by Julie Kibler
Miss Hallye shrugged and began to carry on to the kitchen, but then she froze at Sister Maggie Mae’s next words. “Could you believe Alla Mae’s face when she opened Hallye’s gift?”
The women chuckled, though muffled, as if by hands.
Miss Hallye stiffened. Inside the box she’d wrapped so carefully, along with a shiny ladle from Alla Mae’s registry, she’d tucked a copy of the most recent Journal, which contained some of her own thoughts on marriage. The girls had giggled when Alla Mae held it up to see. Lizzie knew she should pull Miss Hallye along now, but her own feet were like wet bales of cotton.
“She autographed her articles,” Sister Maggie Mae said, snorting.
Mrs. Nettie erupted. “She didn’t! Oh, my. You know, when I read them, I was honestly puzzled. Why would she think to write about marriage? Bless her heart.”
“She’ll never marry. We’d hoped sending her off to Hamlin all those years ago would help, that she’d find some nice man who would appreciate her—shall we say—unusual personality. At the very least, we had to get her away from here…”
“Away?”
“Oh, Nettie. I shouldn’t say this, but it was obvious to everyone. She’d been sweet on JT since the day she latched onto the ministry. At first, we thought nothing of it, but after six years, we had to do something before she embarrassed herself—or us. It was a disaster in the making. Thank heavens JT listened. Then, at Annual Conference last year, she seemed like a new person. She’s very good at bookkeeping, and ours were a mess. I wasn’t sure, but so far…”
Lizzie sensed Sister Maggie Mae’s shrug.
Mrs. Nettie was silent. “Goodness. I had no idea,” she said, finally.
Miss Hallye had doubled over and rushed toward the bathroom, her shoe crashing into the bedroom door as she went, flinging it wide open. The murmur cut off, and silence flowed into the hallway like ice water. Miss Hallye shut herself inside the bathroom, not emerging or even answering when Lizzie tapped gently on the door and called her name after Sister Maggie Mae and Mrs. Nettie skirted Lizzie in the hallway with forced smiles.
When Miss Hallye had finally entered the kitchen, she’d smiled, her voice carefully modulated. “Wonderful shower. Well done! Alla Mae is loved. Thank you for inviting me.”
After an awkward pause, Sister Maggie Mae had replied. “Of course! Alla Mae will use your gifts with pleasure.”
Maybe they’d anticipated hysteria, but Miss Hallye had more class than anyone could have imagined. “The pleasure is mine,” she’d replied, hardly glancing at Mrs. Nettie, whose hands were entwined in a dish towel, before she exited the back door.
Miss Hallye had never mentioned the event. Lizzie had assumed Sister Maggie Mae and Mrs. Nettie were left to deal with their own consciences.
Now Miss Hallye was safely inside the workers’ cottage after her bizarre, yet not entirely mysterious outburst. These days, Lizzie was hard-pressed to blame her for her prickliness.
Come morning, Miss Hallye’s desk chair was vacant. But Brother JT stood near it, gazing out the window while running his hand across its smooth wooden back. He didn’t see Lizzie pass—or he ignored her. The next morning, the girls gathered before breakfast to read aloud from the new Journal.
Miss Hallye is on sabbatical at her sister’s farm. Her hair has turned white from stress, and her nerves are shattered. We trust she’ll return soon, with recovered health and spirit.
Lizzie hushed the girls’ snickers, and they obeyed with surprise. Lizzie’s heart pushed up to crowd her throat. Like any girl who left here, Miss Hallye could always come back.
She pondered over the next several days how the Home had accepted her with no judgment. Others had sacrificed so much for the girls. What had Lizzie given up? Nothing. Instead of giving, she took, every single day. Her sweet babies in the nursery were easy, more pleasure than work. Even Mattie, with her fancy dreams, had labored for the church in Oklahoma City for nearly six years. She deserved that new job if anyone did.
In early days, Lizzie had stood up for the girls like May, who hadn’t a hope otherwise. The Refuge had been created for them. And she’d helped carry Mattie through her worst times—and even understood her choices more as time passed. But now, suddenly, Lizzie’s determination to stay safe in the Home felt cowardly.
It was her time to get on fire again.
She thought of the letter on her desk. She’d ignored it for a month after Mrs. Nettie read it to her. Lizzie hadn’t believed Mrs. Nettie when she said who’d sent it. She couldn’t imagine how her mother had found her. The words were gruff as ever, but her mother claimed she and Pa were slow moving now, and it was hard to do for themselves. The boys were gone, and they lived alone down a remote road in Hill County. Lizzie being a strong Christian woman now—or so she’d heard—they needed her.
The tone made Lizzie breathe hard, like it used to, as if everything they’d done to her and all the trouble she’d run away from—and toward—was her fault. Brother JT had helped her see the truth: They’d not been a family at all. Folks with the Devil inside had thrust sin on a child.
The letter ate at her after Miss Hallye left for Arkansas. It took some convincing for Brother JT to agree that going back was the right thing. He worried she’d hear those sin-nature voices again, calling her into darkness, and off she’d go, believing she deserved no better.
He feared that Lizzie would just give up.
But she wouldn’t, not ever. She had something to get back for. Her girl would need her, no matter what. She’d never leave her defenseless, not the way her ma had left her. And she knew this too: If her people didn’t hear the good news from her, they wouldn’t hear it from anybody.
CATE
Grissom, Texas
1998
“Wake up, sleepyheads! Next stop, Mount Bonnell!” Jess gave us our marching orders as we climbed into Seth’s car. She’d also mentioned Kerbey Lane for breakfast after sunrise—a place that served pancakes as big as your face along with the crack of dawn. I wanted to scream at the thought of staying awake another five or six hours. After the concert, we’d bowled two games at a scroungy alley and were already sagging. Except for Jess. Her eyes still gleamed.
My feet ached. My brain ached. My heart ached. But I wouldn’t let her down.
The park near the base of Mount Bonnell was officially closed from ten p.m. until five a.m., but we parked the car on a dark residential street and walked in, carrying blankets and sweatshirts from Seth’s trunk. Jess had thought of everything.
We spread the blankets in a rare clearing in the forested grounds, too deep for a security patrol to spot us easily. I pulled on Seth’s sweatshirt, keeping my arms inside, cold now that we’d finally stopped moving. Eventually, I reclined and drifted off to the sound of the other three murmuring in the background as they identified the few visible constellations.
I woke to silence, except for a whisper of breath. I’d dreamed, briefly, of River stroking my arms, my ears, my lips…My bearings shifted until I realized Seth leaned across me, his breath tickling my ear. I shrugged his face away.
He smiled indulgently. “You looked sweet lying there asleep.” He reached and took the sleeves of his sweatshirt and playfully tied them together. “There. You needed a bow.”
I laughed. “You’re weird. And I seriously never thought you liked me that way.”
“What do you mean?” He wriggled away and put his hands behind his head.
I shrugged. “I liked you for years and you hardly noticed me.”
“I noticed you.” He sighed. “You were too young.”
“Two years?” It wasn’t a lot, and not enough to explain away his insistence.
“Yeah,” he said, as if stalling. I waited. He shrugged. “Pastor Randy took me aside for flirting with one of the eighth graders, so I was being cautious.”
I pushed up on
my elbows, looked him in the eye. “While you were with Miranda?”
“More or less.” I sensed his flush, even in the dark.
“It seems like there was a lot of more or less there,” I said.
“Exactly.” He and Miranda had had a publicly intense relationship, lots of drama and jealousy on her behalf. Now it made more sense, and it made me thankful he hadn’t given me the time of day.
“How did Pastor Randy even know?”
He stared at his shoes. “Her parents griped. He called me in and made me promise not to hang out with her. I wasn’t supposed to even look at the younger girls. They were embarrassed, I think. They left the church.”
Now I wondered why her parents had cared so much. Simple flirting seemed like no big deal. I wondered at his definition of flirting. And this sounded like a little more than being “taken aside.” Mostly, I wondered why, if Pastor Randy and at least one set of parents had been concerned, Seth was allowed to work with the younger girls now. Did anyone else even know?
But grace was a huge part of our church’s theology.
Worse things had likely happened.
I heard a lot living in my house, where my dad and mom sometimes conversed quietly about private church business when they didn’t think I was listening. One wife had been counseled to stay with her husband, even after he’d cheated on her multiple times. They thought she should forgive him as long as he asked for forgiveness—seventy times seven. Another was counseled to stay with a husband who had anger issues—but he hadn’t hit her. Not yet, anyway.
It made me mad, listening to them. And my mom shook her head and kept her mouth shut. The elders and pastor made those calls, not the women. It was what the Bible directed—at least the books written by Paul, which I’d been reading again lately through brand-new eyes.
I could blame River for that.
Now it seemed as if Paul, through his writings, had created nearly all the “rules” we lived by. It bothered me. Who was Paul to do that? Why had the priests who decided which writings would go in the Bible think Paul knew all the answers? I’d always thought Christianity was about Jesus—about doing what he said and following his example. Every time I compared his “red-letter” words with Paul’s writings, I became more frustrated. We were taught that the Bible was the inerrant and final word of God, but there sure was a lot of contradiction. We seemed to pick and choose what was relevant. With so many contradictions, I guess we had to.
Seth had been watching me carefully while my mind went off on this tangent, and now he reached to run a finger from the soft spot behind my ear down to my collarbone. I shivered, and I guess he thought that meant I liked it. So he ran the finger back up and around my earlobe and along the cartilage. I pushed my hand at him from inside the sweatshirt. “Stop.”
He tilted his head and looked at me, squinting with a small smile. “Why? Shouldn’t we see where this could go? You’re old enough, and I’m available now.”
I sighed loudly, feeling guilty now that I’d accepted his invitation to prom. He was so sure I would be as ready as he apparently was to jump right into something. “Look,” I said—it was past time to be blunt—“I have to be honest. I like someone else.”
“I know,” he said. “I saw you.”
The mood shifted rapidly, and another shiver slipped up my spine. I’d brushed off his annoyance earlier at the club, telling myself he’d been impatient to leave. Now I knew better. “Okay. But whatever you saw has nothing to do with us. I truly don’t like you that way.”
“Well,” he said. “I wonder if you’d like this.” He leaned, but I turned my head, and his lips landed on my cheek. His razor stubble tickled my skin, and I struggled not to laugh, both at the tickle and at his expression.
“Sorry, but no,” I said. “I don’t think you heard me, though. You’re a little too late.”
He frowned, and sudden anger flashed across his face. I regretted my flippant statement, but before I could react, he twisted and clutched my arms, still tied inside his sweatshirt. He pressed his mouth to mine, digging his tongue inside until I feared I might vomit. His teeth scraped mine. I wriggled, and he held me harder, as if that meant I was into it.
“Do you like it now?” he said, when he finally paused and I managed a full breath.
“No. I really don’t like that. Seriously. Stop.”
I could hardly think. And now, he wasn’t just annoying me. He was scaring me.
Any comparison of this gross experience to River’s kiss was impossible. The two kisses shouldn’t even be the same word. One was a pleasure, the other an insult. And it made me highly aware of the differences between Seth and me. Even with my height, he was taller and stronger. His size should have made me feel protected…secure…safe. But it didn’t.
I’d been preoccupied before, thinking about his past, mine, River, comparing everything. Now my focus was completely on Seth. I considered suggesting a walk with Jess and Jordan to defuse the mood, but it occurred to me then that Jess and Jordan weren’t even in sight. They’d been on a nearby blanket when I fell asleep. I’d assumed they were sleeping too.
Seth, still pressed against me, saw me peer into the distance. “Jess and Jordan went for a walk.” He put finger quotes around the word. “They said they’d see us at sunrise. I’m sure they’re having a great time.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Come on, just let me kiss you again. You can’t know whether you like something unless you really try it.”
“I just tried it,” I said. “And really, I don’t. Look, can’t we just hang out? Let’s talk about what you’re doing at church. How are you liking the internship?” I hoped he’d figure out, as I lay there motionless—relaxing to the highest degree I could, given the situation—that I was not playing hard-to-get. That I was just not at all interested.
And then he’d give up.
But he didn’t. He leaned harder, heavier, and I began to struggle. My arms were trapped and useless inside the sweatshirt, though I tried to push at him from inside it. “Seth, come on!” I said, but he moved higher and pressed his chest against my mouth so I could hardly breathe, much less cry out. I felt crushed and suffocated by his weight, but I couldn’t budge him, couldn’t shout, no matter how I tried.
Eventually, though, the pain silences me, as forcefully as a knife at my throat—it seems like forever, though it can’t be more than a minute or two, the hands that squeeze and pinch my breasts and pull at my skirt, the thrusting and shoving against me, and in me, the jolts that pierce and sear like blue flame—and then he shudders and rolls away.
“Holy cow,” he groans. “I did not expect that at all.”
I’m speechless. I’m…wordless.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” he says.
I can only stare. At my bare legs, bent and shaking. At the ground. At nothing.
And then suddenly, unbelievably, he begins to gasp, and silent tears stream down his cheeks. The salty scent of everything curdles in my stomach. I try not to vomit, though I gag.
“I can’t believe you let us do that,” he says, his voice rising. “Why did you? I thought you were different, not like other girls…”
I pull my knees close now, and they shake worse with the effort.
Let us? Did I? Was that what I did? What he did? I’d tried to be rational, to stop him before it got out of hand. I should have cried out earlier, louder, when I still could. Had I said no, specifically, out loud? I did in my mind, again and again as he pushed into me and I fought against him. He’d been crushing my windpipe; I couldn’t make any noise at all.
But did that mean I’d let us?
And what did he mean, different from other girls?
“Are you on the pill?” he says, panic emerging on his face now.
I gape at him, unable to answer, unable to even shake my head.
Why would I be?
&
nbsp; He buries his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees. He runs his fingers through his hair. He twists little strands, pulls them out. Holds his hands before him and watches them fall.
“You’ll be fine,” he says. He nods, hard. “You’ll be fine.”
Except everyone knows what happened to the girl who gave herself to a boy one time…
I see myself, at fourteen. In a new white dress, I walked the church aisle with my mom and dad. Along with my friends, I pledged to remain pure until marriage. Our parents promised their support and placed rings on our fingers. I never removed mine, not even to shower.
I twist the ring around my finger now. Am I supposed to take it off? Put it in my pocket?
Seth had been there, his own ring already shining on his finger, shining on his finger today. “We need to pray,” he says suddenly, his eyes screaming for my response, examining me.
Moment by moment, the emotions emanating from him vacillate. I say nothing.
He grabs the sleeves of the sweatshirt I still wear—his sweatshirt—and I shrink further inside the stretchy fabric, though he still clings to the cuffs. He bows his head. I continue to gaze at him in disbelief.
“Father God,” he prays, “we come before you with humility, imploring…begging your forgiveness. Forgive us this temptation, for desiring the apple you commanded us to leave on the branch, for listening to the serpent’s lies. We gave in…We’re so weak, Lord, so depraved, I don’t know how you can love us, but you do…Thank you, Jesus. Thank you…”
Even in the midst of his endless prayer, delivered in church-ese, I understand him clearly.
He holds both of us responsible for what he did to me. He holds both of us responsible for what he did to me without my permission. Mostly, he holds me responsible for all of it.
I’m Eve.
He’s certain I believe it too.