We stand to sing a hymn, and even though the words are written up on a big screen hanging above the pulpit, I grab a hymnal so that I’ve got something to do with my hands. I follow along in the book, but don’t sing myself. I sound like a hyena on my good days (a hyena in the jaws of a lion on my bad days), and I’m too self-conscious that other people will hear me.
I hear Carson calling me a daredevil, and God, how wrong he was. If I were a daredevil, I would have said screw Dad and auditioned for real dance programs instead of caving to what he thought was best (and what his money provided). I would have found a way to make it all work—the auditioning and the moving and the money. That’s what daredevils do. I also wouldn’t have run off like a timid preteen when Stella caught us together. As if that weren’t pathetic enough, I’d then lied to Stella and told her that maybe I’d had a few drinks after all.
Because, of course, that was the only explanation for me doing something fun and out of character like actually hooking up with a guy.
A guy who didn’t answer either of the texts I sent him yesterday. Clearly he’d gotten over the fascination he’d had with me on Friday night. Maybe he’d been drunk.
I don’t know if I always hate myself this much and I never think about it, or if it’s a product of the reflection that’s inherent in church and religion and being wildly unsuccessful at growing up. Feeling like everyone around me can see the failure written across my forehead certainly doesn’t help either.
I sigh, and when Dad shifts next to me I catch him looking at me from the corner of his eye. I can’t tell if he’s disappointed or worried or annoyed.
Dad really only has two faces: normal and pissed.
And football. Football kind of gets its own expression, though it overlaps with pissed a lot.
Eventually, we return our hymnals to their holding places and take a seat for the sermon. I’ve given up the pretense of paying attention, choosing instead to doodle little dancers in the margins of the church bulletin.
The preacher calls all the little kids up to the front, where he does a short little minisermon for the kids before sending them out for children’s church. It’s usually a parallel for the more complex message he’ll give the rest of us. And I find myself thinking that church is like my kid’s sermon . . . it parallels my life as a whole. I show up, but I’m not in it. I go through the motions, but my mind wanders elsewhere. I dress and behave in the ways I know won’t get me in trouble. I get by. I bide my time waiting for the moment when it all ends.
But life isn’t church. It isn’t one hour during one day in the week. It’s everything, and I’m wasting it.
By the time the service ends half an hour later, I’m awash with emotions, anger and guilt and bitterness swallowing up whatever hope I manage to conjure. As soon as the benediction ends, I slip past Dad before he stands, mutter, “Be right back,” and flee before he’s inundated. As I walk away I hear Mrs. Simmons, whose daughter I went to school with, say, “You know, our youngest is shaping up to be quite the receiver. He’s just in eighth grade, but I’m sure he’ll make varsity as a freshman. Maybe you’ll be seeing him at Rusk in a few years.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. In Texas, everyone is a wannabe coach. Levi used to have strangers hand him plays they’d drawn up “just in case he wanted to try something new.” I pass Levi’s parents gathering their things from the second row, where they’ve sat for as long as I’ve known them. I smile politely and nod as I go.
It’s not their fault their son is a jerk.
Levi stopped coming to church not long after he started college. I should feel guilty over how glad that made me, but I don’t. Church always feels a little bit like I’m putting on a show, but with him here it was ten times worse. If I looked at him too much, of course I was still madly in love with him. But if I didn’t look at him at all, I was madly in love (and heartbroken). It was like living under a microscope.
Breakups are a careful and exhausting dance.
That’s exactly what I need. Dance. It clears my mind better than anything else. I stand by the raised little nook that houses the piano and wait for Mrs. Dunlap to finish the postlude. She must feel me there, because she looks away from her sheet music and gives me an overdramatic smile. She presses the keys with a bit more flourish for my benefit, and I lean against the wall humming beneath my breath.
She holds on to the last chords for a long moment, and they ring out in chorus with the organ before the song ends and only the chattering conversations across the hall are left.
“Let me guess.” Mrs. D turns on her bench to look at me. “You want the studio?”
“How’d you know?”
She snorts. “Because it’s all you want. Always has been.”
I know that. And she knows it. Dad still insists I’ll want other things if I give them a try. After living in a house for eighteen years with me, you’d think he would know me better than the lady who teaches my dance class a few times a week.
“You have a key,” Mrs. Dunlap says. “No reason to drag yourself all the way up here to see little old me.”
She gave me a key when I started teaching classes to the younger kids, but I still felt bad about using it without her permission.
“You’re not old.”
She is. The woman is nearly seventy, but she doesn’t look it. She’s lithe and slender, and if she’d dye her gray hair, she could probably pass for fifty, if not younger.
“Oh pish. You don’t need to suck up to me, child.”
I step up on the platform and place a quick kiss on her cheek. “Learn to take a compliment, Mrs. D.”
I turn to go, and she calls out, “Says the girl who never thinks anything is good enough.”
I blow her a kiss and call back my thanks instead of saying the thought that pops into my head.
Good is never good enough.
One of Dad’s mottos. He would frequently tack on, “Good may win games, but great wins titles.”
As I walk back toward him, he manages to peel himself away from the leeches, I mean, parents surrounding him.
He joins me in the aisle, and we head for the door together.
“Lunch?” he grunts.
I shake my head. “Mrs. Dunlap is going to let me use the studio for a while. I’ll just grab something fast after.”