It's a Miracle!

by H. Claire Taylor

  Clearly Quentin had never thought of that, and he nodded and ahh-ed as the idea sank in.

  “Also,” Jessica added, trying not to let her annoyance spoil her mood, “don’t forget that I can handle my own life.”

  “Oh yeah!” Quentin shouted excitedly. “I forgot you can smite! Ha! Riley, you better not try nothing, or she’ll smite that big ol’ dick of yours right off!”

  Miranda spat out a small portion of her mouthful of beer before swallowing down the rest then allowing herself to howl with laughter. Chris chuckled along uncomfortably, and Jess realized that this was not the first time such an idea had occurred to him.

  Huh. Maybe that’s why he’s never tried anything.

  Most of Jessica’s teammates had graduated that morning, so she made the rounds, tracking them down, saying bye for now, apologizing for missing graduation. It was a deliberate move, though, and most of them seemed to not only understand, but also appreciate the gesture, which had allowed them to have their time in the spotlight.

  The night flew by, and hours later Jessica found herself fully content and relaxed, leaning back in a lawn chair by the bonfire, Chris to her left, Stephanie Lee chugging a glass of water someone had mercifully brought her to Jessica’s right.

  She turned when she heard Eddie’s voice hollering from the house behind them. “Riley! Where’s that beer you brought?”

  Chris turned in his chair as Eddie approached. “It should be in the fridge. That’s where Colton put it.”

  Eddie pressed his lips together in a frown. “Fridge is empty.”

  “Well fuck. That’s what the keg’s for.”

  “Keg’s floated.”

  “Oh.”

  Stephanie’s speech was severely impaired as she hollered, “We’re outta beer?”

  “Easy, girl,” Eddie said curtly. “You don’t get anything else tonight anyway.” He turned back toward Chris. “Yeah, guess we’re outta booze.”

  “Don’t Colton’s parents have a liquor cabinet?” Marcus Mason asked, his massive frame appearing from the other side of the fire. His hands rested on his hips, and he looked more serious than Jess had ever seen him, even during the past two championship games.

  “They do,” Eddie said, “but it’s locked up.”

  More people had gathered around at the signs of controversy and began asking the same questions over and over again. “Wait, we’re outta booze?” Drew Fenster said.

  Eddie nodded concernedly.

  Dennis Rivera, arms folded across his chest, appeared behind Eddie. “Wait, there’s no more booze?”

  Eddie nodded again.

  Gary Higgins, Jess’s once temporary biology partner and well-known busty cat lady enthusiast appeared next to the fire on the other side of Stephanie. Who the hell invited Gary? “You mean there’s no beer left?”

  “God dammit, Gary,” Jess said, irritated by his presence. “Yes. He’s just said it three times.” She looked to Chris. “I guess it’s late anyway. We should probably head out.”

  The voice of a person she’d done a good job of avoiding all night cut through the worried murmurs of the group that had amassed around Eddie, Chris, and herself. “Hey Jessica. If you’re really the daughter of God, why don’t you just turn some water into wine for us?”

  Trent Wurst shoved his way past Gary and grabbed Stephanie’s glass of water, holding it out toward Jessica. “Come on, Girl Christ. Can you perform miracles or not?”

  “God dammit, Trent,” Chris spat, standing from his chair. “You should know better.” His former friend stared at him, and a meaningful look passed between the two boys that left Jess wondering if Trent might actually back down. But then he scoffed. “What, Chris, worried you might be banging the Antichrist?”

  The group around them had gone silent. Jess stayed silent, too, wondering what Chris might say as a response. Would he say they still hadn’t had sex? Or would he lie and say they had?

  But instead he took a drastically different approach. “That’s not a nice thing to call your mom.”

  The crowd responded accordingly with “ooooh”s and cackles.

  Trent’s lips curled into a snarl. “Good one, Chris. But my mom’s not a slut like yours and Jessica’s. Doesn’t matter. Obviously she can’t do a simple thing like turn water into wine, but I coulda told you that. Because she’s not God’s daughter.” Trent seemed pleased with himself and swigged from the bottle of Big Red he clutched in his fist. The coloring had dyed the skin just above his lips in a small semicircle that overlapped onto his blond, wispy attempt at a mustache.

  There was nothing that Jessica wanted to do more in that moment than turn that fucking water into fucking wine. Except maybe turn Big Red into cyanide.

  PROBABLY DON’T WANT TO TRY IT.

  Why not?

  BECAUSE IT’S NOT ONE OF YOUR MIRACLES.

  Oh, now you’re all about telling me what my miracles are?

  ONLY BECAUSE I HATE THIS KID.

  Can I smite him?

  NOPE.

  She remembered a phrase she’d heard Mrs. Thomas use when the woman had added custom-made football pads that fit Jessica’s feminine frame to the school athletic budget: Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

  Yep. That sounded good.

  The glass of water exploded in Trent’s hand, and the shock caused him to spill his Big Red down his front and arms. For a moment nobody moved, not even Trent. But as the Big Red started to mingle with the blood from his fingers, causing the whole scene to seem much gorier than it actually was, Jessica knew two things. First, she’d established her place in the annals of Brooks bonfire lore, and secondly, it was time to head out. And quick.

  Chris didn’t need telling. As soon as she was out of her seat, he was behind her, his hand on her lower back, pushing her toward the ranch house. Courtney Wurst flew by them at the sound of her brother’s screams, and Jess put a little extra hop in her step to avoid having to face the wrath of the Wurst sister once she pieced together what had happened. They were almost all the way through the house and out the front door when Jess remembered. “Miranda. We should grab her. Quentin is way too drunk to drive.”

  Chris nodded. “Okay. Then we should grab Quentin, too.”

  “Are you good to drive?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I stopped drinking like an hour ago. I’m fine.”

  Neither Miranda nor Quentin had been out by the bonfire, so Jess took the house while Chris headed out front to search.

  Living room? She took a few steps in, peeked around. Nope. A couple writhed together on the couch, and a few more looked only minutes away from taking things outside to writhe in the back of a truck, but no Miranda or Quentin.

  She checked the kitchen again but quickly ducked out when she sensed the restlessness of people as the news of no more booze spread from person to person, sometimes needing to be repeated multiple times before it penetrated the drunkenness.

  She headed down the hallway toward rows of doors, stopping at the bathroom. Someone was in there, judging by the light coming out from under it and the sound of retching.

  She knocked. “Miranda?”

  When a male voice responded, she asked, “Quentin?”

  “No! Leave me alone! I’m fine.”

  Not Quentin. Maybe there was another bathroom somewhere.

  She wandered down the hall and poked her head into another room.

  “Oh shit.”

  The light was off, but enough illumination from the bonfire made its way through the open blinds for Jess to make out two figures on the bed in varying degrees of undress. “Miranda! God dammit, Miranda …”

  Her friend looked up from where she was pinned underneath Quentin. “Jessica!”

  Finally Quentin seemed to notice that they weren’t alone, and his eyes shot open and he leapt off the bed, his arms raised above his head. “She told me to!”

  As he stood there in only his boxer briefs, Jessica tried not to stare. She turned her gaze to Miranda inste
ad. “Oh sheesh. Put on your shirt. And pants. It’s time to go.”

  Quentin hopped back into his clothing quickly, but it took a little searching before Miranda was able to locate her shorts and tank top to slip on again.

  Jessica waited impatiently outside the bedroom door until they emerged again. “Party’s over. Time to get the hell out.”

  A shrill female voice hollered from the back door in the kitchen, “McCloud!”

  “Shit.”

  Miranda’s head jerked in the general direction of the sound. “Wait, what happened? Who’s yelling for you?”

  “Sounds like Courtney. We gotta go. I’ll explain in the truck.”

  Quentin and Miranda were compliant from there on out as they followed Jess to the front door, where Chris was just about to walk through. “Found ’em,” Jessica said.

  “Where were they?”

  “Tell you later. Let’s get out of here. Courtney’s pissed.”

  That was all she had to say until they were loaded up into the truck—Jessica in the front, Quentin and Miranda in the back seat, already putting hands on each other.

  As Chris steered the truck in the necessary zigzags to avoid the potholes in the gravel, Jess glanced in the back seat to see Miranda and Quentin trying to steady themselves on each other as they continued a sloppy attempt at sucking face.

  The truck’s front tire was jolted by a sneaky pothole and the driver’s side of the truck bobbed up and down, sending Miranda’s forehead into Quentin’s nose. They both groaned at the pain, and Jess turned away to face front. Maybe that’d cause them to cool it. There was something terribly disconcerting about seeing her best friend like this.

  “I think we should probably drop off Quentin first,” Jessica suggested. A tough-love conversation with Miranda seemed in order before they could leave her at her mom’s house. Cheyenne Forte wouldn’t be thrilled about Miranda’s state, so the girl needed to pull it together, hurry to bed, and sleep it off before her mother caught on.

  “That works,” Chris said, squinting through the high beams at the dusty road ahead. “Quentin! Where do you live?”

  “Palo Alto Road.” With his hands still cupped around his nose, the words came out muffled and Chris made him repeat it louder.

  “I’m only about half sure I know where that is,” he mumbled so only Jess could hear.

  “Are you sure you’re good to drive?” she asked. The amount of concentration he seemed to be exerting just to keep the truck on the road hinted that he was not good to drive.

  “Yeah, I told you, I stopped drinking an hour ago.”

  “You seem anxious, I guess.”

  “I am anxious!”

  Taken aback by his tone, she decided it was best to not reply, and finally they made it onto a paved farm-to-market road.

  Chris’s anxiety didn’t dissipate, though. In fact, it only intensified. When she glanced at him again, there was a vein bulging in his neck and another bulging in his temple. Was it the exploding glass? Was that what had him so anxious?

  Sure, there was a good chance he had a little PTSD from kindergarten, but who didn’t?

  Still, though, it was like his heart rate was emitting rapid pulses into the cab of the truck, making her heart race as well. As the truck slowed down for a four-way stop, Jessica looked into the back seat again. Apparently Quentin’s nose felt much better now.

  “For God’s sake,” she said, “at least put on your seat belts.”

  Then she immediately regretted the order, as Quentin unlocked his lips from Miranda’s, buckled himself in, and then used buckling Miranda as an excuse to wrap his arms around her and grab a fistful of her ass while he leaned over.

  Rolling her eyes, Jessica turned to face front again. What was her duty as best friend here? Should she try to stop Miranda, who was obviously too intoxicated to make any important decisions, or should she let her continue? She seemed to be enjoying Quentin’s hands on her. And they’d arrived at the party together, so perhaps she’d been hoping for this the whole time, even before she got trashed.

  Jess continued philosophizing over her social obligation as the F-350 pulled past the stop sign.

  For a truck as large as Chris’s, the thing had giddy-up and go, and as he accelerated into the intersection, a sedan, headlights off, blew through the stop sign on their left. Jessica’s mind hardly had time to sync with her peripheral vision before the moment of impact.

  The car clipped the front of the truck and jolted them, locking Jess’s seatbelt to hold her in place as the truck spun clockwise. Less than a second had passed and the sequence of events already began to tangle together in her mind—had she seen the car first or heard Chris hiss, “Shit!” first?

  The sedan spun in a tight circle until centrifugal force sent it rolling on its side—once, twice, five times—until it came to rest, nose down in a trench on the side of the road.

  “Oh my god! What just happened?” Miranda slurred from the back seat.

  Jessica was too stunned to reply. She did a quick mental sweep of her body, found she was okay, and glanced over at Chris, whose side of the vehicle had taken the brunt of the collision.

  “Are you okay?” she croaked above the sound of deflating airbags.

  His eyes were opened so wide that the lids were completely invisible. His jaw hung slightly open as he continued to white-knuckle the steering wheel.

  Quentin moaned in the back seat, and it seemed to break whatever spell of horror Chris was under.

  “Shit,” Chris said. “Fuckin’ shit.”

  “Are you okay?” Jess asked more urgently. Chris nodded quickly.

  It wasn’t until she’d hopped out of the truck that Jessica could fully assess the damage, which was thankfully minimal. The driver’s side headlight had been completely demolished, but the rest of the truck was mostly unharmed, and his deer guard was scratched, but otherwise fine. The one headlight that remained was pointed ten yards to the left of where the sedan had finally come to a rest, allowing only the softest, outermost light of the beam to land upon the wreckage. As she and Chris jogged up to the car, smoke poured out of hood, and a change in wind direction sent it blowing into Jessica’s mouth and nose. She coughed and waved at the air in front of her face, trying to clear it.

  The wind changed again as Jessica made it to edge of the road. And it was just before she’d started down the incline toward the driver’s window, which she could tell even from this distance had shattered and fallen out, that she noticed the bumper sticker.

  “Oh shit.”

  Chris paused before he headed down. “What? What is it?”

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him next to her, directing his attention at the sticker, which might as well have read, Congrats, Jessica! You’re officially fucked!

  “We’re fucked,” Chris said, and Jessica’s eyes lingered on the bumper sticker for a moment longer, hoping maybe the words would magically change to something other than they were:

  White Light Church

  Sumus omnes porcos, sed Deus est Aper.

  If someone had presented the current situation to Jessica as a hypothetical—“Imagine you’re heading back from a party with your boyfriend where you’ve both been drinking underage, and he T-bones a car in the middle of the night, causing that car to roll multiple times before landing in a ditch on the side of the road, smoke bellowing from the hood …”—and then asked her “How could this be worse?” she would likely have said, “I don’t know, make it a member of White Light Church.”

  They were a scourge upon her life.

  But that didn’t mean she wanted to be partially responsible for the death of any of the members. Or at least, she didn’t want to get in legal trouble on account of it.

  “Shit,” Chris said for the umpteenth time since the collision. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Jess didn’t disagree.

  There was nothing that could be done for it, though, and that smoke sure was issuing wildly from the hood, so the next logical ste
p was to pull whoever was inside the car out of the car and to safety. Even that plan, though, had one major flaw.

  There was no one inside the car. Jessica discovered it as soon as she’d made her way down the slope, rolling her ankle slightly on an unseen rock, to stand by the driver’s side door. Not a single person.

  Is this a ghost car? She’d heard of ghost ships, but she wasn’t sure exactly how she felt about ghosts in general. Did they exist? How had she never spoken with her Father about this? She needed to start a list of things to ask Him about and have it on hand all the time for when He decided to show up. Then she could simply go down item by item, mining for answers. Item number one would be, Ghosts—What about them?

  But she knew she wouldn’t remember to make such a list.

  The question of ghosts and their means of transportation flew completely out the window when she realized that whoever was driving this car had flown out the window as well. The hole in the windshield was just the right size for someone to have been ejected headfirst through it. That made more sense, though it wasn’t any more comforting than the idea of a ghost car. At least no one could be killed in a ghost car.

  Chris appeared over her shoulder, blocking out what small bit of headlight illuminated the scene. “Driver flew out,” she said.

  “What do we do?” He sounded like he might hyperventilate. She turned toward him and put a hand on each of his shoulders. “We find the person who was in there. Maybe they need help.” But looking at the level of damage and the fact that she couldn’t hear any movement among the brush, it was more likely the need would be for a large black bag.

  “My football career is over before it began,” he said airily, looking like he’d just woken up from a long, vivid dream and was trying to piece it together in his mind.

  “It’s fine. We’ll figure this out.” Why did she have to be the sane one?

  And where in the hell was God?

  Why have you forsaken me?

  She’d had that thought before, but it’d always felt a bit heavy handed and melodramatic. Until now. It seemed appropriate now.

  The truck doors slammed twice just as she was about to continue into the roadside brush to search for the driver. She turned back toward the F-350 and hollered, “Get back in the truck!”