by Nicole Baart
She teared up almost instantly. “I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered.
I hadn’t seen her cry since the day of my dad’s funeral, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by guilt. I had lived with her for four years and had given between little and no thought to how my presence must weigh on a woman who should be long past worrying about a moody, miserable teenager. I was her granddaughter, not her daughter, yet she had been thrust into the role of sole parent to a social reject who rarely thought past her own selfish desires. How many nights had she cried silently into her pillow over me?
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said again, and now the tears made two little lines down her cheeks.
I wrapped my arms around her and held her quietly. After a moment I said, “Don’t worry about me, Grandma. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
She pulled away from me and looked almost desperately into my eyes. “I don’t want you to become bitter. You carry so much for someone so young, and I just don’t want you to get cold. …”
“I won’t—I’m not,” I assured her.
Grandma took a deep breath and pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Julia,” she began almost shyly, “will you do something for me?”
I answered without hesitation because I would have done almost anything to erase the suffering in her face. “Of course, Grandma.”
She nodded gently and stepped around me to reach for her Bible. It was open on the kitchen table, and she picked it up tenderly so as not to disturb any of the scraps of paper that stuck out from between the thin, fragile pages. Her whole life was in that Bible— scribbled prayers and bulletins from special church services and precious black-and-white photographs with brittle, crinkly corners. She even had the program from Dad’s funeral with my name typed first among the ones he left behind.
I had peeked in her Bible once and found the family tree among the first stiff pages and seen that next to my father’s entry she had put a small, unfinished line through Janice’s name. I couldn’t decide if she had begun to scratch her name out and been unable to follow through or if because Janice was neither here nor there it was appropriate to mark her only half gone. Janice wasn’t dead—Grandma couldn’t write a neat date in the “deceased” line—but to simply write divorced beside her name didn’t seem to quite cover what had happened either. I never asked her about it.
But Grandma didn’t have Janice in mind when she took out her Bible that night. I figured we would spend some time sharing memories or that she would flip open that cherished book to a passage and ask me to read with her, but instead she extracted a small blue flyer from the front cover and replaced the Bible on the table. Opening the flyer, she smoothed the center crease and handed it to me tentatively.
The heading read Thunder Road, and I cringed inwardly because I knew exactly what it meant. I pretended to read it as my mind worked furiously to find a way out without devastating her. I forced a smile.
“You want me to go to the youth retreat?” I finally asked because it seemed like the safest place to start. Maybe I had misread her intentions, and I didn’t want to put any ideas into her head— I didn’t want her to think for a second that it was my idea or that I secretly wanted to go.
My hopes were proven unfounded even before I had the words completely out of my mouth. Grandma was looking at me with thinly veiled expectations, and I could see that in her eyes this weekend away with the church youth group would be nothing less than my very salvation.
When I didn’t say anything more, she came to stand beside me and began to point out different things on the gaudy flyer. “It’s not so much a retreat as a time of restoration and renewal,” she explained, indicating two buzzwords that jumped off the page in flashy fonts. “It’s a time to help you refocus and reconnect.” Two more boldfaced words.
It made me want to retch, and the smile that I suppressed at my own private joke was a real one.
“You get to miss school on Friday,” Grandma said as if I were a child who could be coaxed with the promise of some tantalizingly proffered treat.
I turned my smile to her, and she read it as acceptance and maybe even excitement about her idea. I let her. She looked so happy and relieved that I heard myself saying, “I’d love to go,” though my voice wavered a bit and my smile faltered.
“Oh, Julia, I’m so glad!” Grandma drew me into a quick, delighted hug, and though my heart had sunk into the pit of my stomach, I would have said yes again if only to feel the warmth of her happiness. “You’re going to have so much fun,” she continued cheerfully. “You’ll meet so many new people. …”
I began to put the dishes away so I had an excuse to turn from her as my face fell.
Grandma dropped me off at church before sunrise the following Friday morning.
The storm blue church bus was full, and I had to sit next to a girl who perched on the end of the seat and talked to her two friends across the aisle the entire two-hour trip. She would have just sat with them on their own short bench—they were skinny enough to have allowed it—but the bus driver announced that he wouldn’t leave until everyone was sitting two to a seat. He stood there with arms crossed and looked over the whole of the bus with a keen, meticulous eye as a few people shuffled and moved. The girl from across the aisle—who had curly brown hair tossed into an updo that was supposed to look thrown together but that I was sure contained enough bobby pins to set off a metal detector—looked over at the empty space beside me, then turned regretfully back to her friends. She grasped their hands for a moment, and they gave her brave smiles as she shouldered her knapsack and shifted her weight across the tiny aisle.
“Hi!” she said brightly, and her smile was so fake that I didn’t even attempt to respond. She watched me for a minute, her plastic pink smile frozen in place, and before I could force my mouth to form a polite hello, she had turned away with a distinct huff.
I sighed as I looked out the window because it was clear I had already failed my first entrance exam. At best, I had been instantly labeled weird or a loner; at worst, they would mutter nasty but decipherable words under their breath when I walked by. The retreat was a spectacular train wreck, and the bus hadn’t even pulled out of the parking lot. The worst thing was, after sneaking another glance at the girls, I realized that they were a grade below me. At what point did my self-worth become contingent upon what a group of younger girls thought of me?
The weekend hadn’t improved any by the time we arrived at the lakeside lodge. It was depressing to step out of the stuffy bus alone and behold the familiar sprawling cabins of Elim Springs Retreat Center obscured by the dismal gray patina of midwinter gloom. I had only ever seen Elim Springs during the prime summer season, when the cabins were full of happy vacationers and the lake was a translucent, pearly blue beneath silver aspen leaves whispering in the perpetual breeze.
Now the trees stood stark, limbs twisted awkwardly as if they were attempting to cover their own nakedness, while the lake was an indistinct, half-frozen mass the lifeless color of cold oatmeal. This dull, cheerless place was hardly recognizable, and I couldn’t stop my mind from flickering between what I remembered this haven to be and what I saw before me.
When one of my seatmate’s friends bumped into me and knocked the book I was holding into the gravelly snow at my feet, I abandoned any hope of something redemptive coming out of my trip to Elim Springs.
The girls’ dorm room in the west wing of the main lodge was freezing, and as I tossed my stuff onto the top bunk of one of the beds in the far corner of the room, I realized that I had not brought warm enough clothes. I stripped off my sweatshirt to add a long-sleeved T-shirt underneath and ended up being late for the camp-style sing-along at the weekend opening.
Pastor Brad and his wife, Jennie, were on stools in front of a stone fireplace—a massive affair that looked as if it should sport a whole hog on a slowly turning spit—and as I tried to slip in the back door, they both caught my eye and smiled.
Pastor Brad was str
umming a guitar that rested casually on his knee, and without pausing, he called out, “Come join us, Miss DeSmit. We’re so glad that you’ve come!”
I could tell by the soft way he looked at me that he didn’t mean to cause me any embarrassment, nor was he upset by my slight tardiness. But it was hard not to hate him as every head in the room swiveled in my direction.
Sinking deeper into a well of self-pity, I convinced myself that they were all snickering at me—although most of the faces seemed to offer little more expression than mild curiosity. Sometimes I forgot that I was still the lost soul of choice, the orphan waif of the church, the vulnerable recipient of hand-wringing sympathy. But it had been over a year now. My protected status couldn’t last forever, and as I tried to avoid making eye contact with anyone and quickly sat down cross-legged in the back, I heard a muttered word that I chose to ignore. To top it all off, the room was stiflingly hot. I stubbornly refused to remove my sweatshirt and admit that I had made myself late for no good reason.
God, get me through this, I breathed. It was the first prayer I had uttered in ages. With a cynical smile, I realized that the weekend had barely begun and already I was talking to God. If nothing else, it would make Grandma happy, and I wouldn’t have to lie when I told her the youth retreat had rejuvenated my prayer life.
We sang some praise-and-worship songs, and I moved my mouth without making any sound because I didn’t know the words, and Pastor Brad, assuming that we all knew what we were doing, hadn’t provided song sheets. One song melted into another, and soon Jennie was lost in devotion and a few kids had followed suit.
I had the perfect vantage point from the very back, so I carefully stole looks around the room as the service dragged on. Most were singing charitably, almost as if they knew this was part and parcel of a youth retreat and they wanted to maintain at least the pretense of interest and involvement. A handful of people seemed to be trying to hide the fact that they were bored by overcompensating with fake enthusiasm.
But there were a few who looked nothing like the rest. They sat straight or curled over with their heads in their hands or with arms outstretched as they looked at something far away, but their faces had the same gentle quality. There was a peacefulness, a look of fulfillment in the wake of deep longing. For a moment, my breath caught in my throat, and I wanted to be where they were.
Then the song was over, and Pastor Brad announced lunch. There was nothing left to do but join the throng of teenagers crowding the tables along the south wall to grab a brown bag and a pink carton of skim milk.
The rest of the day withered away under the emotionally charged testimonies of a few seniors or recent graduates who deigned to leave their post-high school lives to offer us a taste of maturity and erudition. I knew I was being cold—the one thing Grandma was so afraid I would become—but they were offering quick answers and thrilling conversions, and it was hard to accept their glamorous offer when I was just worried about making it through the next two days.
I didn’t want to be this way, but for the duration of an entire prayer, I actually found myself worrying to the point of obsession about the acceptability of my pajamas. I had never given an article of clothing, much less a faded pair of stretchy black yoga pants, so much thought. I was losing myself as I tried to survive this ridiculous retreat.
That night, crawling into the chilly top bunk after scrubbing my face and teeth in the ice-cold water of the attached girls’ bathroom, I had to appreciate the fact that at least I had marked my opponent and identified my areas of weakness: the girl with the updo had barely concealed a derisive giggle when she saw me wear the same sweatshirt I had worn all afternoon and evening to bed. Apparently I now had a major fashion faux pas to go along with my earlier social blunder.
I wiggled into my sleeping bag and, though I was exhausted, didn’t expect I’d be able to sleep much, if at all. The chatter in the room continued long after Jennie had poked her head in to remind us in a singsong voice that we had a full day tomorrow and it was well past lights-out. Girls giggled in the darkness, moved from bed to bed without touching the floor, and ate cookies pilfered from the kitchen.
I couldn’t make out any specific conversation as I lay there quiet and unnoticeable, but I did recognize the occasional name. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or disappointed that my name was never mentioned—that I was a nonissue.
I had forgotten my watch at home, so I didn’t know what time it was when I snuck carefully out of my bed. It had been quiet for a long time—long enough for me to imagine in great and glorious detail a far-fetched escape from this torturous weekend. Thomas was involved, and I was vindicated in front of Little Miss Updo. As I snapped back to reality when my feet touched the floor, I was a little sickened that I had allowed myself to indulge in such a childish delusion. “Grow up!” I mouthed, chastising myself.
Bags and belongings littered the floor, making it hard to navigate my way through the rows of beds. I almost tripped twice, but the sounds of thirty-odd girls in various stages of sleep muffled the scuff of my feet. If anyone heard or noticed my escape, they didn’t let on.
I went to the bathroom because I didn’t know where else to go. Standing in front of the mirror, I surveyed myself with a critical eye and found nothing overtly offensive or necessarily attractive in my features. I did have remarkable eyes—my one legacy from Janice— and they were a deep and golden green outlined with a thick ring of brown that was both exotic and kind of mysterious. I wondered if eye makeup would cause them to be more noticeable—I was sure that not many people made it past my nondescript features to admire my pretty eyes. But I certainly wasn’t repulsive and was no more or less eye-catching than the most average girl at my school. Only a few stood out as either breathtaking beauties or sadly subpar in the looks department, and I was neither. I had always thought that it was a safe place to be.
And then it struck me. Maybe it wasn’t about looks.
If that was true, it made matters painfully, infinitely worse. If it wasn’t about looks, that could only mean they disliked me for me—for who I truly was. It meant that what was wrong with me was not something that could be fixed with a little mascara or a new haircut with highlights named after some trendy, earthy shade. Harvest-wheat blonde would not make me popular. It was a staggering realization.
Until now, I had always believed that any lack of popularity or heaps of friends was a direct result of my own inability to be bothered with the trappings of status. What if … Oh, God, if You exist, don’t let this be … what if I was a charity case? an object of pity? someone parents encouraged their children to be nice to, but that the kids themselves could barely stand to be near, much less befriend? Include that little DeSmit girl, honey; she has no parents, you know. Well-meant sympathy I could handle. Abject pity was beyond tolerance.
It was as if I had looked into that flawed, inadequate bathroom mirror and pierced it with the sharp agony of my gaze. Lines veined across the surface like so many infinitesimal cobwebs, spider-silk fingers that raced to the far corners and sparkled in the light. They shone there for a moment—shimmering, silvered lines that divided my life into meaningless fragments—before crumbling into jagged wreckage at my feet. Although it was less a crumbling than an eruption—a shining wave of spectacular, glimmering beauty, terrible and breathtaking all at once. It was a dangerous collection of brokenness, and I wanted to wade through it and piece it back together, but I feared all those sharp corners. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I didn’t know how to begin putting myself back together.
I needed air. Past the point of caring if anyone caught me or paid attention to where I was going, I crept back into the dormitory with less caution than I had left it and collected my coat and shoes. I slung on my coat in the hallway and stepped into my tennis shoes without bothering to tie the laces.
The central meeting room was dark and empty, and the glass wall facing the lake reflected the dying embers of the fire in dozens of different panes. It w
as warm and still, and had I been in any other mood, I would have found it the perfect place to curl up alone with a book. In my current state, it was oppressive and close. I couldn’t leave fast enough, even though I had no idea where I was going. I tried the doors leading out to the lake, but they were locked tight.
Remembering that there was an exit through the kitchen, I started off in that direction but stopped with my hand on the door when I heard voices inside. The leaders were going over the fine details of tomorrow.
I nearly shouted in frustration.
Escaping to the narrow hallway behind the meeting room, I stood with my back pressed against the far wall and tried to pull myself together. I couldn’t wander all night looking for a release from this dim prison—especially since I was beyond sure that they had locked and double-checked every door—but I couldn’t stand the thought of returning to the crowded dormitory where all those girls lay contentedly dreaming of clothes and boys in the darkness. There was nowhere for me to go.
Had I been a different girl or maybe younger, I might have waited somewhere that the adults could find me when their informal meeting adjourned. They’d discover me wide-eyed and brimming with emotion, and with the enthusiasm of self-appointed saviors they would just listen. That was the textbook-approved method, right?
Just listen. Except they could only listen for so long before the answer clearly presented itself, and as the proprietors of all that is wise and mature, they would find themselves compelled to pluck the tantalizing nugget of truth as if choosing a ripe apple and share their insight and perspective. Beautifully packaged. Easy to digest.
I wasn’t interested.
My head was getting fuzzy and my legs tired when I heard footsteps at the far end of the hallway. I hadn’t been standing there very long, but it was late and I was exhausted because every road seemed like a dead end. In spite of myself, I wished I had never left my cold bed. I shrank into the shadows along the wall and held my breath, hoping that whoever was at the other end of the corridor wouldn’t notice me. If I could go undetected, I would hurry back to my bed, do whatever was necessary to survive the rest of the weekend, and deal with all of this later. My quick jaunt around the sleeping lodge had revealed that this was not the time or place for me to get dramatic.
