Beyond the Point(35)
The silence was almost too much to bear. Avery wanted to jump out of her chair and scream: EXACTLY! If God had been there, all those people in those buildings and planes wouldn’t have died. But God wasn’t there, because there was no such thing as God. Tragedies happened every single day. To believe that God could prevent those tragedies but didn’t? That wasn’t confusing. It was offensive. That meant God wasn’t loving—it proved He was cruel.
“I’m sorry,” Avery snapped. “But I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”
Wendy closed her Bible. “Martha’s prayer is one of the most honest, raw prayers I’ve ever read in the Bible. ‘Lord, if you had been here, none of this would have happened.’ It’s her cry from the trenches. And Jesus doesn’t get angry with her. He doesn’t walk away. He cries with her.”
And suddenly, much to Avery’s amazement, the girls were talking. Sharing. Dani said that she’d constantly felt that way about her injuries—that she wanted to believe there was a reason, but she couldn’t understand what God was doing in her life. Lisa Johnson brought up Coach Jankovich. The woman grew worse and more vindictive with every passing day, and Lisa wondered how much more she could stand. Avery pressed her fingers into her eyes and felt wetness. She hated to cry. But somehow, she couldn’t make the tears stop. She wanted to feel angry at God. But you can’t be angry at a God you don’t believe in.
“Let me get this straight. These assholes fly planes into buildings full of people,” Avery cried. “And what? We’re just supposed to trust that God has some bigger plan for all this? What’s the point?”
Wendy took her glasses off. “That’s a really important question, Avery. Keep going.”
“Keep going?” Avery cried. “What else is there to say? It’s bullshit.”
Dani squeezed Avery’s arm tight, and when Avery turned to look at Dani’s face, there were tears streaking down her freckled cheeks, in heavy lines.
Wendy didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she simply nodded her head, letting the sound of Avery’s harried breathing fill the room.
“Yeah. It is,” Wendy said finally. “It is bullshit. And I think that’s why I love this prayer from Martha so much. She’s saying, ‘Where the hell were you, Jesus?’
“It’s dirty. It’s ugly. But it’s faith, just the same.”
9
Spring 2002 // West Point, New York
I have nothing to wear.”
“That’s not true,” said Avery. “Here, try this.” She threw Hannah a black dress.
Pulling it over her body, Hannah stared at herself in the mirror hung on the back of one of the wardrobe doors. The dress hugged her in all the wrong places.
“Um, no.” She pulled it off her head. “That looks like I’m going to a funeral.”
Her small dorm room was littered with clothes. Sequined skirts, spaghetti-strap shirts, Daisy Dukes, and dresses fit for nights of dancing were scattered across the floor. Since they were only allowed to have a few select civilian clothes in the barracks, Avery kept her stash in a trunk in the basketball locker room, where she would not get caught. For this occasion, she’d carted the trunk back down to the barracks. A pile of rejects draped the back of Hannah’s desk chair.
They were allowed to wear civilian clothes only on the rarest of occasions: on infrequent Thursday night spirit dinners, B-weekends as they traveled home or to the city, and select events on campus. Thick with muscle, her thighs looked larger than she remembered, and her arms, though toned, looked strange against the pastel colors of Avery’s clothes. To Hannah, dressing like a girl felt pointless, and suddenly, she understood why no guys at West Point had dared to ask her out. Who needed a ninety-degree rule when you had a wardrobe full of high-waisted wool trousers?
Propelled by a surge of anxiety, Hannah fell face-first onto her bed, wishing that she’d never agreed to let Avery Adams play stylist. How did Avery fit into these clothes anyway?
In high school, Hannah always got asked to dances. The student body had voted her homecoming queen, and the quarterback of the football team was her boyfriend for two solid years—that is, until they’d disagreed about sex. He’d wanted it; she’d wanted to wait. The relationship had ended abruptly and without much fanfare. And though she’d never been afraid of being alone in the past, with Avery around, Hannah couldn’t escape the daily reminders that she was desperately, permanently single.
“You seen Avery?” a guy from the lacrosse team had asked last week, popping his head into her room.
“Nope, not here.”
“Adams around?” ventured a dark-haired Latino cadet Hannah had never seen before.
“Sorry.”
“Where’s Avery?” John Collins would demand, for what felt like the millionth time. He was the only one Hannah knew for certain Avery was trying to avoid. Apparently, she’d broken off their fling, and the green-eyed Collins had gone green all over.
“Beats me, Collins. You might try her room,” Hannah had said.
The last time he’d come around, Collins had thrown his fist into the cinder-block wall and Hannah thought she’d heard his knuckle crack.
“You should talk to him,” Hannah had suggested a few days later in the women’s locker room. She and Avery were both cleaning out their lockers after the season ended. “It seems like he might need some closure.”