Read Online Transcendent by Katelyn Detweiler - Free Book Online Page B

over again.
    I stared straight into the light green eyes of the faces hanging up right in front of me—a boy and a girl, maybe even twins, they looked so similar, with their bright red hair and their freckled, dimpled cheeks as they posed in swimsuits by the ocean. There was an article taped to the poster. An obituary. Molly and Matty Michelson. Both of them gone. And the parents—the parents had both survived, somehow. Though, like Kyle Bennett, I’m sure they felt more punished than blessed to have escaped their children’s fate.
    I rested my palm against the cool gloss of the next poster over, a fiercely grinning little blond boy. There were small handwritten messages scrawled on every free space of the poster, prayers and wishes that he would recover. He was in a coma now, a sign explained, and he’d lost an arm, possibly his eyesight—possibly everything, since there was no way of knowing whether he’d ever wake up. Most of the words and pictures and offerings left at the playground—at playgrounds all around the city and all around the country—were about love. Love for the survivors and for the victims. Love for those who were still fighting and would probably always be fighting, never able to escape that day. But there was hate everywhere now, too. Hate for the Judges.
    I closed my eyes and stepped back from the memorial, swallowing the nausea rising up from the pit of mystomach. I realized that I’d somehow managed to forget about my own problems in that moment, and for a second I was grateful. Then a pang of guilt flared through me. I was still alive. I had my family and my friends, all safe and healthy.
    But I was no miracle baby, no daughter of any kind of god. I’d never believed in God; my parents had never taken Caleb and me to church, except for funerals and baptisms and choir recitals. They didn’t identify as Christians—they’d always just said they believed in a greater power. A higher purpose. I believed in people, though. I believed we created our own destiny, our own happiness, and our own sadness, too.
    And really, after this kind of tragedy, how could
any
of us believe in a god? How could any supreme being sit back and watch so many children be slaughtered—for what? For political power, for some sort of statement, a reminder of how egotistical and despicable America could be? We didn’t deserve this. No one would ever, could ever, deserve this kind of suffering.
    But of course, Disney World was related to what was happening to me now, wasn’t it? Disney World was the reason Kyle Bennett had come to find my mother. Disney World was the reason he was so desperate for the kind of miracle that even doctors couldn’t give him.
    What if Kyle told other people? What if suddenlyeveryone was frantic for something
more
, something bigger and better? If at least some people had believed my mom eighteen years ago, what was to stop them from believing now? From believing even more powerfully, maybe, because there was nothing else left. Hope was all we had now—the only thing left besides fear and hate.
    It was all too much. I dragged myself toward my usual bench and curled into a tight ball along the worn wooden planks. But even when I squeezed my eyes shut, I could still see my mom’s face. I could see the belief in her eyes.
    There was something she had said that suddenly struck me now, like ribbons of smoke curling and coiling up from some deep, dark place inside of me. I was
different
,
special
, she had said, and I always had been. She had mentioned Johnson—a stranger I’d met at this same park when I was four years old: my very first memory. I remembered it partly, I think, because it was the first time my dad had
really
yelled at me—though I understood later it was more out of fear than anger. And it was also the first time that I realized there were bad things in our world, bad people even—but that I