Their faces seemed so – young to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I’d now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.
Jaimie Kirkland finally said, “My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee’s Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we’d go native today.”
“Everyone must be flattered.” I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique’s designated spokeswoman. “Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit cocktail from the cafeteria counter.
Dee cut in: “Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to us.” Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.
“Confess to what?” Forcing them to name the deed was fun.
“You,” said Lauren, “and Jason. Fornicating.”
I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness melting away like snow on a car’s hood. And that was when I heard the first gunshot.
Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology class. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town. I knew that Jason’s attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who’s seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.
Jason appeared to be heavily into Youth Alive!, which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic participation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason’s older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of Alive!‘s Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent’s dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into planning and preparing for the next step. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relationship was a slap on Kent’s face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.
In any event, Pastor Fields’s sermons on chastity could only chill the blood in Jason’s loins so long. So I began attending Youth Alive! meetings three times a week, singing “Kumbaya,” bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles – all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.
And I did – nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn’t ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.
The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that’s not something I’d expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle – no God being feared there. My family wasn’t so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don’t know. I’d be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it’s a different place from where my family’s headed.
My family didn’t know what to make of my conversion. It’s not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith – the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.
My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she’s-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.
Dear God,
I’m going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can’t see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.
I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.
For starters, nobody screamed. That’s maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers – part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits – military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition – and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension cables broke and a light bank fell down onto a table of food – the not-very-popular photo club and chess club table. The second guy, in sunglasses and a beret, plucked out two grade nine boys and one girl who were standing at the vending machines. These were messy shots that left a mist of blood on the ivory-colored cinder-block walls. A group of maybe ten students tried bolting for the doors, but the gunmen – gunboys, really – turned and showered them with buckshot or bullets, whatever it is that guns and rifles use.
Two of them got away cleanly and I could hear their footsteps echoing down the corridor. As for the rest of us, there was no escape route, so we clambered underneath the tables, as if in some ancient nuclear drill from the 1960s.
In the summer between grades eleven and twelve, after my conversion and after landing Jason, I had a summer job at a concession stand at Ambleside Beach. It was a dry hot summer and the two other girls I worked with were fun – kind of skinny and nutty and they mimicked the customers quite wickedly. They also didn’t go to Delbrook, so they didn’t have any history with me, which was a relief, and I felt guilty feeling this relief. Youth Alive! was concerned that my constant exposure to semiclad skin, sun and non– Youth Alive! members would make me revert to the World – as if listening to screaming babies and groping for the last purple Popsicle at the bottom of the freezer bin could be a test of faith or tempt me into secular drift. Lauren and Dee and some of the others visited me a bit too often, and I don’t think a night ever went by without returning to my car at shift’s end and finding an Alive!er eager to invite me to a barbecue or a hike or a Spirit Cruise around the harbor.
By the end of that August, Jason was going mental for me. He came into the city on weekends from his job up the coast, surveying for a mining company. A sample conversation from this period might go:
“Cheryl, God would never have made it feel so right or so good unless it was right and good.”
“Jason, could you honestly hold up your head and say to Pastor Fields or your mother or the Lord that you’d been fornicating with Cheryl Anway? Could you?”
Well, of course he couldn’t. There was only one way he could land what he wanted, and that was marriage. One weekend in my bedroom, he said