“One calling in the wilderness.” She pauses. “A lone voice in the wilderness.” Her eyes are gleaming. “One solitary voice speaking truth in a loud, screaming world that does not want to hear it. But John speaks anyway. Because he has to. Because he knows the truth. Because his God makes him brave.
“My friends, the world needs us to be brave. We live in a world full of suffering and hate and fear and greed, full of injustice, just like John did. Just like Jesus did. It would be easy to throw up our hands and say, ‘There’s no use. This is just the way it is. There’s nothing I—nothing one person—can do to change that.’ And I say to you: Yes, the world is broken. Yes, our leaders are often corrupt and it is difficult to trust them. Yes, we struggle to make ends meet while a few of the world’s richest men hoard enough wealth to house and feed all the starving people of the world. Bullies still seem to run things. The earth is getting sicker and sicker. This world is a hard, hard place to live. Yes to all these things.” She pauses just long enough for everyone to breathe. “But I want you to ask yourselves, is this broken world of ours worth saving?”
She gives them a moment to consider her question. Grace doesn’t know if she can answer. She doesn’t know if she wants to.
“Jesus thought so,” Mom says. “John thought so. I think so. I think we are all worth saving.”
Someone in the audience says, “Amen.”
“The wilderness is large,” she continues, gathering momentum, gaining speed. “It is loud and relentless. It is scary and vast. But our voices, they are louder than we even know. Even our whispers can send ripples that will spread farther than we could ever imagine reaching. One small kindness in a sea of cruelty, one word of truth among lies, these are the seeds that can change the world. Luke 3:8: ‘Let your lives prove your repentance.’?”
Someone says, “Hallelujah!”
“We must do the things that scare us,” Mom says, her voice cracking with passion. “We must do the things we know are right even when everyone else seems to be doing wrong. We must listen to that tiny voice inside ourselves, God’s clear voice in the wilderness of our souls, even when the world is noisy and doing all it can do to drown that voice out. Like John, we must be the voice of one calling in the wilderness. We must speak. John 1:5: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’ My friends, we must be the light.”
Grace can feel the energy of the room surge, simultaneously crushing her and lifting her up. She can feel everyone eating up Mom’s words, and she knows everything about her message is right and good, but something about Mom’s sermon is too hard to hear. It’s making her skin itch under the fabric of her dress; it is making her sweat. While everyone else feels inspired, she feels judged. Reprimanded. Damned.
Grace whispers to her father that she’s not feeling well. He smiles and nods but doesn’t take his eyes off Mom. In the midst of everything she’s feeling, Grace is struck with another sadness, a jealousy almost, a yearning. She knows her parents’ love is unique, the way her father adores her mother, the way he admires her so deeply, completely, and without question. Grace has always suspected no high school romance could ever come close to this, so she’s never bothered with boyfriends, never bothered letting anyone in. Has she been set up for a life of disappointment? Is she doomed to be alone? How could she ever dream of having her parents’ fairy-tale kind of love? They live in a magic world where the queen is the one who rules the kingdom, one where the king follows her lead. It’s a beautiful story. But a kingdom is so much bigger than a family. It is a place where a princess can get lost. It is a place where she can be forgotten.
Grace stands up and walks the full length of the church to the back exits. No disapproving, squinty eyes follow her, no muttered reprimands by thin-haired old ladies. After the heavy wood doors swing closed behind her, she expects the lump in her chest to dissolve, but it stays, heavy and stubborn. Why can’t she just be happy for Mom? Why can’t she believe in her the way Dad does? Why can’t she be part of their dream?
The halls are empty and silent. Grace leans against the wall, hit with the realization that she has nowhere to go. She has no place for comfort, no place for refuge, no place that feels like home. Her house is still a mess of half-emptied boxes. Her room is full of a lost girl’s screams.
A bathroom door opens at the end of the hall. The large form of Jesse Camp steps out, wiping his wet hands on the legs of his pants.
“Oh, hi,” he says. His face opens into a warm smile.
Grace wipes her eyes. Hardens.
“Are you okay?” he says. “Are you crying?”
“No, I am not crying,” she sniffles.
“Hey, did I do something?” he says. “You gave me, like, dagger eyes at lunch the other day.”
Grace glares at him, his face so misleading in its softness. “How can you be friends with those guys?”
“What guys?”
“You were sitting with Ennis Calhoun at lunch,” Grace says. “Then I saw you in the hall later with Eric Jordan.”
Jesse’s eyes widen in surprise, but then he looks away and sighs with what Grace suspects is guilt. “Eric is on the football team with me,” he says weakly. “Guys on the team are just sort of automatically friends, you know? And Ennis hangs out with him, so I guess we’re kind of friends by default.”
“You’re just sort of friends with rapists by default? Like you don’t have a choice in the matter?”
“There wasn’t any proof,” he says, his voice rising defensively. “That’s what everyone said. They said that girl was lying.”
“That girl has a name.” Grace tries to kill him with her eyes. When nothing happens, she turns around and storms away.
“Wait, Grace,” he says. She stops walking but keeps her back to him. “You don’t understand. You weren’t here. Everything was crazy after Lucy said all that stuff. Everyone at school, the whole town was, like, falling apart.”
“Yeah?” she says. “The town was falling apart?” She turns her head and looks him in the eyes. “How do you think she felt?”
Grace is suddenly, acutely, aware of a new feeling burning inside her. It is a shift away from the heavy stillness of sadness, toward something faster, hotter, something that until now had been out of her reach.