Shine - Lauren Myracle [27]
“Cat,” Miz Hetty repeated.
I looked at the college boy, who’d gone pale beneath his tan. I clenched my hands to still their trembling.
“You are what you are, and I am what I am,” I said. “And maybe I am a hillbilly or a hick or whatever, but I would never use the word you said. Not if a person was white or black.”
My voice shook just as it did when I first addressed him. This time he didn’t smirk.
“I think you should leave,” Miz Hetty told him.
The college boy looked at me. His lips parted, and he struggled for words. “Listen,” he said. “I, um . . . I really didn’t . . .”
“I think you should leave now,” Miz Hetty said.
He nodded, defeated. He returned the graphic novel carefully to its rack and walked out of the library. I watched him the whole way, confused by what I was feeling. He didn’t look back.
I left not long after, and on the bus ride home, I wondered at what I’d done. It was almost as if a different person had taken over my body—except, was saying that a cop-out? I hadn’t been “possessed,” after all. Not by an angel or a demon. Maybe there were aspects of both inside me, but I was the one who chose which to let out.
I truly was a different person now than when I was a kid, however. When I was a kid, I was curious and fearless, and the two qualities were twined together like ivy. I drove Aunt Tildy crazy with “all that wildness,” as she put it, and in the summer, when I didn’t have school to keep me out of her hair, she would shoo me out of the house as soon as my chores were done. She forbade me to come back till she called Christian and me in for dinner.
But what if I stepped on a rattlesnake? I’d asked. What if a dog bit me, and it had rabies and was foaming from the mouth? What if I saw a baby floating down the creek in a basket made of woven reeds, like little baby Moses?
“No,” she said to all of those. “You can only come in the house if you’re bleeding, and I’m not talking about a scratch from picking blackberries. If you come bothering me, you better have a whole cup full of blood. And now that I’m thinking about it, if you’re bleeding that much, don’t you dare come in the house. Just stay on the porch and holler for me.”
Mama Sweetie, on the other hand, gave me another way to look at myself. She said God had blessed me with an abundance of spirit, and not to ever squash it down. She said there was goodness in everything and everyone, and that it was our job to let that goodness shine out.
“A person does on occasion lose his way,” she warned Patrick and me. “We all have our trials. But I’m gonna tell y’all something, something I want you to remember. Can y’all do that for Mama Sweetie?”
“Yes, ma’am,” we chorused, giggling and making eyes at each other.
She knew she was being teased, but she didn’t mind. She wagged her finger and said, “God loves you even on your blackest days, and He will always, always be there to guide you home. All you have to do is look for the light of His love. As long as you remember that one thing, why, then you can cast off the darkness and shine again, can’t you?”
I used to believe her. Then, for a while, I stopped. I guess I lost my way.
I wasn’t sure I’d found it again, as I hadn’t acted . . . exactly . . . shiny at the library. Yes, I was right to defend myself, but I’d gone too far.
Even so, I was proud of myself for taking action at all. I didn’t hide or run away or pretend the ugliness didn’t happen. I stood up and said something that was true. I said it out loud, and by doing so, I was standing up for lots of people, not just me.
I wondered—and again, I wasn’t sure—but I wondered if a bit of God’s light was maybe back inside me. If so, it was a dove that might at any moment fly away. But for now, here it was: soft and wondrous in the branches of my soul.
TEN DAYS HAD GONE BY SINCE PATRICK WAS attacked, and the police were no closer to finding Patrick’s assailant than when they started. When I was at the library, I read on the Internet that the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation had been brought in, since