Only Uni (6 page)

“Hi Marnie!” Trish infused excitement in her voice in hopes that Marnie would respond with something other than a grunt.

“Hi.” Just that one word. Her full, un-lipsticked mouth set in its normal half-frown. She dropped her keys onto the kitchen counter and smoothed back her crowning glory, her waterfall of dark hair that fell to the back of her thighs. She pulled her computer briefcase off her sagging shoulder.

“You went into work today too?”

She ran a hand over her chipmunk cheeks — which should have made her look cheerful but didn’t — and sighed. “Server crashed.”

Trish winced. “Ooh, bummer.”

Marnie shrugged.

Conversation over.

Well, Marnie did have a slight flush under her olive skin tone, and she looked a little sadder than usual, which Trish took to mean she was tired. Marnie tended to get even less talkative when tired — she often collapsed in front of the TV in a heap after a long day at work.

But today, Marnie surprised her. “Is your mom okay?”

Trish blinked at her for a few seconds before she swallowed her surprise. “Yeah. I talked with Dad.” A stilted conversation. “She’s doing okay.”

“Heart attack?” Marnie opened the fridge.

“Yeah. They’re holding her for observation.” And probably to keep her heart-attack-inducing daughter away from her. “She’s going to need quiet for the next few months. Someone with her to care for her.”

“Your dad?”

Trish looked away. “Dad refused to hire a nurse, said he’d take care of her himself. I was surprised.” She didn’t understand. It would seriously cramp his tomcatting around. Maybe he hadn’t wanted a nurse observing both Mom’s health and his behavior.

Marnie popped open a can of soda. For some reason, she had a rather misty, faraway look in her large dark eyes that made Trish wonder if Marnie was coming down with something. “He must love her a lot.”

Trish’s stomach clenched, and she pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t gag. She felt trapped — she couldn’t talk to her mom about his affair while she was recovering, but she didn’t want to talk to her father, either. For now there was nothing she could do. “I guess.”

Slurping her soda, Marnie wandered into the TV area and peered at Trish’s lap. “Doing your church stuff?”

She closed her glaringly blank notebook. What a great witness to her atheist roommate. “I just started. I’ll go to my room if you want to watch TV.”

Marnie dropped into the couch almost before Trish vacated it and reached for the remote control on the coffee table. “Yeah, I don’t want to keep you from your Bible reading.”

Trish gritted her teeth at Marnie’s pointed tone. Sure, she wasn’t the best Christian on the planet, but Marnie didn’t have to mock her. She padded into her bedroom and shut the door.

Flopping onto her futon bed, she arranged her Bible and notebook in front of her. She bowed her head.
Dear Lord. Um . . . well, I guess I haven’t been reading my Bible like I should. I’m sorry about that. But I could use some answers now.
She felt a whining attack surge up, but she shoved it down.
I feel kind of weird coming to you now. I know my behavior lately hasn’t been very Christian-like, and I’m sorry. I mean, I’m
really
sorry this time. A lot of bad things happened yesterday . . . Well,
duh,
you already knew that. So I guess I’m hoping this means you’re giving me a second chance to turn things around. Please help me. I don’t deserve it, but please give me some grace.

Trish filled her lungs until her ribs felt tight and stretched. As she exhaled, peace like a slow, gentle wave washed over her heart, sweeping the jittery tension away. She flipped the Bible open, and it landed at the beginning of 1 Corinthians. She started reading.

Her heart skipped a beat as she read chapter one: “He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless . . .”

Blameless.
She’d like to be blameless and pure, instead of a mess. And did that verse mean Christ would keep her strong so she could stay blameless?

Could she be blameless again? Could she regain what she’d lost? Well, not literally — she knew she couldn’t regain her virginity, which she’d carelessly lost several boyfriends ago, unknown to her cousins. But could she regain everything else? Her chastity, her cousins’ love and support, her ruined reputation?

She’d always treated God kind of like a genie to save her when she needed Him. But now she wanted to be a better person. She wanted to make better choices. She wanted to be in a better place than the miserable dilemma she was in now, tempted by Kazuo’s presence and by Grandma’s approval of him.

She wanted her chastity back. If she could do that, then everything would be the same as it was before.

The Word spoke to her again in chapter seven: “I would like you to be free from concern . . . I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.”

Trish almost popped off her bed. Undivided devotion to the Lord. That’s the spiritual place she needed to be. God wanted her to be devoted to
Him.
Undividedly.

Undistractedly.

Wait a minute. Undistracted? Guys distracted her everywhere. Her eye always roved around. She always yearned and wondered,
Is he available? He’s cute. Oh, and his friend is darling. Aw, he’s being nice to that old lady — he must be a great guy . . .

But if she was undistracted, she’d only be thinking about the Lord’s affairs, like it said in the seventh chapter of 1 Corin thians. Although to be completely honest, that sounded kind of boring.

Undistracted devotion. Hmm. She’d have to think about that later.

All week Trish continued through First and Second Corinthians, taking notes and jotting down verses that leaped off the page. On Thursday night, she sat in her bedroom reading 2 Corinthians, when a verse struck like a lightning bolt. She gasped and straightened her spine with a jerk.

Unfortunately, at the time she was perched on the seat-back of her chair with her toes dug into the seat cushion. Her sudden movement tipped her balance and propelled the chair backwards.

Trish’s arms flailed in a blur before her eyes, and she toppled with a sound like a cat hacking up a furball. She landed hard on her tailbone and collected two rug burns on her elbows. In a flurry of pages, her Bible flopped onto her chest.

Trish scrambled to her feet. Her bedroom shared a wall with the living room, where Marnie watched TV. She hoped the Spanish-language soap opera had muted her bumping across the carpet. She dropped her Bible onto the desk and pulled her chair upright, resisting the urge to give it a solid kick — her toes would lose, anyway.

Where had she been reading? Trish sat in the chair — properly, this time — and flipped through the creased pages. There, chapter five: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”

She had always assumed it talked about the process of becoming a new Christian, but maybe it applied to old backslidden ones, too. Not that she was old, just . . . well, old enough to know better.

She could completely shed her old self, her old problems, her old temptations (namely, Kazuo) and jump whole-heartedly into a new self. A new adventure for life. How cool!

“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”

Get back with God and tell others. Sure! She could do that. She had no problems talking.

Chapter six was more difficult for her to read: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.”

She had read the passage a million times before, and it never registered. Maybe she’d been willfully blind about it, especially because she didn’t see the harm in dating non-Christian guys. But if she devoted herself to God, she wouldn’t even consider sharing her life with someone who didn’t feel the same way.

Trish also realized the dire truth. Dating only Christian guys cut down her dating pool. Drastically.

She admitted that Christian ity wasn’t at the forefront of her thoughts whenever a cute guy passed by. Especially not if he gave her a second look. But only Christian guys? That was so hard. But if Kazuo had been Christian, he wouldn’t have pushed her into sleeping with him, right?

Well, she hadn’t exactly run away from him. And she’d really enjoyed the magical intimacy they shared. Why was it that all the guys who were bad for her made her feel so
good
? She didn’t know any interesting or attractive Christian men. But then again, if she focused on God, she probably wouldn’t even
care
about the lack of dating prospects.

There it was, printed in black and white. It was what God wanted for His children. And He gave promises if she obeyed: “I will receive you.” Ooh, she wanted to be received in loving arms. “I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters . . .”

Trish wanted the intimacy of being a beloved daughter. She’d lost favor with her cousins after they saw Kazuo embracing her in the middle of the hospital waiting room, and Grandma was withholding favor until Trish got back together with him. Her mom was really sick, and Dad . . . things were strained, to put it mildly. There was no one there for her.

And maybe once she was successful in becoming a better person — if she did enough things so God could love her more — then He might lead Mr. Perfect Christian Man directly to her. Didn’t they always say you found what you were looking for when you stopped looking? It had worked for her cousin Lex and her great relationship with Aiden.

Trish definitely had that whole “burning” thing Paul talked about in 1 Corinthians 7 somewhere. She needed a good Christian boyfriend to depend on, someone to be strong so she wouldn’t have to be.

She continued on. She had already filled pages and pages of her notebook with verses and thoughts.

On Friday night, Trish stayed home like an utter social failure to finish the last few chapters of 2 Corinthians. In chapter twelve of 2 Corinthians, she reached Christ’s words to Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

She burst into tears.

She was so weak, such a loser, such a
tramp
. But Christ promised to give her His power despite her weak-loser-tramp status. Paul himself said, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” If Paul could be flogged and jailed and still be faithful, then she could at least face morning traffic with fewer temper tantrums.

Sniveling and honking into tissues, Trish finished 2 Corinthians and jotted down her last note. She sagged back in her chair and took a deep breath, feeling the air rasp in her throat. A vague nervousness simmered somewhere south of her stomach, making her a bit queasy. This was something big.

Reconciled with Christ. Blameless. Undivided — undistracted — devotion.

Her nervousness rose to a rapid boil, and she started to hyperventilate. Could she do that? Turn her back on non-Christian boys — on
all
boys, because if she was looking at guys, even Christian guys, God certainly wouldn’t give her one. Could she turn her mind and desires around so that she could achieve that undivided devotion? Jenn seemed to have that — she was such a good Christian girl. Could Trish learn to rely on God more than she did? Most of the time, she simply didn’t remember to think about God.

She needed to pull a Nike and just do it. Commit to becoming a different person, a better person. Regaining her chastity, making everything like it was before.

The realization hit like a dash of cold water, calming her boiling tension, invigorating her senses with new purpose. She would change her innermost desires and make Christ her top priority. First and Second Corinthians could show her how to do it.

She sifted through her notes and saw many things falling into a pattern. Energy rushed through her hands and feet. She felt like she was back in school, and she finally understood a calculus concept that baffled everybody else.

I think I get it . . .