Crossroads

“We’re going to break into groups of six,” Rick Ambrose said. “I want each of us in the group to talk about something we’ve done that was wrong. Something we’re ashamed of. And then I want each of us to talk about something we’ve done that we’re proud of. The point here is to listen, all right? Really listen. We’ll meet back here at nine.”

Not wanting to be in a group where she knew nobody, Becky pounced on the one Kim Perkins was forming and left Jeannie to fend for herself. A friend of Perry’s, David Goya, tried to join Kim’s group, but Rick Ambrose stepped in front of him and blocked him out. Becky hadn’t expected that Ambrose himself would participate in the exercise. She and the others followed him upstairs and sat down in the hallway outside her father’s office. At the sight of her father’s name on the door, her chest constricted with the consequence of what she was doing to him. She’d had every right to try Crossroads, but a betrayal was a betrayal.

Rick Ambrose was smaller than he loomed in her parents’ demonology. He was like a little black-mustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves. Following his own instructions, he listened intently while a tough kid Becky had known only by face told the story of breaking windows at Lifton Central with a slingshot after he’d gotten a D-minus in physical science, Kim Perkins the story of having sex with a summer-camp counselor whose girlfriend was the counselor in her cabin.

“And you think that was wrong,” Ambrose said.

“Definitely it was shitty of me,” Kim said.

“But I’m listening to you,” Ambrose said, “and what I’m hearing is more like bragging. Is anyone else hearing that?”

What Becky was hearing was more like statutory rape. Kim had long had a bad reputation, but at some level Becky hadn’t quite believed the rumors about her. Becky was three years older than Kim had been at summer camp, and she hadn’t even kissed anyone. What story could she tell when it was her turn? Behaving irresponsibly had never been her thing.

“I liked that I could have him,” Kim said. “Like, how easy it was. Maybe I was proud of that. But when I went back to my cabin and saw his girlfriend, I felt awful. I still feel awful. I hate that I was ever the kind of person who would do that to someone, just because I could.”

“That, I’m hearing,” Ambrose said. “Becky?”

“I’m hearing it, too.”

“Do you want to tell us something about yourself?”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Ambrose and the others waited.

“Actually,” she said, “right now I’m feeling bad about my friend Jeannie. I made her come with me tonight, and I don’t know where she went.”

She looked down at her hands. The church was very quiet, the other groups dispersed, their guilty disclosures a distant murmur.

“I think she might have gone home,” Kim said.

“Okay, now I’m feeling really bad,” Becky said. “She’s my best friend, and I … I think I’m a bad friend. Everywhere I go, I want everyone to like me, and this is my first time here—I want to be liked. But I should have been taking care of Jeannie.”

The girl next to her, whose back she’d scrawled on without learning her name, put a soft hand on her arm. Becky shuddered and sort of sobbed. It was more emotion than the situation perhaps called for, but something about Crossroads brought emotion to the surface. I want to be liked might have been the most honest words she’d ever uttered. Recognizing the truth of them, she bent forward and surrendered to her emotion, and now other hands were on her, hands of comfort and acceptance.

Only Ambrose held back. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

She wiped her nose. “What do you mean?”

“Why aren’t you looking for your friend?”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

The silver Mustang was still in the parking lot. As Becky approached the driver’s side, Jeannie started the engine and turned down the radio, which was tuned to WLS and playing “Save the Country.” She lowered the window.

“I’m sorry,” Becky said. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

“You’re staying?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come back inside? I’ll stick close to you.”

Come on down to the glory river, the radio said. Jeannie shook her head. “I thought you were only doing this because Tanner dared you.”

“He dared me to try it. Not just go for one hour.”

“One hour was plenty for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re forgiven,” Jeannie said. “I swear to God, though, Bex. You’d better not go religious on me.”

To her own surprise, she went religious. It began with being bored and wanting to be liked, but even on her first night she was forced into interactions with kids less fortunate than she was, forced to listen to them, forced in turn to account for the person she really was, undefended by status, and thereby, just as Tanner had promised, forced to learn things about herself, not all of them flattering. Crossroads didn’t look religious—there was nary a Bible in sight, and whole evenings went by without reference to Jesus—but here again Tanner had been right: simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality. She could feel herself vindicating Clem’s long-standing faith in her, as a person of substance.

A hundred and twenty kids were in Crossroads, and only one exciting leader. In two hours on a Sunday night, every member could hope for one minute of Ambrose’s attention. Becky, in the weeks that followed, averaged a lot more than that. Ambrose twice chose her as a dyad partner, praised her for her guts in joining the group, and called her out in larger discussions, praising her honesty. She would have been more self-conscious about hogging him if she hadn’t felt a natural affinity with him. She, too, had been a person other people measured and compared their time with; she knew the pleasure but also the burden of that. Plus she’d come painfully late to Crossroads—she had two years of lost time with Ambrose to make up for.

Her father, meanwhile, was barely speaking to her. She was theoretically sorry to have hurt him, but she didn’t miss the charade of closeness. He’d needed to be shown that she was eighteen years old and had a right to her own life. The ancient edict needed punishing as well.

The action that had truly taken guts occurred in the school cafeteria some weeks later. She’d already stopped putting on makeup in the morning and taken to wearing only jeans, never skirts, but she didn’t think she’d ever felt more glaringly visible than the day she plunked her sack lunch down between Kim Perkins and David Goya. They acted like it was nothing, but every eye at Becky’s usual table was on her, especially Jeannie Cross’s. Though Jeannie should arguably have been grateful to her, for vacating a rung on the ladder that she herself could then ascend to, Jeannie didn’t see it that way. She continued to give Becky rides to school in her Mustang, and Becky still enjoyed hearing her gossip, but a line had been crossed when she sat down at a Crossroads table. Jeannie referred to Crossroads as Kumbaya, which wasn’t funny even the first time she said it, and Becky, although she couldn’t prove it, sensed that Jeannie was no longer telling her every secret she learned.