I’ve never talked to Zoe, yet she speaks to me in this moment; she tells about the importance of repentance. People murmur amens and I remember that I’m sitting as part of the congregation, but Zoe’s green eyes glance over mine every few seconds. I pay attention to everything about her, like the way her tiny frame hides behind the pulpit, and how even though she tucks a lock of hair behind her ears, it falls out every other minute.
To distract myself, I bring my mind back to the time I first heard her.

After a three hour drive to a forested area that hosted the summer camp, and another hour of instructions for the day was free time. Many of the kids in my age group were playing in the river with each other. I sat against a tree and read, wishing to have my iPod and headphones. Electronic restrictions for the event forbade me from doing so.
“I heard it’s supposed to rain later on today,” the mysterious duo I’d been eying throughout the day passed by me talking to each other. As I tried hiding my interest in their conversation, I glued my eyes to my book.
“Hmm, I wonder how you know that Maggie, being we have no technology to tell us so,” the other girl responds to ‘Maggie’.
Hiding my smile, I focused my attention back to the possessions on my lap. Uninterested in my story’s plot after such a disruption, I stashed it away in my bag in return for my new, blue composition notebook. I scribbled onto the paper as the duo passed by me.
The unknown girl’s wispy light brown hair caught my attention, as well as Maggie’s pixie cut. She introduced me to another hairstyle, instead of the natural long-haired girls around me. I wondered her name: the friend of Maggie, my newfound crush.
My wonderings were answered the next day as they got ready for a field trip to canoeing. Maggie followed the leader's orders by scratching the duo's names in sharpie on the brown sack lunches they packed.
Zoe.

“Repentance is important because it’s an easy process compared to the pain that Christ felt for us,” Zoe speaks again. It’s only been a couple minutes that I’ve reviewed my summer life of 2012. My eyes connect with her and my heart stops. She continues talking without a stutter, and I look to my mom who’s busy with my siblings.

In 2014 was my first church camp to another state, and I’d brought my newly-converted friend Erika. The last night of our stay in Nauvoo consisted of a dance full of kids from both Iowa and Illinois.
That night, Erika squealed as we walked down the mysteriously dim hallway away from the dance in the church gym. We came to an end, where a bust stood on a 3-foot pillar. The shadows around us made me feel uneasy with the man’s sculptured face looking at us with its stony eyes.
“Uh, I don’t think you guys are supposed to be back here,” I turn around to see an older teenage girl that looked unchanged since the last time I’d seen her two years ago.
“Sorry,” I responded to Zoe, “We’re just trying to escape people from asking us to dance.”
She nodded and led us out of the darkness into a bright hallway full of good vibes and chatter. Searching from there on out, I failed to see her again throughout the dance. In the morning was the last time I saw her when our buses brought us to the Mississippi River to explore as we waited for the last bus.

That was the last year I should have seen her, yet she is here at the pulpit preaching repentance. Two years later, her hair is the same style, and she attains the same awkwardness that I’d gotten attracted to from the start
She lives in a different town. Why is she here? I wonder. One last glance at me and she ends her talk with “amen”. The butterflies riot in my stomach and I look at Alex, wishing I liked him more than I liked Zoe. Because here I am, a girl with a female crush in my own church.