Bible Bowl
by Bryan FurunessGrowing up, Jesus didn't know he was Jesus. His parents meant to tell him eventually, but first they wanted him to have a normal childhood. So for a long time, he was as normal as anyone, if not more so—and that was precisely the problem, as far as Jesus was concerned. Almost every other kid seemed to catch the limelight for one talent or another, but not Jesus. He wasn't fast, or nimble; he couldn't carry a tune or do long division in his head. He didn't have charisma like Lucifer, who led the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom in a way that made the janitors murmur Amen. Jesus tried team after club after activity, to mediocre results. Chess club: boring. Speling bee: see? Debate made his voice crack with anger. The science fair was already dominated by the Staniciewicz twins. Every night for two months Jesus rehearsed Kipling's "If" for the Poetry Rodeo, but once his feet hit the stage, the only words that appeared on the teleprompter of his mind were hominah-hominah-hominah.
Sometimes Jesus felt like an extra in his own life.
Then he joined Bible Bowl.
Bible Bowl was a trivia competition, sponsored by the VFW to "promote and foster bible literacy among youth in grades 6 – 8." Why those grades? Maybe the veterans felt like little kids weren't ready to digest loads of Bible facts, while high schoolers were probably already damned anyway—but really, who knows. Maybe it was the requirement of some grant.
So, every spring, Bible Bowlers traveled the VFW circuit. Saturday afternoons, while rain pecked holes in the slush, teams of middle-schoolers faced off in front of old men who shouted out answers to questions no one was asking. The kids played for pride, love of the Bible, and a modest donation to the winning school's textbook fund.
At first, Jesus was okay at Bible Bowl, though his mind tended to go blank on half the questions. His blanking-out didn't hurt the team much, because they had Vasha, a girl with large, dark eyes and a photographic memory. Vasha was the star. This kind of burned Jesus up, but he didn't quit. Not this time.
That was why he hadn't succeeded at any of the other activities, he'd decided. Not because of a glaring lack of talent; no, he just hadn't stuck with any one thing long enough to get good at it. Life held millions of possibilities, and Jesus had been browsing through them like he was a guy at a video store. What he needed to do, he saw now, was to commit to one possibility. It hardly mattered which one. Bible Bowl was as good as anything. Once he figured out how to get good at Bible Bowl, he could apply that same approach to something else. Anything else, he thought.
So Jesus wore out the flashcards. He asked Mr. Gupta—math teacher, Bible Bowl sponsor—for extra worksheets. Somehow this only made the blanking-out worse.
One Saturday, Vasha caught a stomach bug and had to lie down on a pile of coats at the back of the VFW. Mr. Gupta came to Jesus with the captain's C. "Ready to step up?"
Jesus blinked at him. Hominah-hominah-hominah.
Mr. Gupta waved a hand in the boy's face. "Yoo-hoo. Earth to Jesus."
Jesus shuddered. "I think it's Leonard's turn. He's been on the team longer."
They both looked at the corner, where Leonard was digging his pinky fingers into his ears while opening and closing his mouth like a carp.
"Leonard is more of a support-role kind of guy," said Mr. Gupta.
The Bowlmaster called for the contestants and Mr. Gupta slapped the velcro C on Jesus' shirt. "Showtime."
As it turned out, Leonard wasn't much support. Mostly he stroked his chin, sneaking little sniffs of his pinkies, leaving Jesus to answer all the questions. Which he did, one wrong answer after another. Only a few minutes into the game, Jesus had scored -3700 points. He tried to stop buzzing in, but his idiot thumb kept pressing and pressing; it was like it had a mind of its own, but not a mind with any answers, just a lot of misplaced confidence.
The old men went nuts, throwing plastic cups of beer on the ground in disgust. This was not why they'd created Bible Bowl, so some young punk could claim that Noah had been on the ark "four score and seven years," and the food given by God to the Israelites in the desert was "hominah." This wasn't goddamn mad libs. If Jesus wanted to make fun of the Bible, he could take that shit over to the softheads at the American Legion.
Someone tipped over a folding chair and the Bowlmaster called the match for safety concerns.
On the van ride back to the school, Mr. Gupta was upbeat, which only made Jesus more miserable. Instead of pounding the dashboard and demanding to know why Jesus was wasting his potential, Mr. Gupta said, "Hey, the effort was there." Like Jesus was a Special Olympian. The reaction at home was even more depressing. Jesus' daddy mussed his hair and said, "There'll be another bowl next week."
"What if I bomb that one, too?" Jesus said.
His daddy shrugged. He was a carpenter. Bible Bowl seemed pretty fluffy to him. He said, "How are you doing at math?"
That evening, Jesus prayed a desperate prayer. He asked God to make him a different person. Same family, same body, just replace his insides with someone exceptional.
Late that night, he awoke to find a ghost perched on his footboard.
"Poof," said the ghost without looking up from the Reader's Digest in his hand. He looked like a middle-aged guy, tired around the eyes, hair
The name didn't mean much to Jesus; at that point he didn't know one ghost from another. But something about this guy seemed reassuring, even if he did look a little doofy, so instead of running around in terror or wasting a lot of time with gestures of surprise, Jesus simply sat up in bed and said, "Let's get to it."
Holyghost didn't use worksheets, or flashcards, or stage mock-Bowls with a cardboard quiz stand like Mr. Gupta did. Instead, he told stories. Jesus liked this. The stories stuck to his brain, like peanut butter to the roof of his mouth. Holyghost finished his last story as the sun came up, then licked his thumb and pressed it to the boy's forehead. "You're anointed," he said. Jesus had no idea what that meant, but the touch of the ghostly thumb sent an electric tingle through every one of his hairs.
At the next match, Vasha peeled the Captain's C off his uniform. "Thanks for keeping it warm," she said with a generous smile. Vasha was a warm kid. Tough to hate, even with the photographic memory. And after the apocalypse of the last match, Jesus was more than a little relieved to take a back seat again. He thought he'd take it easy this time, just answer a few questions in his head to see if that session with Holyghost had helped at all, but his thumb had a different idea.
When his thumb spazzed the buzzer on the very first question, Mr. Gupta looked at Jesus like Oh no, and Jesus looked back like I didn't mean to!, but it didn't matter, because you can't unbuzz in Bible Bowl, and now the Bowlmaster was saying, "Your answer, please?" in a queasy voice like he couldn't believe this was happening again—but then, hey! What was this? The right answer on his tongue like a candy? How did that get there? Jesus didn't know, but he would take it. And the same thing happened on the second question—thumb spaz, and a correct answer popping into his mouth like a Pez pellet—and his team had a hundred points, right off the bat. Well, that felt all right. Might as well keep buzzing. He racked up five in a row, then six, then seven, and at that point Jesus thought he should probably let someone else buzz in so he wouldn't look like such a question hog, but then he found that he was afraid to stop.
Remember the first time you ever got going on a bike, how it felt like an accident or a miracle, and you were pretty sure that you wouldn't be able to find this equilibrium again, or even stop without crashing, so you kept riding and riding? It was like that.
At the end of the match, Jesus had set a new all-time scoring record. But were his teammates pleased? Vasha peeled off the C and flung it toward the pile of coats. Even Leonard complained that he could have helped with a few answers if Jesus had given him a little time. And Mr. Gupta? Mr. Gupta couldn't even look Jesus in the eye when he told him that the Sergeant-at-Arms wanted to pat him down. "They think you might have had some assistance," he said.
"They think I cheated?" said Jesus with the indignation of a cheater. "Do you think I cheated?"
"It's just that I can't account for your sudden improvement," said Mr. Gupta, apologizing to Jesus with his eyes as he handed him over to an old man with dandruff on his epaulets. The Sergeant-at-Arms searched the boy's pockets, cuffs, socks, his mouth, and found no cheat sheets or secret transmitting devices. But did the crusty old bastard clear him of wrongdoing?
The Sergeant-at-Arms said, "I can't find the kid's trick."
Jesus' team got the victory, but it was a quiet van ride back to school.
"Get used to it," Holyghost muttered that night when Jesus told him about the shabby treatment.
"What do you mean?"
Holyghost looked up at the long shadows of the ceiling fan. "The Bible's got a whole other part. But I don't think you're ready for it yet."
Holyghost should have known better. He should have known that Jesus would hear that as teasing, not as mercy. He should have known that Jesus would beg to hear that other part, and when begging didn't work, the boy would nag, and bargain, and attempt reverse psychology. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."
"You're right, you don't."
"Seriously. Never tell me. I forbid you to tell me."
"That's what you'll wish later on, I bet."
This went on for several nights until Jesus got so turned around that he couldn't tell if Holyghost was being sincere or if he was using reverse-reverse psychology, or if there was even a difference. All Jesus knew was that having all this bible knowledge didn't feel so great, now that there was one big thing he didn't know. "Holyghost, man, come on. Please."
Holyghost tapped his fingers together in front of his face. His eyes were tired, tired. Then he blew out a big breath. "Okay," he said. "You're going to want to sit down for this story."
That night Holyghost told the story of a man who left the comfort of his family to go through all kinds of adventures, some good, some rocky. The man had friends who followed him around, but they misunderstood almost everything he said, and when they tried to help, they mostly got in his way.
Some people loved the man, and some people hated him, and both sides were dangerous and scary.
The story was full of secrets, lies, terrible storms, conspiracies, betrayals, narrow escapes and grisly deaths—it was a real barnburner, the best story Holyghost had ever told. Just listening to the story exhausted Jesus, that's how good it was. "Wow," he said after it was over. "One second it was like all right!—and then it was like oh, no—and then, just when you think the story's over, bam." His hands were trembling. For some reason, he felt electricity running through his hair again. "Just . . . wow."
But the story wasn't over. Holyghost looked at the boy slouched on the other end of the bed, this boy who was small for his age, with knobby knees and a smile too big for his face. Holyghost looked at him a long time before delivering the kicker.
"The man in the story?" he said. "That man is you."
Talk about coming of age. The axe fell on his boyhood, right at that moment. All the choices Jesus thought he had in front of him—all the branching creeks of life's possibilities—all of that disappeared. His story had already been written. There was just the one path, and he would walk it alone, even when he was surrounded by throngs of people.
Jesus bawled. He buried his face in Holyghost's neck. He said, "Forget all that bible knowledge. You can have it back."
"It's not about that. I was going to come anyway. I was just waiting until you were ready."
"Well, I'm not," Jesus said. "I don't think I'm ever going to be ready for all of that business."
"Too late now," said Holyghost.
"Give it to someone else."
"Can't," said Holyghost. "It's pre-ordained."
Jesus bawled harder because now he knew what that meant.
The story isn't over yet. There's a whole other part, as there usually is with Bible stories.
That night Jesus was given a gift, along with the burden. The gift wasn't evident until he went to school the next morning to find that he could see into the hearts of his classmates, the janitors, even Mr. Gupta. It was like x-ray vision, but instead of veins and flaps, he saw their own burdens. He saw the rough roads ahead of them. He saw what they wanted and how it would destroy them.
Jesus ached for all of them, but in a way that felt strangely gratifying. That was love right there, real as a toothache. Love and suffering, they go together like fist and gut. Why do you think they call it "falling in love?"
Just before the bell rang, Lucifer walked into the room and fell into his chair. Jesus looked into his friend's heart and saw a new great sorrow. Jesus said, "You got some news, too, huh?"
"They're wrong," said Lucifer without looking over. His face was stiff. "I don't have to do any of that business."
Jesus, without knowing what he was doing or why, reached out to touch Lucifer on the shoulder—but then the bell rang, and Mr. Gupta came striding in, and Jesus pulled back his hand.
"Another day in paradise," said Mr. Gupta, and began to talk about X, and Y, and N in a serious way, as if the universe actually contained variables.
