by Katie Wismer
JesusInTheHizhouse: My grandma won’t stop buying me bibles. This is the seventh she’s given me this year. We’ve passed annoying and now it’s just downright insulting. I AM AN ATHIEST. DEAL WITH IT.
Alice_in_atheist_land: Came out of the atheist closet to my mom today. She looked at me like I spontaneously caught on fire.
Nope_NoGod746: The prison wardens—ie my parents—have given up on trying to convert me. Looks like they’re sending me off to live with my uncle in the middle of nowhere Montana to “find my way back.” No internet there. Probably won’t be able to post for a while. They may even just off me while I’m out there. I guess you’ll never know. It was nice knowing ya’ll. Stay strong.
A text notification dings onto the screen, making me jump. My gaze darts to the door for a second before I dig around in my backpack for my phone. Johanna.
Johanna: Guess who has an afterschool meeting with Mr. Hot Stuff tomorrow?? ;)
Meredith: I still vote abort mission
Johanna: If it were up to you I’d die a virgin!
Meredith: If it were up to you we’d all end up in prison!
Johanna: Mare Bear, this is happening. Get on board.
The use of correct punctuation makes me pause. She never uses periods.
Meredith: Okay, honestly Jo, idk why you’re doing this. What do you have to prove?
Johanna: I don’t have to prove anything! I’m doing this because I want to. And if you’re just gonna bitch about it every time it comes up, then I guess we have nothing left to talk about
Meredith: Come on, Jo
Johanna: I’ve already made up my mind.
Meredith: This is just so needlessly risky! It’s not smart, Jo.
Johanna: Just call me stupid then.
Meredith: You know that’s not what I’m saying
Three dots appear as she starts typing something else, but they disappear just as quickly. They appear and disappear three more times, but she never responds. I sigh and toss my phone across my bed, not wanting to deal with it right now. If she’s asking me to support her hooking up with our teacher, it’s just not going to happen. And the fact that she’s mad at me like I’m the one being unreasonable is ridiculous.
Propping myself against my headboard, I pull my laptop into my lap and resume scrolling through the chatroom, though my heart’s not really in it anymore.
____0_0____replied: Yo, Fallen2Reason009, start off real serious, praising Jesus or some shit, then make a complete 180 and start talking about Satan or something before they realize what’s happening. They’ll never ask you to do the prayer again. Bonus points if it’s some big family gathering. Worked for me ;)
SufferInSilence303 replied: Don’t do that. There’s no need to be insensitive and insulting.
____0_0____replied: Yeah, cuz obviously they’re being real sensitive to his beliefs.
__Oblivion__ replied: Have you tried telling them how it makes you uncomfortable? Say you don’t mind if they partake in their religious practices at the table, and you’ll respect that, but you won’t participate. If you stay calm and level-headed, they’ll take you more seriously and be more susceptible to reason.
____0_0____replied: Still think you should start pledging your allegiance to the Dark One.
It was freshman year when I first found the site. Back then, there were only seventy or so people who frequented the forums. In the past four years, that number has jumped to over a thousand, and now it’s kind of become my afterschool tradition to do a quick read-through of the updates. Even though I never post anything, I’ve weirdly started to think of the posters as my friends.
And even though I admire the people brave enough to tell their parents—though more often than not the situation ends poorly—I just don’t think I could ever do it. There’s a lot of things my parents could forgive me for, but this isn’t one of them.
“Hey!”
The door to my room swings open and Harper’s head pops in. I jump and slam my laptop shut, my heart lurching in my chest.
Harper’s eyes dart from the computer to my face, a single eyebrow raised. Her hair is tied back in a sweaty ponytail, and she’s still in her running shorts and lime green sneakers.
“What’s up?” I ask, brushing my laptop off my legs casually as if I hadn’t just acted incredibly suspicious.
She narrows her eyes. “Papa wants help with dinner.”
“Great!” My voice comes out too loud and too high. “I’ll be right down!”
Harper stares at me a moment longer before walking away, leaving the door open.
The moment she’s gone, I let out a long, slow breath, and open my laptop to clear the history before heading downstairs. Harper immediately plops down at the kitchen table, which is currently buried beneath a mountain of her belongings. Her backpack lays discarded on its side, bright highlighters and loose-leaf paper spilling out dangerously close to the edge of the table. An empty plastic water bottle lays on its side on the floor, a casualty of Harper’s workout. I’ve been nagging her for years to switch to something reusable because of the waste and what single-use plastic is doing to the planet, but she seems to conveniently forget nearly every day.
Papa is standing at the kitchen island in his tall white chef’s hat, a handprint of flour smeared across his left cheek. I have no idea where he found the hat, but he’s worn it every time he’s been in charge of dinner for the past month.
“Meredith,” he calls, waving the wooden spoon in his hand. “Would you mind chopping those vegetables?” He points to the cutting board already set up across the island.
Why did he need my help when Harper’s right here?
I glance in her direction and she flips the textbook open, revealing a large diagram of a man’s…erm, parts, and quickly covers the page with her worksheet, eyes flashing to Papa.
Her cheeks redden when she notices me watching. “What?” she snaps.
I quirk an eyebrow. I recognize the textbook—everyone has to take Health 101 freshman year, but I can’t resist making her squirm a bit.
“I’m doing my homework!” she insists.
“Mm-hm,” I tease and take up the vegetable-cutting station.
I’m not sure what Papa’s making, but the scent of garlic fills the kitchen, and I can feel the heat of the oven from here. My eyes start watering almost immediately after I start chopping the onion, and I try to rub at them with the inside of my elbow instead of my hand so I don’t get any of the food in my eyes, but they start burning just the same. “Ugh.” I whirl around, eyes squinting, trying to feel my way toward the sink.
“Onions?” Papa asks.
“Always.”
He chuckles a little. “I’ll get it.”
I hear the sink run, then Papa presses a wet paper towel into my hand. The water takes the edge off the burning enough that I can open my eyes again.
“Switch places?” Papa offers. “You just need to turn the potatoes over in about five minutes.”
I nod, still dabbing at my eyes.
Papa nods at the now-empty roll of paper towels. “I’ll go grab another.”
I grab the spatula from the counter to flip the potatoes as he heads for the hall.
“Harper!” Papa’s gasp fills the kitchen. “What is this?”
I turn to see Papa practically prying the textbook out of Harper’s hands, her mouth open in a small oval of terror. His gaze shoots back and forth between me and Harper as if the two of us are conspiring on this. “What class is this for?” he demands, waving the offending textbook in the air.
Harper sends me a pleading look. I stand frozen on the opposite side of the kitchen, spatula still in hand. I’d always assumed Papa and Maman would hate the Sex Ed part of that class, which is precisely why I never talked about it or let them see my homework.
“I’m guessing it’s for Health class,” I say. “All freshmen have to take it.”
Papa’s mouth drops open in an
almost cartoonish way as he snatches Harper’s worksheet from the table and reads through the questions. My muscles tense, waiting for an explosion, but it never comes. Instead, Papa’s body goes very still, except for the slightest shake of his head.
“You took this class too?” he finally says. It takes me a moment to realize the question is directed at me.
I try to swallow, but it feels like it gets caught in my throat. “Yeah, everyone does—”
“I told Colette…” he trails off, shaking his head, and hands Harper back her homework and textbook. “This is what we get for sending you to public school,” he mutters.
“It’s just a short section of the class,” I offer. “Like two-weeks long—”
But Papa isn’t listening. He’s already dialing something on his phone and heading for the door. “Can you finish dinner, Mare?” he calls over his shoulder. “I need to make a call.”
“Sure,” I say, though he’s already out the door before he can hear my response. Harper and I exchange a grimace.
“That can’t be good,” she says.
My mind runs through every possibility of who he could be calling—Maman to discuss the grave mistake of letting us go to a public school, Mr. Johnson to do whatever he and his friend do—I’m assuming the male equivalent of me and Jo bitching about our lives—or, the worst case scenario, he’s calling the school to complain.
“No,” I agree. “This is not going to be good.”
4
Here’s the thing about my friendship with Johanna: she’s my best friend, and I’m hers. But she also has plenty of other friends. And like most outgoing, charismatic people, she’s easy to like. But for me, Jo is one of my only friends. I don’t know why making friends has always been so easy for her; when we were five on the playground, she’d just walk up to any kid and start talking to them, even if she’d never seen them before. For me, it’s always seemed so much more complicated. No one is interested in being friends with the quiet girl because she doesn’t seem that interesting. It’s all too easy to not notice her at all.
It’s not until the next day at school, when Jo decides she’s giving me the cold shoulder until I support her on her Mr. Graham endeavors, that I realize how serious she is.
In the halls, she walks right past me like everyone else does; during lunch, I have to sit at a table all by myself in the corner while she sits with her friends from the yearbook staff; I wait for her by her locker, but when she sees me, she turns and walks the other way. She hasn’t ignored me like since a stupid fight we had sophomore year, and that time it lasted weeks.
The only words we exchange during the entire day are when I lean over during fourth period and tap her with my pencil. Mr. Graham is busy writing something on the board, and Jo is pretending to take notes, but I can see she’s really just doodling.
“Jo,” I whisper.
She hesitates a few seconds before glancing my way. “What?” she mouths.
“How long are you going to keep this up?” I ask.
She raises her eyebrows, glances at Mr. Graham, then back to me.
My expression is apparently not what she wants to see, because she turns back to doodling butterflies that look like crooked hearts. A few minutes later when I try to get her attention again, she pretends like she doesn’t notice.
And that’s how the rest of the day goes.
Suddenly it feels like there’s this barrier between us, this slowly growing distance, and I’m terrified she’s not going to stop pushing me away until I support her on this. And all I know is there’s just about nothing I wouldn’t do to keep her, and I refuse to waste our last few weeks of high school with this pointless radio silence.
So after the final bell, I make my way back toward the west part of campus. Mr. Graham agreed to tutor her for an hour after school every other day, and today is their first session. I peek through the window of his classroom. He’s standing at the front of the room writing something on the board, and she’s seated in the first row, chin propped on her hand, an empty notebook on the desk in front of her. There’s something cat-like about the way she watches him, eyes slit and flickering back and forth, following his every movement. When he turns around and says something, gesturing with his hands, Johanna nods seriously, twirling her pencil around her fingers.
The hallway is quiet and empty, with everyone else already heading home for the day. My footsteps seem twice as loud as I pace back and forth in front of the door, trying to figure out what I should say to Jo when I see her. I’m sorry? I can’t support you, but please stop ignoring me? I don’t know if I can make it through the rest of the year like this. Maybe my face will look pathetic enough that she’ll take pity on me.
I sigh and wander to the lockers across the hall, press my back against their cool surface, and slide down until I reach the floor. I’m about to pull out some homework to work on when the faint sound of approaching footsteps breaks the silence. I see the shoes first—shiny and black but worn enough to leave permanent wrinkles in the leather. A familiar pang twists in my gut before I even see his face.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, suddenly feeling very small sitting on the floor.
Papa looks around the empty hallway, confusion pinching his eyebrows together. “What are you doing out here?” he counters.
I point at the classroom in front of me. “I’m waiting for Jo. You didn’t answer my question.”
Papa straightens his already straight tie. “I have a meeting with your principal in,” he checks his watch, “five minutes.”
If your entire body could groan, that’s the sensation that fills me. “Why?” I ask, even though I’m pretty sure I know the answer. Damn it, Harper. Why couldn’t she just do her homework in her room like every other angsty teenager?
“Just to have a chat,” Papa assures me, as if sensing my unease.
“This isn’t about Harper’s homework—”
“I’ll see you at home,” he cuts me off and continues down the hall. “I don’t want to be late.”
With that, he disappears in the direction of the admin building, perfectly comfortable finding his way from the many meetings he’s had there before.
✦✦✦
An hour later, Jo slips out of the classroom. She’s all dolled up today, more so than usual. But it’s Jo, so she made sure it wasn’t too obvious. She’s wearing a casual black T-shirt dress with riding boots, her hair loose and wavy. Her cheekbones are perfectly bronzed and shimmery. I notice the long, gold necklace dangling from her neck and smile a little. I gave that to her for her sixteenth birthday.
When she sees me sitting against the lockers, she frowns, but she doesn’t turn around and walk away, so I guess that’s progress. I rise to my feet and pull my bag onto my shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” she asks and crosses her arms over her chest.
“It’s Tuesday.” I shrug. “You always come over on Tuesdays.”
Her frown lessens, just a shade, but her eyes are narrowed now, flickering back and forth across my face, watching me the way she was watching Mr. Graham.
Maybe if I act like everything is normal, things will actually go back to normal. “So are you coming or not?” I ask with a nod to the side.
Her eyes are still narrowed, but she takes a step toward me. “Only if we stop and get milkshakes first.”
✦✦✦
I pull little red Stew up to the menu in the farthest parking spot from the door at the drive-in, noticing for the first time the large chip in the black nail polish on my right thumb, even though I just painted them yesterday. I make sure to pull my car close enough to the machine this time so I don’t have to climb out to slide my card. The metal speaker is rusted, the yellow button faded and stained with age. The glossy board behind it advertises half-off milkshakes after 2:00 p.m. with enlarged, over-saturated pictures of fried food so cheap I don’t like to think about what it’s really made of.
The
drive-in is packed with cars and kids from our school, a shiny new car in every spot. I love my little Stew, but at times like this, it’s impossible not to notice his chipping paint, his cracked leather seats, the way his passenger door only opens if you lift the handle just right…
The great thing about drive-ins, however, is we don’t have to get out of the car, so we don’t have to deal with the people. Johanna leans across my lap to shout her Oreo cheesecake milkshake order out my window.
“Gross,” I comment before ordering my own, vanilla.
“Boring,” she observes with a grunt of disapproval.
We sit in silence while we wait for the shakes, watching our classmates laugh and lounge together on the picnic tables surrounding the restaurant. A dozen or so are all trying to squeeze into a table built for half that much, leaving some standing behind seats and others perched on the edge.
Bracing myself, I take a deep breath and decide to go for it. If we’re going to talk about this, we might as well do it now when she’s dependent on me for a ride so she can’t get away.
“How’d your tutoring session go?” I ask, trying to keep my voice casual.
She props her feet on the dash and leans back, eyeing me sideways. “Was this all a ruse to get me alone so you could lecture me?”
“Of course not. We’ve done Milkshake Tuesdays every week since I got my license.”
She still looks suspicious. “It went well.”
“Did anything…happen?”
Now she rolls her eyes. “Nothing happened, so you can stop looking like someone shoved a porcupine up your ass. I’m not an idiot. I can’t just throw myself at him right away. It needs to be subtle. Today was just planting the seed.”
“So you’ve got it all planned out, then?”
“Look, Mare, if you’re just going to judge me—”
“I’m not judging you, Jo.” I sigh and grip the steering wheel with both hands. I focus on how soft and warm the leather feels against my palms. “Okay, look. I don’t like what you’re doing—you know I don’t like this at all—but I’m not willing to risk our friendship over this. I don’t want to spend the last weeks of our senior year fighting.”