"Jesus loves me," she sang with the rest of the kids in the Sunday School class, even though she might as well have been of a different species the way they wouldn't talk to her and giggled when she walked in.
"Jesus loves everyone," she was told she must tell others in order to be a good girl, by a pastor who didn't know her name and was more concerned about how many people came to a building each week than how many little girls didn't have a nice big family like his to go home to.
"Jesus loves the world," a cool video said, and she was told to go to Haiti and help build a home for orphans. But she didn't have the money to go with the rest of the youth group, and her parents thought it was pointless anyway, so she just longingly looked at the Facebook photos of the $70-Chacos-wearing youth group smiling with cute Haitian children.
And then, one day as she invisibly walked home from school with a heavy-laden backpack, not invited to get ice cream with the rest of the school friends who would then tell her Jesus loved her on Sunday at youth group, someone called her name.
"Hey!" said a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, wearing dirty white sneakers and a nose ring. They'd talked a couple times in homeroom and realized they lived in the same neighborhood and liked the same TV show. "You want to come eat with my family and me? And then maybe we can watch TV!"
In that moment, for the first time in a long time, she wondered if someone up there just might love her.
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