I was not a reader.

Let me be clear about that before anything else. I was not the kid in the corner with his nose in a book. I was outside. Street hockey, hanging with friends, doing whatever teenage boys do when the summer stretches out in front of them like it will never end. Reading was not on the list.

Then a girl happened.

Not in a dramatic way. Just the ordinary way a teenage boy notices a girl and suddenly becomes interested in things he would never have cared about otherwise. Her sister gave me a book. Five hundred pages. A thick Christian supernatural thriller by an author named Frank Peretti called This Present Darkness.

I took the book because I had a plan.

The plan was simple and embarrassing in hindsight. If she saw me reading the book her sister gave me she would be impressed. She would think I was thoughtful and serious and worth paying attention to. That was the entire strategy. Read enough of it to have something to talk about. Get the girl.

So I started reading.

And somewhere in those pages the plan fell apart completely.

I do not remember the exact moment it happened. But I remember the day my friends banged on the door for street hockey and I did not go outside. Summer afternoon. The kind of day a teenage boy has no business being indoors. And I was on the couch in my father’s living room and I could not put that book down.

It was more exciting than real life. That is the only way I can explain it. Frank Peretti had built a world that pulled harder than the street outside my door and I did not want to leave it.

I never did get the girl. But I got something better.

I got the book.

Stephon Rudd