Rhythms of Grace (38 page)

No wonder Zeely liked him. I rubbed my aching arms and tried to swallow the hoarseness in my throat. A day in Jerry’s class felt like a low-impact version of my friend’s workout. Between the jumping, shouting, and a run around the hall singing the quadratic formula, I wondered if I’d be able to keep up with my new teaching partner.

Jerry sat down with a pile of papers. “You can go home. I can handle these.”

“One-hundred-point scale?” I grabbed a stack of tests and sat down.

He smiled. “Uh-huh. Thanks for staying.”

I nodded and started on the exams, trying to grade the work as well as the answers. Jerry squinted up and down the page in front of him, as if hoping for correct solutions to appear. He passed me the grade book. I never took it.

He rapped on the table. “You all right?”

I wasn’t, not really. I’d made so many wrong choices in my life, so many mistakes. I stared at the open door. Brian threw up a hand across the hall. I wanted to run for him, to tell him everything. I didn’t dare. “Can I ask you something?”

“Fire away. I can do this in my sleep.” Jerry flipped the third test over. “Blank spaces are easy to grade, just hard to look at.”

“This is going to sound stupid, but how can you know if a man is really a Christian?”

I looked on as Jerry added five creativity points for a math poem in the margin. He laid the page across his lips. “Only God knows that for sure. We aren’t to judge hearts. We’re to pick fruit. When a man gives his life to Christ, you’ll know, and not just by his church attendance. His words, his wallet, his woman . . .” Jerry sucked his teeth. “Every part of his life will begin to reflect Christ.”

I picked up my pen and commenced grading.

“Wasn’t the answer you were looking for?”

“It’s not so much your answer as it is my questions. Some people do all the right things: go to church, read the Bible, pray . . . but they still
act
wrong. And then other people do all the wrong things, but their heart seems right.”

Jerry frowned. “Thinking like that earned me a stack of bills and an ex-wife who isn’t taking my calls. Don’t follow hearts. They can’t be trusted. Stick with the Word.”

An unexpected guest waited for me in the hall after school. I almost knocked him over.

“Miss O?”

“Yes, Sean?”

“I just wanted to say again how sorry I am for what I said in Doc’s class about you two, you know . . .”

“Forget it.”

“For real? You’re not going to hold it against me?”

I smiled, glad to offer forgiveness to someone. “For real. Now how are your grades doing? You seem like a totally different guy lately.”

“I’m different in math because there’s a different teacher. And you know, I got me a girl.” He sighed, looking across the hall at the English room.

My eyes didn’t follow his. Seeing Brian again would be too much. I hoped he’d gone home. “You two really don’t get along, do you?”

“Nope. And we never will. I’ll never be good enough for him.”

I let myself look into Brian’s room—it felt strange to call it that when it had so recently been my room too—and read the day’s word on the board. It was simple today.
Goals.
No wonder Sean was looking so blue. “So, Sean, what do you want to do with your life?”

“Live.”

“Seriously. If you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do?”

“Anything?” Sean shifted his gaze from side to side and peered over his shoulder. He spoke just above a whisper. “Music.”

“You sing?” My eyes lit up.

“You could say that.” He shrugged his backpack farther up on his shoulders.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Do you have a demo?”

“Naw. I tried a couple times, but it costs like a hundred bucks an hour and they want a down payment—”

“Is that all you need, money? Do you have your songs together? Tracks?”

Sean looked surprised. His voice cracked. “I got all that. One of my boys has a system. I mixed the tracks awhile back.”

“All right then. Start practicing.”

“But Miss O, the down payment is two thousand bucks. It’s impossible.”

I looked upward. “I’m not promising anything, but hey, God specializes in impossible things.”

Whoever chose the teachers’ lounge should have been shot. It had once been the equipment room, before the city renovated the gym. It still had that sweaty, squeaky smell of basketballs and boys. Still, it was a place to be alone. I sat down with the application I’d gotten from the guidance counselor to get the funds for Sean’s project. The foundation was called Excellence in Color, and the application looked so long that Sean might have a better chance of getting into college now than getting that studio time. From the looks of things, I’d need everything short of his dental records to fill this out.

Not that I needed to be fooling with this at all. Why couldn’t I just keep out of other people’s lives anyway? Probably because my own life was so screwed up. I heard someone coming in the hall, but kept my eye on the pages, searching for a line I could actually fill in. So far, all I’d been able to do was his name.

“Hey.” Brian’s voice caught me off guard. Papers tumbled onto the floor. He leaned down to pick them up, but not before I scrambled to get most of them.

“Excellence in Color student grant?” he asked.

“It was going to be, but I don’t know if I can finish it before the deadline. This application is Ivy League.” I knelt on one knee, the cold floor biting through my skirt. When I looked up, Brian’s lips were inches from mine. For a few seconds, neither of us moved. Then he took a step back.

He helped me back into my chair. “So, how are you doing? How’s the class?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Brian gave me the top page. It had been stuck under my chair. “We miss you, but everything’s good. Sean and I are still bumping heads some, but he’s really improving. Still, I wonder if he wouldn’t do better in a regular school environment. I’ve wanted to talk to Joyce about it, but with her sick, that puts all that on hold.”

His words hit me like a brick. If I wanted to help Sean, I’d have to hurry. I shoved the papers back into their envelope. I’d call Sean’s mother tonight to get their personal information.

“Right, well I’d better head out. I’ll have to work on this later.”

“Wait, is it for one of our kids?”

I hesitated, deciding to tell less rather than more. “It’s one of ours, but I’d rather not say who. Privacy act and all that.”

Brian reached into his organizer. “Take this.” He offered a beige business card, similar to the one he’d given me the day we’d met but with no heading and an unfamiliar number. “Call and ask for Tiki.”

Did he have the hookup everywhere or what? “Tiki? Are you serious?”

“Very. Do you want the grant or not?”

“I do.”

“Okay. Tell Tiki to issue a grant for a student at Imani. Ask for only what you need for the project. Three thousand is the limit, and the kid has to write an essay afterward explaining how their life has been changed.”

This guy was unbelievable. “That’s all? I know you’ve got connections and everything, but that seems too easy.”

Brian grabbed my hands between his in that heart-wrenching way that was becoming his habit. “It’d better be easy. It’s my money.”

It was only eight thirty in the morning and I had already run out of excuses. The studio manager—and Brian—had come through, but Sean hadn’t shown up yet. The owner wanted his money either way.

“I don’t know what could have happened.” I clutched the envelope in my pocket. Carrying so much cash around wasn’t an experience I wanted to repeat.

The studio manager didn’t look concerned. “Want to sing something? You’ll have to pay for the time anyway. I came up here special because it was a kid. I try to help out, you know?” He cocked his head to one side like he was proud of himself.

A discount would have been more helpful.

“I understand.” I stood and moved to the open window. Nothing but snow. A bell jingled behind me.

Sean walked up, unwinding a scarf from his mouth. “There was an accident—”

If he hadn’t been in an accident on the way to the studio, he would have been in an accident upon arrival—with me
.
“Are you hurt?”

He shook his head and stacked two CDs on the counter.

“Good.” I pointed toward the booth, smiling. “Now get in there and sing.”

Sean moved toward the recording area, striding at first and then taking baby steps. Finally, he went in.

The studio manager, his lips glossed with donut glaze, offered me a set of headphones. “Do you want to listen?”

I groaned. The last rap music I’d heard sounded like a root canal for the ears, but I’d come this far so I might as well listen.

Sean waved from the glass booth and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

I pushed on the headphones over my hair. “Let’s do this.”

The man wiped his hands on his pants and put Sean’s CD into the machine. When no music played, I gave him a questioning look.

“The track is pretty clean, but I’m going to sharpen it some. Bring it out. Who mixed this anyway?”

“He did.”

“I’m down to hear him sing then. This is nice. Different than what the kids usually come in with.”

A melody rushed into my ears. Unlike the pounding beat I’d expected, it was a wave of sound, dipping and rising with a bass line somewhere underneath. I held the seat to restrain myself. This was dancing music.

The manager did a quick sound check. After that, Sean closed his eyes. I closed mine too, listening as Sean’s voice flowed through the system like butter yielding to a hot pan.

“I am an invisible man, shaped by God’s hand. Wondering who I am . . .”

The manager leaned closer to his equipment, nodding to the beat.

“I keep asking folks, but they keep walking. They keep talking. Say they don’t know who I am. Say I’m an in-vis-i-ble man . . .” Sean’s voice boomed now, full of his passion, his pain. I was on my feet, tangled in the words.

“I know you can’t see me. I know you don’t need me, but please stop walking on my head. I’m not dead . . .”