Rapture Practice (13 page)

“Thanks,” I say, and smile.

We’re not dating anymore. When I told her what happened because of the CD, she decided we should go back to being friends.

“You doing okay?” she asks. “When do you find out if you still get to do the play?”

“Tomorrow.” I can’t stop staring at the sheen of pink gloss on her lips. I wish I’d tried to kiss her more when she was my girlfriend.
Why didn’t I?

“I’ll say a prayer,” she says.

“Great. And just so we have all the bases covered, I’m going to cut myself and worship Baal.” I’m joking, but she doesn’t get it.

“What?” She frowns, confused.

“Never mind.” I smile and shake my head. “A little Old Testament humor.”

“Oh!” She laughs, but it’s awkward. “Let me know how it goes.”

“I will.”

She turns to leave, then looks back over her shoulder. “I really like that CD,” she says. Then she pushes through the double doors and into the parking lot.

“I talked to Miss Tyler, Aaron.”

I am standing in my parents’ bedroom, waiting for the
next sentence to come out of Dad’s mouth. The verdict. He and Mom have been here with the door closed since he returned a half hour ago. I could hear hushed voices from the hallway, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

My stomach is in knots and my shoulder blades are pulling into each other like penguins huddled together for warmth on an ice floe.

C’mon, Miss Tyler, please
…

I’ve been quietly chanting this all morning, sending a silent message to the drama classroom at my high school, hoping against hope that Miss Tyler will somehow be able to talk my father into an alternative—any alternative—to pulling me out of the play.

I am somehow startled by the stuff that hangs on the walls of their bedroom, as if I am seeing them for the first time: lace doilies crocheted by Papa, a leaning goose I made from stained pine in sixth grade, groupings of plaques and needlepoint samplers of inspirational sayings and Bible verses, a sheaf of wheat tied with a ribbon, and, over Mom’s antique nightstand, a mirror framed inside an actual horse collar—the kind of black, rubbery harness with big metal rings on the sides that might have been slipped over a Clydesdale’s head and then hitched to a buggy a hundred years ago. It’s a very country, very homespun decorating style, very Early Baptist Bookstore.

I hate it.

I hate the way my stomach feels as I’m looking at it.

I wonder where the horse collar came from. I think about
how I saddled up the horses with Jason last summer at camp in Nebraska, and how exhilarating it was to ride at full gallop. I felt the same sense of sheer glee and power I did with the wind whipping through my hair as Jason and I raced along the rain-slicked Nebraska highway in his little red sports car, speeding back to camp with the music cranked up after we saw that first movie—high volume at a high speed.

Dad’s voice snaps me back to this moment, my fate rushing toward me like a brick wall.

“We talked for quite a while up at the school.”

High speeds. High volumes. My heart is pounding, the blood racing through my ears with a roar only I can hear. I want to feel rain on my face, a ticket stub between my fingers, wind through my hair. I want be anywhere but here.

“So, am I still in the play?”

Even as I ask the question, I want to take the words back, pluck them out of the air, stuff them back down my own throat. I don’t want to know the answer, because I know the answer.

“No, son, you’re not going to do the play.”

Mom looks up at me, startled, and only then do I realize that I’m yelling the word “no” at the top of my lungs. I’ve always read in books about how people can’t breathe when something dreadful is happening—like they’re drowning and their lungs won’t work. Apparently, I don’t have that problem.

“Dad, you can’t! You can’t do this.”

“Son, I know you’re upset—”

“You can’t punish the rest of the cast like this,” I cut him off. I’m desperate, and I don’t care about being disrespectful.

“Aaron, lower your voice,” Mom says, her tone a flashing red light of warning.

“How can you do this to me?” I yell, pressing the accelerator, gathering speed. “Nanny and Papa have already bought plane tickets. They’re coming for opening night!”

“Aaron, I want you to realize that there are some consequences to sin that are worse than a spanking,” Dad says.

“And you think this is going to make me want to
obey
you?” I floor it.

“Aaron Hubert.” Mom uses my middle name, a full-on squad-car siren.

“I know this hurts,” Dad says, “but you have to learn that you cannot lie and get away with it.”

“It was a
CD
, Dad! If you weren’t so uptight about the music that we listen to, I wouldn’t have had to lie about it.”

“Aaron, I have to cause a crisis in your life now so that you learn this lesson before it’s too late.” Dad’s voice is quiet, steady, grieved. “We don’t want to lose you to the world, son.”

“
Lose
me? You don’t want to
lose me
?” I am blind with rage, plowing full speed ahead.

“Aaron, we love you.” Dad’s quiet, slow voice. The freckled blue pickup truck is square in my headlights.

“I HATE YOU.”

The impact is deafening. The part of me so desperate for Dad’s approval is dead on arrival.

“I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU.”

No one has ever dared to say these words to my parents in our home before, much less shout them at a volume that surely
the neighbors can hear. Yet in this moment, I’m unafraid. I don’t care. I’m not worried about the consequence. Shouting these words has changed me on the inside.

I’m sobbing, and all I want to do is get away from this. I turn on my heel and walk down the hall to my bedroom away from their disappointment, their rules, their restrictions—away from
them
. I hear Mom and Dad calling after me, pleading, telling, begging, warning.

I ignore them.

What could they possibly take away now?

Dad decided to take me out of the play the day before spring break. Rehearsals were already scheduled for each of the five days off from school, and now he drives me to the first one that week. He wants me to explain to the cast, to ask their forgiveness. “The only way to turn away from sin is to stand up and admit what you’ve done wrong,” he says, and then he prays with me in the parking lot and asks God to give me strength.

Miss Tyler gathers everyone to the bleachers by the stage in the gym, and Dad calls the cast to attention. “Aaron has something he’d like to say to all of you.”

My friend Dawn has a quizzical expression on her face. She sits in front of me in typing class and has big, beautiful eyes like a Disney princess. I can tell she knows something is
up. As I stand there facing her and all of my other friends I still can’t believe this was happening.

“I need to apologize to all of you,” I begin. Trying to force these words off my tongue is like trying to push a cat into a bathtub. I might be able to do it, but I will be torn and bleeding by the end. I soldier on. I explain about the CD and lying to my Dad about it, and how I can’t do the play as a result.

Miss Tyler hugs me when I finish, and as I walk towards the door of the gym with my Dad, Dawn catches my eye with a small waive of her hand. She and everyone else sits wide-eyed, and uncomfortable on the bleachers, unsure of what has just happened, uncertain how the
Pretty Woman
soundtrack and my lie to my Dad is any of their concern.

As I follow Dad to the car tears fill my eyes once more, but I am tired of crying, and angrily blink them away. How had I let him convince me this was about asking forgiveness of the cast? I don’t feel absolved, I feel ashamed, and ridiculous. It’s bad enough I don’t get to be in the play. Did he have to embarrass me in front of everyone, too?

Daphne has tried her best to cheer me up, but it’s been hard to think about anything else for the past two weeks, and even harder to talk about. Not even Daphne has been able to make me laugh about this, and as the student body files into the gym to see the final dress rehearsal during sixth period, she sits down next to me at the end of a row of bleachers in the back.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

I try to smile but I can’t. Even before the curtain opens, I know I won’t be able to watch what is about to occur.

And I’m correct: The play is a disaster.

Miss Tyler recast my role with a soft-spoken junior who is a nice guy, but not particularly great at comedy. He has no presence in the hallway between classes, let alone on stage. After he butchers the funniest line of the first scene, I slip off the bleachers and leave the gym. I walk down the hall to the music wing, close the door of a practice room, sit down at a glossy black lacquer piano, and cry.

I have heard the phrase
broken heart
before, and I suppose I have been sad in the past, but I realize I have never understood what that phrase meant until now. I have never cried like this before. I want what I’m feeling to end, but it will not.

I’m not even sure what the feelings are; it seems there are so many at once, roiling and rolling over one another. Anger, hurt, and the numbing boredom of sadness have paralyzed me during the past two weeks since Dad told me I wouldn’t be doing the play. I can’t laugh with Daphne. I can barely smile.

I am exhausted from crying and worn out from these feelings—the gnawing anxiety of knowing this day would come, that I’d have to watch this dress rehearsal with the entire high school and feel my humiliation and heartbreak all over again.

My tears are splashing down onto the shiny white keys of the piano, and I lift my hands to wipe away the wet spots. As I do, my fingers find the keys, and the notes of a hymn
arrangement I’ve known for years fill the practice room. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been practicing the piano a lot. When I’m at the keyboard, I drop into the music and everything else falls away. This is one of those songs I don’t have to think about; my fingers know it from memory, so I can put my hands on autopilot and be alone with my thoughts. It’s a beautiful, majestic arrangement, and I play it well. As my fingers float over the keys, the lyrics run through my head:

When peace like a river attendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot Thou has taught me to say

“It is well, it is well with my soul.”

Horatio Spafford wrote these words on the back of an envelope in 1873, while sailing to meet his wife in Europe after she had been rescued from a shipwreck that had claimed the lives of his four daughters. No one has died in my family, so why is the sadness I feel so profound? Why does my grief feel like I’ve lost more than a part in a play?

Dad did more than teach me to act when I was a little boy; he entrusted me with his
love
of something. Acting is the thing he and I share, just like he shares basketball with Josh and Miriam. When I am up in front of a crowd at church or at school singing in a musical or acting in a play I feel his endless encouragement and approval. I see the pride that shines in his eyes. Dad knew this was the one thing he could do that would hurt me the most. He thinks this pain will somehow
bring us closer together, but he’s taken away the thing I feel makes us a team. How can he not see this?

This isn’t discipline. It’s betrayal.

As I play the final arpeggio of the song, fresh tears begin to fall. I am so angry, and so hurt, and so tired of being angry and hurt. I want the pain to go away. I want all to be well with my soul. I’ve prayed a hundred times in the past few weeks, but I don’t know if God can hear me. I’ve begged for forgiveness, I’ve bargained and pleaded, but nothing changed the outcome. I’m still sitting in this practice room while some junior mangles my jokes onstage. In one last-ditch effort, I raise my eyes toward the ceiling.

“Please,” I whisper. “Please, help.”

It’s the only prayer I can manage.

Then I practice the Brahms étude I’m supposed to have memorized for my lesson next week. Maybe God answers my prayer. Or maybe I don’t have any tears left to cry. At some point, I realize my eyes are dry, and I look at the clock. I head to my locker before the curtain call and make my way to the car before the whole student body floods the hallway. The fewer people I have to see, the better.