Not Quickly Broken Read online

  I went to church with her and her family a lot and I was learning so much more about the Bible and about God. I was praying a lot more too . . . asking Him to take care of my screwed up family, praising Him for who He was, and thanking Him for all the things He was doing in my life, and – invariably – what I thanked God for the most, was Rhiannon.

  When I found out that her father was taking a new job in Chicago, I was devastated. I couldn’t imagine what God was possibly thinking. Surely He had seen how important Rhiannon was to me? How every aspect of my life – including my relationship with Him – was so much better because of her? Honestly, I thought, what was wrong with Him?

  Eventually, however, I realized that the time had come to put into action all of the faith that I’d been so busy developing. Either I trusted God and was going to choose to thank Him for everything . . . or I wasn’t.

  Rhiannon was devastated too and both of us were struggling . . . both of us had choices to make. For several weeks, we had seriously considered taking off together – just running away . . . going somewhere where no one could find us – but eventually we decided not to. Our decision didn’t have anything to do with the fact that we were only fifteen years old and that it was ridiculous to think that we would have gotten very far (because when you’re young and in love, nothing is impossible). Our decision was simply based on the fact that – as much as we loved each other – we both loved God even more, and we finally decided that we were going to trust Him.

  Lying in bed now, two years later (despite the fact that Rhiannon had just broken up with me), I found that I still trusted God. Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t trust Him to bring her back to me, (despite all my fantasies of getting back together with her, I knew deep down in my heart that it was over), but I did trust that God knew what was best for me and that He loved me and that He was going to take care of me.

  But even though I trusted God, I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to find somebody else to love. Rhiannon had been the perfect person for me and (no matter how impressed I was with God and His abilities to do all things) I was pretty sure that I was never going to be able to love anyone the way that I had loved Rhiannon.

  Maybe getting married one day and having a family wasn’t what God had in mind for me. Maybe what I was supposed to be doing was helping others somehow or focusing on spreading God’s word through some kind of mission work or something.

  Maybe becoming a monk wasn’t actually such a bad idea after all.

  ~ ~ ~

  THE NEXT DAY in math class I was surprised to find that my calculator was still in scientific mode. It wasn’t until Friday that I spotted a little green frog sticker on the inside of the lid. It was then that I realized I had taken Charlotte’s calculator, instead of David’s, by mistake.

  Charlotte and I didn’t have any classes together or anything and I hardly ever saw her at school, so after practice and dinner that night – before I started working on my homework – I put on my jacket and headed over to her house, four blocks away.

  Charlotte’s mother answered the door.

  “Well, hi, Jordan,” she smiled. “What a nice surprise. Come on in!”

  “Thanks,” I said, stepping into the house. I hadn’t been inside since some Christmas party they’d had when I was about twelve. Things hadn’t changed much.

  “Wow, you’re getting tall!” she remarked as she gave me a hug. “What are you now? Six-seven?”

  “Almost,” I grinned.

  “Are you taller than Tanner?” she asked.

  “Almost.” I smiled again.

  She smiled back at me. “What brings you by?”

  “Is Charlotte here?”

  “No,” she said. “Sorry. She and Jarrett are out.”

  “That tall, blond guy on the lacrosse team?” I asked.

  “That’s the one,” Mrs. White nodded.

  “I didn’t know they were going out,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding again. “They’ve been dating for about a month now.”

  “Oh. I suppose she took her purse with her?”

  “Her purse?”

  I pulled the calculator out of my pocket. “This is hers,” I said. “She’s got mine.”

  “Oh. Well, if yours is here I certainly don’t know where it is,” Mrs. White said, holding her hands up in a helpless manner. “Do you need yours or can you just use hers for right now?”

  “I don’t suppose you know how to get it out of scientific mode?”

  She laughed at me. “Sorry!” she said. “Charlotte inherited all that stuff from her father.”

  “That’s okay,” I smiled. “I’ll have David change it for me, but just tell her that I have it and I’ll give it back to her on Wednesday night.”

  “Okay,” Mrs. White said and I headed to David’s house.

  Less than a year earlier, David had moved into the house across the street from me. He and Tanner were good friends and it hadn’t taken long for Tanner to convince David (who was an engineer), to start helping me in math. David and his wife, Laci, had also started going to my church and begun leading our youth group, so I saw him quite a bit.

  David was another person who understood what I meant when I said that my heart hurt sometimes. Not that I’d ever had that exact conversation with him, but I could tell that he felt the same way I did about the really important things in life. Laci did too.

  They were the perfect couple and they led the perfect life – just like I had thought Rhiannon and I were going to do one day. They’d spent the last few years living in Mexico (where Laci did mission work), and they had adopted two children while they were there. Their little boy, Dorito, was in kindergarten, and their little girl, Lily, was about two.

  It was actually because of Lily that I had finally decided what I really wanted to do with my life. When I had first met Lily, she had put a little finger in her mouth and stared at me, snuggling closer to Laci, but never taking her eyes off of me. She was a cute little thing, but the way she wouldn’t stop looking at me with those dark eyes of hers was almost disconcerting.

  “Why is she staring at me?” I had whispered to Laci.

  “You don’t need to whisper,” Laci had laughed. “She can’t hear you.”

  Because Lily, it turns out, was completely deaf.

  Laci taught me the sign for “hello” and I tried it on Lily. She just kept looking at me, still sucking her finger. I took another step forward, smiled at her, and tried it again. This time I got a smile from her and then she signed it back.

  I was immediately hooked.

  The next day at school I found the lady who always stood on the corner of the stage during assemblies, signing whatever was going on. I asked her if she’d teach me how to sign and she almost acted happier about that than David did about helping me with math.

  I learned that she was a speech pathologist and that her main job was to help students who had trouble with articulation and fluency and other kinds of voice and language disorders or delays. (I didn’t communicate with people very much myself, but that was because I didn’t really want to, not because I couldn’t.) It hadn’t taken me very long to realize what I wanted to do with my life (no matter what Tanner might have wanted me to do). Of course I hadn’t exactly told Tanner any of this yet, so he was still operating under the delusion that one day he was going to be able to live vicariously through me, but my plan right now was to use baseball only to get myself a scholarship and then do something with my life that really mattered.

  When I got to David’s house, Dorito let me in and Lily ran up to me like she always did.

  “Hey, Lilybug,” I said, signing it at the same time. Saying things while signing them helped her to learn to read lips. She signed the letter “J” back (which is what she called me then), and plucked her hand at the corner of her mouth, laying her palm flat against her cheek, the sign for “kiss”.

  “Kiss?” I asked her, signing it back. “You want a kiss?”

  She nod
ded and I gave her one on her forehead. She smiled at me and stroked her hand against my cheek as David came into the room.

  “What’s up, Jordan?”

  “I need help,” I said as Lily continued to stroke my cheek. I pulled Charlotte’s calculator out of my pocket with my free hand and handed it to him, telling him what was going on. He looked at the calculator for what seemed like an extra-long moment and then proceeded to try to explain to me how to get it out of scientific notation mode.

  “Just fix it,” I interrupted. “I really don’t care how.”

  Then he said (and I’m not kidding), “You need to become friends with your calculator.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and put Lily down because she was getting wriggly. I planted another kiss on her forehead and she wandered off toward Dorito. David finally handed me back Charlotte’s calculator.

  “You wanna work on your mountain?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I answered.

  “I just found out I’m going out of town for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m probably not going to be back before it’s due.”

  I sighed and reluctantly followed him down to his basement.

  David had been helping me with a project for one of my classes for a couple of weeks. Our teacher was making us create a scale model mountain from a topographical map (I had Annapurna in Nepal). We had to get a topographical map of our mountain and then trace each ring onto a piece of poster board or foam board or something like that. Then we had to cut out each layer and stack them on top of one another to make the mountain. It was all about ratios and proportions – how the thickness of the board you used had to be to the same scale as the topo.

  David (who tended to go overboard on anything related to math) had bought a bunch of insulation board that was so thick he’d had to have the topo enlarged at a local print shop. My stupid mountain was going to be huge.

  When we got into the basement I resumed cutting with an Exacto blade while David traced the last few lines. After we’d been working for a while, David said, “I hope this thing’s going to fit out the door.”

  “I told you we should have used foam board!” I said, glaring at him.

  “Every idiot in that class is going to use foam board,” David argued. “This is going to be unique! This is going to be awesome!”

  “This had better get me an ‘A’.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re teacher’s gonna love this! Look at how good it’s looking!”

  I glanced over at the layers that were already stacked on top of one another and had to admit that he was right . . . it looked good.

  Huge, but good.

  “Everybody in class is going to think that I’m a big a suck-up,” I muttered.

  “Since when do you care what anyone else thinks?” he asked.

  I kept cutting.

  Less than an hour later we finished the last layer, applied the glue, and set it on top. Finally we both stepped back to admire it.

  “It looks great!” David said.

  “Yeah,” I conceded. “It does.”

  “Let’s spray paint it!”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “She didn’t say anything about painting it.”

  “Did she say you couldn’t paint it?”

  “Well, no, but . . .”

  “Come on!” he urged. “You don’t want a pink mountain, do you?”

  “I really don’t think it matters what color it is,” I said. “All she’s gonna do is make sure it’s proportional.”

  “I bet you’ll get extra credit if you paint it.”

  “Let’s not worry about it.”

  “I think I’ve got some silver from Dorito’s pinewood derby car,” he said, ignoring me. He walked over to a shelf by the hot water heater and picked up a can of spray paint. “I wonder where we can get a can of that fake snow to put on top?”

  “Come on, David! I’ve already spent like ten hours on this stupid thing!”

  “It won’t take long,” he promised, shaking the can of spray paint up and down. “Watch how great this is going to look.”

  He popped the lid off of the spray can and depressed the button, spraying a fine mist of silver paint all over the pink insulation.

  “That looks cool,” he said, moving slowly around the mountain. “Admit it.”

  “I guess.”

  He kept painting while I walked to the other end of the workbench and started cleaning up scraps of insulation. All of a sudden the sound of the spray can stopped and I heard David say very quietly, “Uh-oh.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna make me change a layer . . .”

  I looked over at David. He appeared stricken. He was standing there with the paint can in one hand, staring at the mountain, mouth open.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked again, looking at the mountain.

  “It’s melting,” he said softly.

  “It’s what?” I walked over and stood next to him and looked at it. He was right . . . Annapurna was slowly melting away.

  “WHY IS IT MELTING?!?” I yelled.

  “Um . . . I’m not sure,” David said worriedly, glancing at the spray can. “I think maybe there was some kind of chemical reaction between the paint and the insulation.”

  “Ya think?!”

  “What’s going on down there?” I heard Laci yell from the top of the stairs.

  “He RUINED my mountain!” I yelled back. “That’s what’s going on!” She came down the stairs carrying, Lily. Dorito followed close behind.

  “What’s wrong with it?” she asked.

  “It’s melting!” I told her. “Can’t you see that it’s melting?”

  “I think it stopped,” David said.

  “Where did it melt?” she asked.

  “Here,” I said, pointing, “and here and here . . .”

  “It’s not supposed to go in there like that?

  “NO!”

  “Well . . . it looks nice,” she said. “I mean . . . if you hadn’t of told me it wasn’t supposed to be like that I never would have known.”

  “Well my teacher’s gonna know!” I cried, covering my eyes with my hand. “It looks like some wooly mammoth cave or something.”

  “I have a dinosaur you could put in there,” Dorito suggested.

  “Does your teacher have a good sense of humor?” David asked.

  I glared at him again and Lily looked at me with concern.

  “I didn’t know it would melt,” David said meekly.

  By nine o’clock that evening I was back at my house and had just spread my math out on the coffee table when I heard a knock on the front door (our doorbell hadn’t worked for years). I got up, walked across the living room, and opened the door, surprised to find Charlotte standing on the porch.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Mom said you came over,” she explained. “I have your calculator.” She pulled it out of her purse and held it up for me to see.

  “You didn’t have to make a special trip over here,” I said. “I just thought you might want yours back.”

  “Yeah, I kinda do.”

  “It’s right here,” I nodded, holding the door open for her. She stepped into the living room and I crossed over to the coffee table. “I hope it’s okay that it’s not in scientific mode anymore.”

  “You changed it all by yourself?” she asked. “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. I had David fix it.”

  She laughed as she took her calculator from me and handed me David’s.

  “Sorry they got mixed up,” I told her.

  “No, problem.”

  My mom walked into the living room.

  “Well, hello, Charlotte,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Fine, Mrs. Clemmons. How are you?”

  “Good. What brings you over?”

  Charlotte explained about the calculators and then my mom asked her if her basketball season was over yet.

  “Yeah,” Ch
arlotte nodded. “Our last game was Wednesday.”

  “No playoffs?”

  “Not hardly,” Charlotte said, rolling her eyes. Mom’s phone went off and she glanced at it.

  “I gotta get this,” she said, pushing a button and walking back out of the room. Charlotte gave her a little wave.

  “I thought you were out with Garrett,” I said to Charlotte.

  “Jarrett.”

  “Jarrett,” I said, correcting myself. I looked at my watch. “That was a short date.”

  “What are you working on?” she asked, blatantly ignoring me and glancing at my math that was spread out all over the coffee table.

  “Ummm . . . boats and currents and stuff like that.”

  “Oh,” she replied. “Vectors.”

  “Did you take Technical Math, too?” I asked. I was surprised . . . the textbook might as well have said Math for Big, Dumb Jocks on the cover.

  “No,” she said. “Physics.”

  “Oh.”

  “You need any help with anything?” she asked, rounding the coffee table and sitting down on the couch.

  “Uh . . . no, I don’t think so. David explained it pretty good.”

  “Well.”

  “What?”

  “David explained it pretty well.”

  “I bet you’re a lot of fun on a date,” I said.

  She smirked at me and picked up my notebook and worksheet, resting it on her lap. “You don’t care if I look at it, do you?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Knock yourself out.”

  “I could check your answers for you,” she suggested, shrugging off her coat. “You know? Tell you if you missed anything?”

  “If that’s really how you want to spend your Friday night.”