Prologue--Sheeba

Sheeba Marguerite Parker wants love. She seeks it. She craves it. But there’s just one problem—she’s a PK. That’s right, a preacher’s kid.

I wanted love. I chased it. I craved it. You know that pure, sacrificial, unconditional, and everlasting love. The kind of love that made Jacob work fourteen years for Rachel. The kind of love that made Odysseus and Penelope wait twenty years for each other. I would have even settled for the kind of love that made Heathcliff yearn for death after Catherine was gone just so he could be with her again. My mother, Sharon Parker, wife of Dr. Reverend Parker, said I already had that kind of love. That’s right, I was a PK"a preacher’s kid, which made things all the more frustrating.

“God loves you Sheeba,” Mommy said, when I told her I wanted to fall in love. “That’s enough for right now.”

But it’s not enough. I wanted to tell her. Don’t get me wrong, I knew God loved me. I knew that He sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross for my sins. I understood that love. I believed in that love, but I couldn’t feel that love. And for once in my life, I wanted to experience a love that I could feel, taste, see, hear, and touch. I told Mommy that, and after she rebuked the overwhelming urge to slap me, she responded accordingly: “God’s love is the only love you need to be concerned about feeling, tasting, seeing, hearing, and touching until you’re at least thirty years old.”

Please don’t be alarmed, you’re not hallucinating. You read that correctly--thirty years old. According to Mommy, I would have be lucky if I got married at thirty because no woman should be concerned with becoming any man’s wife until she’s had a life of her own and made a name for herself. I consistently tried to tell Mommy that everyone couldn’t be her, because Mommy was lucky. She made a name for herself at an early age. Declared a child prodigy and savant at seven, Mommy became a lawyer at twenty. She married Daddy when she was twenty-five and had me and my sister Taylor in rapid succession.

Sometimes when I had the strength to debate with her, I pled my case for twenty-five. Mainly because I was an eighteen-year-old virgin, I’d never kissed or touched a boy, and I couldn’t imagine living another twelve years with the latter still being my reality.

It should be duly noted at this moment that I tried to change my reality. I wasn’t a girl that complained about my circumstances and did nothing to change them. Just because I hadn’t kissed or touched a boy didn’t mean I hadn’t wanted to or tried to. His name was Devin Foster. He was the cutest thing I’d ever laid my eyes on. He reminded me of Gumby"long arms and legs that he hadn’t quite grown into yet. He was so sweet to me. I would catch him staring at me from the audience during church service, and he would find the most creative ways to get close to me. I just knew he was going to be my first boyfriend--well that was until Daddy ended it before it could begin. “You’re too young,” he said. “It’s not proper. I don’t want you to have a boyfriend.” But honestly, what father does?

His lack of enthusiasm about the subject didn’t stop me from pleading my case to him as well. When I felt really courageous, I made my argument to Daddy, but he always sided with Mommy. And after my sister became pregnant at twenty, refused to have an abortion, dropped out of college, and was disowned by our family, Daddy didn’t want to hear the word “boy” or “man” come out of my mouth. And to make sure I didn’t follow in Taylor’s footsteps, he made me memorize and recite two scriptures upon command. The recitation request inconveniently came before I left the house to hang out with my friends.

“Alright Sheeba,” Daddy always said, standing in front of the door. “Let me hear it.”

“Seriously Daddy,” I replied, without stopping to wait for his response. He was always serious. “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.”

“And,” he said, looking at me.

“And know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Be not deceived: neither fornicators nor idolaters; nor adulterers, not effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind.”

“Perfect,” he would respond pleased.

“Can I go now?” I usually asked embarrassed.

“Of course,” he always said, as he opened the door smiling and acting as if what just happened was a normal occurrence for every teenager in the world.

Without fail, I walked out of the door thinking what’s the point. If I was hell bent on having sex, no amount of scripture memorization and recitation could change that. And although Mommy and Daddy didn’t think so, the seeds they had sown into my life had fallen on good ground. I heard God’s word, I knew it, I understood it, and I wasn’t going to depart from it. Just because I said I wanted to fall in love didn’t mean that I wanted to have sex. I knew the difference between sex and love. And I was old enough to know what I wanted, and it wasn’t meaningless sex, to be married at some arbitrary, archaic, predestined time, or even to become a lawyer. I told Mommy and Daddy all of this until I was blue in the face, but they never listened. However, when it got closer to me leaving for college, I decided they didn’t have to.

Toward the end of July, I was scheduled to start my first year of college"at Helsman College to be exact. That was precisely 2,226 miles away from them. Of course Mommy and Daddy didn’t approve. The daughter of Dr. Reverend and Sharon Parker was supposed to study at Yale, Harvard, NYU, Stanford, or Princeton. They forced me to fill out all of the applications, but guess what, I never mailed any of them, and miraculously, rejection letter after rejection letter appeared in the mailbox.

If it was one thing I knew how to do, it was fight for what I wanted. I had let Mommy and Daddy dictate my life long enough. It was time for me to do what I wanted, and that’s exactly what I had planned to do. The way I saw it, Helsman was going to be a catalyst for the change I had waited far too long for. Like Sam Cook sung all those years ago, I believed a change was going to come. And to ensure that it did, I had three goals I wanted to accomplish my first year at Helsman: (1) I wanted to fall in love, (2) get my first kiss, and (3) instead of majoring in pre-med, I wanted to major in English and be the writer I had always wanted to be. Oh yeah, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake. I could already see it, and I was ready to let the good times roll!