Maranatha: Chapter 14.

- Chapter 14 -

Maranatha had heard, years ago, that the Agees lived in a mansion. According to the inter-church gossip circuit, it was a gated twelve-acre estate high on a hill and surrounded with flowering trees that made their home invisible from the road. At Christmas, they hosted Gatsbyesque soirees, opening their house to other area pastors and a few select families of their 5,000-member congregation.

Before Gideon came back to Ridgewood to teach, when Maranatha was around thirteen, her mother and stepfather were invited to one of the Agees’ parties. Anne had been invited to preach at a women’s ministry banquet at their church earlier that year. Children weren’t allowed at the party, so Maranatha was forced to stay home with a sitter, dreaming up tables filled with crab puffs and caviar; a twelve-foot tree trimmed in glitter and gold leaf; a live jazz band playing carols as guests tippled sparkling cider; and Gideon home on holiday, regaling guests with stories of post-college life.

She’d never gotten to tell him that she’d thought of him long before he resurfaced, wondering what he might look like or if he had children or whether she’d ever see him again. Maybe he knew. Maybe he figured it, but didn’t quite care.

As it turned out, the house wasn’t quite as palatial as Maranatha had imagined it all these years. It was stone and brick with beautiful bay windows and a sprawling, impeccably manicured lawn, but it wasn’t exactly a compound with a family crest over the threshold and horse stables in the backyard.

That Maranatha was able to pry her hands from her steering wheel, after working up the nerve to park in the Agees’ graveled driveway, was a marvel, but she managed it. She couldn’t tell if anyone was home. There were no silhouettes of movement behind the sheer, silvery curtains on their front windows, and any cars that may’ve been there were probably parked in their double-garage. What would she do if one of his parents answered? Would their eyes still shoot laser-like contempt and disdain? Would they glare at her through the peephole and yell that she should leave before she inflicted any further damage on their family?

She’d always wanted to apologize to them. On occasion, she still strolled down the greeting card aisle at the grocery store, looking for an appropriately remorseful message. But there was just no way Hallmark could help her adequately express the sentiments, I’m sorry I sued your son. I’m sorry for any insomnia my parents might’ve induced by demanding “justice” from the “crime” of an unassuming kiss. I’m sorry jail time was threatened. I hate that your equity in this house was jeopardized. I’m sorry I wasn’t more convincing, defending him, and that my stepfather remembered the Christmas Eve he spent here and saw dollar signs, recalling your plush white carpet, your baby grand piano, the stainless steel appliances in your kitchen, and your imported leather upholstery. I’m sorry if, afterward, you ever resented your son. I’m sorry I thought I could love him.

Maranatha: Chapter 13.

Part II

- Chapter 13 -

Law offices set Gideon’s teeth on edge—and with good reason. He envied the millions of people who got to live their whole lives with little to no contact with the justice system. They were lucky, traipsing joyously about, nursing benign delusions about the effectiveness of Law, and luckier still were those for whom Law was simply an abstraction to bandy about at dinner parties.

They would never know the sting of arrest or accusation. Central booking ink would never blacken their fingers. Their mugshots wouldn’t be Googleable. Their paychecks would never be garnished. They wouldn’t have to explain their complicated history with law enforcement on an additional sheet of a job application.

And above all, they’d never have to suffer a fidgety paralegal repeatedly offering room temperature water from a dusty pitcher in a windowless room like this one.

He’d worked with Cooper, Willis, and Dunn once before. They specialized in discrimination and child advocacy and they’d settled his case with Maranatha’s father. They were a much smaller firm then and what he remembered most about them was that they weren’t hard-nosed about agreeing to settle, even though pushing that case to trial would’ve brought them very high-profile publicity.

They seemed fair and he was appreciative, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be here a minute longer than he needed to be. The stuffiness of the room and his inability to look outside it made him feel like an interrogation was imminent. The overhead light was abrasive. The print on the wall, of a boy at the edge of a pond filled with water lilies, was cloying and, for whatever reason, that made him uncomfortable, too.

Maranatha: Chapter 12.

catch up with a visit to the archives.

- Chapter 12 -

It was glass, delicately blown from the breath they held, on each other’s approach. A paper-thin pane, their friendship: fragile and crystalline and spotless. But there it was: hanging in those spare, unnoticed moments when they glanced and looked away to grin to themselves before or after class. It was widening, this glass, during those first few months as she wrote elegant op-eds for the school paper, as he gingerly critiqued the poems and photographs she’d submitted to The Manna Quarterly. Every conversation, a vibrant stain. Every smile, a beam of color through the glass.

By late winter, when the worst of the snow had fallen and she knew that more of senior year was behind her than before her, Maranatha began to let slip tiny bursts of excitement every weekday morning. And though she absorbed more than enough customarily sour stares and nose-upturns each day to dampen her high spirits, Gideon was there in the afternoon, waxing practically romantic about Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and her lips couldn’t help but perk up at the corners.

She’d been collecting a sack of happy incidents: that time he’d caught her crying on a side entrance step and dropped his briefcase to sit beside her, silent, till she stopped; the poem he wrote and read during class, about Jesus as a swashbuckler; how close he’d stood so close in the cafeteria line once that their trays almost touched.

He was the kind of teacher she’d never thought she’d encounter till college, the kind she feared might only exist as myth. He was free-thinking. He wasn’t afraid to reference other religions and knew how to cast his lot with one, without disrespecting the others. Though he rarely referenced the bible in lessons, his voice took on equal parts ecstasy and reverence whenever he cited it. She recognized the tone as near identical to her own and knew that the great joy of Gideon’s Christian life had been approaching the bible as poem and story and surprising himself with how easily he accepted all its accounts, however horrifying or fantastical.

Sometimes, in class, Maranatha found herself wanting to run with him, to grab his hand and spirit him away to some reckless space where her crush made sense and she didn’t feel self-doubt singeing its edges.

Maranatha: Chapter 11.

get caught up with a visit to the archives.

- Chapter 11 -

The Law Offices of Cooper, Willis, and Dunn were in an office park near a shallow manmade lake. Shady elms encircled the lake and ducks flitted back and forth between the brackish water and the long grass. When Maranatha pulled into the labyrinthine parking lot, she angled her car into a spot under one of the trees, even though the building she wanted was much farther back in the complex. She stared out at the water for a while and at a pair of agitated ducks, boxing one another with wildly flapping wings. Then she leaned forward, resting her chin on her steering wheel, and gazed up at the sky.

She couldn’t see the sun, obscured as it was by tufts of cloud, but its beams barreled down in angled rays; and she imagined God holding a scepter refracting the light. Maranatha had always thought of God as air, intangible and shapeless unless He compressed Himself into something small enough for her attempt to fathom—like a white giant in a robe with stone tablets, holding a scepter of sun.

Jesus, on the other hand, was always very human to her. She had no doubt that, if she shuttled back in time two millennia, he’d be there. He’d have rebel eyes and a wry grin and she’d be madly in love with him, so in love that when he died, she’d cut her own wrists and hope to die along with him. But then, as she awaited her end, the gashes she’d opened would seal and her life, so amazingly spared, would be listed among the last of the pre-resurrection miracles.

The Holy Spirit seemed something else entirely. It was what she felt when she made bad decisions, constantly, impartially observing. It was what the “something” whenever she heard the words, “Something told me to…” It was the complicated scriptures that still floated up to her, all these years after she’d memorized them. The Holy Spirit hovered and always felt really close by, too close sometimes, like a person whose slightly stale breath you felt clinging to your barely conscious face, as he checked your vitals.

Maranatha liked the way she imagined the Trinity. It helped her to conceive of each branch in a very personal way. She’d never told anyone of the grand tales she’d spun, dating back to early girlhood, of God as avenger and Jesus as rescuer and Holy Spirit as conscience and key. She feared accusations of blasphemy from people who were part of her old life—Anne and all the old church folks she might meet during the course of the trial. And she feared skepticism and ridicule from the people who were part of her life now—the academics at the colleges where she taught, the few acquaintances she still knew from college, her Tuesday Night Writers Circle.

It was a part of herself she’d learned to fiercely guard. Holy Pentecost Academy had been cruel. Sometimes, it was even vicious. But she’d stopped believing that anyone there represented the God she knew by the time she was ten years old. After that, their behavior stood on its own, apart from what she thought Christianity was or what she hoped it could be.

Holy Pentecost was just a nightmarish Evangelical factory where she’d been trapped until she turned eighteen. She’d been reminding herself of that her whole adult life. The Academy was just something to get over; it didn’t hold the truths of her faith and she shouldn’t allow it to shape her future.

Of course, that was nearly impossible to accept, no matter how many mantras and positive confessions and “forgetting those things which are behind” sermons she heard. This was why she needed to sue the school. She needed sit among people who knew, and talk about how deeply this place scarred its students’ souls.

Maranatha: Chapter 10.

turn to your neighbor and say, “visit the archives.”

- Chapter 10 -

In his dream, he was dead and meandering through an emptiness he assumed was heaven, in the absence of flame-melted flesh and the gnashing of teeth. Every minute, his chest swelled with a tidal wave of relief and gratitude. Every minute, that wave receded into a chasm of loneliness too certain and unchangeable to bear.

He woke, back home, gutted and hungry. The sunlight in his old room seemed dingy. The sounds he heard, his parents milling about, already hours into their day, were tinny and muffled but swift and efficient.

Being here reminded him of how he used to feel on Saturday mornings, when he’d wake to find the massive house creepily still and his heartbeat would quicken as he threw back his bedsheets and rushed through the halls. The longer it took him to find one of his parents, the more sure he became that the rapture had taken place in the middle of the night and he’d been left behind.

He’d check the bathrooms first, looking as much for his parents as for their pajamas in a pile on the floor. Then he’d run down the winding staircase and head to the kitchen. Then his father’s study. Then the sunken family room.

All the while, he’d hearken back to the movies he’d watched when he was little, with the bloodcurdling screams of a wife upon finding her husband missing and the multi-car highway pileups that began with the disappearance of one driver. He’d think of the scriptures that’d been drilled into him: Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.

He’d freak out about the candy he stole at Giant and the lie he told about being sick in the men’s room, when he’d really ditched Sunday school for an Egg McMuffin from the McDonald’s up the street of the church. He’d mutter to himself, “Lord, I’m sorry! I repent! Please forgive me!” even though it was becoming increasingly clear that his pleas were too little, too late.

Then he would shudder at the thought of a microchip under his skin or a barcode branded on his forehead or the back of his hand or his neck: the Mark of the Beast. He’d imagine scorpions with the heads of women and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And what about when things became so bad that he tried to kill himself—again and again and again—only to find that he couldn’t, that he was doomed to remain alive until Armageddon? And what if his head was shoved into a guillotine and he was asked to deny Christ to spare himself? Would he do it?

And then he’d double back to the kitchen, his shoulders slumped as he resigned himself to his fate as a kid left behind to manage post-apocalyptic life all alone.  He might as well toast himself some Eggos before food became unattainable, without the Mark of the Beast.

Maranatha: Weekend Weigh-In.

It’s been almost two weeks since I started working on Maranatha: A Novel.

Last Friday, I decided that I’d take weekends off. Initially, I thought I was doing this just to take a breather—and to allow any new or potential readers to catch up, so it wouldn’t seem like a constant barrage of overlong blog entries. Now, I realize that the more chapters I write the more writing-free weekends are a necessity, just so I can re-read what I’ve got so far.

I can’t believe I’m nine chapters in.

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to open the floor to comments. I know that a few friends are reading and I really appreciate your time and any comments you’ve already left! You all are keeping me focused and accountable and I really think I might be able to finish this before September (which was my goal).

Here are a few things I’m interested in hearing about from you, regarding the first nine chapters:

• Are Maranatha and/or Gideon sympathetic characters?
• What is your perception of Holy Pentecost Academy so far?
• Where does there seem to be too little development?
• What are you still left wondering about the characters/plot?
• Do the characters’ motivations and attraction(s) seem believable?
• Do you feel like the plot is moving forward?

Please feel free to address these inquiries as briefly or extensively as you’d like by leaving a comment. And don’t hesitate to chime in on anything that isn’t listed in the questions above. I welcome any observations, criticisms, or questions you may have.

Thanks again for reading. See you Monday!

Maranatha: Chapter 9.

to catch yourself up, get into the archives.

- Chapter 9 -

She was distracting. Did she realize how gracefully she walked, how squaring her shoulders once and for all would be all it took to make her formidable? Did she know how closely she resembled an editorial fashion spread with her angular movements, the abstract slope of her arm on her desk as she propped her chin in her hand, and the sharp juts of her jittery legs as she sat? Was he obvious when she strode by his desk in the morning and he quickly inhaled, like someone had just lit incense?

Of all the things Gideon had fantasized about, coming back here—storming the administrative offices and staging a coup or throwing copies of I Kissed Dating Goodbye out of his classroom windows or burning a bottle of Pompeian Extra Virgin in effigy or planning a field trip to a Unitarian church with a lesbian pastor—attraction to a student had never crossed his mind.

For one, church girls weren’t his type. He didn’t like their clothes, the ill-fitting skirt suits with boxy shoulders and overlong hemlines or the unfortunate floral patterns on all their dresses. Even when they wore something normal—a pair of jeans and heels, for instance, or a form-fitting frock—he hated the way they fancied themselves quietly revolutionary for it.

Their conversation also wearied him. They were so much more preoccupied with what other people were into, since they considered so many things sin themselves—so many things, besides gossip, of course. And worst of all was their preoccupation with marriage. When would they realize that, “I’m believing God for a husband” was second-date Kryptonite?

The dating venues were so limited. Restaurants. Bowling alleys. Museums. Movies were an option, but with anything rated R, a church girl might make a show of cringing at all profanity and looking away during any sex scenes or, worse yet, covering her eyes. Then later, when Gideon asked if she liked the film, he’d likely be forced into a lengthy conversation about the uselessness of onscreen nudity, or else she’d clam up and treat the whole outing like some kind of spiritual betrayal. She’d side-eye him, accusingly, like he was trying to coax her away from her salvation or, worse yet, her virginity.

Gideon couldn’t take the constant edge, the endless, dogging worry about shocking a date or knocking her off her evangelistic square.

He preferred women who’d grown up only attending church in passing or irreligious women who conceded belief in God but didn’t need to discuss Him on their dates. His favorite type of all was a woman who’d been devoutly raised with any religion—Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam—but had, for whatever reason simply stopped practicing.

They seemed best able to understand him.

Maranatha: Chapter 8.

catch yourself up with a visit to the archives.

- Chapter 8 -

This was Maranatha’s summer: sharing a bedroom with Anne at her nana’s apartment in Ridgewood; rabidly scanning the face of the driver in every car she passed, looking for signs of Gideon, on those rare occasions when she left the house; scrambling to write as much as she could before she was due back in Grand Rapids for the start of the fall semester, and preparing for the possibility of testifying in a class action suit against her alma mater.

It started slowly, as Ridgewood summers do, with steamy air clinging to her bare arms like cellophane and, in the wake of her recent breakup with Elias, a torturously silent Blackberry. But there were some perks to her lazy Maryland hometown, like the dollar-sales on plump, tart blueberries at the local produce stand all summer and the endless supply of dark, sweet cherries swollen with juice. There were the cheap matinees at Ridgewood 8 where the air conditioning kicked up to Icelandic and made you forget how sweaty and clammy and gross you’d felt before deciding to catch a movie.

“Look up in that cabinet and get me the vanilla extract.”

She spent most of her time with her mom, their minds elsewhere. It was curious to Maranatha, how painstakingly they avoided talking about the lawsuit or the complicated past that had precipitated it. She shouldn’t have been surprised; there were far more things Maranatha didn’t discuss with Anne these days than things she did. But it was still odd to dance around the details that loomed and the choices that would have to be made concerning them.

Maranatha: Chapter 7.

catch yourself up with a visit to the archives.

- Chapter 7 -

Maranatha decided extracurriculars were pointless in middle school, when she tried out for gymnastics. Another team hopeful told everyone there she was gay and none of the girls would volunteer to spot her. But now that she was a senior with a tepid GPA, she needed all the help she could get. College application deadlines were looming and for the opportunity to skip town, possibly for good, she was willing to make sacrifices.

Three weeks into the school year, she began noticing new flyers plastering bulletin boards, hallway corridors, and empty lockers. The blue ones announced the revival of the school paper; there hadn’t been one in years, ever since the alleged “budget cuts” of five years ago, the ones that just happened to coincide with the “renovation” of the nurse’s suite and the installation of surveillance cameras in the classrooms and halls.

The other flyers, gold ones, announced the launch of Holy Pentecost’s first literary magazine, The Manna Quarterly. Maranatha made a mental note of the date for the combined informational meeting.

But as she approached the cafeteria after school that Friday and heard far more voices than she’d anticipated, she considered bailing. Sweat pulsed into her palms. Her teeth began to chatter like she was cold, even though the hall was stuffy and unseasonably warm.

It’d be easy to just head home. Maybe should manage a few undisturbed hours while her mother prayed and studied for upcoming speaking engagements before her stepfather got home. She thought of her CD collection, of the journal tucked under her bed, of the Oreos she’d bought at the grocery store two days ago. But home’s creature comforts paled as she imagined a faraway dorm room and a major that didn’t require her to memorize psalms.

She steeled herself, creeping up to the massive, closed double doors. Through the window in one of them, she saw that of the twenty-eight round tables in the cafeteria, ten were filled. The size of the crowd confused and intimidated her. Jake Rich was there with his wide-eyed freshman girlfriend. Cammi Shaw was sitting a table surrounded by her usual coven. Cosi whispered something to Demetria that made them both turn and grin idiotically at Ben Waldron, the best artist in school. And there were clusters of underclassmen she didn’t know, milling around their own social whirls.

Maranatha: Chapter 6.

get caught up. visit the archives.

- Chapter 6 -

Gideon found himself zoning out quite often: in the morning, as he waited on a slice of bread to leap up from the toaster; at stop signs on near-empty residential streets; in showers, where he stood under the steaming deluge until he exhausted his hot water; in roundtables at the agency, while his colleagues cooked up copy for new ad campaigns; in restaurant booths sitting across from lovely women he’d rather drop off than dine with.

But it was particularly bad in churches, where the entire setup—half-hour of praise and worship, twenty-minute pre-offering sermonette, forty-five-minute sermon—seemed designed as a license to let his mind wander.

This was why he still went.

He’d chosen a place that didn’t remind him of home, an emerging church with all-White members, lax interpretations of biblical edicts, and a name ambiguous enough to belong to any number of businesses. It was the kind of place where you’d attend men’s bible study and, afterward, meet back up at bar for beers. Sometimes, rather than preaching, the pastor would screen a short film, shot by his Visual Arts Ministry, and the congregation would laugh and gasp and lift its hands, as actors played out some hardship on a scripture could fix. Once there was even popcorn.

They liked Gideon at The Lighthouse. When he wasn’t there, a twenty-year-old hipster whose actual birth name was Megatron shot him the occasional “Where ya been, bro?” text. When he was there, they worked hard to include him, asking him to offer his opinion on the design of their promotional material or trying to convince him to create an oversee a “Marketing Ministry.”

Gideon assumed the attention had to do with him being Black. This had happened to him a few times since he’d moved to Bellevue. He’d enter an all-white setting and either people were overly enthusiastic about his presence or they averted their eyes when he entered. The Lighthouse seemed really eager to have him there. Sometimes, if he stuck around long enough to have a conversation, he’d zone out while the person was talking, imagining himself grinning on their next brochure, standing between Tron and some bright-eyed girl with pink lip gloss and long blonde hair.