Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,32

a church when he’d first gotten to campus. He knew what being there felt like. Like he was invisible, not real, not part of any of it. Most of all, he remembered never going back there again.

“God,” he prayed, closing his eyes, “please, please don’t let Taylor feel alone, not now, not here, not like this. Please let her know You are right there with her. Please.”

“New beginnings,” Pastor Dave said when the readings were finished. “We hear in the readings today about becoming a new creation in Christ. The old has passed away and the new has come. Very appropriate for today, wouldn’t you say?”

Several students around the chapel laughed softly and nodded. Taylor just put her head down. If today was a new day, then why did it feel like her past was right there, dogging her heels, trying to drag her right back into it? She sighed as the despair wrapped itself around her. Mitchell’s idea was not going to work. In two days she would be in a courtroom, facing lawyers who knew the very worst about her and who were prepared to tell the world every horrible thing she had ever done.

Her head swam with it all, making her sway with it. All those nights when she’d first gotten to college, all those parties, all those random guys. She had used them like they had used her. They were just someone so she wasn’t alone for a little while. It was difficult to fathom how she could recall so easily how alone and empty she had felt back then, how scared. She remembered the girls at the sorority, the sisters, how they had, at first, pushed her down only to raise her up as one of their own. But even then, she knew she had to prove herself to them, not just once but constantly. They drank, so she did too. They went out partying, so she did too. They gave themselves to any guy the others thought hot enough, so she did too.

Of course, she knew it was wrong. Wrong in her parents’ old-fashioned sense of the word anyway. Though in all honesty, it was a world she had been introduced to long before she got to Tech, long before the sorority, long before she had come to the conclusion that wrong was all right because everybody else was doing it. Those thoughts dragged her even further down, and she felt the stupid tears they dredged up. She sniffed them back as anger with herself knocked them backward. Maybe not at first, but she had known what she was doing back then. She had known, and she had willingly chosen it anyway.

Just like Hannah.

How many times had she, herself, come in about the time the sun came up? How many times had she stripped her dignity and worth off like smelly clothes and dropped them on the floor just so some guy she barely knew wouldn’t leave?

A new creation?

Laughing and crying were in a battle inside her, and she had no idea which one might win.

Back home, the idea of God was one thing. Here it was something very different.

Here, the world knew better. Here, the world was the thing that made sense.

God was for the good people, the righteous ones like Greg and Wes and even Nelson. She glanced over at Paige, Lauren, and Clara. No wonder they shunned her. She was, in fact, as worthless as yesterday’s trash. It wasn’t their fault they knew it. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t buy that she had changed or even that she wanted to change. Because the truth was, no one could change that much. Not even God could do something that impossible.

“Let us stand,” Pastor Dave said, and Taylor did as she was told, feeling the complete numbness wrap its bony, wretched fingers around her once again.

She stood with the others, knowing then, admitting then, that she was different than all of those in that chapel. Concepts like grace and mercy, love and forgiveness didn’t extent to trash like her. Accepting that was easier than fighting to believe they did.

Right then as she looked around at all of those she could never be, she vowed that before the last song was sung, she would quietly slip out and be gone, never to return to this place. The only one who might even conceivably notice was Greg, and seeing him up there now, singing about God’s grace, she knew that him being seen with