Before the Rooster Crows
by Morgan Want
“I wish your parents would change their minds about letting you come to the lake this weekend, Steph. It won’t be half as fun without you.”
I looked up from the cold pasta I was pushing around my cafeteria lunch tray, and shrugged.
“I do too, but I wouldn’t bet on that happening.”
Kara had already brought up the lake trip three times that week. She was my best friend; I knew she wasn’t trying to make me feel bad that I wasn’t going. She just didn’t believe I’d tried hard enough to convince my parents to let me go.
“Why won’t they let you go?” a freckle-faced girl named Brie asked.
“Oh, they just don’t like me missing church,” I said casually.
Then I lowered my head and focused on winding spaghetti noodles around my fork, so Kara wouldn’t notice how red my face was getting, like it always did when I lied.
Brie made a sour face. “Okay, sure, but it’s just one Sunday. My parents don’t even go every week.”
“They say Sundays belong to God,” I said.
Of course, going by their actions, Sundays also belonged to football and early afternoon naps. But saying they didn’t want to miss church was less embarrassing than the real reason they wouldn’t let me go to the lake: there would be boys and no parents.
“Man, I’m glad my parents aren’t the Bible-thumping kind,” said. Derek, Brie’s boyfriend. “My grandma sure is, and she drives everyone crazy with it,” he said. “You should have heard her chew out my parents when they let my sister get her ears pierced.”
“What does that have to do with the Bible?” Brie asked.
“Wouldn’t know,” Derek said. “She just went on this rant about letting in sin.”
“Well, Stephanie’s parents let her get two ear piercings, so I know they’re not that bad,” Kara said.
“Definitely not,” I laughed, grateful that Kara stepped in.
She always knew the right thing to say when I didn’t.
My parents had a strict rule for when I was growing up: I could play outside as much as I wanted, but I couldn’t leave the backyard without them. But Kara? She walked around town without an adult all the time. That’s how we met.
I saw her outside my backyard fence one day. We stared at each other for a minute, and then I walked over and asked if she wanted to come inside for a popsicle. It felt natural for Kara to be there. She kept coming around, and it wasn’t long before we were best friends.
Now our relationship was changing. Kara was the first person in our class to get her driver’s license, and suddenly the rest of our class wanted to hang out with her more. Her parents didn’t put the same restrictions on her that I knew mine would, once I got my license. She could take their car any time, as long as she remembered to refill the tank.
The boundaries of my life stayed the same, while hers widened. There were times, like with this lake trip, where I felt like I was still stuck in my backyard, watching Kara explore without me.
“It’s one Sunday,” Kara said. “Do you even believe in all that stuff?”
“No, of course not,” I blurted out.
I wanted to snatch the words back and shove them back down inside of me, but it was too late.
“Well, that sucks,” Kara said after a pause.
The conversation moved on without me, but I didn’t listen. Fear and horror rushed through me like a cold stream. I did believe in God, but I just said I didn’t. To deny God, I’d always been taught, was to lose your soul.
Once, I saw a couple of girls in my class get into a fight in the hallway. It ended when one of them ripped out the other’s lip ring. I always thought losing your soul would feel like that, the tearing away of something separate from your body, but still linked to it.
I jumped when the bell rang, but nobody noticed. The day went on as usual. Lightning didn’t strike me dead. The ground didn’t open up and swallow me. I started to calm down a little. After all, it wasn’t as if I’d meant what I said. God knew I believed in him, and if Kara didn’t know that too, after all our years of friendship, what did it matter? Backtracking would just make me look stupid.
When Mom picked me up that afternoon, she asked if anything interesting happened that day.
“No, not really,” I said.
And I meant it.
*
There was a window above our kitchen sink. If we finished dinner late enough, I could see the sunset while I helped Mom with the dishes in the evenings. When I looked out it that night, I froze.
“I know,” Mom said. “It’s beautiful tonight, isn’t it?”
It was. The sky was cut into two perfect halves: a death blue night fading into new, pink light. A cut made by an expert surgeon. I felt I was squinting through a peephole at something bigger and more beautiful.
For the first time in hours, I thought about what I’d said at lunch. It did matter, and it always would.
“Are you okay, Steph?” Mom asked. “You look sick.”
I didn’t know how to tell her what I’d done. I didn’t know what to say at all.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired. That’s all.”
*
I knew the thing to do was tell the truth to Kara and our friends, but if I did, I’d be admitting that I was a liar who cared more about what other people thought than what I really believed. But the guilt was always with me, like silt shifting under murky water. Did I really have to confess to be absolved of my sin? Couldn’t my guilt be enough? Something inside me said no, so I decided I would just make up for my sin some other way.
After church that Sunday, I told Mom I wanted to start helping with children’s church. It took place during the main service, so the pre-K aged kids didn’t have to sit quietly in the sanctuary the whole time. Mom was one of the regular teachers. She didn’t try to hide her surprise.
“What’s brought this on?” she asked.
“I just want to help out more around the church,” I said. “Do God’s will and all that. What’s so weird about that?”
“Nothing, you’ve just never shown much interest in helping with it before.”
And by that, she meant I avoided it the way a fugitive avoids the police.
“If you really want to help though, I’m glad.”
She beamed at me, and I had to look away.
When my friends came back from the lake the next day, they couldn’t stop talking about what a great time they had. I tried to stay off the subject, not wanting to bring up the reason I said I couldn’t go with them. We found other things to talk about, and things went on as usual. That’s what I thought, anyway.
A few days later, Kara pulled me aside at lunch.
“Stephanie, are you mad at me?”
“Huh? Why would I be mad at you?”
“You’ve been really quiet since I got back from the lake. I thought maybe you were mad I went without you.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t even care about that.”
“Something’s bothering you,” Kara said. “And don’t say it’s nothing. I know you, and something is. Your parents aren’t giving you a hard time, are they?”
“No!” I said again. “I mean, I know they’re a lot stricter than your parents, but I can deal.”
Kara blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean, yours seem to trust you to take care of yourself more than mine do.”
That sounded so much worse.
“I guess,” Kara said. “But sometimes I wish they were more like your parents. They really care about you.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like your parents don’t care,” I stammered.
“No. I know. Oh, I don’t know what I mean. They just like to do their own thing. As long as I’m not dead, they don’t care what I do.”
Now that I thought about it, Kara had always spent more time at my house than I did at hers, and I rarely saw her parents when I was there. I remembered the day we met, how she’d been walking alone, as if she had nothing better to do and no one to miss her. Was it because she didn’t? In all the time I’d been jealous of her, had she been jealous of me?
“I know my parents love me, but not like yours do,” she said. “So it bothers me to think you might be having problems. I don’t know why.”
There was a vulnerability in her face I’d never seen before. There we were, two people who claimed to be best friends, and we both coveted something the other didn’t consider worth having. But I couldn’t believe that if Kara saw all that was inside me, she’d feel the same rush of love and sympathy for me that I now felt for her.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “there aren’t any problems between us. I promise!”
I’d never hated myself more.
*
When next Sunday rolled around, I decided forcing myself to do things I didn’t like wasn’t going to make me feel better. Mom took me up on my offer to help with children’s church. I had to pick Goldfish crackers and crayons off the floor after an hour of trying to stop the kids from throwing them at each other during the lesson.
Clearly, making myself miserable hadn’t made me more righteous.
I dumped a handful of crayons in the trash can and straightened up to face the wall above it. It was covered with a row of posters, depicting cartoon scenes from the Bible. Animals with balloon-like proportions lining up two-by-two for Noah’s Ark. Adam and Eve, covered by bushes, passing an apple back and forth. At the end of the row was Jesus, with Peter and his brother Andrew, struggling to haul a net full of smiling, googly-eyed fish into their boat. The calling of the first two disciples.
Peter was smiling a little too widely, considering what he said when he first met Jesus. What was it? “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
And he really was a sinful man, wasn’t he? He also denied knowing Jesus, three times, before the rooster crowed for morning.
All my life, I’d heard about the martyrs and saints, who’d chosen to die rather than deny God. I always imagined I’d do the same, just like Peter promised he would, before the crucifixion. That any situation where I’d be put to the test would be just as dramatic. Sin, it turned out, was ordinary and boring.
Jesus forgave Peter. He asked him three times if he loved him, once for each denial. Could I say the same? Had I ever truly loved him?
“How is it you can love me, or anybody?” I prayed. “When you know what’s really inside us?”
I thought of Kara, how she’d torn down the image I’d always had of her, without knowing how I’d react.
“I want to love you,” I prayed. “I’m sorry I said I didn’t. I’m so, so sorry.”
I didn’t know what the right thing was to say, but maybe that was okay. If I worried less what other people thought of me and more about what was true, perhaps that would help me to love them better.
“Stephanie?” Mom said from the doorway. “Are you okay?”
I looked back at the poster of Peter. How could something so ugly suddenly seem so beautiful?
“I have to call Kara,” I said. “Right now. I have to tell her something.”
About the Author
Morgan Want is a short story writer and former journalist. She is currently at work on her debut novel.
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