Blue Star Rapture by JAMES W. BENNETT Page A

“I’ll get you a refund.” Then, without another word, he walked on. He needed to finish the route.

TEN
    T.J. took a part-time job at Hardee’s, working from three to seven, Sundays through Thursdays. He was a lobby person. He washed tables, took out trash, mopped floors, and cleaned bathrooms. He didn’t like the job, but he wanted the cash, and it was a no-brainer; after two or three days, the job itself was as rote as his paper route.
    Having the job meant spending less time with Tyron, which was another benefit, as far as he was concerned. There would be more than enough time with the big guy once school started.
    Although his mother couldn’t know it, he planned to use some of the extra money to rent computer time for her at Kinko’s. One evening when he returned home from work, she asked him how long he expected to keep the job.
    â€œI don’t know,” T.J. replied.
    â€œAre you going to work there after school starts?”
    â€œProbably. I’ll have to start later, though; school doesn’t get out until 3:30.”
    â€œYou have to have enough time for homework, T.J. You’ve got college in your future.”
    â€œI know, Ma.”
    â€œWith your brains, you have to go to college. You can’t ever forget that.”
    â€œI’m not forgetting.”
    â€œAnd what about basketball? What will you do when basketball practice starts?”
    â€œI may keep the job, anyway,” T.J. informed her. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
    â€œYou mean you might not go out for the team?”
    â€œI haven’t made up my mind yet,” he repeated. “There won’t be any practice till November, so I don’t have to decide now.”
    By the middle of August, T.J. had a different mission for his diary. Instead of using it to record Bumpy’s activities and inclinations where college recruiters might be concerned, he employed it now as a resting place for his own reflections and self-examination. At the top of one page in particular were the words the unexamined life is not worth living . He wasn’t sure where he had heard this declaration—it probably came from Shakespeare or something—but he was convinced of its appropriateness.
    He stapled together those pages that formed the first part, the section he had kept for the benefit of Coach Lindsey. They were sealed off then, but he decided against tearing them out and throwing them away. Someday, they might serve as a reminder of a lesson too important to forget.
    Using the back cover of the diary because it was rigid, he paper clipped his saved newspaper articles dealing with LuAnn’s death and the subsequent investigations into it. T.J. had not attended her funeral because it was a private one for family only. One of the articles was a profile of Brother Jackson, which characterized him as a “charismatic will-o-the-wisp evangelist.” It revealed he was conducting revival meetings in Oklahoma at the time of her death.
    The autopsy report revealed that LuAnn was pregnant, but there was no evidence of drugs in her system. The coroner’s jury, which took three weeks to render a finding, determined that her death was a “simple suicide.” No foul play was suspected.
    Two other articles were interviews, one that quoted her family and schoolmates, and another that revealed the sorrow of her camp chums and counselor, Sister Simone, at Camp Shaddai. Sister Simone was quoted as saying. “Ruth Ann was a troubled but Spirit-led girl whose faith in the Lord was unconditional.”
    T.J. bought a Bible at a used-book store. He couldn’t forget that last night in the wilderness when he’d had that final conversation with her, the one in which she disclosed to him her dream about the horse on the footbridge. He used a fresh page of the diary to write down some scripture: When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living