Things I Can't Forget Read Online Free

God.
    But I couldn’t understand why she was questioning that, and that made me think about my own beliefs. Church was all I had ever known, and Emily had come back from D.C., telling me most kids there didn’t believe or they belonged to some other religion that I knew nothing about, like Judaism and Islam. Why didn’t we learn anything about those religions in Sunday School? Why didn’t we have more than a few temples and mosques in Tennessee? The only thing I knew about either religion was what I had learned in history class: the Holocaust, 9/11.
    I knew what I was supposed to believe: God is great. God loves me. I don’t want to go to Hell. I know some people wonder whether Heaven and Hell truly exist, but do those people question whether gravity exists? Or oxygen? You can’t see those with your naked eye, either. I can’t see cologne on a guy’s body, but I can smell it. I may not be able to see Heaven, but deep inside, I can feel it.
    Anyway, Emily’s boyfriend of three years liked her physical changes a lot, and when the three of us would hang out together, Jacob and Emily disappeared upstairs into her bedroom more frequently. I figured they wanted to kiss in private.
    Before she went to D.C., she’d once told me about how Jacob had gone up her shirt and unsnapped her bra.
    “Emily, that’s wrong,” I had said.
    “Prude,” she’d replied with a laugh.
    Maybe I was a prude, but that’s how I wanted to be. We had been told to save ourselves for marriage. After that, she tried to talk to me about physical stuff she did with Jacob, but it always made me uncomfortable.
    A small part of me was jealous. I wanted a guy to kiss me. To touch me.
    But Mom sent me to Sunday School every week and she taught me to follow the Bible’s instructions (thou shall not steal, thou shall not lie), to do what our pastors say. And for good reason.
    Like, my pastor told us not to drink. That made a lot of sense after James Macanley drove his truck into a backhoe and slashed his forehead open on the windshield. He had to get seventeen stitches. Sex before marriage isn’t smart because you can get pregnant or contract some nasty disease. Taking drugs is stupid. Why mess up your brain like that?
    God’s laws just make sense. And like I said, before Emily went to D.C., I honestly never knew there were other options, other beliefs. It was like a part of my brain opened up to this whole new world. A world I didn’t understand.
    Using my pink coloring pencil, I shade in Emily’s Converse, which she was staring down at.
    That day on her porch in April, Emily wiped her eyes and said, “I want to play for the National Symphony. I can’t have a baby.”
    In elementary school, my Barbies married Emily’s Ken dolls. In middle school, we shared deodorant after gym class. Freshman year, when Kristen Markum called me a Jesus Freak, Emily got in her face and told her to shut up. I loved Emily more than anything.
    “Have you prayed about it?” I asked her.
    “I need to do what’s best for me. I think God would want that.”
    “I don’t know what He wants,” I replied, and bit my lip.
    “I want to get an abortion,” she said so quietly I could barely hear her.
    I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes to stanch my tears. If I were her, I would’ve married the father and had the baby.
    I wanted to tell Emily that at nine weeks, a fetus can wrap his tiny fingers around his nose and toes. At fourteen weeks, which was about how far along Emily was, a fetus learns to suck his thumb.
    “Shouldn’t we talk to your mom?” I asked.
    “No!” she blurted. “No one can know.”
    “What does Jacob think?”
    She glanced up at me, her eyes watering. “He can’t know either.”
    “But it’s his baby.”
    “But it’s my body.”
    I rubbed my chest, squeezing my T-shirt. “What happened? Didn’t you use a condom?”
    She smiled sadly. “This one time it kind of slipped off and Jacob didn’t notice until we were finished.”
    I