Lay It on My Heart (10 page)

By now, most of the boys in the bleachers have parked thick slugs of chewing tobacco under their bottom lips. They try to hide it, but if you turn too quickly, you'll catch them spitting into empty pop cans.

“Disgusting,” says the girl with the ponytail as a boy wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

I pull out the letter from my father and smooth it against the cover of my social studies book. I read it once through and start in again, as though it will begin to make more sense.

“Who'd you get the letter from,” says the girl.

“My dad.”

The song ends and then they restart it louder. “Eye of the Tiger.” Beside me, the girl dances with the upper half of her body.

“I'm going out for cheerleading,” she says. She stops dancing and starts making the rigid motions of a cheer with her arms. “My sister used to cheer at my old school. My used-to-be stepsister. My parents are divorced, too. My dad lives in Omaha.”

“My parents aren't divorced.”

“Then how come your dad's writing you letters?”

I look down at the letter in my lap, which is starting to fold itself back into thirds. “He's just away for a while.”

“In prison?”

“No,” I say. I hadn't considered prison or expected anyone else to. The girl has straight dark eyebrows, and when she speaks, her lips move carefully over a delicate set of braces. After she stops speaking, it is hard to believe her face ever moved, much less that she was talking about prison.

“Theresa's dad is in prison,” she says. “It sucks that there's no one popular in English. No offense.”

I dimly perceive the insult and shrug it off. “Who's Theresa?”

The girl lifts a thin, graceful arm and points to where the cheerleaders have sprung out onto the floor in their blue-and-white uniforms, doing an “Eye of the Tiger” cheer routine. At the song's chorus, a blond girl in ribboned pigtails, legs tight with muscles, takes a running start and turns handsprings down the entire length of the gym floor. The rest of the girls in the squad wait their turn under the basketball hoop. “I can only do a round-off back handspring,” says the girl beside me. “I can't do a standing back tuck, and that's what you have to do to make cheerleader. I have a week to learn, though.” On the gym floor, Theresa, having landed and thrust her arms ceiling-ward in a jubilant V, snaps them back in, crouches, then lofts herself in a back flip and lands on her feet again, rising into another V. “That's a good one,” says the girl beside me. “Theresa's dad wrote bad checks. He wrote a check to cheerleading camp that bounced, but they let her stay because she has such good spirit. She even won the spirit stick. Are you from East Winder?”

“Originally,” I say, which I already know is obvious. Everyone from East Winder looks wrong here. Our jeans are too thickly cuffed. Our shoes are mostly plain canvas sneakers from the dollar store. Mine have a crackling white layer of shoe polish to make them look more new. The Clay's Corner kids wear name-brand sneakers or brown leather lace-up shoes I don't even have a name for.

“That's where all the churches are,” says the girl. “Have you ever thought about growing your hair out?”

I touch my hair. Today I have pulled my bangs straight back into a barrette again, but some have escaped and curl on either side of my forehead in the natural wave Phoebe says I should be grateful for.

“The thing to do is wear it in a ponytail every day.” The girl moves her face from side to side to make her ponytail swing. It's as straight and smooth as water poured from a pitcher. “Then one day you just wake up and your hair is long, which makes you prettier. Unless you're like them.” She points again, five rows below us, to twins from East Winder whose parents are missionaries, like Seth's, only to Honduras instead of Ghana. Ida and Martha Hughes. Their flat, dishwater-blond hair dangles below their waists in a line of brittle points. “They look like they haven't cut their hair since they were born.”

“They haven't,” I say. “The Bible says a woman's hair is her crown in glory, and some people think that if you cut your hair in this life, you won't have a crown in glory.
Glory
means heaven.”

“Not even a trim?”

“That's just how their family takes it,” I say. “It doesn't really say not to cut your hair, except for Samson in the Old Testament, and there it was just that if he cut his hair then he would lose his strength. But when he let it grow out again he got his strength back and brought the temple down.”

The girl blinks at me a few slow times, looking confused at the mention of Samson, then entirely bored. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

In my head I break down the word into
boy
and
friend
, and say, “I guess so.”

“What's his name?”

“Seth,” I say, experimentally. “He doesn't go to this school.”

“Have you kissed him?”

“Kind of.”

“You know what's better than having a boyfriend? When someone else's boyfriend likes you. Even if the boy is a little bit scummy, like from down by the river.”

“Scummy,” I repeat, swallowing hard. It's an awful word.

“Because when you have your own boyfriend, they could always be about to like someone else. You have a lot to lose. Another thing: it's good to have a brother or sister who's popular.”

“I'm an only child.”

“When your parents get divorced, maybe one of them will marry someone who's also divorced and has kids, and maybe those kids will be popular at the school where you end up. That's what happened with my stepsister. Then my mom divorced her dad.”

“My parents aren't getting divorced, though. I already said. My dad's just away for a while.”

“That's code for getting a divorce. That's Divorce One-oh-one. My mother's been divorced twice.”

“Stop saying ‘divorce,'” I say. In my head I hear Phoebe telling me she loves me more than anything else in the world. “God told my father to marry my mother.”

The girl blinks at me again, like I'm speaking in another language and she's not curious enough for a translation. Then she keeps talking like I haven't said anything at all. “This is my fourth school, though I did go to Clay's Corner Elementary for third and fourth grade. When my name was Melinda. Now it's Kelly-Lynn. But my old junior high started in sixth grade, not seventh, so this isn't exactly my first rodeo.” Kelly-Lynn takes a tube of lip gloss from her small leather purse, uncaps it, and taps it onto her mouth. Her face gives nothing away. It's possible to imagine that she has already thought of every single thing anyone could say, ever, and every single thing that could ever happen anywhere in the world, and all of it has already bored her.

This is exactly the opposite of Phoebe, and I am Phoebe's daughter, and right now I know that I have a face full of divorce. In the book with the missing father, the girl has to pass through an evil, dark specter that's spreading itself over the earth and even throughout the universe. That's the way the idea of divorce feels, like a specter creeping over my heart. Beside me, the girl watches cheerleading, her ponytail switching gracefully against her back. In each of her earlobes nests a tiny pearl. Not like a planet coated in evil, but like a clean little moon, still and serene unto itself.

 

In the ten-minute break before final period, I join a group of about forty East Winder kids outside the lunchroom for a prayer meeting. I'm standing at the back, next to a long, skinny window, and when I peer through it, there he is. Right outside, the Child of God. Cecil. He grinds a cigarette into the dirt with his awkward, booted foot. Three boys tower over him, dressed in jeans and concert T-shirts that you can tell used to be black. Quiet Riot and Iron Maiden. One of the boys flicks a lighter and holds the flame to the edge of a textbook. He looks toward the window, and I turn my head away as fast as I can.

In front of the group now, one of the long-haired missionary twins stands on an upturned milk carton. “Separation of church and state does not mean we don't have the right to free assemble,” she pronounces.

“Yeah,” holler some of the kids. They raise their fists like they're protesting something, but it's not as if anyone's trying to stop us from assembling. In fact, none of the kids trickling in and out of the lunchroom for study hall seem to be paying that much attention.

“Charmaine, hey,” someone whispers behind me. It's Mary-Kate with Karen, from church, both clutching their clarinets. “Where were you Sunday?” asks Mary-Kate.

“Out of town.”

Up front, the missionary twin says, “They can take the Ten Commandments off the wall of the classroom, but they can't take them out of our hearts.”

“Did you bring a lock for your locker?” Karen says. “I forgot.”

I shake my head. The twin up front is detailing how the prayer requests will work. You submit your request on a folded-up piece of paper, and each day the person leading prayer will unfold as many as there's time to pray for. Around me, kids start tearing paper out of their notebooks and scribbling requests.

“We were going to see if we could put our clarinets in your locker,” says Karen, “but now I'm going to write a prayer request that they don't get stolen.” I hold both clarinets while Mary-Kate and Karen write their requests and pass them to the front, where the other missionary twin collects them in her bag. Then she reaches in, selects several, and hands them to her sister.

Behind me, the outside doors open with a heavy
clank
. The high school boy who tried to burn the textbook sneers at our group, lips pulling back from sharp yellow teeth that look too small for his mouth. He holds the door until Cecil's made it through, then he and all his friends line up at the back of our group.

“This is a good one,” says the twin up front. “It says, ‘Remember to pray for David Peake, who's still in the hospital.'” All the East Winder kids turn this way and that until they spot me at the back. Heat creeps into the roots of my hair. I don't know how many people knew about my father before the request, and I don't know who wrote it, but I can't even hear the next two requests because of the blood pounding in my ears. When everyone lowers his or her head in prayer, I get ready to slip away from the first and last school prayer assembly I will ever be
a part
of. That's when one of the high school boys behind us yells, “Jesus fucking FREAKS!”

Not a single East Winder kids moves. We've been trained for persecution, and we know how to keep our heads down.

“Those boys?” whispers Mary-Kate. “They don't even steal stuff out of lockers. They pee through the slots in the locker doors.”

It has the horrible ring of truth, and I turn around and look. I can't help it.

“What's your problem?” says the textbook-burning kid.

Cecil looks at me hard. “Girl from the bus,” he says. He lifts his nose in the air like he's trying to smell me again, and I shut my eyes against what comes next. “Girl from the bus on the God Squad.” Then he does a little hop with his foot, pivots awkwardly, and shuffles away down the hall with his friends.

E
VERY MORNING BEFORE SCHOOL
, Phoebe drives to the pay phone at the gas station in Tate's Bend to find out where she's substitute-teaching. If it's far out and she will be late, then she will leave a message for me at school to take the afternoon bus that stops in East Winder. On these days I am to stay with Daze, if she's available, or at my old house, where I have been handpicked by Mrs. Catterson for the unlucky task of socializing Seth, who is homeschooled. If Phoebe won't be late, then I'll ride the river bus back to the cabin. I'll sit in the RV's passenger seat and do my homework on the dash. Daze says this makes me a latchkey kid, like she saw on
60 Minutes
, but Phoebe says it most certainly does not.

On the second day of school, a Tuesday, I get the message to ride the bus to the Cattersons, and Seth's mother meets me at the door of my own house. She is tall and blond, with a strong-looking nose and a wide red smile. Inside the front door she stoops to give me a little hug as I stand there looking around for our shoe tray.

“How's your father, dear?” she says. “We missed you in church.”

“I don't know, I know,” I say, like an idiot.

Even though the cabin is a very cramped space, the inside of my house seems smaller than I remember. It has the invisible feel of other people, a strange, clear layer that distorts all the familiar things in a way I can't pin down. For the first time ever, I keep my shoes on while I cross the pale gray carpet, the carpet Phoebe says is for sock feet only. Already there's a faintly soiled footpath between the front door and the kitchen, right through the foyer. There's a small television set too, on the shelf opposite the couch.

“You can set up your books on the table,” says Mrs. Catterson as she pours two glasses of milk. “You and Seth can do homework, and then we'll see about the rest of the afternoon, if there's time left over. Maybe even watch television.”

What I would like to do is go up to my room and get my box. Only not in front of Seth.

“Make yourself at home,” Mrs. Catterson says. “I mean, I know this is your home already, but you know what I mean.” Then she pulls on yellow rubber gloves and heads off to clean the bathroom. I've just opened my history book, which is the only real homework I have so far, when Seth thumps a red clothbound Bible down on the table across from me, at my father's place. He doesn't say hello and he doesn't drink his milk. He just flips to a page in the middle of the Bible and begins reading. I am already on the history chapter about Puritans, how they believed in the “Elect,” and how some women would throw their babies into wells so that they knew they would go to hell and wouldn't have to worry over it anymore.