The Beginning (Jessica Christ Book 1)

by H. Claire Taylor

  The girls poured out into the hallway on their way to lunch, chatting and reflecting on all the information and drama of the past few hours. Jess hung a few steps back from her normal group of friends, deciding that it might be prudent to lay low for a while after speaking publicly on God’s behalf. Miranda, of course, hung back with her.

  Where the seventh grade hall intersected with the main hallway, the flow of girls intermixed with the flow of boys, resulting in an uproar or giggles from the girls and uncharacteristic silence from the boys. While Jess had undoubtedly been subjected to more disturbing images in the past three hours than she had in her entire life leading up to today, the gait of the boys as they stumbled speechlessly through the halls indicated a whole other level of trauma, and Jess wondered what on earth could have gone on in their classroom to leave them in such a state.

  Jess spotted Mr. Foster as he passed by, his jaw clenched, shaking his head slowly and mumbling, “I swear to God …” before her eyes landed on Chris Riley. The boy’s usual confident posture and oblivion-based friendliness had been drastically tempered. His shoulders slumped, and the only conclusion she could draw was that the boys had simply been chastised all morning.

  “Hey Chris,” Emma said smoothly as she walked near him.

  He looked up and for a moment seemed awkward, but then his gaze flickered for a half second from her face to the region just below her neck, and a small smile turned the corners of his mouth. “Hey Emma.” He nodded slightly. Then his eyes wandered casually over to Jess, and the confidence disappeared instantly, replaced again by the downtroddenness of seconds before. He looked away as soon as he could.

  Crap, crap, crap!

  A fluorescent light and its covering exploded above Chris’s head, raining shards of plastic and glass down onto him and the other students nearby. The boys and girls closest to the source of the bang yelped and fled, causing an outward stampede in all directions.

  But Chris remained planted in place. His head jerked toward Jess immediately, the fear in his eyes intensifying. It was an accusation. He was accusing her of having smote the light.

  Granted, she had. She hadn’t meant to, just like with the grackle, but her frustration had snuck up on her before she could contain it. And with him staring at her like that, she felt like smiting a lot more than just light bulbs, but she knew better.

  Jessica and Miranda were the only two of their small group remaining by the lockers after the others fled with the masses, and as Stephanie Lee elbowed past, screaming, “It’s happening! Oh my God, it’s happening!” Jessica figured it was time for her to get gone as well.

  She flashed Miranda an apologetic grin, hoped it would suffice, and then headed off to find an escape route out of the building. Maybe she could make it home before anyone noticed. But when she turned, she ran straight into Mrs. Thomas.

  “Why don’t you follow me?” It wasn’t a question. Mrs. Thomas grabbed Jess’s arm and led her to the side of the hallway so that they could make their way back toward the classroom against the flow of cafeteria-bound melodrama. They stepped inside the open doorway and Mrs. Thomas gave Jess a good long stare before speaking. “I know that was you.”

  Was Jess about to get in trouble? Was this finally the thing that would cross Jess’s name off Mrs. Thomas’s list of favorites? That didn’t seem fair. She hadn’t meant to do it, and she’d been trying to do what she could to keep it from getting worse when Mrs. Thomas had intervened. That seemed like responsible behavior.

  But it became clear from her voice that she wasn’t angry with Jess when she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Jess wasn’t even sure herself until it came pouring out of her mouth. “I don’t want to be the daughter of God.”

  Mrs. Thomas nodded sympathetically, but asked, “Why don’t you want to be the daughter of God?”

  “Wait, you believe me? You actually believe I’m God’s daughter?”

  Mrs. Thomas nodded slowly and shut her eyes softly in a way that told Jess this wasn’t something to spread around. “Yes, I believe you, Jess.”

  It felt like a light turned on inside her chest. Mrs. Thomas actually believed her! She didn’t bother holding back as she explained further. “It’s never done anything good for me. It just gets me bullied. The only special power I have is smiting, and that just gets me in trouble.” She considered mentioning how being the daughter of God had also gotten Randy killed, but thought better of it. Mrs. Thomas might not understand the correlation, and considering she’d been the first on the gruesome scene as well as the first person to tell Jess it wasn’t her fault, admitting any guilt for the event didn’t seem great for self-preservation. Best to tuck that memory away.

  “But don’t you like being closer to … you know, Him?” Her eyes lifted to the ceiling and she smiled.

  “No! I can hear him. Not all the time, but whenever he feels like it. And it’s awful! I don’t even like him that much. And he never pays child support to my mom.”

  Mrs. Thomas chuckled, and Jess realized how much she’d just spilled to her assistant principal. No one besides Destinee, Miranda, and Jimmy knew that Jess talked directly with God on a fairly regular basis. She tried to gauge if God was listening in on the conversation, but she couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter anyway; surely He already had a pretty good idea of her feelings about Him.

  Mrs. Thomas placed a comforting hand on Jess’s shoulder. “You can be whomever you want to be. I see enormous potential in you, Jess, and I would see that in you even if you weren’t God’s daughter. So look, if you want to be the daughter of God, obviously you can be that. But I believe that if you want to go in a different direction, you’re strong enough to do that, too. You hear me?” She squatted down so that she looked up at Jess. “You can be whomever you want to be. You’re not defined by who your parents are.”

  As appealing as that idea sounded, Jess’s gut immediately doubted its accuracy. No matter what she did, people seemed to bring up either her mom or her dad. But at the same time, she began to imagine in vivid detail life as a fully-human girl. Maybe she could learn to keep God out of her head or at least ignore Him when He popped on by. Maybe she could find a way to distance herself from Destinee’s reputation and poor judgment.

  It was the first bit of hope Jess had felt in a while, even if imagining it came with a hearty side of guilt.

  She nodded and Mrs. Thomas stood. “Good. Then you need to get to lunch and get some food in you … if you can stomach it after that slideshow.”

  * * *

  “So how was sex ed, baby?” Destinee sat down at the kitchen table with her plate of fried chicken and looked eagerly at her daughter, who sat in her usual spot opposite.

  Jess wished her mother hadn’t asked her about sex ed while her cheeks were packed with chicken and sweet peas. An image from the slideshow surfaced in her mind, and she opened her mouth and used her tongue to force the half-chewed lump of food out onto her plate. She stared down at it, all fleshy and green. “Awful.”

  “Well at least you have spring break to recover.”

  Jess nodded noncommittally. “I guess.”

  “What’d I tell you about that slideshow? I called it, didn’t I?” Destinee gnawed into her chicken leg, tearing off a large chunk and poking it all the way into her mouth with her finger. She sucked in air to combat the scalding meat, then gave in and sipped her beer as a last resort.

  Jess rolled her eyes and nodded. “Yeah, you called it.”

  “And I bet you didn’t learn a thing, either,” she said around her food.

  “Actually, we learned quite a bit.”

  Destinee stopped chewing for a moment to take a serious look at her daughter. “Really?”

  Jess nodded and spooned a few peas into her mouth while trying her best not to think about herpes.

  “Like what?”

  “That sex should be respectful and between two consenting individuals.” That particular lesson made sense to Jess, too, which was always an added b
onus in her education. She didn’t see the point in mentioning that it was God who’d taught it to her.

  But Destinee eyed her suspiciously and took another quick swig of beer. “Really? You learned about that today?”

  Jess nodded. “Yeah. And that it shouldn’t involve non-human animals.”

  Destinee nodded seriously and shook her chicken leg at Jess for emphasis. “That is very true. Screwing animals is a big no-no.” She took another bite and then shoved the chicken into her cheek so she could speak around it. “And what about marriage?”

  “Sex without consent within a marriage is still rape.”

  “Huh!” Destinee pouted out her lips and nodded approvingly. “Well isn’t that something. Abstinence sex ed ain’t what it used to be, I guess.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been as good if Mrs. Thomas didn’t kick out the woman from White Light Church about halfway through.”

  Destinee’s eyebrows shot up. “Did she really? Never thought much of that woman, but it sounds like she has some sense in her after all. So then Mrs. Thomas just taught it?”

  “No. A doctor did. Dr. Fractal.”

  Now Destinee really seemed to think Jess was making things up. “Fractal, eh? I don’t suppose she’s related to Jameson Fractal.”

  How did everyone but Jess know who that was? “Yeah, his sister.”

  Destinee smacked the table. “Well I’ll be.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You kidding me?” Destinee tilted back the bottle and finished off her beer.

  “No.”

  “Jess, you really need to watch something other than nature shows. Every girl your age should know who Jameson Fractal is.”

  “Well, who is he?”

  “Hell if I know what he actually does. But he’s famous. He’s … a celebrity. Maybe a little bit older than you. Eighteen maybe?”

  That seemed a lot older.

  “But he’s cute, apparently. A little young for my taste—I like them older. Significantly older, obviously. But he’s right up your alley. You crushing on boys yet?”

  Jess’s mind immediately went to Chris. “No.”

  “Give it a year, then.”

  Destinee set her chicken leg down, wiped the grease from her mouth with her forearm, and then headed over to the fridge to grab another beer.

  Jess thought back to Chris’s face when she’d smote the lightbulb above his head. What was the point of crushing on a guy if every guy she liked was scared of her because she was the daughter of God? Mrs. Thomas’s idea of being someone other than God’s daughter sounded more and more appealing each time Jess considered it. Maybe if she told her mother about it, Destinee would help her do it.

  She pulled off a tiny chunk of chicken with her fingers and flicked it into her mouth, glancing up at her mother, who was back at the table again, going to town on her meal with a fresh beer in one hand and the chicken leg in the other.

  It wasn’t like Destinee was getting much out of God as the father of her child. So odds were, she wouldn’t care one bit if Jess decided to disown God as her father.

  “I don’t think I want to be the daughter of God anymore.”

  Destinee dropped the chicken bone onto her plate, set the beer down slowly, leaned across the table, and smacked Jess on the side of the head with a greasy hand.

  “Ow! What?”

  Destinee swallowed. “That’s for being an idiot. First of all, you don’t have a choice about who your daddy is. Second of all, even if you did, you got about the best daddy around, even if he’s almost never here and doesn’t work a job that puts food on this table.”

  “But Mrs. Thomas says I can be whatever I want to be.”

  “Sure, as long as what you want to be is God’s daughter. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You got a good lot in life, and I’ll be damned if you turn your back on it and settle for any less, you understand me?”

  Jess poked at her peas with her fork, and she could feel her mother’s eyes still glued to her. “Yes.”

  But even as she said it, her fantasy of having a different dad expanded into a fantasy of having a different dad and a different mom. What would life be like with a mother who actually listened to what Jess wanted? What would it be like to have a cool mom everyone loved and respected and never teased her about? A mom like, say, Mrs. Thomas?

  Something inside her chest ached for that, and she let her mind drift away into a parallel reality where everything was the same, except Mrs. Thomas was her mother and her father had died in an earthquake in Asia when she was just a baby …

  13 A.G.C.

  It was a special day for a couple of reasons. For one, it was the first time Jess had ever been to a sleepover. Sure, she’d slept over at Miranda’s house plenty of times, and vice versa, but that hardly counted as an actual sleepover. Sandra’s thirteenth birthday bash, though, was a sleepover.

  The second and clearly less important reason why the day was special was that it was also Jess’s thirteenth birthday, although no one at the party except for Miranda knew that, and Miranda had been sworn to secrecy, which didn’t necessarily mean that it would remain secret for long (though Jess had long since given up begrudging Miranda for her accidental slips, seeing as how her tendency for it seemed more God’s fault than her best friend’s).

  Nine girls sat huddled in a tight circle on a pallet of pillows, blankets, and sleeping bags that covered the entirety of Sandra’s bedroom floor, and they had every intention of staying awake on said pallet, gossiping and giggling, all night long. Jess tried not to think too hard about how she’d made the exclusive list, along with Emma, Courtney, Miranda, Stephanie, one of Sandra’s neighbors, and two of Sandra’s cousins of a similar age. What mattered was that Jess had made the cut, so once school started again after the summer, she had an exclusive party invite to add to her ongoing social resume upon entering eighth grade. And maybe, just maybe, this would be the year where things started to look up for her.

  Mrs. Thomas had bought just about every junk food imaginable for them to graze on (or devour, as the case may be) in their downtime, and she had even downloaded them an R-rated movie to watch later on. Jess still didn’t understand the movie rating system and wasn’t sure what made a movie rated R, but she guessed from the tone with which everyone said, “Rated R” that it was a coveted thing for people her age, meaning it was probably largely forbidden by parents.

  The sheer amount of damage control Jess’s reputation required after the little sex ed fiasco had instilled within her a new intensity of cautiousness when it came to mentioning anything even remotely related to God around her friends. And, because she was herself closely associated with God, she remained tight-lipped on as many personal details as she could, including, or rather especially, her birthday. Ever since she first realized that Christmas and all the insanity that went along with it was actually a celebration of her half-brother’s birthday, she’d made a concerted effort to keep the date of her nativity under wraps. But over the past few months since spring break, she’d taken it a step further and made sure that both Miranda and Destinee understood that the date of her birth was now classified as Top Secret. She wanted the opposite of Christmas; she wanted a birthday that everyone forgot each year.

  So she reminded herself, as Sandra tore into her presents, gasping and squealing with unrestrained excitement, that forgoing recognition and gifts was a small but worthwhile price to pay for having friends.

  Sandra discarded the wrapping paper for the last of her presents, shucking it off and tossing it to the side of the pallet, and squealed at what she held in her hands. “Oh my god! Thank you, Emma!”

  Jessica leaned to the side to get a better view, but she still couldn’t get a good glimpse without crowding Courtney. “What is it?”

  Sandra unfolded a ladies T-shirt and held it up for the rest of the girls to see. Jess read it. Never the same. Never that different. And behind the jagged text was the outline of a face that she now recognized, thanks to a thorough Goo
gle search over her spring break.

  “I’m so jealous!” proclaimed Sandra’s cousin Tracy. The girl looked just like Sandra, except her forehead was much too large in Jess’s opinion. Or maybe her eyes were too low … “I saw that shirt online and was like, ‘Oh my god, I have to have it.’ I’m like, so jealous.”

  Sandra hugged it to her. “I love it! Thanks so much, Emma!”

  “Did you see Cutthroat Times yet?” Emma asked.

  “No, but that’s what my mom downloaded for tonight!” Sandra said excitedly.

  Tracy and Sandra’s other cousin, Natalia, who was only a grade ahead of them but at least a foot and a half taller, squealed and flapped their hands. “Oh my god no way!”

  But Emma remained calm and collected. “I mean, it’s good but it’s not his best. Bridge to November is way better.”

  “Well, duh,” Sandra said, holding up the shirt as evidence, and Jess could only surmise that the Jameson Fractal quote on the front of it—which made zero sense to her, if she was being honest—was from that movie.

  After her comprehensive image search of the apparently well-known actor, Jess had decided two things. First, Jameson Fractal was cute, with his dark blond hair, hazel eyes, and leather jackets, but she by no means had a crush on him. Second, she must never let any of her friends know she didn’t have a crush on Jameson Fractal. And while she’d done her homework to an extent, she hadn’t actually taken the extra step of watching him in any of his movies, so when that topic arose, as it frequently did, she nodded enthusiastically—but not too enthusiastically—with each opinion that was expressed.

  “Yeah, Bridge to November is a good one.” She murmured it just loud enough for it to register on Emma’s radar so that the girl glanced over and nodded approvingly but not so loud that anyone would remember her claiming to have seen it later on if she was directly asked about it.

  “Cake’s ready!” Mrs. Thomas hollered from the kitchen.