This is one of my stories: a story about the scriptures and a story about me, surviving. My Facebook feed has been littered today with people posting scriptures (because #LIGHTtheWORLD). I’ll be honest: I skip over them. They’re all such long scriptures. I dunno. I guess I’m not spiritual today. But guess what? I have my OWN scripture to share. Only mine comes in the form of a story. So, it’s actually WAY WAY longer than my friends’ scripture-social-media posts. If you know me, that’s how I do. I have a story for everything. And I’m not good at telling short stories. I go on random roads down many a tangent and throw excessive amounts of detail at you. Turns out, that’s my modus operandi. This story comes from my memoir I’ve been writing for some time. I spent a summer, when I was 19, selling books door-to-door. This is right in the middle of my story so you’ve missed out on introductions and background, but I think you’ll still get the gist of it. If not, post a comment about how silly I am to throw these random stories at you! By all means: NOBODY WANTS TO READ A SILLY BLOG. I mean. Come on. Go and read something amazing from a blogger who has incredibly pinnable content. Then, PIN ALL THE THINGS! Have fun. Now, on to my story.
“We might move you to a new sales area,” Kit had told me Saturday night. I replayed that statement over and over since then. It kept me up much of last night. It rattled through my brain as I sat in church. And now, sitting on a couch at a home in York, Pennsylvania, my mind repeats her voice over and over.
Deb sits next to me, talking with Eric. Byr is in the kitchen with others. Somebody is sleeping on another couch in the room. They’re laughing and cuddling and telling stories about selling. They’re acting like college kids. But it’s all muffled by my own mind.
“We might move you to a new sales area.”
Did Kit somehow know? Did she find out about that time that I hid in Byr’s trunk? Deb didn’t find out about that. Did she? Deb wouldn’t tell. Would Byr? She might for the sake of telling a good story. She wouldn’t tell Kit. But if she told Brice, would he tell Kit? Is that why Kit wants to move me? Because I hid in a trunk? That wasn’t in the rules.
The rules.
“We might move you to a new sales area.”
That was mentioned in the rules.
You may have to move some time during the summer. (New sales area, a more competitive roommate, better living environment, or a roommate that left the field early.)
Byr and Deb need a more competitive roommate. That’s probably it. “We might move you to a new sales area.”
Deb was laughing at Eric who was looking over at me. Is he waiting for a response? I have no clue. I nod slightly. “We might move you to a new sales area.”
Ugh.
I thought about the rules again. There was another rule about working with another first year. Deb, Byr and I were all first years. We were the only headquarters without a student manager or experienced book seller roommate. We were the only all-first-years HQ.
So I hid in a trunk, so what.
Never work with another First year dealer, unless recommended by a student manager. Never meet another First Year dealer for lunch. When you need to you can work with another Student Manager.
I thought back to when Kit read this rule to me, sitting in Sales School in Tennessee. She had modified the rule and crossed off a section that was an absolute no-no. She crossed off: “unless recommended by a student manager.”
“We won’t do that,” she said. “We’ll only have you work with another manager. It’ll be great!”
And then just last night, she’d told me, “We might move you to a new sales area.” She must have found out that I was with Byr during the day. We didn’t meet for lunch, though. And really, we didn’t really work. There was that one time where we went to the birthday party at the Shoemaker’s. Mama Shoemaker turned to Byr, when she came in and didn’t shut the door behind her, and stated, hands on her hips: “Do you live in a barn?”
So if I had to move, I’d have to start over in a new area. I’d have new roommates. I thought about the other girls HQ. The group in Middlesex used to have Kate. I liked Kate. But she went home. A student manager that went home. Even the managers quit this job. “We might have to move you to a new sales area.”
Byr was laughing in the kitchen. Something was funny. Capital F Funny. Her laugh snapped me out of my thoughts for a moment. Eric and Deb were talking about a friend of hers back home that wrote to her about her job as a life guard at the pool.
“She probably doesn’t have a book girl tan line,” Deb said, as she laughed and pulled up her sleeve to show her white shoulder, stark in contrast to her tanning arms.
“I know, right?” Eric pulled up his shorts to show a sock tan line.
I got up from the couch and stood there. I was going to go somewhere. Where? The kitchen? Outside? Home?
Oh, the kitchen. My laundry was probably done and the washing machine was just off of the kitchen. As I wandered through, Byr was standing around laughing with several of the guys. I snuck past, ducked into the closet used for laundry, left the lights off, and switched my clothes from the washer to the dryer in the dark.
After shutting the dryer and turning it on, I put my hands on top and drooped my head.
“We might have to move you to a new sales area.”
Why was I so anxious about this? I didn’t eat breakfast this morning. I hadn’t had any lunch yet. I wasn’t hungry. I was anxious.
Because I can depend on Byr to let me find her when I can’t stand this job.
I couldn’t do this alone.
Maybe I need help from someplace else, I thought. Kit had talked to me at church this morning. She mentioned the possible move again and seemed to pick up on my dread. “You should read Mosiah 24,” she said. “We talked about it in Sunday School. I think it would really help.”
“Mosiah 24?” I asked.
“Yeah. Mosiah 24.” She smiled. “Good chapter.”
I left the dark laundry room, walked through the kitchen without stopping for lunch, into the living room and grabbed my scriptures off of the coffee table. I kept walking out the front door.
We were at a two-story, white, wooden house, on a busy road in York. It had a long, wooden front porch that was sagging with age. It hadn’t been painted or stained in perhaps a decade. It might give you splinters if you looked at it for too long. I walked along the planks in my sandals so that I could sit down to the left of the door.
I stared at the traffic. Cars driving back and forth. Back and forth. Left. Right. I turned my head with them. Left. Right. Back and forth.
“Okay, Mosiah 24,” I mumbled.
I leaned my back against the house and slid down into a seated crouch, my scriptures perched on my knees. I thumbed through the pages, flipping past the Bible until I was in the Book of Mormon, following the tabs on the side until I got to the book of Mosiah where I opened and flicked the pages to the 24th chapter.
I rested the book down on my lap and looked down to begin reading:
“And it came to pass that Amulon…” I couldn’t read the words past that. I was crying. Ugly crying. Tears pouring down my face, blurring my sight. My shoulders shuddering with muffled sobs. A headache rapidly starting. I’d been holding it in, all of the anxiety, and I needed to sit down. I needed to stop.
The tears kept spilling down my cheeks, but they started to change from tears of anxiety, to tears of relief. I looked around, through my tears, at the cars speeding past. I wondered if they could tell something was happening on this sagging porch as they drove by. I looked back down at my scriptures. Why hadn’t I read these for so long?
I did need to read Mosiah 24. Kit knew. My shoulders stopped shaking, although the tears kept coming. I gulped big breaths of humid air and it felt good. I lifted my eyebrows in surprise. I was even smiling.
As the tears slowed, I smudged them off of my cheeks and eyelashes and continued reading. It was a story of a group of people in bondage. Their captors demanded that they not pray. So they prayed in their hearts instead. And there was the verse that I needed most:
“And I will also ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders, that even you cannot feel them upon your backs, even while you are in bondage; and this will I do that ye may stand as a witness for me hereafter, and that ye may know of a surety that I, the Lord God, do visit my people in their afflictions.”
