Things Can Get Pretty Crazy at church school

He had been looking at me from a row over and back all two weeks we had been in Bible class. That was six classes, two Mondays two Wednesdays two Fridays, of intense stares penetrating my left shoulder.
His name was Ty Anders, and he was a baseball player at Lavery.

As an extremely conservative religious University, Lavery did not have enough money to invest in an extensive atheltics department. There was no football team. There was baseball, softball, soccer, and the basketball team, which was the major source of any "students of color" Lavery happened to acquire. Rumor had it that the students were recruited without ever being told about Lavery's religious affiliation, or that every student was required to go to Chapel and University Bible Monday through Friday, as well as take an additional Bible class of their choice every semester. It was intense religion.

Ty Anders had obviously been aware of Lavery's extreme reputation. I had spotted his seat in University Bible at the arena and had watched as he sang every song, flipped to every scripture, and praised his little heart out with hands uplifted. I thought it was odd, actually. He had a definite smack of POPULAR kid, of EXPERIENCED kid, with his New Balances, his shag hair cut, and the harem of blonde hotties that always loitered in close vicinity to the baseball team as a whole.

He wore a black North Face jacket and ripped jeans. I wore an imitation fleece and clearance shoes. I had only just discovered the wonders of straightening irons. I'd had no idea how the blonde hotties got their shine, but now that'd I'd been living around them for months, I was picking up a few cues. I couldn't tell if this newfound awareness guys had for me had to do with my picked-up tips, or whether I'd always been attractive and had fallen into a new group of people who HADN'T known me since I picked my nose in Elementary school.
The older I get the more I realize it was the latter.

"Hey, I'm Ty."
I had dropped a book on the floor called Marriage and the Christian Home. I hated that book, but my mother had spent twenty-five dollars buying it at the campus bookstore, so I picked it up. Upon standing, I realized that the baseball player was right in my face.
"Oh-- hi." The last of the other students were starting to file out, and Baseball-Ty and I were about to be alone in the classroom with the Bible instructor.
"Do you have class right away, or can you walk with me to the student center for some coffee."
Geez, cutting to the chase all ready, I thought.
"I can go. I don't have class right now."

I was starting to get used to male attention. In high school, the only shocking male attention I'd had to thwart was from the Asian foreign exchange student who watched me reach over the side of my desk to pick up my pencil in math class before informing me that there was "a whole other world" down my shirt. That hadn't been the most pleasant of experiences. At Lavery, though, jocks and preppy kids resembling the popular elite at my high school seemed to come out of the woodwork to suavely profess their interest in me. I still didn't see it coming very often, but it didn't surprise me as much. Then again, they weren't usually commenting about the other world inside my shirt either.

"So I have to ask you, now that I'm talking to you outside of class," Ty said. He turned around and walked backward for a few steps, looking me in the eye as he bobbed along next to me down the brick walk. "What are you writing in that notebook? Donovan doesn't give that much to write notes about, and the study guide he gave us should be enough for the test on Friday. What is so interesting that you hardly look up during class."
I flushed a little bit. "Oh, my notebook. I've just always had one. Its like... what I do until I sort out a story or something."
"I KNEW it wasn't class related." He was suddenly more animated than I had ever seen him. Especially considering how I'd watched him sleep through an entire class in the previous week, and I told him so.
"Oh that!" He laughed before opening the door for me as we stepped inside the student center. "That was because of my initiation."
"Initiation? The social clubs haven't even started rush yet." I was suddenly aware of everyone else looking at us on our way in. If only for a second, I wondered if I looked like one of the blonde, hottie, hangers on.
"Not a social club. For baseball. I'm on the team."
"I know that. What kind of initiation are we talking here?"
"Well." He looked around, and I noticed for the first time that his eyes were a pale blue color. "Its kind of more like hazing. See, I don't know how you're gonna take this and all," he chuckled, "but the baseball team initiates new players by getting high-- you know, smoking pot-- and then watching the movie Requiem for a Dream." He said it like he was a real rebel, a real bad boy, like it was something so awful and hilarious at the same time.
"Wow. Thats pretty intense I bet. I've seen that movie, and I would not want to watch it under the influence."
A smile broke across his face. "I KNOW right!??" I had passed the test.

We drank frozen lattes and traded numbers, mine, at that point, was my dorm room number. I didn't yet have a cell phone. And he didn't laugh at me for it. Instead, he invited me to study with him for the test later that week.
***

"Where are you going?" My roommate Alana was getting dressed at the same time as me. It was seven thirty at night, and she usually put on her raccoon eyes and powder pink lip gloss while I was making raviolli or watching reruns of A Different World on Nickelodeon, but tonight I was debating between the red shirt with the cute collar or the white shirt that showed cleavage.
"I'm going with some guy from my Bible class to study for the test tomorrow."
"Ooooh, study date, huh." She quirked an eyebrow at me while powdering her nose in the mirror, then turned around. "In that case... white shirt. You gotta add at least a little spice to your Bible study."
Alana was one of the blonde hotties I was getting tips from. Though she didn't usually offer them up like she was tonight.
College is funny because its the first time in your life where the pot gets stirred and all the carefully constructed social layers get warped and mixed up. Nobody knows each other, and sometimes people like me ended up rooming with formerly popular girls like Alana. Somehow everyone always seemed to be able to still know who was who. So Alana never asked me to go out with her. Instead, I just used her stuff that was lying around when she left, or in the morning when she slept late. I still hadn't bought my own straightening iron. For all I knew they could cost a hundred dollars like the Birkenstocks she wore. They had little ridges in them for your toes and they felt really good. I had almost gotten busted when I'd worn them to church on a rainy Sunday.
"Thanks, Alana. You going out tonight?"
"Yeah." She picked up her purse and took one last glance in the mirror. "See ya!"

I considered looking through her shoes again, but stopped when she busted back in the room five minutes later.
"Dang it." She was mumbling to herself. "Forgot my birth control. Not like I need it or anything. But still."
I watched her leave after putting the tic-tac looking thing in her mouth.
Alana was on birth control?
My roommate had had sex?
***

"I really thought you were going to be like some up-tight cutesy girl, you know. But you're really cool."
Ty and I were in the student center again, this time with our Marriage books and our Bibles between us. I still had a multicolored copy of the Teen Study Bible that my mom had given me for Christmas when I was fifteen years old. Ty's Bible was brown leather and had big margins and gold leaf trim. I noticed that he had parts of it highlighted as we flipped the pages.
"Where are you from?" I asked. We had already filled out most of the study guide.
"Atlanta. I went to private school down there. Where are you from?"
"Here."
"Cool. You must like country music."
"No, actually. I think it lowers IQ scores."
He laughed. "Me too! Do you like Christian music?"
"Not really. My church sings old-people hymns. We're not really jiving with Michael W. Smith or anything."
"Some of it's really good, you know." He shut his Bible and leaned back with a smirk on his face. "You don't seem like most of the other people here."
"I'm not, really." I laughed, and checked my cleavage before I looked up at him. "I'm... from a very different school than this. My high school had more minorities than white kids. It was a public school."
"Woah. Were there like gangs and stuff?" I would have been offended, but he was smiling. So I smiled back.
"Yeah. Minority gangs, too. Brown Pride. KPG. The whole she-bang. But they weren't really scary or anything. They were just first and second generation immigrants caught in the gap. And its actually really weird for me, now, being here. Because I feel kind of caught in the gap myself."
"What do you mean?"
It was late, and the sanitation crew was cleaning the place up. The florescent lights glowed bright against the black night outside the windows. It was deserted, and the food stands were closed. Lavery is the only university I can think of that closes their student food options after standard business hours. If you weren't eating in the caf between 5 and 7pm, you had to go off campus. And even then you had to be back before 10 to avoid curfew rules.
"I feel caught in the gap because this place is so... Christian. And private. I mean, I feel like I can smell money radiating off of half these kids. And I'm not saying I'm poor or anything, but its just funny to be around so many people who are used to all of this. I'm not used to this. I'm not used to talking about God at school and praying before class starts and going to church every single day."
"You're not a Christian?"
"No. I've just grown up differently-- where there was a time and place for everything, and my personal beliefs were private. I could share them with people if I wanted, but its not like we all believed the same things. I feel like here we're all expected to be the same. And I'm not the same. I'm different."
Ty sighed, and smiled a little.
"You're something else." He stuck the study guide into his Bible and sat back again, looking at me. "I bet you do feel different. But different is good. I mean, I like different. I like you. And I know what you mean. Sometimes it feels like people are really closed minded and stuff. But God wants us to challenge what we believe in, because he knows we'll come back to him. I mean, I don't know why you came here, but I bet God led you here somehow. You're supposed to be here. Like fate."
I opened my mouth to retort, and one of the cleaning people turned on a vacuum cleaner. I jumped at the sound.
Ty pointed and laughed at me a little before leaning in over the table.
"You wanna get out of here?" he asked. I did.
"We could make flash cards somewhere else! I brought stuff to make them!" I held up some notecards.
"Or we could do something different." He half yelled over the sound of the vacuum. He smiled slyly with one side of his mouth.

Ty was a nice guy. I had thought he was going to be shallow and rich and jock and all of the things I hated about popular kids. But he was kind. He opened doors for me and pulled out chairs. He gave money to homeless people and was really polite. Chill. His eyes weren't wild and jaded looking like I thought of the "popular" kids I had known before. He didn't look like he had any secrets I wasn't allowed to share. He just looked like a kid who had grown up a little more sheltered than me who had rebelled until he'd reconciled the differences between his life and other peoples'. Tha'ts what I remember most about him now. He smiled at me in this very kind way, and I felt like I was okay. He didn't smell a rat in my existence at Lavery.

We ended up at a Praise and Worship devotional event at a nearby church. The thing had already started. It was now 10pm and I was a little skeptical about any church even that would last that late, but Ty insisted that it was kind of like a concert.

"A concert?" I took off my seatbelt, still in the car. We'd had to look for a parking space and ended up on the side of the street. "I thought Church of Christ kids didn't do concerts. I mean, music in the church and all, you know?"
Ty looked over at me with a smirk. "Okay. There's a lot you don't know apparently. Let's just say not all CoC churches believe the same things."
"You mean you have a piano or something at your church in Atlanta?"
"No." We stuffed our hands in our coat pockets and started walking along the wet pavement. "That's worship service though, on Sunday. For devotionals and stuff like that outside the service, we sometimes have drums and a praise team and an acoustic guitar and all sorts of stuff."
He was looking at me to gauge my reaction. I maintained a straight face.
"So they're going to have drums and stuff in here?"
He smiled. "Yeah."

We entered through the side of the building and ended up right at the front of the room next to the pulpit. I could hear the music before we even opened the outside door. It was a song I'd learned since I was at Lavery. They sang it at the required University Bible in the arena sometimes. I liked the song, actually. But it sounded funny now with music. It sounded like a real song and not just a church song.
Ty took off his baseball hat and tucked it in his back pocket. I followed him to the door that would open up in front of the pulpit. There was a tiny window and I could see blue light coming from the auditorium through the glass over Ty's shoulder. He was taller than me, and I suddenly felt small and strange and a little bit scared with all the loud singing and loud music and holy glory praise hallelujahs.
"Hey. You ready for this?" Ty looked back at me, and I nodded. He grabbed my hand. "Okay then. Come on."
He opened the door and the music seemed even louder. It wasn't as scary as I had thought it was, but I could tell the minute he pulled me in that there was hardly anywhere to sit. I let him guide me down the side of the room, and took in the faces of all these people I'd seen around campus. The blue light was coming from spotlights above the pulpit, on which three girls and two guys were standing. The girls were singing and one guy was playing what looked like bongo drums while the other played an acoustic guitar. Everyone else was singing, too, and swaying, and several people were kneeling on the floor. I didn't know why I felt so weird.
Ty finally led us to a pew toward the back of the auditorium. There weren't as many people sitting around us there, and he let go of my hand as he sat down. He leaned in to my ear as I continued to look around.
"Not what you expected?" He was grinning.
"Its just... I've never been to one of these before."
I sang a couple of songs and watched the rest of the group praisy praise praise and worshipy worship worship and I just felt so weird. Like I was at what my mom would call a "holy roller" church. I tried to rationalize to myself that I shouldn't feel weird and that I should embrace this stuff. When a new song started, and the girl introducing it was reduced to tears when describing how beautifully God had made us, Ty leaned over again, still grinning.
"Things can get pretty crazy during this one."
"What do you mean?" I shot back.
"Just wait."
He was right. The song was long and repetitive and people were throwing their hands in the air and crying and kneeling and hugging one another and all sorts of stuff I'd never seen first hand. I was shocked for a few seconds and then didn't know what to do with it. It felt alien to me because I'd never known to be religious that way. I'd never known that. All I'd ever known was Overbrook High and its four required translations for printed take-home permission slips. There were lots of religions at Overbrook. And being there bathed in the blue light on a church pew next to a kid who had told me three days earlier that he'd recently gotten high while watching Requiem for a Dream was tripping me out.
He leaned into my ear again.
"You want to leave?"
I stared at the torn place on his jeans. "Do you?"
"Its a little loud, isn't it."
I smiled and leaned closer. "Its worse than the vacuum cleaner."

I never started dating Ty. I don't remember why. He always smiled and talked to me when I saw him in class and he waved when I saw him around campus. I might have been dating someone else, I don't remember. But I somtimes wonder whatever happened to him. He was really nice to me, even when Lavery seemed like a religious jungle.

My roommate Alana graduated with a premed degree, but ended up as a nurse. She got pregnant and her plans for full blown medical school had to change. Ironically she had the baby with some guy I knew from Overbrook. He was younger than us and incredibly immature. But he was always popular, which I find funny now, because thats how I thought of Alana, too.

I don't know if Ty was right about God and fate bringing me to Lavery. They "suspended me immediately" less than a year after my study date with Ty Anders. But I never felt like I belonged there. And it took me years and years and many mistakes to let that whole experience go. It sat on me like a dead weight that I couldn't shake. I let it define me.

And if Ty was right, and God brought me to that, then it sure was one twisted game of getting me to where I am today.

But I'm here, aren't I?