Conviction by Kelly Loy Gilbert Page B

from me and it’s to work my hardest and win the Brantley game and that’s all I need to focus on, that what I
thought I heard God say before was just my own fears, the worship team starts to play. And there with her guitar, her dress brushing against her thighs and lifting over a few inches of pale skin
when she raises her arm to adjust the mic, is Maddie.
    On my left, Colin nudges me, wearing a grin that means
I know exactly what you’re looking at.
I glare back, and his grin pushes wider. “Why, Braden, you ought to be ashamed of
yourself,” he whispers, exaggeratedly concerned, in my ear. “This is
church
.”
    I never noticed before how easily she carries herself until she got up onstage, and I see how, there, she doesn’t: up on that stage and behind that microphone she holds herself with more
control, all her angles sharper and her spine straight. As the lights dim, I hear the opening to the song she sent me fill the room. She doesn’t look in my direction, but all the same, I
wonder if maybe that might be for me. And then, just as quick, I wonder if maybe it’s actually the opposite—that it’s no longer something she gave only me.
    The chords drift into something else, though, a different song. And when she starts to sing, quietly, with her head bowed and her eyes closed like the rest of us aren’t even there, I force
myself to look down at the floor and not at her; there are ways you can’t let yourself think about a girl in church. Usually at youth group they sing more modern stuff, but Maddie sings
hymns: “Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder”; “Before the Throne of God Above.” Her voice is breathy and deep, deeper than the way she talks, and she doesn’t allow herself
any tricks in her singing; her voice is steady and perfectly controlled, even and soft, and the sound of it makes me ache.
    When you grow up going to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night, there are certain things you expect from worship, and one of them’s this: on a particular part in every song, the
music’s supposed to intensify. You feel it coming a couple beats away; the drums get louder, the singers lean in closer to their mics, the people around you close their eyes and raise their
hands. (Trey’s always said worship looked like a cult.) The percussion’s supposed to meld into your own heartbeat until your own self’s been stamped out and all that’s left
is the music and a roaring, empty space for God—but Maddie’s not giving us that. Her notes are too quiet, too sure, and she holds you in a kind of surrender to the form and structure of
them. Her chords fill the room and swell around me. And in them, in their closeness, I think for a split second that I feel something else there that’s not just the trying to be good or the
angling for answers to prayer or the fear of what God might want from me—something that feels more like a presence, some hopeful kind of calm.
    Except then next to me, Colin, who always sings too loud because he thinks he’s got a way better voice than he does, belches accidentally, and then he starts laughing silently into his
fist, and next to him Hannah King slaps him in the arm and Jenna looks over and Colin puts on an innocent face. And that’s it—the feeling’s gone.
    After youth group’s over that night, I hang around talking to Colin and Kevin and the other guys until I finally see Maddie break away from the group of girls she’s
been talking to. I catch up to her as she’s walking toward the parking lot, juggling her guitar case and purse. I pretend not to see the enormous game-day grin Kevin gives me—if I know
him, I’m in for an awkward talk about purity and respect and guarding a girl’s heart—and say, “Hey. You were great up there.”
    “You think so?”
    “I never say that unless I mean it.”
    “I was worried I—oops, hang on a second.” She pulls her phone from her pocket, then makes a face.
    “Everything okay?”
    “Yeah, my