Johnston: This will be a little long. Stay with me.

I took a Bible class in high school. Long story about that, but let’s just streamline that particular narrative by saying I was in South Texas. I sat by a young woman named Rebecca who looked like a free-loving hippy, but who was, in fact, a born-again Christian, the kind of girl who brought her own Bible (with her name stamped in gold cursive on its cover) to class every day. She had huge chunks of scripture memorized, and our teacher, a woman so old and frail it hurt me to look at her, regularly called on her to recite those chunks. In South Texas in the late eighties, most girls in high school shellacked their hair and squeezed into their Wranglers and wore blousy, primary-colored cowboy shirts. Not Rebecca. She had this cool and inexplicable SoHo/bohemian thing going on: bell-bottoms and henleys and platform shoes and beaded necklaces that hung to her waist.

That year, I didn’t really care about anything other than skateboarding, and I came to class one morning limping from some fall I’d taken the night before. Had I done the splits on a handrail I’d been trying to boardslide down? Had I gotten hung up on the top of a ramp and smashed to the ground eight feet below? Even odds. I only know that I was limping, and when Rebecca saw me, she bowed her head and clasped both her hands behind her neck. Praying for me, I thought, and was both flattered and a little freaked out. But I was wrong. She was unclasping one of her long necklaces. She pooled it in her palm, then handed it to me. She said, “It was my grandmother’s. It’ll speed up your recovery.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t lose it,” she said. “Just wear it until you feel better, then give it back.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t lose it.”

And I didn’t lose it. I broke it. That night. I was helping to build a halfpipe at the skatepark and wearing the necklace when the downswing of my hammer caught the string of beads and the necklace snapped and the beads scattered like hundreds of marbles. They rolled down and behind and under the ramp, and I distinctly remember the person who was working on the lower part of the ramp and upon whom many of the beads fell (remember how Mr. Moose would rain all those ping pong balls down on Captain Kangaroo, think of that) saying, “What the shit, Johnston?”

“I just broke this girl’s grandmother’s necklace.”

“Is she hot?” the guy said. His name was Todd, but he tried to make everyone call him “The Squad.”

“She’s a born again Christian,” I said. “She’s going to be pissed.”

“I’m down with Jesus,” The Squad said.

“She’s going to be really, really pissed. Help me find all the beads.”

“Fuck you.”

By the end of the night, I’d found a handful of the beads out of maybe a hundred. I skipped Bible class for the rest of the week.

One section of the beads hadn’t fallen off the string, which meant I had the pattern. Which pattern was: One ruby bead, one silver, three pearly ones, another silver, another ruby. Red, silver, white, white, white, silver, red, then repeat, repeat, repeat. The day after I ruined the necklace, I went to a hobby shop and bought the nearest approximations to the original beads. Everything looked perfect, except the rubies, which may have been antiques, according to the hobby shop worker. (“You want to sell those?” he’d asked.) Then I went back to the skatepark and asked The Squad’s girlfriend to help me replicate the necklace.

She was almost done when she said, “This won’t work. You’re an idiot.”

“I think it looks good,” I said.

“The originals are antique beads. Yours are like from K-Mart. She’s going to know. She’s going to kick your ass.”

“She’s a Christian.”

“Then God’s going to kick your ass,” she said.

“I think it looks good.”

“You’re an idiot.”

On Monday, I told her I’d forgotten the necklace at home. I said I’d taken it off because I was helping to build a ramp at the skatepark and I didn’t want anything to happen to her necklace. I managed to forget the necklace every day that week, actually. When we bowed our heads to pray, I prayed that she’d tell me to keep the necklace. The following week I mounted a campaign to buy it from her. I offered her an inordinate amount of money for the necklace—money I didn’t have—and for a while she seemed to be considering it.

“Why do you want to buy it so bad? You never wear it anymore.”

“I just really like it. I feel good when I wear it.”

“Good how?”

“I don’t know, just good.”

“Does it make you feel closer to God? My grandmother was a great Christian.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly how it feels.”

She smiled, nodded. Jackpot, I thought.

Then she said, “No, I can’t. Bring it tomorrow. I want to wear it to church this Sunday.”

So I brought it. She started weeping right away. I felt like trash. I told her everything. I apologized, apologized, apologized. She accepted my apology and said she hoped I’d learned a lesson. She quoted something from the Bible. Just writing about it makes my stomach roil.