“I had my first kiss,” I said. My mom tried to pretend to be shocked at the admission, but all that fake yawning had exhausted her acting abilities. “You knew that was gonna happen,” I said. “All the peppermints.”
My dad told me Jason had asked permission to kiss me the week before. “I told him it was just for tonight,” he said.
“Just tonight?” I asked.
“Just tonight,” he answered, as my mom rolled her eyes.
I went to the bathroom to see if I looked different. I turned my face in the mirror to see what Jason saw. I leaned forward and kissed my own reflection.
5
Against All Discouragement
Thanksgiving 1995
My cousin Sarah and I sat near the middle of the theater waiting for the movie to start. I was stewing with an empty seat next to me, and every few minutes I turned back to give a hurt look at Jason. He’d sat in the back with my boy cousins, Drew and Zeb, instead of with me.
It was Thanksgiving night, and we cousins had all gone out to see Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. I was back in Texas after being in Nashville all week, recording a gospel album for Buster. He and my parents decided that was what I needed to jump-start my career at age fifteen. I’d been missing a lot of sophomore year—and time with Jason—putting in eight to ten hours a day in the studio, singing up-tempo secular-sounding songs with lyrics like God being a “sure thing.” We flew home to Texas that morning because the fare was cheap, and we drove straight to Sarah’s house. Her mom, my Aunt Debbie, was hosting that year. Jason showed up after I’d eaten a ton of turkey and dressing, but he seemed more interested in hanging out with my cousins than me. He Jet-Skied with Drew and Zeb even though it was cold on the lake, and so it was Sarah who had to hear all my stories about recording my music, not the boy I had pretty much decided I was going to marry.
“It really hurts me,” I whispered to Sarah. “He can be so—”
“Jessica, you’ve got to relax,” she whispered back, passing me the popcorn. I put my head on her shoulder, breathing in the cucumber-melon of the soap she loved. She was always telling me to relax. Because, well, I needed to hear it. I was working so hard to be a rigid version of “godly” that I judged so many people. I held myself to an insane standard, and while I beat myself up about always falling short, I definitely held it against the people who I thought weren’t trying.
I didn’t know how Sarah managed to be just as devout a Christian as me—if not more so—and still be cool. I always started talking about someone at school who went to a party and drank, and she would shrug and cross the red cowboy boots she loved. She was a girl who would turn up the car radio when Mötley Crüe’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” came on but who could also counsel people about faith. She talked to my little sister, Ashlee, who was already so smart and questioning everything at eleven years old. Ashlee did what worked for Ashlee, and if she didn’t feel like volunteering at church that day, she didn’t. I didn’t even know you could say no. But when Sarah talked about Christ, Ashlee listened. With Sarah, God could be cool.
After the movie, I sulked in the car, sticking my lower lip out in a pout. Sarah rolled her eyes at me, and I’m not sure Jason even noticed. He was going to spend the whole weekend with the boys, so they could Jet Ski. I would spend it doing vocal exercises. Sophomore year was such a weird time for me. I had this thing that I was afraid to call a career because it seemed so make-believe, so I just called it “my music.” I never felt like I was doing enough to make it happen, and it didn’t help that no one at my school thought it was real. Me and my mom would go to Nashville periodically to record, sleeping in the one bed in some smoke-stale hotel room to save money. Buster would come in and out of our lives, making promises about my future and his belief in me, and then he would be back in New Jersey, while we just ran on faith.
I was getting used to planes, and the Tylenol PM I took before a flight or to come down from a recording session or concert. I was doing more appearances and handing out more headshots to audiences at Bible camps and revivals. I wished we had an album to hand out or, better for my family, sell.
When I was home, I clung to normal things, like the church lock-ins and pancake breakfasts. Our Sunday school teacher, Carol Vanderslice, was especially kind to me. She both welcomed the fact that I’d recruited so many boys to come to youth group and joked that it was a full-time job keeping them from falling all over me. More than a few times, I heard her remind some guys where my eyes were.
Carol was so sweet, and when we had sleepovers, we girls could talk her into anything. She knew our faith set us apart at school. We didn’t go to parties where there’d be drinking or anything “sinful,” so in many ways we were isolated. When we spent the night at her house, we would convince her to help us do things that we thought were wild, like pool hopping. Six or eight of us girls would climb into her SUV at one in the morning on a Friday night, and she’d drive us around to the houses of the boys in the youth group. I should specify, the cute boys. She’d park down the street a bit, and we’d get out, climb the fence, and all six of us would go to their pools, jump off the diving board, and then move on to the next house. Innocent pranks helped us feel less alone in a world that called us uncool.
Carol started to become a second mother to me, one who really just wanted me to be a kid. My mom wanted that, too, but she was also invested in the promise of me. She had to think big picture, like she always said.
I fell further and further behind in school, so that gave me license to give up on algebra. It just seemed so useless if I was going to be a singer. But I kept up with my reading for English, always packing books on my trips. We did a Shakespeare unit first semester, so I remember reading Romeo and Juliet in an airport, Hamlet on breaks in the recording studio. It all seemed so romantic, even though Hamlet was tragic. The next semester we read my favorite, Great Expectations, a book I have returned to again and again. It was even the theme of my wedding to Eric. Just the title alone grabbed me. “To whom much is given, much is expected” was something my parents had always told me. So the expectation to be great, that was everything to me. I’d only had these dreams of making it as a singer for a couple of years, but time moves so slowly when you’re that age that it felt like a long time. My dreams felt grand but worn down, just like old, jilted Miss Havisham, still wearing her wedding dress in the dusty but still-gilded mansion of Satis House. But I kept trying to make them happen, because I felt called to music. Waiting for my life to really begin, I underlined a passage in chapter 29 of my paperback copy: “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
That quote has stayed with me. Sometimes through the years, it was about a man who I wished could love me as much as I loved him. But more often it was about my determination to make good on the expectations placed on me. By God, by my parents, by me. No matter what.
FROM THE MOMENT MY MOTHER WALKED IN THE DOOR OF THE HOTEL, SHE was pulling my outfits out of suitcases to drape them around the room. We were in Nashville, and I was about to have a photo shoot for my album. It was finally something tangible for my mother to help with, and she seized the moment. She preferred being behind the scenes while my dad did all the talking as my manager. But this she could do. My mom moved quickly around the room, arranging the “looks,” as she now called them. She’d put different tops with the jeans, and then stand back like a painter judging a canvas.