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“I don’t have anything else to do,” she said.
“What about Garr– I mean Jarrett?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. She deliberately kept her eyes on my notebook and I sat down on the other end of the couch.
“You might feel better if you talk about it,” I said in the exact same tone she’d used with me two nights earlier.
She looked at me hesitantly.
“We had a fight,” she finally said. “Okay?”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said quietly.
“What’d you have a fight about?”
“I’m definitely not getting into that with you,” she muttered.
“Okay,” I said. “Sorry.”
“It’s no big deal,” she assured me, waving a hand at me dismissively. Then she turned back to my math.
“You, uh . . . you want something to eat?” I offered. “Aren’t you supposed to drown your sorrows in junk food or something?”
“Whatcha got?” she asked.
“Quadruple-stuff Oreos?”
“They make quadruple-stuff?” she asked.
“Hang on,” I said, holding up one finger.
I went into the kitchen and returned with a package of cookies.
“You really are bad at math,” she said. “Those are double-stuff.”
“Prepare to be amazed,” I promised, taking two cookies out of the package. I twisted the tops off and put them together. “Voila!” I said, extending it toward her. “Quadruple-stuff.”
She took it from me and tried a bite.
“Oh my gosh, that’s really good,” she nodded around a mouthful of cookie.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “Want some milk?”
She nodded again and put the rest of the cookie in her mouth.
I went back out into the kitchen and then returned to the living room with two glasses of milk.
“If you’d rather have ice cream . . .” I ventured, setting the glass down in front of her.
“No,” she assured me. “This is great. Thanks.” She made herself another quadruple-stuff cookie and then settled down to check my math.
“You need to be putting your units down,” she said after a few minutes.
“You sound just like David,” I told her.
“Great minds think alike,” she smiled, leaning forward to grab two more cookies. “Do you have to do number nineteen?”
“That one at the bottom of the page?”
She nodded.
“No,” I said.
“You should do it anyway. It’ll be good practice.”
I looked at her skeptically.
“Come on!” she encouraged. “It’ll be fun!”
“I really can’t believe how much you sound like Dave right now,” I said. “It’s kinda freaking me out.”
“I’m gonna do it!”
“You’re the one who just broke up with someone,” I said. “Whatever makes you happy.”
“We didn’t break up,” Charlotte said. “We just had a fight. We fight all the time.”
“Well that sounds like a lovely relationship.”
“Well, we don’t fight all the time,” she amended quickly, “it’s just that . . . I just mean that it’s not that big of a deal that we had a fight.”
“But I thought you were highly distressed!” I cried. “I never would have pulled out my secret stash of Oreos if I’d known it wasn’t a big deal!”
“Secret stash?”
“You have to hide stuff like that around here,” I whispered.
“From your mom?”
“Her,” I agreed, “and Tanner.”
“But he doesn’t even live here anymore.”
“I know, but he comes over all the time,” I explained. “And you have to promise that you won’t even tell him that I have a secret stash or he’ll go on a rampage until he finds them.”
“Okay,” she promised. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
I wiped imaginary sweat off of my forehead.
“I can’t believe you’re sharing your secret stash with me,” she said, smiling at me. “I’m very touched.”
“Well,” I reminded her. “I thought you were emotionally devastated.”
Charlotte returned to my math problems and after a few minutes, Mom came back into the room.
“Oooh!” she exclaimed, reaching down and taking three cookies out of the pack. “I didn’t know we had Oreos!”
I looked at Charlotte knowingly and she grinned at me. Mom sat down in her recliner and turned on the television.
“I guess I’d better get going,” Charlotte said after another minute. She put her coat on.
“I’ll walk you home,” I said, heading to the closet to get my own jacket.
“No,” Charlotte said, “you don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, he does,” my mom chimed in. “It’s not safe for you to be walking around alone after dark.”
I could tell that Charlotte wanted to argue with her, but she kept her mouth shut.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I told Mom and we went out the front door.
“You really don’t need to walk me home,” Charlotte said.
“I don’t mind.”
“But it’s so archaic!” she complained. “I’m suddenly safer just because I have a male with me?”
“Yes.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s so old-fashioned,” she said, shaking her head.
“Wow. I’ve gone from ‘archaic’ to ‘old-fashioned’ in about twenty seconds,” I noted. “Maybe by the time we get to your house you’ll have decided that I’m ‘chivalrous’.”
In the light from a nearby streetlamp I saw Charlotte smile.
“You should appreciate what I’m doing,” I went on. “I’m not even going to have any cookies left by the time I get home.”
“Don’t blame me,” she insisted. “Go back there and hide them.”
“It’s too late,” I sighed. “They’re probably already gone.”
I didn’t see Charlotte again until the following Wednesday evening when she found me before youth group started.
“I have something for you,” she said with a smile.
“You do?”
She nodded and handed me a bag. I peeked inside. Oreos.
“Awww,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I felt bad that you had to compromise your secret stash,” she explained.
“Well, thanks,” I said, taking the cookies without further arguing. “Did you and Jared make-up?”
“Jarrett,” she corrected.
“Sorry. You and Jarrett make up?”
“Yeah,” she nodded.
“That’s good,” I said.
“You getting along okay with David gone?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“I mean with your math,” she explained.
“Oh,” I said. “No. I’m doing fine.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because if you need some help or anything . . .”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m good.”
“Oh.”
“But, if you guys have another fight and you need some cookies,” I said, holding up the bag, “feel free to come by.”
“Thanks,” she said, with a little laugh. “I will.”
I had pretty much just been kidding and I’d thought that she had been too, but two nights later, there was another knock on the door and I opened it, surprised to find her standing on the porch again.
“Seriously?” I asked.
She looked at me ruefully.
“You want some more Oreos?” I asked.
“You still have them?”
“Well,” I admitted, “not the ones you gave me . . .”
“You ate all of those in two days?”
“Do you want some cookies or not?”
She nodded and I held the door open wider for her.
“What are you working on right
now?” she asked, looking at the coffee table that was littered once again with my math homework.
“Angle of elevation,” I said as I went into the kitchen to get the cookies. When I came back into the living room, she had my notebook and worksheet on her lap again. I set the cookies down on the table, but she didn’t take any.
“Do you know when to use sine, cosine and tangent?” she asked, looking up at me.
“Yeah.”
“David show you his little trick?”
“Yeah,” I said again, laughing.
She shook her head and smiled.
“So this is the same thing,” she went on, pointing at the next problem I was getting ready to do on the worksheet, “except that you’re working backward so you just need to use the inverse button before you hit sine.”
“I know.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you needed some help.”
“No,” I said. “I called David earlier. I think I got it.”
“Oh,” she said again, looking down at my paper.
My mom walked into the room.
“Hi, Charlotte,” she said, pleasantly. Then she spied the cookies. “More Oreos?” She took a handful and sat down in her recliner.
“I’d better get going,” Charlotte said, putting down my notebook and standing up. She picked up the cookies and held them out toward my mom. “Do you want another one before I go?”
“Oh,” Mom said, looking surprised. “I didn’t know those were yours, honey. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” Charlotte assured her, giving the bag a shake. “Help yourself.”
Mom took one more and then Charlotte turned to me. “I suppose you’re going to insist on walking me home?” she asked.
I got my jacket.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said, handing me the bag once we got out into the yard. “I didn’t mean to make you lose a bunch more.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, taking it from her.
“I really was just trying to help,” she went on. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s no big deal,” I assured her.
“It is to me,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I just appreciate how nice you’re being . . . that’s all.”
“No problem,” I said, unsure what else to say.
We trudged along quietly for a minute.
“You never did tell me,” Charlotte said, “have you heard from any colleges?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. I’d heard from a lot of colleges actually – baseball coaches had been sending me letters ever since September.
“Where are you thinking about going?” she asked.
“I dunno,” I shrugged. “I’d really like to go to Baylor, but I’m not sure if my grades are going to be good enough.”
“If your stats are good enough, it probably won’t matter,” Charlotte pointed out.
“Maybe,” I agreed, shrugging again, “but I’m kinda worried about it.”
“Is that why you spend every Friday night doing homework?”
“I guess,” I said, looking at her.
“You should be going out and having fun on Friday night,” Charlotte said. “Not sitting at home working on math.”
“You’ve been right there with me the past two weeks,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but only because I had a fight with my boyfriend. What’s your excuse?”
“I broke up with my girlfriend.”
“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically. “Because before that you were going out and doing so much stuff on the weekends.”
“She lives in Chicago!” I reminded her.
“I know,” Charlotte agreed, “but my point is that you never go out and do anything. It’s not good for you to be sitting at home every Friday night doing school work. You need to get a life.”
“I have a life!” I protested. “I have a great life!”
“No, you don’t,” she argued. “You eat lunch with the speech pathologist every day at school and you go to your classes and ball practice and church and then that’s it! The rest of the time you’re sitting home in your living room, by yourself, doing homework.”
“I need to get my GPA up.”
“What you need, Jordan,” she argued, “is to get yourself some friends.”
“I have friends!” I said indignantly.
“Like who?”
“Like Ben and Hunter and Mark and–”
“Those are teammates,” she interrupted, “not friends.”
“They’re my friends.”
“Do you ever go out and do anything with them?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do stuff with them all the time.”
“Like what?”
“Like we work out together and go out to eat and stuff like that. I hang out with them.”
“Go out to eat after games and practices, things like that?”
I nodded.
“Work out with them as part of the team?”
I nodded again.
“Do you ever go partying with any of ’em?”
I didn’t answer.
“Ever go over to one of their houses and play video games?” she asked.
I just looked at her.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, smugly.
“I have friends,” I said again.
“What you really need,” she went on, ignoring me, “is a girlfriend.”
“I’m going to be a monk, remember?”
She laughed.
“You should let me fix you up with someone,” she suggested.
“No way.”
“Why not?” she asked. “I’d find you someone really good.”
“No way,” I said again.
“Why not?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
She shook her head disgustedly and then muttered, “Suit yourself.”
We trudged along quietly for another few moments and soon we reached her driveway.
“Just out of curiosity,” I finally said, breaking the silence, “if you were going to fix me up with someone, who would it be?”
She grinned at me.
“I don’t want you to,” I added quickly. “I was just wondering.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, still smiling. “Well, let’s see . . .”
We reached the front steps of her house and she leaned against the rail.
“Let’s see,” she said again, bringing her hand to her face. “Let’s see.”
She stood there like that, running a finger across her chin in a thoughtful manner. Eventually I leaned against the other rail.
“Is it really that hard to think of somebody?” I finally asked when she seemed unable to come up with anyone.
“Uh, yeah,” she said, looking at me. “Actually it’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.”
I looked at her questioningly.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” she said hastily. “I think you’re a great guy and everything and I’m sure there’re lots of girls who’d be happy to go out with you, but . . .”
“But what?”
“But I’m having a hard time thinking of somebody who would live up to your standards.”
“Standards?”
She nodded.
“I have standards?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” she nodded again. “You have standards.”
“Oh, really? I can’t wait to hear this. What are my standards?”
“Well, you know,” she said, shrugging again. “You’re so . . .”
“So what?” I asked when she didn’t finish her sentence.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re just so different.”
“Different?”
“Yeah. Different.”
“Different how?”
“Well,” she said, hesitating. “You’re so . . .”
I looked at her expectantly.
“You’re so virtuous,” she finally said reluctantly.
“Virtuous?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “You know, like how you insist on walking me home and how you never do anything wrong.”
“I do plenty of stuff wrong!” I protested.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life, Jordan?” she asked with a smile. “Jaywalked? Moved your hands from the ten and two o’clock positions on the steering wheel?”
“I let you lie to my mom about the Oreos,” I reminded her, holding up the bag for emphasis.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, putting her hand on my chest in a consoling sort of way. “I’m not saying that it’s bad.” She looked at me for a moment and then went on. “It’s actually one of the things about you that I like the most.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Good night, Jordan,” she said, giving my chest a gentle pat.
And then she turned and walked up the steps.
That night I lay in bed, thinking about some of the things that Charlotte had said.
It’s a big deal to me.
What was a big deal to her? That I gave her some cookies? How was that a big deal?
You’re so virtuous.
I wasn’t quite as confused about why she might have said that: I didn’t drink . . . I didn’t smoke . . . I didn’t do drugs . . . I’d never had sex. Probably a lot of people thought that I was virtuous. Of course what hardly anybody seemed to realize was that all of us are sinners and that it’s not just what we do that separates us from God, but what we think and what’s in our hearts. And so, while everyone may have thought that I was so virtuous, what they didn’t understand was that I had plenty of stuff in my heart and in my mind that kept me in need of a Savior . . . not that I was about to get into any of that with Charlotte.
It’s one of the things about you that I like the most.
One of the things about me that she liked the most? Since when did Charlotte like anything about me? Since when did Charlotte reach out and rest her hand against my chest?
And since when did I fall asleep, thinking about somebody other than Rhiannon?
~ ~ ~
THE NEXT NIGHT I sat on my couch, trying to do my homework, but after two hours and no knocks on the door, I finally convinced myself that I needed help.
“She’s not here,” Mrs. White told me apologetically after I’d walked over there and rung their doorbell.