Double Minds by Terri Blackstock

Christian music festivals that drew thousands to hear the most popular Christian bands play. Some of them had contests for new singer/ songwriters. She’d submitted demos to all of them.
    No word from any of them yet.
    She was also considering other reality shows than American Idol . She’d written off Survivor because she didn’t think she could ever do anything athletic without losing an arm or a leg. So she’d applied to be on Big Brother , hoping that being trapped in a house with a bunch of others for six weeks might give her some notoriety. They always needed a guitar-playing Christian to mock, didn’t they? She hadn’t gotten a reply from her application or the video she’d sent in, though.
    So lately, she’d thought of trying to get on a decorating show. She’d applied for Trading Spaces and convinced her mother to trade houses for a weekend to decorate a room in each other’s home. If she could just have a camera crew here for the weekend, she would paint like a screaming banshee and sing her original songs while she did it. She’d get a decorated living room to boot.
    But none of them had responded. There were fifteen emails from people who’d heard she was dead, then subsequently found out it was all a mistake. They gushed as though she’d been their best friend. Though she saw the irony in their emailing instead of calling, she was glad they hadn’t added their voices to her growing voice mailbox.
    Besides the condolence/praise emails, she had a dozen e-cards she didn’t want to take the time to open. She wondered if Day Spring Cards had come up with a So Glad You’re Not Dead card, but she didn’t want to take the time to find out. She hit the delete key on each of them.
    Familiar anxiety swirled up in her stomach, starting a bitter churning. She realized she hadn’t eaten lunch, so she went to the pantry and pulled out a bag of caramel rice cakes she’d bought on one of her health kicks. The idea was that one or two would assuage her hunger when she was trying to lose a few pounds. Instead, she binged on them and ate the whole bag. Unlike Serene, she didn’t purge. No, she preferred to let her calories go straight to her thighs.
    Her father had aptly named her. Parker was the name of a guitar that was handcrafted and unusually shaped. What could be more fitting? Not her jeans, that was for sure.
    Who did she think she was kidding? She wasn’t skinny enough to be a star.
    Now that she’d finished the bag of rice cakes and the email, she still felt uneasy. Sick, almost. Her anxiety was pushing toward panic. There was only one remedy for that.
    She went to her bedroom and got her Bible, which sat on her nightstand, on top of her workbook on James. Crawling onto her unmade bed, she opened the Bible to where the ribbon marked her place and began to read. As always, when she got into God’s Word, she felt sucked in, totally absorbed, fascinated by the living words that had such application to her life.
    Time passed before she knew it, and just as she’d hoped, the churning in her stomach stopped. The anxiety level went down. She didn’t feel like she was going to explode.
    She heard a door and looked out the window. Gibson’s car sat in the driveway. She slid off the bed and met him in the front room. “Did you solve the case?”
    She’d never seen her brother look quite so tired. “Not yet.”
    “I saw Chase this morning, and Brenna’s roommate Marta.”
    He opened the fridge and shot a look back at her. “You need to stay out of this, Parker. I’m serious. You don’t have any business interrogating witnesses.”
    “I didn’t. I just wanted to tell them how sorry I am.”
    He closed the refrigerator door. “You ought to go to the grocery store.”
    The nerve. “I wasn’t planning for company. I have rice cakes.” She grabbed the bag off her computer table. There were mostly only crumbs left, but she tossed it to him. “I’ll make you a sandwich. I have bread and some