Bright Purple: Color Me Confused with Bonus Content by Melody Carlson Page A

isn’t that true?”
    I think about this. “I guess so. But I also know I need to obey God. And part of obeying God is obeying the rules and respecting your parents and authority and stuff. But you know all about that. your dad’s probably instilled that into you since you—”
    “Yeah, yeah.” He kind of brushes this off like he doesn’t want to talk about his dad. “So where’s your dad in all this, Ramie? I mean I’ve heard a lot about your mom, but you never say a word about your dad. What’s he like?”
    “What’s he like?” I slowly sink back into the seat as I contemplate on how to best answer Mitch. “It’s kind of a long story,” I say, hoping that might be the end of it.
    “Okay, then let me treat you to lunch and you can tell me all about it.”
    So it is that we’re sitting over cheeseburgers and mocha shakes and I start telling Mitch more about my dad than I’ve told anyone. Including Jess.
    “I used to just think I didn’t have a dad,” I begin. “I mean I’d never actually seen him or anything. When I got old enough to realize that everyone has a dad, I asked my mom about him. At first she just told me that my dad lived in a different country, and I kind of accepted that.”
    “A different country?”
    “Yeah, he’s Jamaican. He came over here on an exchange program with my mom’s parents’ church. He was studying to become a pastor, and my grandparents were his host family. My mom was in her second year of college and, according to her, she had changed a lot after leaving home. you see, her parents were Christians, but extremely religious and extremely conservative, not cool like your parents. So as soon as my mom got away from them she went a little wild.”
    He chuckles. “That sounds familiar.”
    “Anyway, she said she had this need to rebel against them so that she could find herself, you know? By her second year of college she was smoking pot and drinking and doing pretty much anything she could think of that they wouldn’t approve of, which didn’t sound too difficult since they pretty much didn’t approve of anything.”
    Mitch laughs. “Sounds kind of like what my older sister did when she went off to college. Man, my parents freaked big time. But after a couple of years, she straightened up. She married a pretty nice guy, and now everyone seems happy.”
    “Well, my mom never straightened up—at least not in the opinion of my grandparents. They’re still estranged.”
    “Too bad.”
    “Maybe. Anyway, it was Christmas break and my mom went home to visit her parents. And that’s when she met David, the aspiring pastor.”
    “The Jamaican exchange student?”
    “Yeah. She and David kind of hit it off. My mom said he was really handsome, and she was really pretty then. Long blonde hair, blue eyes, good figure, you know. And they were attracted to each other.”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “Yeah. She’s admitted to me that their little fling might’ve had as much to do with getting back at her parents as it did with liking David. But she also assured me it was mutual. Apparently she didn’t have to do much to lead the poor man astray. Of course, she had never planned on getting pregnant.”
    “Her parents must’ve been fuming.”
    “She didn’t tell them.”
    “Never?”
    “Not for a long time. She went back to school and got a job to support herself, got some kind of assistance, and then just kept plugging along until she got her counseling degree.”
    “Wow, she must be a pretty strong person.”
    “Yeah, I guess so.”
    “So have you ever met your father?”
    “Nope.”
    “Does that bug you?”
    “Sometimes. Especially when I was about fourteen. For some reason I got totally obsessed over it. All I had of my father was this faded photograph that Mom gave me of this nice-looking dark-skinned guy standing in front of a Christmas tree. But he seemed like a perfect stranger. I told my mom that I had to meet him, and I almost talked her into letting me go to