Conviction (11 page)

M
y dad’s been in jail eighteen days now, and it’s the day before his hearing, eight days before the Brantley game, and three minutes
before youth group. By the time the music starts in the sanctuary, where the adults are, I’m still trying to decide whether or not to go into the multipurpose room where we meet.

I’ve been avoiding church, because while it’s one thing to pray for specific things, like dipping your foot in the water before scurrying back to land, it’s another thing
altogether to just jump all the way in. The thought of being around a bunch of people in worship or in prayer where God’s close by and I’m right in his line of fire is unsettling. But
with the hearing tomorrow, I started thinking about how maybe God’s not real impressed with my attendance record at church these days, and I can’t afford to take chances right now, so.
Here I am.

Kevin comes up to me as soon as I walk in, his wife, Jenna, beside him, and I see Maddie on the other side of the room talking with some of the homeschooled girls. She doesn’t acknowledge
me, but I have a feeling she saw me, too. Kevin gives me a huge smile and claps his hands warmly on my shoulders.

“Well, hey, look who’s here!” he says. “Great seeing you, Braden. We’ve missed you around here.”

“I keep saying to myself, we absolutely
must
have Braden and Trey over for dinner one of these nights,” Jenna chimes in. It hasn’t been that long since I last saw her,
but she looks thinner than whenever that was. I always thought she was pretty, but these days she’s all angles, severe-looking almost. “Though I’m sure it’ll be a letdown
compared to what your brother’s been cooking at home for you.”

“That sounds nice,” I say, although it kind of doesn’t. I don’t tell her Trey still throws out almost everything he cooks and I live on mac and cheese and peanut butter
sandwiches. I step out from Kevin’s hands. “Yeah, he keeps pretty busy cooking…stuff. I couldn’t tell you what half of it is.”

“Well, we’re just happy to have your brother back in town,” Jenna says. “And so glad you’re here tonight.”

I tell her thanks, and then I make my way over to the side of the room where Maddie is. When I do, she breaks away from the girls she’s talking with.

I feel more nervous than I expected I would, both being here and seeing her. She’s got her hair pulled up and she’s wearing this blue lacy-looking dress, and she looks perfect,
basically, like if you were to stick her on a magazine cover, there wouldn’t be a single thing to Photoshop. All of a sudden, I worry it’s weird I came over this way to talk to her,
that it looks like I’m all into her and I think we have something going on when really she’s just a friendly person. I shove my hands in my pockets and say, “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says. “We were just talking about you.”

“Oh yeah?” I glance back toward the door and pretend not to see everyone watching us. A guy and a girl talking one-on-one is a bigger deal at youth group than probably anywhere else
in America. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.”

“Joy was asking if I knew how you were doing, and I was telling her I can’t believe how well you’ve been taking everything. I’d be a total wreck.”

“Eh, I doubt that. I mean, that’s just something people say. It’s not like you really get much of a choice.”

“Well, you aren’t—I don’t know—doing drugs or cutting class or streaking through the hallways or anything.”

My face prickles with warmth at the idea of her thinking about me naked, in any sense. “Uh—yeah. Not yet. Keep watching, though.” Dear God, that came out wrong. “Ah…not like that.”

She laughs. “Should we all stop watching for it, then? Too bad. It sounded a little exciting.” The warmth from my face spreads down to my neck and chest. Maddie twists her ring
around her finger—I think it’s a purity ring; we guys get copies of
Every Young Man’s Battle
and accountability groups, and a lot of girls at church wear the
rings—and says, “Seriously, though, how’ve you been holding up?”

“You excited to sing tonight?”

“Are you changing the subject?”

“Yes.”

She spends a few seconds deciding whether or not she’ll let me get away with it, I think, seconds I spend wondering what exactly a purity ring means you can’t do. “No,”
she says finally. “I’m nervous. I regret saying yes.”

“Really? Why?”

“I hate singing in front of people.”

I laugh, and then realize she isn’t joking. “You’re serious?”

“I’ve always been that way.”

“Really? I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“That’s probably just because you don’t mind getting up in front of people.”

“No, it’s not that. I mean, you sent me that song, right? That’s almost the same thing.”

“Oh. Right.” I think her cheeks flush a little, but it could just be the lighting. “Yeah, I never do things like that. I’m kind of having a panic attack right
now.”

“How come?”

She hesitates. “You’ll think it’s stupid.”

“Try me.”

“All right.” She looks around like she wants to make sure no one else can hear. “It’s just…sometimes I kind of get scared I’ll mess up enough that it’ll
change the way everyone sees me. Like if I play and it’s bad, my friends will see who I really am and decide I’m not worth it.”

I can feel a slow grin spreading across my face. I grasp my hand over my chin to hide it. “How would that work, exactly? They’d all have, like, a meeting without you? Everyone gets
five minutes to offer pros and cons?”

“Braden, shut
up
. I’m never telling you anything again.”

“No, hey, I mean it. Messing up a song is pretty unforgivable. As a friend.”

“I hate you,” she says, but she’s smiling. “Okay, fine, I hear how crazy it sounds. So now I feel terrified
and
crazy, thank you. This was good. Good
talk.”

Before I can tell her that I’m just messing with her and that in truth I kind of get it, or that she has nothing to worry about and she’s got a great voice, Micah Clementi and Jon
Nessbaum get up on the makeshift stage with their guitar and drums, and Maddie says, “Oops, that’s my cue.”

I hope I didn’t actually make her feel worse—I think she was kidding, but it’s hard to know. She heads for the stage, and the rest of us sit down in the banged-up metal folding
chairs they line up for youth group Wednesday nights. Colin plops himself down next to me—his parents make him go to church, but I wouldn’t exactly say he’s a Christian—and
whispers, “Damn, Nessbaum’s really rocking the Jesus-wear. Think he’d let me borrow it?”

I look. Jon’s sweatshirt has the green and yellow Subway logo, but when you look closer, the lettering reads his way. My dad wears crap like that, too—a shirt with a cross on it that
says
THIS SHIRT IS ILLEGAL IN
41
COUNTRIES
, a sweatshirt with a picture of a Bible that says
LOST? ASK FOR DIRECTIONS
. He
used to buy that kind of thing for me all the time, and even when I was too young to care about not looking like an idiot, I’d never wear them. I know people know I don’t drink or hook
up with girls, but I always thought marking yourself that obviously as a Christian felt like tempting fate, like if you did something wrong wearing clothing like that, it would be doubly bad.
Besides that, I’ve always kept what I believe to myself.

But it’s hard not to wonder now if maybe I was the stupid one. If it’s like my dad used to say, that you have to take a stand for God if you expect him to take one for you, and all
this is happening because I didn’t prove my faith. But then I’ve been in my dad’s studio, and I think it’s easier to say whatever you want to into a void, into your
microphone and to all your invisible listeners, than it is to people your own age right in front of you. To Colin, I say, “Yeah, well, he could still probably get more than you.”

“That was cold,” he whispers back. He hasn’t hooked up with anyone since he and Amye Morgan broke up over the summer. “Hit a guy where it hurts, why don’t
you.”

“Not like anyone else is hitting—”

Pastor Stan heaves himself up onto the stage, and we shut up then, although Colin flicks my thigh with his middle finger hard enough to sting and I do it back, harder, in return. Pastor
Stan’s not usually here on Wednesday nights because he’s with the adults instead. He scans through the rows of us, and then his eyes land on me and he smiles.

“Braden,” he says, “would you come join us up here? We’d like to pray for you and your family before we get started.”

I was afraid of something like this. I think of the stories I’ve heard all my life about what people said it was like for God to speak to them, how those stories are always about God
calling them to do the last thing they ever wanted to do and how they usually start with
I was praying
or
Someone was praying for me
. But there’s no actual way to tell someone
you don’t want to be prayed for, especially not when it’s your pastor, so I make my way up to the stage and hold still as he asks Kevin and the other youth leaders to come around and
lay their hands on me.

“Father,” he says, still kind of out of breath from climbing onto the stage, “we know your Word tells us that we’ll be persecuted and despised for our belief in you. But
we also know you promise us that you’ll contend with those who contend against us. We know you promise to bring about justice for those who love you. So we ask to fight for your servant Mart
Raynor. We ask you to give him strength in this time of persecution. Be with him in this time.”

All those hands feel like someone set a cockroach underneath my skin and now it’s scrabbling around. The lights on the stage force me under a microscope: God staring down at me with a
scalpel, ready to dissect. I’m grateful for that
Amen
, and I mumble a quick thanks and escape back to my seat. I feel wide open, like a wound. But then, as I’m trying to stitch
myself up again, trying to tell myself that I already know what God wants from me and it’s to work my hardest and win the Brantley game and that’s all I need to focus on, that what I
thought I heard God say before was just my own fears, the worship team starts to play. And there with her guitar, her dress brushing against her thighs and lifting over a few inches of pale skin
when she raises her arm to adjust the mic, is Maddie.

On my left, Colin nudges me, wearing a grin that means
I know exactly what you’re looking at.
I glare back, and his grin pushes wider. “Why, Braden, you ought to be ashamed of
yourself,” he whispers, exaggeratedly concerned, in my ear. “This is
church
.”

I never noticed before how easily she carries herself until she got up onstage, and I see how, there, she doesn’t: up on that stage and behind that microphone she holds herself with more
control, all her angles sharper and her spine straight. As the lights dim, I hear the opening to the song she sent me fill the room. She doesn’t look in my direction, but all the same, I
wonder if maybe that might be for me. And then, just as quick, I wonder if maybe it’s actually the opposite—that it’s no longer something she gave only me.

The chords drift into something else, though, a different song. And when she starts to sing, quietly, with her head bowed and her eyes closed like the rest of us aren’t even there, I force
myself to look down at the floor and not at her; there are ways you can’t let yourself think about a girl in church. Usually at youth group they sing more modern stuff, but Maddie sings
hymns: “Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder”; “Before the Throne of God Above.” Her voice is breathy and deep, deeper than the way she talks, and she doesn’t allow herself
any tricks in her singing; her voice is steady and perfectly controlled, even and soft, and the sound of it makes me ache.

When you grow up going to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night, there are certain things you expect from worship, and one of them’s this: on a particular part in every song, the
music’s supposed to intensify. You feel it coming a couple beats away; the drums get louder, the singers lean in closer to their mics, the people around you close their eyes and raise their
hands. (Trey’s always said worship looked like a cult.) The percussion’s supposed to meld into your own heartbeat until your own self’s been stamped out and all that’s left
is the music and a roaring, empty space for God—but Maddie’s not giving us that. Her notes are too quiet, too sure, and she holds you in a kind of surrender to the form and structure of
them. Her chords fill the room and swell around me. And in them, in their closeness, I think for a split second that I feel something else there that’s not just the trying to be good or the
angling for answers to prayer or the fear of what God might want from me—something that feels more like a presence, some hopeful kind of calm.

Except then next to me, Colin, who always sings too loud because he thinks he’s got a way better voice than he does, belches accidentally, and then he starts laughing silently into his
fist, and next to him Hannah King slaps him in the arm and Jenna looks over and Colin puts on an innocent face. And that’s it—the feeling’s gone.

After youth group’s over that night, I hang around talking to Colin and Kevin and the other guys until I finally see Maddie break away from the group of girls she’s
been talking to. I catch up to her as she’s walking toward the parking lot, juggling her guitar case and purse. I pretend not to see the enormous game-day grin Kevin gives me—if I know
him, I’m in for an awkward talk about purity and respect and guarding a girl’s heart—and say, “Hey. You were great up there.”

“You think so?”

“I never say that unless I mean it.”

“I was worried I—oops, hang on a second.” She pulls her phone from her pocket, then makes a face.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, my mom just got caught up in work and can’t come get me. I better go back and ask Jenna or someone for a ride.”

I get this feeling like a seat belt clicking into place, that same little burst of rightness. “I can take you, if you want.”

“You drove here?”

“I rode.” I motion toward my bike leaning against the sanctuary wall. I never did get another car. “But I’ve fit people on the handlebars before. And I can carry your
guitar.”