Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock(28)

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Do you go to high school here in town?”

“No, I don’t,” she said to me, and then said, “Jesus loves you,” to a group of businessmen who ignored her and the tract she was trying to hand them. They didn’t even look at her. It was like she was invisible. And while I’m not really one for getting into debates with religious people either, I felt bad for Lauren, because she had this desperate look in her eyes—the kind that needs someone else to make it go away. I imagined she was invisible to most commuters, who only wanted to go home after a long day of work, which I knew from many hours of observation.

I mean—there are people who believe in one of the various gods available already and therefore don’t need the tract, and then there are people who will never believe in this sort of thing. And I imagine the gals and guys in between mostly aren’t interested in being harassed on their way to and from work.

“Where do you go to school?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Oh, I’m homeschooled.”

“So your mom teaches you?”

“And my dad. Yes.”

She kept looking eagerly at the people coming out of the subway station and wasn’t really paying me much attention anymore, which I thought was weird, since I was the only person who had taken her pamphlet. You’d think she’d concentrate on winning me over, right? She was a classic femme fatale—determined, gorgeous, a real dame.

“Why?” I said.

“Why what?”

“Why are you homeschooled?”

“My parents want me to have a Christian education.”

“What’s that?” I said, just to keep the conversation going.

“An education rooted in the Bible.”

“Oh.”

“Jesus loves you,” she said to an old man who ignored her outstretched pamphlet.

“If I read this,” I said, holding up the story she gave me, “can we talk about it afterward?”

She turned to face me and her eyes lit up. “Are you serious? You’ll really read it and consider giving your life to Jesus Christ?”

“Sure,” I said, and then laughed. I must have been the first person who ever agreed to read her tracts. She was acting like a little excited kid, but she had to be about my age—and yet she seemed so much younger, maybe unspoiled, like she could still get really excited about something in public without trying to hide it. Even though she was getting excited about Jesus, I liked the fact that she was genuinely keyed up about anything.

She said, “Do you want to come to my church this Sunday?”

“Let me read this and we can talk about it.”

“How will you contact me afterward?” she said, looking very concerned.

“I’m going to read it on that bench over there and then we can talk, okay?”

She bit down on her bottom lip and nodded way too enthusiastically—like it sort of creeped me out—and if she wasn’t doing that cat-eye thing that Lauren Bacall sometimes does in Bogie films, the thing where she squints sophisticatedly and looks up at her man from under her eyebrows or seductively out of the corners of her eyes, I probably would have left right then.

When I started toward the bench, she said, “Oh, wait,” and then began shuffling through her papers. She smiled and said, “Read this one instead,” and extended a new pamphlet toward me. “It’s for teenagers.”

“Okay.” I sat down on the bench and read it in about five minutes.

It was sort of unbelievable.

Actually, it was a little insane—and should have been my cue to get the hell away from this dame.

The basic gist is that there are four teenagers in a convertible, out “cruising”—two guys, two girls. They go to the woods to “park,” which I gather basically means to drink beer, make out, and feel each other up. The protagonist of the pamphlet is the boy in the backseat, who is a “born-again Christian” and feeling a bit conflicted about the “sins” that are happening. In the little bubble over the kid’s head it said something like, “Cindy is so beautiful and I really want to go all the way with her, but I know Jesus would be disappointed in me. I already let him down by drinking beer.”44

At one point you get the protagonist’s view of the front seat—it’s one of those old-style front seats that’s like a bench with no space in between the driver and passenger, or no center console, which makes me think this is a very old tract—maybe from the 1950s. And we see the girl’s naked ankles sticking up in the air, which I guess means the couple in the front is having sex. Cindy, the girl in the backseat, says to the protagonist, “You know you wanna. Let’s have some fun. Didn’t your mother ever tell you to try new things?”

The next frame shows protagonist Johnny chugging a beer.

And then we see them driving home and the driver’s eyes are slits, which I assume means he is drunk.

We get a close-up of Johnny’s face next, and the bubble over his head reads, “I let you down, Jesus. Sex. Booze. I’m so so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”

You won’t believe this but the next frame shows the car crashing into a tree, and then we see Johnny’s ghost floating up to heaven, which is when I figured out that he was dead. I was sort of happy that the other three teenagers lived at least, but I couldn’t figure out the point of the story.