Once it did, she took a step back and the man didn’t seem to notice her until she pointedly spat, “Who let you in?”
Jimmy Dean looked up and emitted a surprised “Ay!” before composing himself. “Jessica. How are you?”
“Screw you, Jimmy. I know you’re just here to protest me.”
He nodded sadly. “Is that what you think?”
Was that a joke? She laughed, because clearly it was a joke. “Yes, that’s exactly what I think. You enjoy ruining my life.”
He tsk-ed and shook his head slowly. “No, Jessica. That’s not it. It’s actually the opposite.” He stepped closer, and as much as she wanted to back away from him, she stood her ground. “You remember our ice cream dates?”
“Yes,” she said begrudgingly. She folded her arms across her chest.
“Remember when I said I thought of you as a daughter?”
She didn’t bother replying, because what she wanted to say would’ve been too mean.
“I meant it,” he said. “Truly. I did. And do.”
What was she supposed to do with someone like Jimmy? The only person she knew who’d ever been able to adequately handle his bullshit was her mother, so she took a page from Destinee’s playbook. “Then what the fuck, Jimmy?”
His eyebrows shot up for a millisecond at her response. “You’re more and more like your mother every day.”
She rolled her eyes before realizing that was also a very Destinee response.
“I can see how you would misinterpret my actions,” he said. “The media do an impressive job of weaving their own narratives, and I haven’t been great about keeping you in the loop. For that I apologize.”
Ugh. She hated how intrigued he was making her. “You’re full of it, Jimmy.” It didn’t exactly make sense anyway, Church Jimmy talking about Ice Cream Jimmy. Did the two of them ever communicate? But she knew without a doubt that she was talking to Church Jimmy, because Ice Cream Jimmy didn’t use words like narrative and apologize.
“Jessica.” His voice was watery and pleading. She didn’t trust it. But a part of her must not have completely mistrusted it, because she let him continue. “I know it might seem like I’m against you, but I’m not. I’m with you. I’ve been with you all along. Don’t you see? The world would have long since torn you up and spit you out if I hadn’t done what I did.”
“Yeah, that makes no sense. And I gotta pee, so you better get to the point.”
He wiped his hands down his face—a strangely Ice Cream Jimmy thing to do. “No one wants to hear about God’s daughter right now. The safest thing you could do would be to pretend you aren’t who you are until the world is ready. I’m helping you do that. Time and time again people like me—handsome, charismatic, wise, hard-working, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, salt-of-the-earth white men—have been able to easily earn their way into high ranking positions in society, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m climbing the ladder so that I can pull you up with me without anyone noticing.”
“Yeah, you’re doing a great job with that last part, the no one noticing part. You’re doing such a great job that I didn’t even notice.” She pressed her lips together and arched an eyebrow at him impatiently.
“We need each other,” he said flatly, his soft, nurturing tone kicked to the curb by stark assuredness. “You don’t have to accept it, but it’s a reality. My poll numbers have been abysmal since Ruth Wurst betrayed me like a cold-hearted Judas, and if I don’t win this election, I’m done. Which means we’re both done. I can’t pave the way for you if I lose. And then what? The world will miss out on your message.”
Is he bullshitting me?
I … BELIEVE SO.
But you’re not sure?
I LEARNED MY LESSON LONG AGO ABOUT READING JIMMY’S THOUGHTS. THE LORD DAREST NOT TREAD THERE ANYMORE. IT IS A DARK PLACE.
He’s actually making a little bit of sense, though.
RIGHT?
“Whatever, Jimmy, I have to pee.”
“Think about what I said, Jessica. The world needs you, and you need me. Don’t be shortsighted on this.”
She waved him off and headed into the bathroom (another place where the Lord had learned the hard way that He darest not tread), grateful for a moment of solitude to consider her options. But all she could think was, God dammit, Jimmy.
* * *
By the time Jessica and Chris walked into the McCloud home that night, carrying two plastic bags full of Pacos Tacos, Coach Rex was already on his second post-game beer, and Destinee was donning her after-work leopard-print sweat pants.
As Jess had suspected, she hadn’t been asked even once to take the field during the pre-season game against Van Dyke—unfortunately leaving her with too much time on her hands to recap her conversation with Jimmy Dean again and again—but she was starving nonetheless.
They plopped the bags onto the center of the kitchen table, and everyone gathered around, sorting through for their order. Chris stacked five crispy tacos in front of himself, and Jess assumed his lack of playing time was to blame for his diminished appetite.
“Almost felt sorry for the Dykes,” Destinee said through a mouthful of burrito.
“I don’t think that’s their mascot, Mom.”
Destinee shrugged. “Maybe not. A buncha dykes woulda put up a better fight, though. It was like everyone on the other team was anemic, the way they were huffin’ and puffin’. Thought you were gonna have to resurrect a few of them on the field, baby.” She swigged her beer.
“You talk to Jimmy?” Jess asked her mother. She tried to sound offhand, but as soon as the words had left her mouth, she understood that there was no way to bring up Jimmy Dean around the McCloud household in an offhanded way.
“The hell would I do that for?”
Jess shrugged. “Just wondering. I mean, he was there, you were there. It could happen.” She glanced up from her food to find both Chris and Destinee staring at her like hawks. (Coach Rex continued doing X-Rated things to his taco, oblivious to what everyone else was picking up on.)
“What’d he say to you?” Destinee asked.
“I mean, you know Jimmy. It was nonsense. He said”—we need each other—“some bull about all that he’s done being for my sake.”
Destinee threw her head back. “Ha! Right.” She laughed until she had to wipe away a tear. “Man. Jimmy just doesn’t stop, huh? So is that why he was holding that Repent sinners! Denounce the Antichrist! sign behind the end zone tonight? Was that for your sake, too?”
Jess chuckled along with everyone else, but somehow her mother’s certainty only made Jessica less certain that he was lying. Jimmy’s claim seemed so far off from his actions that surely he couldn’t expect her to believe any of it unless there actually was some truth to it. No one would lie that blatantly, right?
Her mind traveled back a handful of hours to when she passed Jimmy and the other White Light Church protestors on her way from the school to the locker rooms, just before game time. He’d made eye contact and given her a simple nod, like they were in cahoots with one another, like it was all one big game and they were playing for the same team. Maybe he actually believed what he’d said, whether it was reality or not.
Certainly media could be biased and make up stories out of nowhere—she knew that much from personal experience. Was Jimmy just as much of a victim as Jessica in all of it?
She crunched into a taco and allowed herself a moment of savory goodness while the dust settled around the thought so she could examine it more closely.
Mmm … cheese and beef and onions and shredded lettuce …
A thin layer of grease coating the walls of her stomach provided the necessary comfort for her to begin thinking more clearly, and she decided that regardless of whether Jimmy was being honest, the way he’d martyred her and Destinee on the stage in front of all those people at White Light Church would never be okay or excusable. Even the momentary memory of it was enough for her to decide that she was willing to do whatever she
could to make sure Jimmy didn’t get elected.
Maybe he could do what he said, maybe he could start as mayor and climb the ladder, pulling her up behind him, but when it came down to it, she didn’t want to follow Jimmy anywhere, not even up a ladder to power, especially not if he was always a rung or two above her. And she simply wouldn’t be able to stomach the sight of his awful, handsome Church Jimmy smile if he won.
“And it’s only going to get worse,” Chris said as Jessica clued back into the conversation.
“What’s only going to get worse?”
“The craziness at the games.”
“Oh. Yeah, that was pretty bad today,” she conceded. It hadn’t bothered her so much because she didn’t have to play and was able to hang out on the sidelines with her back to it all.
“I think you’re right, Chris. It’ll only get worse,” Coach Rex said. Destinee’s body twitched slightly and Rex jumped in his chair and sucked in air as he shot a glance at Destinee, then seemed to understand what the kick was about. He turned to Jessica. “Not your fault, though. You just be you.”
Jessica sighed and felt her shoulders grow heavy. Of course is was her fault. There had been an entire decade where no one gave two shits about the Mooremont Mexicans before she joined the team. Was it worth winning championships to put her teammates, who’d stood by her side for the past two years, through the worst media circus yet?
Maybe it was just her tiredness from the late night, or her confusion after her conversation with Jimmy, or the fallout of the grease bomb she’d just ingested, or the fact that there was a lightning storm in the forecast for the next couple days (whether meteorologists realized it yet or not), but a new realization seemed to settle in her chest, one she knew better than to share with any of the well-meaning people who sat around the kitchen table at the McCloud home: I need to quit the football team.
Jessica was on a mission. It felt good. She had a clear goal. She had a purpose. Adults always talked about discovering a sense of purpose, and while she’d been born into a fairly obvious one, she’d assumed that wasn’t what adults meant. They meant something simpler, something less likely to get a person tortured and nailed to a cross.
She was three minutes early for her meeting, but she didn’t care.
Her sudden arrival as she let herself into Mr. Foster’s office caught him with ramen noodles dangling from his mouth. They flapped around as he yanked his head up, sending small flicks of broth onto his wrinkled sea-foam button-up.
As he tried to corral the noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks, Jessica started in on him with her big news. “Politics. I want to study politics.”
He choked for a second, but was able to recover enough to croak, “Why in God’s name … ?”
“I want to learn all about politics so I can destroy someone.”
Mr. Foster scooted the Styrofoam cup to the side of his desk and leaned back in his chair, nodding his understanding. “That’s why most people get into it, I suppose.”
“So where do I start? The sooner the better.”
He took his time evaluating her, inspecting her expression intently. “Well, considering how much people seem to enjoy blending government and religion nowadays, you might just be a shoo-in for basically any school’s political science department …”
She waited silently but impatiently for him to get through his obligatory opining. She knew he needed to mull things over before he could get on board. And for some reason, she really wanted him on board. She needed the Mr. Foster seal of approval.
“But I guess it wouldn’t hurt for you to start getting involved in local politics this year. Have a little something to put on your resume.”
That’s what she’d hoped he’d say. “Perfect. How do I get started with that?”
He eyed her skeptically. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the ritual bloodbath of a mayor’s race over in Midland, would it?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Motives are everything, Jess.”
She sighed and decided she should probably sit down and stop hovering over him. “I just don’t want to see him win.”
“Neither do I,” said Mr. Foster quickly, surprising her.
“Why do you hate Jimmy?”
“Hate is a strong word,” he hedged, “but it’s not quite strong enough. Disdain is closer, loathing is more like it.”
Jessica cackled. Hearing someone bash Jimmy was always a treat. “But why?”
He shrugged. “What’s there to like about him? He’s the worst of religion and he’s trying to converge with the worst of politics. He’s a monster. Someone should stop him.”
“So that’s what I want to do.” Surely he had to understand that.
He hesitated and steepled his fingers together in front of his mouth. “Right. But I’m not sure you’re the best person to take him down.”
“And why’s that?” she asked crossly.
“Because, Jess, you’re a nice person. Even if you do want to destroy him—which, by the way, you probably shouldn’t go around telling people that you want to ‘destroy’ others—your motive stems from a selfless love for others and a desire to protect them. Because you’re nice. Politics is the playground of personality disorders. If you’re not a narcissist, sociopath, or psychopath, you’re just chum in the water for narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Why wouldn’t he just agree to help her?
He sighed. “It means I would hate to see you get into politics. But if that’s what you want to study, far be it from me to stop you. And as ill-advised as it seems to be for you to dip your toes into the murky, polluted waters of politics before you’re even old enough to vote, it’s always a good idea to try out the field before you commit to studying it for four years. Maybe you can get it out of your system now and then spare yourself some pain and suffering by finding a less dangerous, exhausting, and soul-sucking career. Like working in a mental hospital. Or a maximum-security prison. Or a public school.”
He dragged a napkin over his desk, mopping up droplets of spilled broth, and then pulled over his laptop, from where it tottered precariously at the edge of his desk, to rest in front of him. As he began typing quickly, he said, “Okay. So do you want to stay in state or go out of state?”
She may not get his outright seal of approval, but at least he was on board, even if he clearly thought it was a terrible idea. “Which one did you say didn’t cost an arm and a leg?”
His head leaned from side to side. “Eh … They both do. But in-state only requires your non-dominant arm.”
* * *
It felt unmistakably scummy to use resurrection as a photo op, but Wendy Peterman insisted that if Jessica wanted to get into politics, she needed to get used to scummy, maybe even going so far as to embrace it.
After two months away from Midland Memorial Hospital, Jessica had assumed it would be strange walking back through the sliding glass doors and into her private room in the near-empty wing. But the room was just as she’d left it on her birthday, and it felt like almost no time had passed. The orderlies that hadn’t graduated after the summer smiled at her, and the doctors said hello like she’d never left. And there was no resentment there. She’d expected resentment. After all, she’d left them in the lurch to shoulder the responsibility of keeping people alive without the safety net of her miracle. The guilt had definitely eaten at her during her time away, and her only defense against it was that the few hundred deaths she could have prevented over that period of time was a drop in the bucket on a worldwide scale. Especially when considering Asia. It’d occurred to her once she’d returned that maybe the doctors and nurses had come to the same conclusion. Or maybe they’d heard about her birthday. (What was she thinking? Of course they’d heard.) Maybe after the debacle with the young man—who she’d later found out was a hitman for the Zeta cartel out of Nuevo Laredo and had spent nearly a week in the Rio Grande before being discovered�
�the good people at Midland Memorial understood why she would need a break from performing her miracle. If anyone understood the burden of having people’s lives in your hands, it was these folks.
She jerked her hands back from the body as the girl’s eyes shot open. “Whoa.” Jess took a quick step back. Spacing out while resurrecting wasn’t a great idea, and she had a feeling it hadn’t made for a very good photo. She glanced over at the photographer, who frowned at the view screen of his camera.
“Eh … can I just have you stand next to the body—er—patient? Be sure to smile.”
Jess moved closer to the girl, whose chest heaved up and down as she tried to reacquaint herself with the harsh reality of being yanked away from the afterlife. She gazed up at Jessica. “Who’re you?”
“Uhh …”
The girl was about Jessica’s age, plus or minus two years.
“Can you get her to sitting?” the photographer asked. “Maybe put your arm around her?”
“Who’re you?” the girl asked again.
“Jessica,” said Jessica.
“Oh hey! That’s my name, too!”
Jessica had never felt a particular desire to get to know the people she brought back. Whoever the hospital brought her, she fixed and then sent on their merry way. Sharing a name with this one didn’t sit well with her, and Jess tried not to look at the two vampiric pinholes in the other Jessica’s neck where the rattler had nipped her at a family picnic. The holes would close eventually, and not even a scar would remain.
“What happened?” asked Snake Bite Jessica, as the assigned nurse helped her sit up slowly.
“A little closer together,” instructed the photographer, waving his hand until Christ Child Jessica’s right hip was up against Snake Bite Jessica’s left hip.
“Smile!” he demanded, like that was the obvious thing to do in this situation.
Both Jessicas smiled as instructed, and once that was done, Christ Child Jessica asked the nurse if that was the last patient of the afternoon. When the nurse nodded, Christ Child Jessica fled the room. She hated the awkward post-resurrection conversations between the nurses and miracle patients, which sometimes turned into shouting matches, sometimes involved more crying than Jessica would ever be comfortable with, but mostly involved the nurse tediously repeating everything.
It's a Miracle! Page 10
