The First Time I Went to Visit Chris

I was sitting in social studies class. Careen was sitting in front of me when she turned around and said, “Did you know Chris is so sick he stopped going to school and church?”

I stopped what I was doing. “What is he sick with?”

“I think he's depressed.”

And suddenly, a part of my past rushed me. When I was younger, not a child and not a teenager, I had been very unhappy. My hands went to my wrists that I had narrowly missed slashing. I was very alone and couldn't tell anyone what I was going through back then. My family thought people who were depressed were just looking for attention and when I thought about what I was going through, I suspected that what I wanted might be more attention. No one had helped me. I had to get over it on my own. Find my own purpose and press forward completely alone.

A very specific memory came to me. I was praying and I was crying. It was a regular prayer that I always prayed. I asked God why I felt that way. Why was there always darkness around me? Why couldn't I find my way out? I asked him over and over again. There was no answer, and it was hard when I was working on my testimony of Christ when I thought about all those prayers and how there had never been an answer.

Then, all of a sudden, there was an answer. I suddenly felt that I needed to go take care of Chris. That his family and his doctors and no one in his world knew how to help him. They couldn't help him any more than my family had been able to help me. I needed to go to him, befriend him and ease him back into living. I thought I could do that.

My ego is the stuff of legend.

I didn't have a driver's license, but lucky for me, Careen did and she had started dating a boy who lived down the street from Chris. So, I tagged along with her. We went up to Chris' house and I told her to ring the bell.

“Why should I do that?” she complained. “This was your idea.”

It was my idea and I rang the bell, but I felt more than a little like dying. The house I was standing in front of represented deep personal humiliation, rejection, and the disgrace of wanting something you shouldn’t want. My girl, Scarlett, knew all about that. And I knew that no matter how bad things felt on the inside, I had a special talent for making things look good on the outside. Even if I had mud smeared on my face, I suspected it only made me look hotter. So, even though this house was the last house I ever wanted to visit, I was spirited enough to ask for admittance anyway.

Chris' father answered the door. The way he looked at me standing on his back step was weird. “David doesn't live here anymore,” he said as he recognized me.

I fidgeted on my feet. “I'm not here to see David. I'm here to see Chris.”

Then a smile broke out on his face like I had turned on a light bulb. “Well, come on in!”

As a side note, Chris' father was a high school English teacher and very knowledgeable about all things teen. He sat Careen and me on stools at the dining room table and looked down at us with a catlike grin.

“Where's Chris?” I asked uncertainly.

“Oh, he's not home right now.”

I was stunned. “Why did you invite us in if he's not here?”

He put a phone book down in front of me with a cordless phone on top. “He's at this number. Call him and tell him to come home.” With that, he turned his back on us and left the room.

I really did not relish having to make that phone call. It was probably one of the hardest calls I have ever had to make in my life. I dialed the number, told people I didn't know that I wanted to talk to someone who didn't live at their house, explained to a guy who didn't like me that I was waiting for him at his house and he had to come home. It was the pits.

Careen was like, “Well, I got ya here. You're on your own.” And she bolted.

So, I sat there and Chris' mom came in and had that same perplexed expression on her face that her husband had had when he answered the door. Except she said something different. She said, “I don't have a letter from Jared for you.”

I felt like groaning... loudly. No one could keep up with all my conquests. These people didn't even know which one of their sons I was supposed to be matched up with if I had been matched up with one of their sons. And I didn't blame them. My life was stupid! I was too ridiculous! Why hadn't my parents choke-chained me in the backyard until I was nineteen?

“I know,” I sighed. “I wasn't expecting one.”

She did not ask me why I was sitting on a stool in her dining room, even though I would have asked that if I had found a random teenage girl sitting on a stool in my dining room. Instead, she fetched me missionary Jared's latest letter to the family and told me I could read that. Then, she also left the room. If this had been my house, I would not have left the random teenage girl alone in my great room. I would have stopped what I was doing and stared at her with my great goblin eyes until I knew everything about her. Even so, everyone had left me completely alone.

I tried to read Jared's letter, but the letter I was holding was not going to be like one of the letters Jared wrote specifically for me, so it was a waste of time. Besides, I was too bent up.

So I looked around. There were a lot of family pictures on the wall, but strangely there was not one of Chris. The last time I had seen him, we had mostly been in the dark: the dark of the theater, the dark of the car, the black light of the bowling alley. Was he handsome? I couldn't remember exactly and I knew that helping him with his depression was going to be hard because I was a heartbreaker and guys fell for me easily. I clung to the idea that it was going to be all right. Chris had known me and my work for years. If he was going to be attracted to me, I would have gotten wind of it, but he always looked at me blankly.

But as he walked through the door and dropped his backpack noisily on the floor, the blankness was gone. He was annoyed and very attractive. I realized too late that what I wanted to do was going to be a lot harder than I thought.