Amen, L.A.

by Cherie Bennett

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Cherie Bennett

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ember, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Ember and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bennett, Cherie.

  Amen, L.A. / by Cherie Bennett & Jeff Gottesfeld — 1st Ember ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When seventeen-year-old Natalie Shelton and her familiy move from Minnesota to Beverly Hills after her mother is hired as pastor of the wealthy Church of Beverly Hills, Natalie becomes overwhelmed by the lavish lifestyle and starts to forget her Christian values.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89808-2

  [1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Christian life—Fiction. 3. Beverly Hills (Calif.)—Fiction.]

  I. Gottesfeld, Jeff. II. Title.

  PZ7.B43912Am 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010032348

  RL: 6.0

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For our editor,

  Wendy Loggia. Amen!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Prologue

  To lose my virginity or not to lose my virginity? That was the question.

  Before I elaborate, I really should introduce myself—my name is Natalie Shelton, but my friends call me Nat—and let you get to know this virgin on the verge. Now, I don’t normally blab about my personal life to complete strangers. In fact, one of my pet peeves is when a girl you’ve never seen before decides that just because you happen to end up in the same ladies’ room at the same time, this is the moral equivalent of longtime best-friend-hood, and she spills the most intimate details of her life. Her period is late and she’s scared to death she’s pregnant. Or she has certain—ahem—symptoms that make her worry she has an STD but no way can she go to the family doctor because the family doctor is her mom’s best friend. Or … well, you get the idea.

  No matter how many times this happens—and it happens to me a lot—I’m still amazed. My dad says I just have a face, like my mother’s, that makes people feel like they can confide in me. My mom and I both have deep-set blue eyes, a round face with dimples inherited from my grandma Palma, and shoulder-length wavy blondish hair. I say “blondish” because in my case, it’s the color you end up with when you’re a platinum-blond baby and everyone coos over you and says how cute you are and how gorgeous your hair is and how you look like a little angel that should be on the top of a Christmas tree, only then you grow up and by the time you’re seventeen and filling out the information for the driver’s license your parents have finally allowed you to get, when you write blond under hair color, you’re kinda-sorta-almost-but-not-quite lying.

  In my mom’s case, it’s Clairol Nice ’n Easy.

  I guess that’s what I have to look forward to. Joy.

  Once I got past the baby-pudge stage—which lasted until I was fourteen, unlike for my younger brother and sister, who each apparently reached puberty in the womb—and shot up to my present height of five foot six, I ended up with a decent figure and nice legs. Once, at a party, this guy told me I look like Katherine Heigl. He also told me he wasn’t wearing his contact lenses. Objectively, I suppose I’m not as hot as my little—trust me, “little” refers only to the fact that she’s two years younger than me—sister, Gemma. She’s five eight but has four-inch heels, like, superglued to her feet, and one of those skinny-curvy-busty-all-natural bodies that get a million guys wanting to be your friend on Facebook. Her goal in life is to be famous. She worships Megan Fox. Unfortunately, I’m totally serious.

  As for my brother, Chad, he’s also little in name only. Already five foot nine (thanks to Grandpa Chester) at age thirteen and still growing, with black hair and huge blue eyes framed by long, sooty lashes, he’s got a cut, broad-shouldered swimmer’s build, because, well, he’s a swimmer. One of the best his age in the state of Minnesota. Mostly, he concentrates on swimming, which is a good thing. If he concentrated on girls, Mankato would be the broken-heart capital of the Midwest. Again, totally serious.

  My dad, Charlie, is an author of middlingly successful mysteries. No bestsellers, but he does write for a New York publishing house and has a rabid, if modest, following. My mom, Marsha, who I sort of look like, is a minister. The “my mom is a minister” thing had everything to do with why I was pondering the big “Do I or don’t I?”

  Hang on, this is all going to make sense, I swear.

  At the moment of my contemplation, I was on the bedroom floor of my good friend Shelby’s family fishing cabin on the shore of Lake Washington, about forty-five minutes from Mankato. I was separated from the hardwood floor by a truly butt-ugly pee-yellow/puke-green hooked rug and could hear my friends partying in the living room while Lady Gaga sang. My red blouse was off, my floral summer skirt had worked its way up to my navel, and my boyfriend Sean’s hands were inching under my 36B lacy pink push-up bra bought on sale at Victoria’s Secret—the one my mother didn’t know I owned.

  My position—on the floor—and the position of Sean’s hands—on my breasts—would have been shocking to those on the other side of the bedroom door. Here’s the thing. I am the proverbial “good girl.” Good grades, good friends, a good relationship with my mom and dad, do church volunteer work, play guitar and write songs, don’t drink, don’t smoke anything, don’t do drugs, and the gates to my heaven were still one hundred percent intact.

  My parents have always emphasized the importance of waiting till marriage to have sex—that sex is a holy gift from God meant to be shared by husband and wife. Unlike Gemma, who—let’s face it—will not make it to age sixteen without biblical knowledge, I sort of agreed with my mom and dad. I mean, how cool would it be, sometime in the distant future, to marry my true love and know that I’d saved myself for him?

  When I discussed this with Gemma, she smirked and asked if my “true love” was supposed to have saved himself for me, too. Like, didn’t I want a guy on my wedding night who had some concept of what he was doing? Besides, how would I know if my true love and I were sexually compatible if we hadn’t done it? What if I waited until after I was mar
ried, and it turned out my true love had the performance capabilities of our basement sump pump? Then I’d be, like, stuck.

  Gemma’s point was well taken, but it still seemed to me that in specific cases, you could tell whether you’d be sexually compatible with a boy without actually “doing it.” Take Sean, for example. We’d known each other since eighth grade and had been boyfriend and girlfriend since just after Christmas. Everything between us pointed to our being sexually compatible if and when the time came. We matched up in so many ways. We cared about our friends, we cared about music, we cared about our families, and we cared about our church lives. We didn’t have deep conversations, but hanging out together was easy. For as long as I could remember, my friends had been telling me, “You and Sean Butler would be the best couple,” and after we started dating, he told me that his friends had been saying the same thing about me, except in guyspeak.

  Here is how Sean first showed romantic interest in me: he showed up at my mom’s nondenominational church on Sunday, which, considering that his parents were typical Minnesota Lutherans, meant he had to be highly motivated.

  Anyway, I know you’d rather hear about Sean than about my mother. You’d especially like to know whether my theory of prospective sexual compatibility is true in real life. I have to admit that until that night on the puke-ugly rug, I hadn’t really been in a position to comment, since the furthest we’d gone had been Sean’s hand atop my sweater. Under which had been a tank top, under which had been a bra from Kmart and not from Victoria’s Secret, under which had been me.

  It’s not like part of me hadn’t wanted to go further. Most of the time, my body was screaming, “Sean, yes!” while my morals were screaming, “God no!” Every time Sean touched me, my skin was aflame. Okay. That reeks of bad romance novel. But Sean was also sweet, smart, and way cute. And did I mention talented? He sang with a local Christian rock group named Fever. We even wrote songs together.

  You might ask: If Sean was so big on Christian values, why was he trying to take off my bra? You might also ask: Why was I about to let him?

  I might answer, he made an excellent case for himself when he groaned in my ear, “Who knows when we’ll be together again?”

  Again, point well taken. The very next day, my family and I were moving away from Mankato. Yes, this is the twenty-first century and not the twentieth. Yes, there’s email, texting, and Skype. But the fact is, I would be there, and Sean would be here, and there would be approximately 1,800 miles between us. The reason I was at the cabin was to attend a going-away party for me.

  Which brings me back to the thing about my mother being a minister.

  Back when I was fourteen and she was still the minister at our church in Mankato, WMAN-AM radio asked her to fill in one November night for a call-in talk show host who had the flu. My mom was such a success that evening, with her down-home, practical advice—helping callers with everything from sexual problems in their marriages to health crises with aging parents to choosing the best trimmings for a Thanksgiving dinner—that the station offered her a show of her own. They called it Minister Marsha and billed her as the anti–Dr. Laura, in that my mom was funny, nonjudgmental, not self-righteous, and didn’t intimidate her audience.

  Then came the call that changed everything.

  My mom was near the end of one show when a kid buzzed in from northern Minnesota. He called himself Dr. Death and said he had a loaded .45 in his lap. He was planning to go downstairs, kill his family, then kill himself. He was on a prepaid cell phone, so it was impossible to trace the number, and said he was sitting by a window. If the police as much as turned onto his street, he’d go do it.

  She used humor, warmth, and insight to talk him down, even telling him about a time when she was fourteen and had been secretly voted the ugliest girl in her class. She only found out when somebody stuck the early-1980s version of a Hot or Not survey in her locker. To make matters worse, the guy she was crushing on and her best friend had voted her the ugliest.

  Finally, the kid asked my mother to call the closest hospital and have an ambulance come for him. He asked if she would stay on the phone and pray with him, and she did.

  A lot of people were listening that night. CNN picked up the story. Then People magazine did a piece, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  A month later, Mom got the Call from California. I suppose she’d call it the Calling. It was the president of the Church of Beverly Hills—the biggest, richest, most celebrity-packed church in L.A. They were looking for a new minister, and they wanted to meet my mother. A week later, they flew her and my dad to Los Angeles to talk about it.

  My parents got the razzle-dazzle treatment. First-class airfare, a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and a car and driver for the week. The governor’s wife and two members of Congress attended the party in their honor at some supermodel’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Then, on Sunday morning, Mom preached a guest sermon at the church about the power of prayer, which—my dad reported this, my mother is far too modest—moved the congregation to tears.

  By the time they landed back in Minneapolis, she had a firm offer with a salary literally ten times what she was making in Mankato, including a lovely parish home in Beverly Hills, plus a commitment by the church board of directors to get behind her radio show and syndicate it nationally. Since the chairman of Clear Channel was a member of said board, this was not mere hyperbole.

  Gemma promised she’d go to church every day for the rest of her natural life if only our mom would accept the job. There was no place she’d rather live than Beverly Hills. Chad was good to go when he found out that the training program for the next Olympics cycle was based at UCLA. Dad, who can write anywhere, declared that while he’d miss our friends, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and he’d support whatever decision my mother made.

  Mom prayed on it for a week. I did, too. Because the only one in our family who was freaking out about utterly, completely, and totally changing our lives was—you guessed it—me. My opinion of Beverly Hills, based on TV shows, was this: Why would I possibly want to live in the land of the plastic and the shallow? Why would my family?

  At the end of the week, my parents called a family meeting to make a decision. I presented an excellent case for staying put. It convinced no one. I was outvoted four to one. “Consensus has been reached,” my father joked, since there was obviously no consensus.

  Let me make two things perfectly clear: First, I did not decide to give it up to Sean that night because I was pissed at the four people who voted against me—namely, my own family, also known as the traitors. Second, let the record reflect I still believe that even if you haven’t taken a formal purity oath, having sex with your boyfriend is just plain wrong.

  However, in that moment at the lakeside cabin with Sean, right and wrong got a little befuddled as my IQ slipped somewhere south of my navel. I suppose I should say here that it was safe sex, and also, if I’m going to be brutally honest, my reaction was “That’s it? That’s what all the shouting is about?” It hurt a little, didn’t last very long, and frankly, I liked all the stuff that led up to actual intercourse way better than I liked intercourse.

  Afterward, we didn’t have much to say to each other. I asked Sean how he felt, and all he could muster was that he loved me. He didn’t ask me how I felt, which was kind of sad. On the other hand, I’m not sure I could have offered a coherent answer other than that I was already disappointed in myself—probably not what Sean wanted to hear. I did tell myself that since I was moving to La La Land the very next day, no one would ever know.

  In fact, if I wanted, I could act like it had never happened.

  Chapter One

  Of course, that didn’t mean I didn’t think about what I’d done with Sean the entire two-hour shuttle van ride from Mankato to Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport and then a goodly part of the four-hour flight from the Twin Cities to Burbank, California. Fortunately, my father, brother, and sister were
sitting in the row behind me, row 12, while I had secured the window seat on the left side of row 11. My father was doing hard-copy revisions of his latest novel, Gemma was rewatching Jersey Shore on her iPod, and Chad was sleeping.

  As for row 11, unfortunately, the middle and aisle seats were occupied by a pair of adult twin ladies in wide matching poodle-themed skirts. Members of the Poodle Club of America, en route to a poodle convention in Los Angeles, they were traveling with matching champagne toy poodles named Fred and Ginger. Ginger sported a rhinestone collar and her nails were painted silver. Fred had a black tuxedo collar. Their little poodle carriers were a joke.

  Some people say that evangelical Christians can get too enthusiastic in their efforts to bring church to the unchurched. I am here to say that they have nothing on the poodle ladies in their efforts to convert me to the pulpit of poodles.

  Pretending to sleep was my best option, but then I really did doze off, with thoughts of Sean and what we’d done the night before dancing in my head. Not good. Sugarplums should dance in your head, not the loss of your virginity on the floor at a party and not being too pleased with yourself for having done it.

  My mom had come to Los Angeles a week ahead of the rest of us to start at the church; Dad had stayed behind in Mankato so that we kids could finish our finals. The church had put her back in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, since our new home was being repainted and re-everything else, but that day it would be ready and we’d all move in. I was half convinced that the moment my mom saw us, she’d know I’d had sex. Sometimes she’s spooky like that. If she asked me, I’d be dead, because I found it impossible to lie to her. On the other hand, even if she didn’t ask and I didn’t tell, it would still be the building of a false impression.

  I could imagine her writing a sermon about that.

  What woke me up was a poke in my ribs through the space that separated me from one of the poodle ladies. It was Gemma, lifting folds of poodle skirt to find me.