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  It wasn’t that people didn’t like me or anything like that. On the contrary, I was actually pretty popular.

  One reason for this was because I looked just like Tanner, (which – after watching women throw themselves at him for years – I’d learned wasn’t exactly a bad thing). Another reason was that my size and my skill in sports alone made a lot of people think that they liked me. Of course they didn’t really know me at all, so how could they possibly like me? But when people feel that they can’t win a game or something without you, they tend to think like that.

  I’m sure that if I had been a jerk toward everyone it wouldn’t have mattered how good I looked or how well I played, but I wasn’t. Although I usually didn’t talk to anybody unless I had good reason to, when I did I was always polite and nice and so – overall – people liked me.

  Charlotte was popular too, but (unlike me) she actually enjoyed being around a lot of people and having meaningless conversations with them for hours on end. It seemed to me that she loved seeing people and also loved being seen, so prom was pretty much her kind of thing. I figured the least I could do was let her put me in a tux for one night and drag me around.

  As she rattled on about where we were going to have our pictures made, I thought about how odd it was that the two of us got along as well as we did. Come to think of it, it was actually odd that we’d ever gotten together in the first place.

  “You know what?” I asked her after she’d finally decided what restaurant she wanted to go to for dinner on prom night.

  “What?”

  “It’s funny how some little thing can wind up being really important.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, turning my head to glance at her. “Like if I hadn’t of accidentally taken your calculator that first day of play practice, then you wouldn’t have come over to my house a few nights later to get it back. And if you hadn’t of started coming over to my house, we never would have gotten together.”

  “Yes, we would’ve,” she said, laughing and turning her head toward me.

  “How do you figure that?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the road.

  “Because, silly,” she said. “You didn’t accidentally take my calculator!”

  “I didn’t?” I glanced at her again.

  “Uh-uh,” she laughed, shaking her head. “I purposefully took yours.”

  ~ ~ ~

  IT WAS BOUND to happen that one day things were going to get out of hand between the two of us, because you can’t have the kind of feelings that Charlotte and I had for each other without also having the desire to act on those feelings (especially not when you’re seventeen years old).

  One day those feelings and that desire were really all I was thinking about and I guess that Charlotte was too because she whispered in my ear that her mother wasn’t home. I’m pretty sure that her intention wasn’t for me to stop kissing her, but that’s exactly what happened. Something about hearing her say those words made me stop.

  “We can’t do this,” I said, somehow managing to pull away from her a bit. My throat was so dry that I sounded hoarse.

  “Why?” she asked, looking dismayed.

  “Actually I’m having a very hard time remembering why right now,” I admitted. “Can we go outside and get some fresh air?”

  She didn’t look very happy, but she let me take her hand and lead her out onto the front porch. We sat down and I looked at her.

  I knew her well enough to know by the way she was looking at me that she was taking this very personally . . . that she was assuming I somehow didn’t find her to be completely irresistible (which was, of course, absolutely the stupidest idea in the whole world).

  I squeezed her hand, hoping to reassure her.

  “I don’t think that’s what God wants for us right now,” I said carefully.

  “What?”

  I looked away and hesitated. In all of the conversations we’d had, God wasn’t something that we’d actually talked about yet. I wasn’t at all sure what she was going to think about hearing me say this. I glanced back at her, nervously.

  Charlotte was still looking at me, but this time I couldn’t tell what she was thinking . . . her face wasn’t giving anything away.

  “I actually made a promise to Him that I was gonna wait,” I went on.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “A while back.”

  She was quiet again, her face still betraying nothing.

  “Ummm,” I finally asked when she continued to be silent. “So what do you think about that?”

  It didn’t take her long to answer.

  “I didn’t think it was possible that I could love you even more,” she said softly, squeezing my hand back. Then she nodded and went on. “I think it’s great.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Really.”

  “So you’re with me on this?”

  “Yeah,” she smiled. “I’m with you.”

  “We can’t put ourselves in a situation like that again,” I told her, pointing back toward her house. “It won’t be so easy to stop next time.”

  “That was easy?”

  “It’ll be worse next time,” I promised.

  “We’ll just have to be strong.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not about being strong. It’s about being smart. We can’t let ourselves be alone like that again.”

  I searched her eyes to see what she was thinking now. Again, I couldn’t tell.

  “Are you still with me?” I finally asked.

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “I’m still with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she smiled, putting her hand on the side of my face and rubbing my cheek with her thumb. “I’m sure.”

  “Good,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief and kissing her on the forehead, “because if you decided to try and make me change my mind, I’d be a goner.”

  Of course this would have been an excellent opportunity for Charlotte to let me know that it was too late – that she’d already made a different decision. It would have been a great chance for her to let me know that she was now almost three months along . . . carrying someone else’s baby.

  But she didn’t. She waited about two more weeks before she dropped that bombshell on me.

  ~ ~ ~

  CHARLOTTE STARTED AVOIDING me – coming up with excuses as to why we couldn’t get together. At first she claimed it was because of exams (which actually made a lot of sense), but after school was out and she still came up with reasons why she couldn’t see me, I knew that something was wrong.

  I didn’t consider for a moment, however, that she didn’t love me with all of her heart. I knew without a doubt that she loved me just as much as I loved her, and so – no matter what was going on – I was certain that we could work it out.

  And, besides that, I actually had a feeling that I knew what was bothering Charlotte. Both of us were going to need to start applying to colleges in the fall and we’d already decided that we were going to go to State together. They had one of the best engineering programs in the country for Charlotte and a decent communication disorders program for me, so it seemed like a perfect idea. But as great as State’s engineering program might have been, I knew that MIT, Stanford and Berkeley were all better and I also knew that if the two of us hadn’t been going out, Charlotte would have been applying to each of them . . . just like I would have been applying to Baylor.

  When Charlotte continued distancing herself from me even after summer vacation started, I figured that I knew what must be going on. I decided that she was really torn between going to State with me or going somewhere else without me (because I didn’t have even the slightest chance of getting in to MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley, no matter how good my stats were). Or, I figured, she’d already decided that she was going to go to one of those schools instead and she was just afraid to tell me.

  So the day Charlotte quit answering my calls and tex
ts, I headed over to her house to let her know that she didn’t need to worry. If she wanted to go to another school then that was fine . . . we could work it out. We were meant to be together and nothing was ever going to come between us . . . that much, I was sure of.

  Her mother opened the door after I rang the bell.

  “Hi,” I said brightly. “Charlotte’s not answering her phone.”

  Mrs. White nodded.

  “Is she here?”

  Mrs. White nodded again and for the first time I noticed how strained she looked.

  We stared at each other for a moment and then I finally asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I’d better let Charlotte tell you that,” she said. I looked at her questioningly and then she turned to lead me up to Charlotte’s room.

  Mrs. White opened the door without knocking. I had been a few steps behind her when I’d stopped so I couldn’t see into the room, but Mrs. White told her, “Jordan’s here.”

  “I can’t see him right now,” Charlotte said, obviously crying.

  Her mom ignored her, holding the door open for me and nodding her head for me to go in. I stepped into Charlotte’s room tentatively and Mrs. White closed the door, leaving the two of us alone.

  As soon as she realized that I was there, Charlotte began sobbing uncontrollably and buried her face into her pillow. I sat down next to her on her bed, rubbing her back, asking her what was the matter and reassuring her that I loved her and that there was nothing she could ever tell me that would change how I felt.

  As it turned out, I was wrong.

  ~ ~ ~

  HOW MUCH DID my senior year suck? Let me count the ways. By the time we started back to school in the fall Charlotte was obviously pregnant and – even though I went out of my way to avoid her – it seemed as if I saw her everywhere I went. Naturally everybody assumed the baby was mine and this guy named Zack (who I played football with and who I already pretty much disliked anyway) made some comment to that effect and before I could stop myself, I punched him in the face and got suspended for five days. Zack’s parents, incidentally, didn’t like the fact that their son had to have his jaw wired shut and they pressed charges, so suddenly I had a record and one hundred hours of community service. A lot of ways . . . that’s how many ways my senior year sucked.

  I heard through someone that Charlotte was going to go to State and at first I was surprised that she hadn’t applied to Berkeley or Stanford or MIT. Then I decided I didn’t care enough to be surprised that she was going to State and I just hoped that she rotted there.

  Never before in my life had I ever felt such an intense hatred for anyone as I did for Charlotte that year. Of course the only reason that I hated her so much was because I had also loved her so much, but I wasn’t about to admit that to anyone. I convinced myself that going out with Charlotte had been the biggest mistake I’d ever made and the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

  I reveled in my hatred for her. Basked in it. Steeped in it. I let it take over my life. It ate away at me, bit by bit . . . and I let it. Nothing was going to pull me out of the pit that I was in.

  The only thing that kept me going that year was that I got accepted to Baylor University. Baylor (in case you don’t know) is in Texas – almost a thousand miles away – and I accepted without even visiting the campus. Deep down inside of me there was this shred of hope that maybe – if I could just get away from everybody and everything – just maybe I could have a “do-over” or something and somehow get my life back on track.

  David could tell how much I hated Charlotte and he knew that it wasn’t good for me to have that much anger and self-pity bottled up inside. He arranged for our youth group to go on a mission trip to Mexico and I was pretty sure that the only reason he did it was so I could see how fortunate and blessed I was compared to what some other people were having to going through. It didn’t work, though. All Mexico did for me was to reaffirm my belief that life really did suck, and I came back more depressed than ever.

  David didn’t give up on me though, and after I finally graduated he came right out and told me that I needed to forgive Charlotte (who had by this time had her baby and put it up for adoption). He said that I was only hurting myself by staying mad at her and when I wouldn’t listen to him he started going on and on about what God wanted me to do . . . trying to guilt me into forgiving her.

  I finally told him that I would. Mostly I said it just to get him off of my back, but I also said it because I knew that he was right . . . I knew that it really was what God wanted me to do.

  Despite how bad everything was, I still did care what God thought about me. I wasn’t doing a very good job doing what He wanted me to do, but I wanted to do a good job doing what He wanted me to do. I guess my shred of hope came from more than just the fact that I was going off to Baylor in the fall . . . it also came from the fact that I still loved God and I still believed that He loved me. That’s why I still had hope that maybe my life was going to get better.

  I wasn’t at the same place in my relationship with God that I had once been (it’s impossible to love God when you’re filled with so much hate), but I wanted to be in that place again and I wanted to love Him again.

  Every time God had tried to convict me of the fact that I was outside of His will, I just buried those thoughts underneath my anger. But when David came over and talked to me about forgiving Charlotte, I knew that I couldn’t bury them any longer. A year was long enough and if I was really going to be able to go to Texas and start over in the fall, I was going to have to leave all the hate behind.

  Forgiving Charlotte, however, wasn’t going to be easy. Although I could have just walked over to her house and told her that I forgave her, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to be real . . . I wanted God to actually heal my heart. But I only had a few weeks before I was going to be going off to school and I knew that I needed to forgive her pretty fast. Whenever I imagined myself talking to her, however, I still felt nothing but hate and humiliation and pain. So finally I started talking to God about it.

  I told God what I wanted to do and I told Him that I needed His help.

  And He must have just been waiting for me to ask . . . because He got right to work.

  ~ ~ ~

  THEY SAY THAT God works in mysterious ways, right? I guess that’s what He was doing when the police knocked on our door a few days later and told me and Mom that my dad was dead. Apparently he had been dead ever since he’d “walked out on us”, seven years earlier. Except that he hadn’t walked out on us at all . . . he had been shot in the head, stuffed into the trunk of his car, and submerged in a lake.

  I’d been without my dad for seven years already and I had never wasted hours daydreaming about him coming back one day to pick up where he’d left off. To tell the truth, he hadn’t been that great of a father when he’d been around and things were actually better once he’d disappeared. Finding out that he was gone was not what was such a huge blow to me.

  What was such a huge blow was that I pieced together some of my memories from the summer that Dad had disappeared and then I convinced myself that Tanner had been the one who had shot my dad in the head and put him in the trunk of his car. That was what was so hard for me to deal with.

  If anyone had ever been a father to me, it was Tanner. It wasn’t as if Tanner spent hours talking with me about the meaning of life or anything, but he had always been the one to take care of me and Chase whenever Mom and Dad dropped the ball. I couldn’t count how many meals he’d cooked for us or how many loads of laundry he’d done. When I was being picked on by some kid at school in the second grade, Tanner left his own school one day and came and had lunch with me. He sat right between me and the kid that had been giving me a hard time and had quite the conversation with him. I didn’t hear a lot of what was being said (because Tanner was saying it in hushed tones so that our teacher didn’t hear), but I do know that I never got bothered again. I also think the kid might have peed in his pants, but
I’m not sure.

  Money was often tight in our family, but Tanner made sure that Chase and I always had something we really wanted to open at every birthday and under the tree every Christmas. And once he got his driver’s license, Tanner carted us around better than any soccer mom could have and he went to more of my games than either Mom or Dad ever did, combined.

  So to think now that Tanner had murdered my Dad was more than I could handle on my own and I wound up turning to someone who actually had spent hours talking with me about the meaning of life.

  I went and talked to David.

  At first David told me I was being ridiculous, but after I told him everything that I remembered, I think he was starting to have some serious doubts of his own. He told me that he’d talk to Tanner and get things cleared up, but then both of them started avoiding me like the plague and I became more certain than ever that Tanner was going to wind up in prison or on death row and that my life was about to somehow get even worse.

  It didn’t get worse though, it got better. One-hundred fold.

  ~ ~ ~

  DAVID AND LACI had invited everyone to their house for lasagna. I was planning on going because it was going to be a good chance for me to see people one last time before I flew down to Texas. But before I went to their house, I walked over to Charlotte’s and rang the front bell.

  Just as she had a little over a year ago (the last time I’d been there), Mrs. White answered the door.

  “Is Charlotte here?” I asked.

  She looked at me for a moment and then nodded slightly. “I’ll go get her,” she finally said.