It didn’t go so well last time.”
Jace waved me away. “You worry too much.”
I lifted an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, and for a good reason too.”
“Just take my hand already,” Jace said impatiently. I did and he opened to a page in the Bible. I closed my eyes.
Worthy of Rain Page 27
