Thou Shalt Not Road Trip (26 page)

“Actions speak louder than words.”

“Then go to the signing.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

She sighs. “Listen, I can’t make you go, but I want you to know that I saw something this week—people lining up for two hours just to shake hands with you. That book of yours means something to people, Luke. But it’s not really your book anymore. It belongs to everyone, and means whatever the heck they want it to mean… or need it to mean. You have to let go of everything—the praise and the guilt.” She shifts on the seat, sits a little straighter. “So you’re a sinner too. So the stories aren’t about
you
. If that’s enough to shatter people’s faith, well… I’d say their faith was on rocky ground to begin with, you know?”

Fran is energized now. She conveys each point with the confidence of a lawyer reprising a winning argument. When I don’t respond she seems amused rather than annoyed, as though I’ve conceded defeat.

Seeing her like this is enough to make me forget how awful I feel. I spent a whole year never seeing her smile, and her face suffered for it. People are meant to smile. It’s like food and water—nourishment for the soul.

“No counterargument, huh?” she asks. “Then it’s thirty–love.”

“Who said you were on serve?”

“I’ve spent the whole of the last year returning serve. For once, I want to be in control.”

I look at her dress, the strands of hair that have escaped from her ponytail and now frame her face. So beautiful, and yet…

“You’re not on serve, Fran. Not like this, you’re not.”

She looks away, and I know I’ve crushed her once again. I don’t mean to hurt her, but every fiber of her appearance screams defeat. Being a better person than her parents and friends, she has given up, gone back to being the girl they’d prefer to see. But it’s just another mask. And I’ll bet she knows it.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s none of my business.”

She doesn’t answer, and she won’t look at me. Why couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut?

“Just do the event, Luke,” she says finally. “Do it to show you’re willing to take responsibility. And to show you’re not afraid.” She points to the sky. “There’s a higher power than us, remember? If you can’t face up to adversity now, are you really sure you’ll be able to face Him?”

United Christian Church, St. Louis, Missouri

I’m a couple hundred yards from the church when I see the photographers. News of my daring escape must have filtered through to the media masses, and now they’re gambling on me showing up for my signing. Which is stupid of them, really. I’d be crazy to go through with it. Certifiably insane.

Unfortunately, they’ve guessed right.

I take a detour along another alley and approach the church from the back. There are about a dozen news vans in the parking lot, but everyone is so busy that they don’t even glance at me as I weave through them. I even filch a clipboard from a deck chair, and when I barge through the throngs outside the church office door, scribbling on the clipboard, no one stops me.

I knock on the door, and Andy opens it immediately. He looks flustered—his robes are too heavy for a sticky summer day—and when he sees me his eyes grow wide. Before he can say my name, I hand him the clipboard. “I need your signature,” I say. “Maybe you could do it inside?”

He nods blankly. “We’ll, uh, go into my office.”

I’m through the door before the words are out of his mouth, and it’s not until I turn around to close it that someone recognizes me. The door shuts with a resounding clunk, followed by a chorus of frustrated shouts outside.

“Wow,” says Andy. “You’re pretty cool about this, huh?”

“No. I just can’t let them win.”

He gives me a hug, but pulls away quickly. “Do you smell something?” he asks.

“It’s me. Sorry. There wasn’t time to shower.”

“To
shower
? How long do you take? And why is there writing on your arm? Never mind, the important thing is that you’re here. Your publicist said you were having second thoughts, but that you wouldn’t let us down.”

Huh. Score one for Colin.

We walk to the church office. The dark oak cabinets and the tiny squares of glass in the window look so familiar, but somehow so different. I always felt as though I belonged here; now I feel like an imposter. I don’t even sit down until he points to the armchair beside his desk, on which a copy of
Hallelujah
has pride of place.

“It’s good to see you, Luke. Kind of a crazy week, huh?”

I actually laugh at that—a wry, angry laugh. “Yeah. Crazy is right.”

He sits across the desk from me and presses his palms together in prayer pose. “During your interview with Pastor Mike, why did you say everything in
Hallelujah
is true?” he asks.

“I don’t remember the interview. I was really nervous, so before I went onto the set, I prayed; after that I got into this kind of zone where everything just happened.”

“But you’ve seen it since, right?”

“No. But you obviously have, so why didn’t
you
call me out on it?”

“How could I? I didn’t know it was made up.”

“You thought I’d spent a month alone in the desert?”

“No. I just didn’t know that was in the book.” Andy picks up a pen, spins it around, and puts it down again. “See, I didn’t actually get around to reading
Hallelujah
until this week.”

“
What?
But you gave it to Pastor Mike.”

“Because of the response it got from our youth groups. They loved those first few pages, and I thought Pastor Mike would too. He took it from there.”

“You critiqued the whole of the first part—covered it in red pen. You practically rewrote it.”

His expression is caught between amusement and concern. “That wasn’t me.”

“Then who was it?”

He may only be in his thirties, but his expression makes him seem a hundred years older and wiser than me. “It was Fran.”

It takes me a moment to remember to breathe; even then, I don’t understand. It makes no sense. And yet it makes total sense.

“When you gave me the first part of the book, I passed it along to her,” he continues. “I knew something weird was going on with you two when she bailed on the church retreat, so I didn’t really expect her to read it. But she did. Liked it too. Said it was funny and heartfelt, but there were problems. So I told her to fix them. I had this plan that when she was done we’d all meet and discuss it. Then she told me she wouldn’t even hand over the manuscript if you knew she’d had anything to do with it.”

He takes a sip from a tall glass of water on his desk. Then he runs it across his forehead.

“I told her I wasn’t going to lie to you,” he continues. “But then you never asked who’d made the comments, and so I respected her wishes and didn’t tell you. I figured sooner or later you’d come back to me and follow up on the ones you disagreed with, and then I’d be able to tell you I had nothing to do with them. But you never did.”

“That’s ’cause they were great changes.” I stare at
the copy of
Hallelujah
just in front of me. How many of the phrases in it are Fran’s, not mine? “What about the second part? You didn’t give her that too, did you?”

“Yeah. But she didn’t critique it. I’m not even sure she read it.” He shrugs. “It was around the end of the summer, and things had gotten bad for her, remember?”

Yes, I remember. I remember everything. And now I think I understand everything too—not Fran’s fictional version of events, or even her father’s simplified account, but the cold, hard truth.

“Hey, Luke.” Andy interrupts my thoughts. “It’s a good book, okay? I read it this week. Haven’t laughed so hard in years, and I mean that in a good way. What you said in the interview with Pastor Mike was the mistake, not writing
Hallelujah
. The context may have changed, but the text is the same. Don’t lose sight of that.” He pats my hand. “I’m going to check on things in the church. I’ll come back when it’s time.”

I’m already sobbing by the time he closes the door—big, fierce tears that shake me. I thought the puzzle had been solved, but I was only seeing half the picture. Now that the picture is complete, I can hardly bear to look.

But if I’m going to change, I must look: at the day I turned away from her at the church retreat, and showed her I was no different than her parents; at the
day she read the first part of
Hallelujah,
and saw in verse after verse just how happy she made me; at the day she read the second part—an angry monologue aimed like an arrow at her heart. What could her parents have said that would’ve hurt as much as those words? Nothing at all. No, if I want to uncover the culprit here—the one who drove Fran to hurt herself over and over—all I have to do is look in the mirror.

I take off Matt’s T-shirt and look for something less pungent to wear, but I can’t find anything. So I put it back on correctly, my chest proudly proclaiming that beer is not just for breakfast. At the very least, it’ll distract people from all the other reasons they hate me.

With nothing to do but wait, I open
Hallelujah
and begin to read. I expect to loathe it—almost
want
to—but instead a strange thing happens: I laugh through the tears. I recall how great it felt to write during those first inspired days. A few pages later, the mood shifts, and I remember how this felt too—the confusion and frustration. It’s painful to read, and even more painful to know that Fran read it too, but I still find myself nodding after every few sentences, as though what I wrote in that fevered state a year ago still hits home today. I’m older now, sure. Wiser too, I hope. But I can’t help feeling that my fifteen-year-old self has something to tell me: perfect or not, this is all just
life. And whether or not I face up to my critics, life will always be beautiful and messy.
Always.

Maybe that’s a lesson worth sharing.

United Christian Church, St. Louis, Missouri

The door flies open and Andy bursts in. “Sorry, Luke, but I need you to start now.”

The clock on the wall reads 12:50.

He follows my eyes. “I know it’s early, but the church is already full. Police are holding back the crowd outside. And… well, there’s a problem.” He tries to smile, but just looks deranged. “A
serious
problem.”

I’d figured that police trying to hold people back was a problem. If there’s something worse than that, I’m not sure I want to hear it.

“Look, just go in there and do your stuff, okay?” he says. “Will you? Please?”

It takes more than a little effort to stand up. At the doorway I hear the first telltale signs that things aren’t going well.

“I love this church,” says Andy. “It’s been here
a hundred and eight years. I really don’t want it destroyed.”

“Destroyed?”

“You know… pews broken, stained-glass windows shattered, hymnals on fire.”

I try to stop dead in my tracks, but he wraps an arm around my shoulders and presses me onward. Above the door there’s a painting of Jesus carrying His cross to Calvary. I hope it’s not an omen.

Beyond the door the noise is extraordinary, and I’m still only in a corridor; I haven’t entered the main church yet. I figured no one would bother to show up, but instead a lynch mob has been summoned.

“I’m praying for you, Luke,” he says.

If that’s supposed to reassure me, it’s not working. I’m even a little ashamed at my lack of faith, but really, I’m just being realistic. I mean, it’s not like things got a whole lot better for Jesus when they finally nailed Him to that cross He’d been carrying all around Jerusalem.

At the end of the corridor, Andy opens the door with two hands, knuckles white as though he’s fighting a stiff breeze. “Nice T-shirt, by the way,” he says, but I can barely hear him now. In the church the rumbling noise shifts to booing.

There’s a raised platform at the front, and I focus
on not falling over as I walk toward it. It distracts me from the verbal assault, these words that have no place in a house of God. But I still catch occasional highlights: “Liar!” “Disgrace!” “Traitor!” “Satanist!” That last one puzzles me. Would a Satanist really hold an event in a church?

The crowd falls silent as I take my place behind the lectern. A copy of
Hallelujah
is sitting on it like a joke that’s fallen flat. It’s mocking me, this book, but Fran was right when she said the problem was with me. So I hold it up for everyone to see, and elicit a fresh round of booing.

I wait for the noise to die down, which takes a long time since there are a thousand people here, quite a few of them from the press.

“Um… this is, uh… difficult,” I mumble, my words amplified by the microphone just in front of me. “Awkward, you know? I think… no, I
know
that some of you are really annoyed at me right now.”

I expect to hear people murmuring agreement, but most of them are laughing maniacally instead. It’s not a good sign.

“Yeah, so… to start with, I don’t know exactly what I said on
The Pastor Mike Show
because I haven’t actually seen it.”

The crowd boos. A projectile flies through the air,
lands on the front of the platform and bounces harmlessly toward me. I pick it up and spread it out. It’s just a piece of paper—specifically, a page from
Hallelujah
. Why anyone would try to take me out with a page from my own book is beyond me, but I’ll need to be on my guard from now on.

I raise my hands and wait for the noise to settle back into a low-level drone. Before I can continue, a man I don’t recognize stands: “Did you really empty your hotel minibars?”

Halfway down the church, Matt is shaking his head from side to side.

“Well,” I begin, “it’s true that alcohol was taken from a hotel minibar. But I never actually drank any of it. Honestly.”

More laughter. It’s clear no one believes me. Matt just rolls his eyes.

“And what about that photo in the paper?” someone else shouts. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I pretend to give this some thought. “That it was the best night of my life.”