Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

by K. Dawn Goodwin

I looked away in order to turn the other goddamn cheek. Plus, I didn’t want to offend him with my ginormous popout eyes.

  “Why do you always smell bad?” he asked.

  Ah, this must be codespeak for can we go out this Friday?

  “Why do you think it’s cool to pick on a girl?” I blurted, then took cover by looking the other way.

  He said nothing. Maybe he was surprised. Maybe he was unaware that I had a speaking voice and the ability to hear. But he went silent.

  At home, I sat in the kitchen souping up my second bowl of 100 percent fat-free Crispix. In the other room, Kate was sitting on the couch channel surfing. A National Geographic special was on, showing a variety of male creatures preening their rainbow feathers and dancing for show, locking their massive horns and bearing claws and goring themselves to bloody messes just to impress one homely brown female. She wasn’t pretty. Just a plain ugly bird, like me.

  I stopped eating and stared. It was so different for humans. All males had to do was learn to belch the alphabet, skateboard, and play video games. Oh, yeah, and keep girls like me in their place. When it came to winning love, the real battle belonged to us females.

  Kate clicked on one of the networks just in time to hear the ominous thunder roll of a tympani as two spotlights glistened on a stage.

  “It’s on tonight?” she yelled, surprised. “What time is it?”

  I drew closer.

  “It’s on tonight!” I echoed.

  It was. The pied piper of young girls, the fascist wood chipper of their impressionable hearts. The Miss America pageant had just started.

  Tagged with numbers, parading their lean skirt-steak flanks in the spotlight, their smiles fierce and their hair halos luminous. Worthy of spotlights and sequins and crowns, they carried the survival of the human species on their dimple-free hindquarters. By comparison, my body was clearly a factory second. I looked down at my bowl, but the digestion of my cereal had ground to a halt.

  “They rub Preparation H all over their butts,” Kate told me excitedly, her eyes glued to the screen. “It hides the cellulite. Tightens the skin.”

  I knew what she meant. We couldn’t afford to like this too much, the harbinger of what was coming in our lives. Happy endings were slipping farther and farther out of our trajectory.

  “Where’s Miss Connecticut?” I asked, trying to be hopeful.

  “She’s the one in the blue,” Kate said, and I squinted. Yeah, okay, she was… okay. Crap. She wouldn’t survive the first cut. She wasn’t Barbie enough. She didn’t rape your eyes with her spastic perfection and her fiberglass buttocks like Miss Texas did.

  I set my bowl in the dishwasher and paused one more time in the doorway to watch a Maybelline commercial. The model kicked the surf with her long beige legs, laughing in slow motion as one might when in the throes of self-love. The hunk in the linen shirt caressed her teensy waist, mesmerized by her weightless body.

  Maybe it’s Maybelline!

  “Maybe it’s hemorrhoid cream,” I called back to Kate, as consolation. “All over her face.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s funny.”

  Neither one of us laughed.

  Halloween Day at school was my get-out-of-jail-free card. It was the one day where looking weird was condoned, and I could finally embrace some negative attention. I planned my costume for weeks. Head on a platter maybe, with zombie-like makeup? Nah. Half-man, half-woman? Human electric socket? After much deliberation, I decided to tone it down a bit, maybe something more sardonic and obscure, like candidate for president.

  I laid it out on my bed piece by homemade piece: man’s suit jacket and tie, American flag do-rag and boxers, red Converse high-tops, and a VOTE FOR ME! button on the lapel. Yes! It was a random ensemble, but I imagined the entire school would be so impressed by my double entendre, and so glad that the bandanna covering my forehead would prevent my bangs from taking over the town. I was so excited. I was so scared.

  Mom snapped my photo on the front steps and asked me what I thought was on voters’ minds.

  “Change,” I said, and jingled the coins in my suit pocket.

  Then I walked into the fluorescent light of the school foyer and froze. What voters had on their minds definitely wasn’t coming to school dressed like an idiot. No one else was doing Halloween. Duh, we were too old for that. And my costume wasn’t funny ha-ha. It was funny weird.

  “What is she wearing?” Passersby asked themselves. “What the hell?”

  Just be yourself, whispered Jesus.

  Oh, crucify me.

  A random girl by my locker covered me with a once-over that was like being smeared with shit.

  “O-kay,” she sang.

  “Halloween,” I explained with a friendly laugh.

  “You need serious help.”

  “Thanks.”

  Why did I always thank people? I meant it to sound sarcastic, but it was always too quiet to be heard.

  Mr. Tanner understood me, though, bless his delectable soul. Mr. Tanner was my English teacher and lone beacon of hotness and hope. Late thirties, twinkly blue eyes and sandy hair, sexy, funny, and fodder for my naughtiest journals. I had written several stories in which we’d made out passionately, and he’d left his wife and newborn twins so we could gyrate together on every beach in the Northern Hemisphere. He always wore this adorable little bow tie and sometimes even juggled copies of eighteenth-century classic novels. His motto was, “Be a dork,” and ironically, the cool girls couldn’t get enough of him. They gathered like groupies around his desk before class, fawning.

  “You are a dork,” they’d gush, salivating. “Total nerd.”

  For Halloween, Mr. Tanner was totally decked out in clown gear. Of course he was. Truly stupid looking. He was so brave.

  “Hey, Mr. Tanner!” I said grinning, throwing down my backpack. “Whadya think? Get it?”

  I spun around once in my boxer shorts, flaring my suit jacket, and he studied me, resting his chin in his hand.

  “Okay, wait,” he said.

  “Aw, please say you get it.”

  “‘Vote for Me.’ Ha. Very original, like, what, flasher for president?”

  “Sort of,” I said, twisting, wishing I had thought of something that clever.

  He turned around in his clown shoes. “What about me, too subtle?”

  “No, you’re perfect.” Indeed he was. Dreamy. But so tragically married. Ugh.

  “Geek power.” He grinned, and I grinned back, completely blank and stuttering in the presence of his red foam nose. I looked at the shape of his hands, masculine and sturdy, and melted.

  Then some popular girls entered and swallowed him whole.

  “Oh, my God, Mr. Tanner!” they screamed. “Nice outfit!”

  “Hilarious!”

  “So dumb! But I love it.”

  As I watched them, I turned invisible again. Little pieces of their superior hair, their more attractive fingernails, their tan ankles and unabated group happiness—it canceled me out.

  A terrifying jock I’d never dared talk to in my entire life dropped his book bag near my desk and summed me up. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him shaking his head.

  “Oh, my God,” he said, moving in for the kill. “Why do you have to sit near me. Why?”

  I struck my default I-can’t-hear-you pose.

  “Nice zit,” he said. “Why are you dressed like a homeless man?”

  “Go away,” I muttered, my interim comeback until I could spend several years preparing a proper one that I would deliver boldly, but only to the mirror.

  “Ashley, look,” he called out to no one, still staring at me. “Look, it’s your twin. Not.”

  I wondered what he meant. Did I act like a copycat, even in costume? I grew sullen, the edge of my festive bandanna burning my skin.

  “You think you’re so hot, don’t you?” he persisted.

  Oh, no.

  I pulled out my books, placed them on my desk as if they mattered, as if I c
ared about homework, or school, or anything besides escaping. A hush fell over the class as Mr. Tanner began talking, but I could still hear the boy next to me, whispering to his buddy. A spitball or two crossed my desk. One hit my shoulder and stuck, which meant I had to brush it off, which meant acknowledging that it was happening. I flicked it off and swallowed hard, staring straight ahead at pages with words that made no sense.

  Dear God, I prayed. Please.

  I waited for an answer, but could hear only my own thoughts speaking in a movie voice.

  They must fulfill prophecy.

  I took one glance at the boys and they looked away, laughing quietly.

  Why was I praying? I needed earthly help.

  When the bell rang, I gathered my things and hovered around Mr. Tanner’s desk again, waiting for the class to disperse. When the room was empty, he smiled up at me, gathering his papers.

  “President-Elect?” he asked. “What can I do for you?”

  “Um,” I mumbled, “I’m kinda having a problem.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He paused and did a double take. “What’s going on?”

  He had taken off his clown nose, and his hair was slightly pressed down where the wig had been. There were tiny smile lines in the corners of his eyes. He was so tall and experienced and happy, so achingly hot. The exact opposite of everything I was.

  “I don’t know, it’s a couple boys, I guess.”

  I watched the surprise on his face and wondered. How could he have missed the spitballs in my hair?

  C’mon, my eyes pleaded. Geek power? Remember?

  “I’m sorry I never saw that,” said Mr. Tanner, and I knew he meant it. “But sometimes guys act like jerks… when they like you.”

  “Yeah,” I managed, and choked on my escaping air, trying to turn it into a polite laugh. Maybe, I thought with growing horror, maybe you’ve never actually been a dork. “Yeah, but trust me, I really don’t think they like me.”

  “Let me talk to them,” he said. “Hang in there, kiddo.”

  I looked right at him and for a moment felt certain that he saw me and not my face, and that he cared. I nodded automatically, suddenly not even thinking about how I looked.

  Still, there was not much feeling of relief in getting my hot teacher to fight my battles for me. There was even less when the boys shuffled over to me the next day in class, flinging folded-up apologies at my desk, eyes averted, mumbling sorry.

  I opened their letters in the stairwell after lunch, filled with dread, trying to decipher the boy scrawl.

  I’m not sure what I did, one read. I really didn’t do anything. But whatever it was, I’ll try not to do it again I guess.

  Paper wadded up as spitballs or wadded into apologies. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Probably this.

  8 | Lunch on the Shitter (One Teen’s Walk with Christ)

  “God is coming… He is coming to save you.”

  —ISAIAH 35:4

  I don’t remember why Cortney started hanging out with me during our freshman year. She was such a beautiful girl, gentle, creative, with lots of cool friends. It didn’t really make any sense, so I just assumed that Jesus had sent her to me to be saved.

  As we sat in her room, redecorating—dipping sponges into paint and pressing them into half-moons on her wall—I daydreamed about walking the scary corridors of Avon High School with her by my side, keeping me safe from harm. Such a good look for me!

  Thanks to her popular older brothers, whom she hated, Cortney was an insider to any and all venues of hot sex and hard drugs on a rich-town Saturday night. Stuff people like me were born to judge while eating popcorn, hanging on every word. She’d been doing bad things with cool people, and yet here she was with me! I was over the frickin’ moon! But only because I wasn’t allowed to frickin’ swear.

  On the other side of her messy shag-carpeted house, I could hear one of her brothers blasting John Cougar Mellencamp.

  “I hate him,” Cortney muttered, wiping her sponge on the edge of an aluminum paint tray. “I fucking hate him.”

  That was shocking: hating one’s brothers rather than standing in awe of them. This is what happens, I realized, when Jesus was not around to properly affix your thoughts. Oh wait. Maybe she was talking about John Cougar Mellencamp. Jesus probably agreed.

  “I tried smoking,” Cortney admitted, stirring the pool of paint. “At this party I went to.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said looking up, careful not to suck in my breath.

  “It didn’t do anything to me,” she continued, pressing the sponge gently onto her blue bedroom wall. “Not that I care if it did. It just makes you feel good.” She pressed harder and harder. “And it’s not like drinking, where you have to deal with sobering up. With smoking, at least you know what you’re doing.”

  “Totally,” I said, wondering what she meant.

  Cortney eyed me, sensing that my heavenly ankle monitor was about to go off.

  “Relax. I’m not a smoker. I don’t want to hear about how bad it is for you either. Your lungs clean up after a few days.”

  I felt incredibly holy and insanely jealous at the same time. She was both drinking AND inhaling smoke? What next? Blow jobs? Being used? I shuddered, thinking about her poor, poor neglected future husband.

  Ah, but imagine being used. Used… for sex. It was something happening on another planet, in a pamphlet filled with warnings. On my Earth, the only thing deep and penetrating was God’s love.

  “Steve’s going to be at this party on Saturday.” Steve: a senior and captain of the wrestling team. For Cortney, such stars were within reach.

  “Really! That’s awesome!” I said. Then I tried to appear thoughtful. “But what if he… if you drink, and he… uses you?”

  “I know, I know. You don’t approve.”

  “No, I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I felt a strange lightness in my chest that I would later realize was the loss of my self-respect. Maybe Jesus was using me. Like a Muppet. And yet, I had to let Him. Because it was dangerous for my friend to be so guilt-free. Dangerous. Plus I didn’t get to do any of that stuff. I soaked for a minute in my acute self-righteousness.

  “I don’t wanna wait to have sex,” Cortney whined. “I know you’re against it, but the way I was brought up, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “No, it’s not bad,” I lied. Then I pictured me at a party, getting drunk and hooking up, but the scenario did not compute. I’d be in so much trouble, bad did not even describe how bad it would be. Mom would disown me, God would smite me, future husband would shame me. He’d get up sadly from our future candlelit table, walking away from me and my list of indiscretions forever. I thought you were someone else, he’d say, dropping his cloth napkin in a crumple at the base of the stemmed crystal.

  Cortney stepped back to check her work. The effect was not as promised.

  “This looks great,” she said.

  An angry thump came on her door. One of her brothers.

  “Cort-ney…” he sang. “Are you guys naked?”

  “Go away, you fucking asshole!” she screamed, chucking the wet sponge. It left a little white blob on her door. I stared, slack-jawed, at the indelible imprint of her dysfunctional family and also her apparent first-name basis with the word fuck.

  Back at my house, God’s own Partridge Family model unit, I realized it was up to me to save Cortney’s endangered virginity, to pull her from the quagmire of her expletive-ridden and poorly sponged bedroom. I would do what I always did in a crisis: save souls. Via a five-hundred-word essay.

  Dear Cortney,

  If you truly want to know that God is there, I believe you have to ask Him. Just say, “If you are truly there, God, then open my eyes.” And He will. It will happen when you least expect it, and it will change your life. God can fill up the void in your life that Steve never can.

  But then again, I didn’t have a Steve. It was much easier to fill up on God when you didn’t have a popular athlete tantalizing yo
u with his sweaty muscles. Plus I couldn’t go to parties. I didn’t want to. But that was because I wasn’t invited. Which was God’s Great Plan for my life. Earth sucked, I reminded myself, and the cost of getting into heaven was high. God had brought Cortney into my life so I could bring her closer to Jesus. The Lord was very mysterious.

  It was made worse by my rampant, untreated addiction to large bangs and bathroom mirrors.

  Though I had vowed that high school would be different, it really wasn’t. Before school, between classes, before and after lunch, during study hall, and after school, I could always be found assuming the position by a bathroom sink, frantically doing my hair. Doing it, like a pimp pushing his ho. And as always, I continued to fail, on average, about eighteen times a day. For some odd reason, Cortney didn’t want to spend high school panicking in the mirror with me. So when I got her note, I pretty much knew. I deserved it. God had probably ordained it.

  I know you’re probably mad at me for not hanging out. But you’re always in the bathroom. I just hate standing in there waiting. I guess that’s why I want to start giving our friendship some space. I don’t want to be mad at you, and I hate going to the bathroom with you before and after lunch, and between every fucking class. How could hair be so important to you? I’ve tried to understand, but I still can’t. I know your hair seems like a stupid reason for our friendship to be over, but that’s all I can really think of.

  If she was the devil and I was Jesus, then clearly I had risen victorious. My virtue had prevailed, rising to the light like a corpse in deep water. But my social life had sunk straight down, down, down to the bosom of hell, where it came to a rest in the devil’s ass crack.

  After Cortney and I broke up, I went back to spending more quality one-on-one time with my old friend, the tampon receptacle.

  I started eating lunch in the bathroom because I couldn’t just accept that my corresponding demographic was the nerd section, where girls used test scores and GPAs to establish their own subhierarchy and dominate each other like bull elephant seals in heat. It was far more comfortable being completely uncomfortable near anyone. Yea, I would deny-eth all social groups save the One True Group, a group I would quietly hate from afar, while eating a turkey sandwich in a stall.