Believe Read online

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll let you know how it goes.” There was no point telling her I wasn’t optimistic, that my peers were almost as bad as everyone else.

  Or maybe worse.

  First period, three people insisted I was appearing on Letterman, Conan, and the Daily Show respectively. This was not the first time people told me this. The difference is, the first time, I thought it was funny. Now not so much.

  Second period, it got worse. Some guy who had never said two words to me asked me to go to the prom. When I said no—I didn’t even know him—he said, “Do you already have a date? Or is it because you are dropping out of school to star in a movie?”

  Someone else heard I was doing a nude photo spread. And people in the hall started calling me “Healer Girl.” And the captain of the football team slid onto his knees and crossed himself at my feet.

  A few people laughed. If it weren’t happening to me, I might think it was funny, too.

  What wasn’t funny: Miriam and Samantha. They wouldn’t stop pestering me about Roxanne. Every time I turned around, one of them asked, “Have you called her yet?”

  “I will,” I promised. But I didn’t. And so they kept asking. Every hour. At the same time, I hoped that Miriam would change her mind and tell me not to bother. She knew how much I didn’t want to make this call.

  “Not to be critical,” Samantha says, “but if I were you, I’d be thanking us. I mean—you could do a lot of things with your fame. You know, like stop AIDS. Or end hunger.”

  Yeah. My responsibility. A lot of people said things like that. They thought being famous was easy/fun/exciting/meaningful. I just couldn’t believe that someone as smart as Samantha really believed that my kind of fame could do anything.

  Miriam could see I was about to blow. “J, you told me I could count on you. And now I am.”

  I took out my phone and her business card. Tricking Roxanne into covering their story was not a good idea. I knew that. This whole thing gave me a sick feeling. But I wasn’t going to be able to get out of it either.

  She answered on the first ring. “Janine. I was just thinking about you.”

  As we suspected, she was more than happy to meet me. “At the protest,” I said a few times, so Samantha and Miriam could hear that I was doing what they wanted. “That is where I’ll be after school.”

  Finally, they smiled. Miriam said, “Thank you!” Samantha said, “We have so much work to do! See you at lunch!”

  I spent lunch hiding in the last stall in the girls’ bathroom. Right now, all I wanted to do was be alone. I didn’t want to talk about me or the farm or Roxanne or Abe. I didn’t care that Dan was avoiding me or that all of my teachers were looking at me funny.

  Instead, I sat on the edge of the toilet. I read the graffiti that covered the walls and the stall door, realizing it was a kind of high-school news report.

  Some of it was etched into the metal. “Ian loves Carol.” “Marci is a slut.” I knew a girl named Marci, but the message might be an old one. “For a good time, call 867-5309.” This was the kind of fame most people had to deal with. It was the kind of notoriety people joked about in their yearbooks. At reunions.

  In big block letters, someone had written, High school proves THERE IS NO GOD. I wonder who wrote that. We could be friends.

  The door creaked open. I put my feet up on the toilet until the person was gone. A minute later, the bell rang. When I opened the door, the first things I saw were the signs pasted to the mirror.

  SAT PREP COURSE. GET YOUR SCORES UP.

  AUDITIONS FOR THE TEMPEST! Must be able to rehearse four nights a week.

  SAVE OUR COMMUNITY FARM! PROTEST TONIGHT!

  Everyone else had it so easy. They tried out for the play. They took the SATs and applied to college and got to introduce themselves without any preconceived notions. Whether they had been sluts or a good time or in love, they got to live their lives the way they wanted to … without the cameras. They never had to wonder what people had heard about them.

  At the end of the day, I saw Miriam. “Are you coming?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. She was so confident, she’d told everyone she saw that it was going to be huge. They should come camera ready, wink, wink, nod nod.

  She said, “You are so awesome.”

  I hated that word. “Fingers crossed. See you in a bit.” I told her I wanted to change my clothes, but that was a lie. What I really needed was a little more alone time, so I could be mentally prepared to face Roxanne.

  I walked out the door. There were no photographers. No reporters. For a moment, I almost felt safe. I almost thought I could walk home, just like everyone else.

  And then I saw them. “Janine. Over here.” Standing on the corner were Dave and Emma. He was wearing a perfectly tailored overcoat. It was definitely cashmere, just the right choice for those in-between temperature days when it’s not cold enough for your Paddington-inspired wool coat, but too chilly to wear a leather jacket. “We need to talk to you,” he said, waving me over. “Something important has happened.”

  Emma, of course, looked over- and underdressed at the same time. She wore a ski jacket and a headscarf—the kind people wore if they needed to wash their hair or if they were bald. And sunglasses. Like she was a movie star who didn’t want to be recognized. When I was close enough to make eye contact, she took them off. She was shivering.

  “Haven’t you ruined my life enough for one week?”

  Without warning, he pulled me into his arms and lifted me into the air. He spun me around and around and around. Emma seemed antsy. She told him to put me down. “You’re going to make her dizzy.”

  He would not stop smiling. “You did it,” he said. “Your hands, your hands, your beautiful holy hands!”

  “Did what?” I asked.

  Emma had very wide, dark eyes. Her skin was pure white. She looked around to make sure no one was listening. “Brian,” she whispered. “The boy in the wheelchair.”

  “What about him?”

  “After he left your house, he began to get feeling back in his legs.” He picked me up and spun me again. “Janine, he’s healed. He’s not paralyzed. Because of you, he can walk.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “He can walk? That guy in the wheelchair?”

  “Yes.” Dave said. “Well, right now he still needs a walker. But he says he can feel himself getting stronger every minute.”

  “Don’t say it’s a coincidence,” Emma said. Again, she looked around, like this was national security. “I looked it up in three medical dictionaries, and they all agreed. Spinal-cord paralysis is not reversible.”

  I was sure my cheeks turned bright red. “That’s great.”

  Emma led me to a small maroon car. “Before you held his hands, he was looking at life in a chair. Now he is getting ready to walk down the street.”

  They were not joking. Dave pointed his key at the car and clicked the door open. “We’d like to take you to see him,” he said. “What do you say?”

  I didn’t move.

  “Say yes,” Emma said, getting into the passenger seat. “He wants to thank you. He is so grateful for everything you’ve done.”

  This had to be a trick. “Who else knows?” I peered around the back of the car, just to make sure we were really alone.

  “No one,” Dave promised. “Trust me. We’ve been very careful. There will be no coverage.” He opened the passenger door. “When something like this happens, we control how the word gets out.”

  “That’s funny.” He didn’t sound so pious now.

  He looked at me like he knew something I didn’t. “Janine, in this world … where there are so many people in desperate need …”

  “Don’t preach to me about this world.” I’d had my share of revelations. “I already know—you can control very little.” You can prove even less. This guy might be willing to thank me privately today, but tomorrow, no doubt, I was going to see him on TV grabbing his fifteen minutes of fame
. “You can swear all you want that you won’t tell, but we all know that if this kid wants to, he can sell his story and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Still, I got into the car.

  Yesterday, he’d been the good-looking paralyzed guy. Now he could walk.

  I was curious.

  Dave’s backseat was full of boxes of shiny brochures. Find the healing power that is within you! Trust in the Lord! His mission’s logo included two imperfect hands. They were posed to welcome me.

  Of course, the hands were scarred—jagged crosses over each palm. The fingers veered off to the sides. I didn’t have to ask whose hands they were supposed to resemble.

  “When Brian’s mother first called,” Dave said, starting the car, “I was sure she was exaggerating. Or hysterical. Honestly, I thought the stress might finally have gotten to her. She’s been alone for a very long time.”

  Emma said, “We doubted her. But then we watched him stand up. We filmed him taking his first steps.”

  Dave drove a little faster, away from my neighborhood and into Bethlehem. “It was all very exciting. We’ve been waiting a very long time for an event like this.”

  Emma opened her window a crack, which created a vibration in the car, a thump, thump, thumping of airflow. She said, “He described it like hitting a wave. First he could feel his feet. Then his legs. He thought he was going crazy. Six hours later, he could wiggle his toes. Then he tried to straighten his knee. Then he called for his mom and right in front of her, stood up out of the chair.”

  “Incredible.” I bet someone was already writing a script to turn his story into a ripped-from-the-headlines movie, the kind that play back-to-back late on Sunday nights.

  Dave said, “Brian has always been a true believer. When we were still at your house, Emma swore she saw the light of God in that boy’s eyes.”

  I closed mine. Even though Brian’s were cute, I didn’t like thinking about eyes. Eyes reminded me of Emir and death and pain. Just the word triggered the memory. If there really was a God, Dave would stop talking about eyes. This light would stay green and we’d drive right past the white church. No stopping. No memories. No questions about Abe.

  Naturally, the light turned yellow. Instead of speeding through, Dave took his time. A family walked right over the spot where Abe lay dying. I asked Emma to roll up the window. She looked at the intersection with interest. “Is that where the miracle happened?” (She might have been sweet and amazing, but she was also very predictable.)

  “It was an accident, not a miracle.” This was the longest light in the town. “His doctors believe in medicine. I’m sure there is another reason for Brian’s recovery.” The light needed to turn green.

  “I don’t agree,” Emma said. “Traditional medicine does not always have an answer. Sometimes, people have to look at alternatives. Sometimes,” she said, smiling at Dave, “they need to open up their mind to see the answers.”

  Turn green. Turn green. “That’s easy to say, impossible to prove.”

  “No one is doubting the validity of science,” Dave said. “But my feeling is this: when science doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you’re out of options. That’s all.” Emma told me about a lady who had some undiagnosed fatigue disease. “Drugs didn’t work, neither did therapy. Once she put her faith in God, she began to grow stronger.”

  On “stronger,” the light finally changed. Dave made a quick left, then another right. This was not the way to the hospital. I asked, “Where are we going?”

  Dave smiled into the rearview mirror. “To the hotel. The college rented me an executive suite. Part of the perks of being a scholar-in-residence.”

  I looked at Emma. “What about you?”

  “A few of us from the mission came along. I’m staying in the hotel too. So are Brian and his mom.”

  That sounded wrong. “Wait a minute. Your parents let you do this? What about school?”

  “My parents support my beliefs,” Emma said. “I already have a GED. What’s so strange about that?”

  What was so strange was everything. She was a girl—she looked no more than fourteen, but must be at least seventeen—and she was following this man, a preacher, instead of going to school, making friends, hanging out with guys. She was strange because she didn’t seem to have a bad thing to say about anything. She wore ridiculously ugly clothes that didn’t look new or even vaguely appropriate. For a moment, I wondered if she had done something terrible—if maybe she was hiding from the cops. Or if Dave had kidnapped her—you heard about things like that—men brainwashing girls and holding them captive for years.

  I just said it. “You two aren’t … you know … ,” I stumbled.

  They both laughed. Dave said, “Janine. Don’t be ridiculous. Emma is like a daughter to me. She’s also a huge part of the mission.”

  I stared at my hands. The air had made my knuckles look a little bit purple. “Could you turn up the heat? My hands are cold.”

  Emma told me not to be embarrassed. “Last year, I probably would’ve thought the same thing.” She turned around and faced me. “Before I met Dave, I was cynical. But he changed my life. His words made so much sense. Bad things do happen. But if we have faith in God, we can help ourselves.” She blasted the heat, but the creases in my hands still looked discolored. “Miracles happen, too. They happen every single day. Successful people rarely get there by traveling in a straight line.”

  Four turns later, Dave drove onto the main street toward the Hotel Bethlehem. The hotel was the tallest building on the block.

  Dave parked the car in the garage. We walked up the stairs, past the man in the big black coat and tall hat, into the lobby. “This is nice,” I said. Lo and Sharon sometimes came here for Girls’ Night Out, but I hadn’t been here since Miriam’s bat mitzvah reception. At the party, Miriam’s mom had joked about the paranormal activity that was part of the history of the hotel. Apparently, some guests had sworn ghosts had woken them up or appeared in their mirrors. Dave hadn’t seen anything like that. “It’s really very nice. Much nicer than the last place we traveled to.”

  We sat down in the lobby. “Brian and his mom will be here any second.”

  I stared at the elevators until the door opened and out stepped a woman in a dress she was ten years too old for. The hem was too short, the neckline too low. She was trying too hard—the fabric looked way too shiny.

  She looked dressed for a party.

  She held the elevator door with an outstretched arm. “They’re here, Brian.”

  He took one step. Then another. Until he stood next to her. Yesterday, he had popped a wheelie. Today, he walked out of the elevator on his skinny, shaky, bare legs and pumped his fists.

  TWENTY-SIX

  He could walk.

  He could really, actually, all-by-himself walk.

  For the second time in one week, I wondered if I was losing my mind. I questioned who I was. For the first time, I couldn’t come up with a logical explanation.

  When we held hands, he was in a wheelchair. Paralyzed. Now he was standing.

  This was not happening.

  I did not do this.

  I couldn’t do this. No human could.

  It defied explanation.

  He walked right up to me. He said, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  He was grateful.

  He was humble.

  Face to face, he was also very very very very good-looking. When we hugged, his knees started to buckle. “Whoa,” I said, laughing, holding him up until he had his balance.

  Dave invited us to go upstairs and sit down. He pressed the elevator button.

  Brian would not let go of my hand. “Don’t take this personally,” he told Dave, “but I am never sitting down again.” He pointed to the outdoor patio and asked me to join him there. Then he said to the others, “Could you guys leave me and Janine alone for just a few minutes?”

  Even though I wished with all my might for them to stay, they all took the elevator
up. That left me and Brian and some marble stairs. We took them slowly. “I want to thank you,” he said, three or four times. It was a little bit awkward—being alone with Brian. Even though he was cute, he couldn’t have had a lot of experience dating.

  I kept it casual. I said, “I’m just so happy for you.” And “It’s so great that you can walk.”

  Brian looked at me like I was a supermodel. “Say that again.”

  I laughed. His walk looked a little wobbly and weak, but he seemed to be getting stronger every second. “I’m happy for you. It’s so great that you can walk.” When he smiled, I caught a glimpse of that dimple, the cute one. He was even better-looking than Dan.

  “It’s all thanks to your hands, and of course,” he said, half-bending one knee for one second, “God’s grace.”

  God’s grace. My hands. I sat down at the table and frowned. That was just what I didn’t want him to say. He reached under the table and held my hands. This was not where I wanted this to go, but that dimple. That smile. I shifted the conversation. “Your doctors must have been excited.”

  He winked, like we had a secret. “More like they didn’t believe me.” His hands felt sweaty. “Ever since I got sick, they told me there was nothing they could do. No cure. No possibility.” A waiter brought us some sodas, and for a few minutes we sipped in silence. “They told me it would be in my best interests to adjust to being in a wheelchair for life.”

  Doctors had told me I’d have to adjust. They sat next to me and said I’d have to get used to having stiff fingers and tired hands. They joked about how I’d just have to find nice boys to open jars for me. They said, “That’s not so bad, right? You’re a pretty girl. Play the damsel in distress.”

  That made me mad, too. But now I said, “They meant well. They don’t know what it’s like.”

  Brian was still complaining about the doctors when Dave returned. He wanted us to come up to his suite. “You really can’t fault your doctors,” he said in the elevator. “Adjustment can be a very sacred step. They are not the only ones who believe that acceptance is the true path to happiness.”