This Side of Salvation

CHAPTER 18

FIVE-ISH MONTHS BEFORE THE RUSH

Dad came home in time for Thanksgiving, in fantastic spirits. His good mood made me all the more nervous about him discovering his gun was missing. But a week passed with no mention of it.

I didn’t know what most gun owners did with their weapons on a day-to-day basis. Some probably kept them locked away and took them out only when it was time to use them. Some probably admired them daily. My dad seemed to be in the former category. But use it for what?

In early December, Bailey’s parents took us to Longwood Gardens to see the Christmas displays. They picked the night of the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, as they thought the lights and trees and flowers would cheer them up. A quick calculation told me that since they weren’t even forty yet, they would’ve been in elementary school when he was shot. Whatever. I knew a kid in middle school who was obsessed with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, even though he killed himself before we were born. And who am I to judge? I worship a guy who died two thousand years ago.

By the time we arrived and got in line with our tickets, it was already dark. Bailey took a million pictures of the huge Christmas tree in the front of the greenhouse, using an app on her phone to check different effects, like sepia or green filter, or negative shots. When I made fun of her, she got back at me by “solarizing my butt,” whatever that meant.

Mr. and Ms. Brynn let us look at whatever we wanted while they did the same. I was glad we were mostly out of their sight, because I was busy noticing how Bailey’s face shone in the different Christmas lights—and the way her hand would tighten on mine every time she saw something she loved. But the constant, overwhelming desire to hug and kiss her couldn’t make me forget the last time I was here.

John said I could ride on his shoulders when I get tired, so I fake exhaustion by dragging my toes against the pavement. Mara calls me a baby and a wuss, but I don’t care. I am five, John is seventeen, and his girlfriend Holly is sick, so she couldn’t come with us. I like Holly—she smells like the orange Tic Tacs she’s always giving me—but I like having John to ourselves even better.

I’m already on his shoulders when we pass under the giant whitelight snowflakes dangling from the pine trees. I tug on John’s short, stiff hair with one hand and lift the other toward the branches. “Stop! I wanna touch.”“You can’t reach that high,” Mara says. “You’ll fall.”

“No, he won’t.” John shuffles two steps to the right, putting me directly under the lowest flake. “Go for it, little man. I got you.”

I know he does. I plant one palm hard on top of his head to steady myself, then push off. My heels scrape his collarbone in my determined upward surge.

“Careful . . .” my mom can’t resist saying under her breath.

It’s no time to be careful. I coil back for an instant like a snake, then thrust myself up in one long reach. My fingertip taps the underside of the snowflake. “I did it!”

My legs slip out of his grasp, and for a cartoon-like moment I’m suspended in midair before I start to fall. The bright snowflakes recede rapidly like in the hyperdrive scene from Star Wars. There’s no time to scream.

“Whoops!” is all my father says as he sweeps me up against gravity’s pull. He was standing behind John the whole time, in case I fell.

My heart pounds so hard, I’m sure Dad can feel it through his chest as he tugs me into a hug. He gives me a quick kiss on my temple, then lowers me slow and steady until my feet hit the ground.

I jump up and down, giddy with having not cracked my head open. “I wanna do it again!”

The snowflakes were still there, beyond the lighted fountains where Bailey and I stood now, my arms wrapped around her from behind. Her shoulder blades shivered against my chest, and the fabric of her fake-wool cap scraped my chin.

In the musical fountain show, the water danced and lights changed colors in time to the carols. I held Bailey tighter than I should’ve, as each memory of John swept through me like a needle-filled breeze.

I’d thought I was long done with the Firsts. First Easter since his death, First Birthday, First Trip to IHOP, First Phillies Game. But everything we ever did together, that we’d never share again—like Longwood Gardens at Christmas—still waited before me. In that moment, I dreaded the rest of my life.

The fountain’s Christmas hymns segued into “Imagine.” “Ohh.” Bailey found my hands and squeezed them. “A tribute for the John Lennon anniversary.” She started to sway. Not wanting to loosen my grip, I moved with her. If anyone had told me that in the middle of celebrating Jesus’s birth, I’d be imagining a world without religion, I’d have said they were crazy.

After the fountain show, we walked toward the cafe, hand in hand, about ten feet behind her parents, who were also holding hands. To get there, we had to pass under the overhanging pine boughs filled with the giant white snowflakes.

“So gorgeous,” Bailey said, reaching up with her mittened hand. “I wish I could touch them.”

The branches had been cut back, and the snowflakes were at least fifteen or twenty feet high now. Even if I’d put Bailey on my shoulders, they’d have been out of her reach.

So I just held her hand and watched the swaying lights dance over her uplifted face.

Bailey and I exchanged Christmas gifts that night, since she and her parents were leaving after next week’s finals to visit colleges in New Jersey, California, and Massachusetts, then spend the holidays in Vermont.“I confess, Kane gave me the hint for this one.” She handed me a rectangular, flexible package.

I carefully pulled off the 100-percent-recycled gift wrap so that she could reuse it, pretending that I wasn’t completely blown away by the fact that I was sitting in her room, on her bed, no less. “Awesome. Coach Kopecki’s been bugging me to read this all year.” I flipped the pages of H. A. Dorfman’s Mental Game of Baseball. An envelope fell out from the chapter named “Concentration.”“But that gift was my idea,” she said proudly.

I opened the envelope to see a gift certificate for a beginners’ yoga class. “Thanks? I mean, thanks!” I went to kiss her to convince her of my enthusiasm, but she stopped me.

“You’ll love it, I promise. It’ll be great for your pitching. Yoga helps with balance and focus, and it teaches you how to breathe.”

“I know how to breathe, though sometimes you do make me forget.”

“Aw, David . . .” Her face softened, and this time she let me kiss her. While her eyes were closed, I placed the smaller of my two gifts on her knee. “Ooh, a plastic bag—fancy!”

“It’s not wrapped because I just bought it tonight at Longwood Gardens. It’s the bonus impulse gift.” One that cleaned out my spending money for the next three weeks.

She pulled the small box out of the green plastic bag, then opened it to reveal a silver snowflake necklace. “It’s beautiful! Put it on me?”

Bailey turned her back, lifting her hair. There was her bare neck, warm and inviting.

I knelt behind her on the bed, then drew the chain around the front of her, intensely aware of the fact that it would fall down her shirt if I let go.

My thumbnail fumbled with the catch, and the silence became embarrassing. I glanced around for a conversation topic. “Who’s in those pictures on your wall?”

“That’s my Gallery of Geekdom. Left to right, it’s Galileo, Newton, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, and of course Einstein.”

“Yeah, I recognized that last one.”

“I should have one of Gregor Mendel, the grandfather of genetics, but having a monk’s picture in my bedroom just seems wrong. How’s it going back there?”

“Almost got it.” I leaned in, inhaling her scent, my mouth a few inches from her nape.

Darwin had never seemed so correct, because in that moment I felt pure animal. All I wanted to do was bite Bailey’s neck, pin her down, and feel her writhe beneath me, mewling with pleasure. I wanted to bash in the head of every guy who looked at her. I wanted to hunt down a tasty creature and bring it home to feed our offspring, so they’d live long enough to pass on my genes to their offspring.

Maybe not those last parts. No bludgeoning, no hunting, and no passing on genes.

But definitely the biting.

“There.” I let the necklace clasp click shut, but before she could drop her hair, I touched my lips to her neck, soft and brief.

Bailey shivered, and didn’t let her hair down. “That was nice,” she whispered. “Do it again.”

I rested my hand on her shoulder, as much to steady myself as anything, then pressed my mouth to her skin again, longer this time. My lips and tongue were nearly dry from nervousness, but Bailey didn’t seem to mind. She leaned back against my chest, resting her head on my shoulder, her body between my knees. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held her snug against me, almost like when we were watching the fountain show, except now we were alone. On her bed.

Bailey lifted her chin, finally letting her hair fall. “So what’s the nonbonus present?”

I placed the green-and-red–plaid gift bag in her lap. “Something your gallery would approve of.”

She pulled out a pair of knitted puppetlike mittens, one decorated with round ears and whiskers, the other with horns, then read the tag. “Predator versus Prey mittens! A lion and a gazelle.” Bailey stuffed her hands inside the mittens and opened their mouths wide. “With teeth and tongues!”

“You like them?”

“This is the best gift! I mean, other than the necklace.” She growled as she made the two mitten animals fight, mouths locked together. “And they’re warm, too. Thank you so much.” She put one mitten to each of my cheeks and me a kissing sound. “You really know me.”

I wondered if she really knew me. Looking past her, I saw that she’d written a quote under each photo in her Gallery of Geekdom had a quote underneath. Darwin’s was “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

“You remember that fight you had with Francis about evolution?”

“In the soup kitchen? It wasn’t really a fight. Mostly just me yelling at him for being stupid.” She shook her head. “That’s mean. He’s not stupid, just misled, I guess. I don’t understand why creationists are so offended by evolution. Why can’t they just tell themselves God wrote all the laws of science, including evolution, or say that evolution is part of the divine plan? Whatever they need to feel better. But they want to claim that their beliefs are science.”

“Well, it’s not exactly—”

“They can dress up creationism and call it intelligent design, but it’s not based on facts. I just don’t get it. Is their faith so weak they need to support it with lies?” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m ranting again, aren’t I?”

“If I try to explain, do you promise not to yell at me?”

She appeared to ponder my question. “Okay, I promise.” Bailey moved away from me, pulled off her mittens, then set one of her pillows in her lap. “Go for it.” She patted the pillow.

I hesitated, but for only half a second. If she wanted my head in her lap, I would share even something this dangerous.

I lay down on the pillow, letting my legs dangle off the side of her bed. “First of all, in my head I have no problem with evolution. I’ve taken two years of bio, so I know the score.” Much to my parents’ chagrin. “But deep down there’s still one thing that bothers me. If everything that we are, even our souls, comes from random mutation, then life has no meaning.” Which means death has no meaning, especially one like my brother’s.

“You can give your life meaning.” She stroked my forehead from the center to the temples, with just her fingertips. “We all can.”

“No, because whatever we say our lives mean might not be true.” It was hard to concentrate with her touching me like that. “If I say baseball gives my life meaning, then what if it doesn’t work out? What if I get injured or I’m not good enough, or I remind a scout of his stepson, whose bio dad is a total dick to him?”

“You have quite the catastrophic imagination, you know that?” With good reason, I thought.

“David, you can make your life mean something that doesn’t depend on what other people do or think.” She dragged her nails over my scalp, ruffling my hair. “Maybe it’s helping others or just being a good person.”

My entire body was starting to tingle. “Then what happens when I’m not a good person? What happens when I lie or cheat or I’m mean to my sister?” Or tear off all your clothes, like I want to do right now? “If my life is about being good, then it loses meaning when I’m bad. That’s the thing about God—he loves us no matter how much we screw up. Because he made us.”

“Wait, you lost me.” Bailey’s fingers stopped moving. “Can’t God love you even if he didn’t personally create you and all the little fishies in the sea? What if he just watched you from afar and was like, ‘That David Cooper, he’s pretty awesome. Good job, evolution. You rock.’”

“The problem with that”—I pointed to Darwin—“is that it makes this”—I pulled my cross out from under my shirt—“unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary but not impossible. Besides, this”—Bailey slipped a finger under the cross’s thick silver chain—“has nothing to do with creation. This actually happened. There are historical records from the Roman Empire that say a guy named Jesus from East Nowhere, aka Nazareth, was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate. Whether he walked on water or brought Lazarus back to life or did the loavesand-fishes—that could all be folklore. Unlike Adam and Even, Jesus wasn’t a myth. He was a real person executed for a political crime. And if it’s important to you to remember that by wearing this”—she held the inch-long cross between her thumb and middle finger—“then your life has meaning. Because you made that choice. You decided it matters. And I think that’s pretty cool.”

Bailey tucked the cross back inside my shirt. Her fingernails brushed the hollow of my throat as she withdrew her hand, sending a tremor down the rest of my body.

I stared up at her, wondering how we could disagree on the meaning of life—the meaning of life!—and somehow still get each other. She didn’t shut me down every time I talked about God, or try to convert me, any more than I tried to convert her. And the look in her blue-gray eyes when she talked about science was like the one my Stony Hill friends had when they sang of faith and certainty. She got the same charge out of not knowing as they did out of knowing.

Yet as open-minded as she was, I still couldn’t bring myself to tell her about my parents and their End Times plans. Bailey could tolerate this cross around my neck and the fact that I said grace before eating so much as a snack. But the Rush was a whole other world of wackadoodle.

Other Christians across the country including those at our church, were starting to rail against Sophia Visser and her “cult.” I’d hoped it would make my parents realize how dangerous she was. Instead, they’d rallied around her. Mom had said we should make the most of this Christmas, since it was the last one we would spend on earth.

Determined to forget the doom, I reached up to take her hand. Instead of interlacing our fingers, I folded hers into a fist and gripped it gently but firmly. It soothed me to feel a hard, round object against my palm.

She skimmed my knuckles with her pale-green-polished fingertips. “Which pitch is that?”

“Fastball. If my fingers are gripping the two seams straight on”— I turned her fist inside mine, then traced imaginary stitchings over the back of her hand.—“then it’s called a two-seam fastball. But if they lie crosswise over it, it’s a four-seamer.” I shifted my hand ninety degrees. “It changes the spin. Two-seamers sink, and four-seamers rise. But because of gravity, a four-seam fastball ends up being just a straight, level, blindingly fast throw.”

“Cool, physics. What other pitches do you know?”

“I know them all in my head, but I’ve only mastered the fastballs, and this.” I switched to my three-finger changeup, feeling her thumbnail scrape my palm. “This is my off-speed pitch, and next year I hope to add a knuckle curve.” I curled in my fingers, pressing my knuckles against hers.

“So this semester,” she said in a low, throaty voice, “before we were together, I used to sit there in class and stare at your hands. After seeing you pitch, I thought they must be really strong. I wondered what they’d feel like on . . . well, on me.” She licked her lips and let out a shaky breath. “You know?”

I knew. Up to this point, I’d touched her shoulders and her waist, and held her hand, of course. But I’d never come close to venturing inside the Zones.

I had no clue what to do—not that I let that stop me. I sat up, leaned over, and kissed her, deep and soft, so she’d know I was willing.

Bailey kissed me back, then pulled me down onto the bed with her. We ended up on her other pillow, side by side, legs overlapping. My cheek rested on a thick layer of her hair, but she didn’t seem to mind. I was too nervous to meet her eyes, so I watched the lamplight glint off her silver snowflake necklace.

Bailey’s mouth opened as she guided my hand to meet her breast for the first time. As amazing as it felt, warm and full and alive, it was her soft sigh that shot through me. I wanted to capture that noise, turn it into a text alert ringtone or put it on an endless loop to listen to while I fell asleep.

It made me realize how wrong I was about girls. I’d been taught that they only wanted to be kissed and cuddled and bought stuff. Sex was something they gave away reluctantly in exchange for love or a sad sort of self-esteem. Horniness was a Guy Curse.

But that one sigh, as her leg drifted up, knee pressing my thigh, toes tracing my shin, told me that Bailey wanted more than kissing and cuddling. She wanted sex.

She wanted sex with me.