by Rebecca Rupp
I sat there looking at the clock. It had one of those minute hands that jumped with a click from minute to minute and I was practicing holding my breath between clicks.
“What about a time when you obeyed even though you didn’t want to?” Mrs. Prescott encouraged. “But you did it because you knew that was God’s commandment? Do you have a story, Marie?”
Marie said that last Friday she stayed home and babysat for her little brother.
“I really wanted to go over to my friend’s house. But my parents were going out to dinner and they told me I had to stay home and babysit.”
“How did you feel about that?” Mrs. Prescott said.
“Mad,” Marie said.
“Obedience isn’t easy,” Mrs. Prescott said. “But you did the right thing. You did God’s will and that brings great rewards. Does anyone else have a story to share? What about you, Octavia?”
I thought about how all I did just then was bounce back and forth like a tennis ball between Ray and Boone.
“What happens if your parents don’t agree?” I said. “How do you know which one to obey?”
“Yeah,” Wesley said. “My mom doesn’t want me to ride on my cousin Ricky’s snowmobile. But my dad says it’s fine. My mom sure doesn’t like it though.”
Marjean shot me a look from under her braids, and I waited to hear about a woman’s place. Instead she bit her lip.
Then she said, “My dad wants Bud and Grover to go to college. But not me, even if I get straight As. A girl doesn’t need college, he says. Not if she’s going to be a good Christian wife and mother.”
“Education is always valuable, Marjean,” Mrs. Prescott said. “Perhaps if you spoke to Pastor Bruno . . .”
Pastor Bruno was the head of the Fellowship of the Redeemer. Ray liked him, but he reminded me of a rubber ball, the way he was always springing around and pumping his fist in the air.
“That’s what my mother says,” Marjean said. “She says what if someday I get left in the lurch like her sister Caroline, with four kids and no skills for anything but to be a maid in some rinky-dink motel. But my dad doesn’t care. College costs money, he says. He doesn’t even want me to have guitar lessons.”
I looked at Marjean, who was breathing hard through her nose and glaring at her shoes. It occurred to me that maybe she wasn’t as set on being Adam’s Help Meet as she said she was.
“When I get out of high school, my father wants me to come work for him in the garage,” Matt said. “But I don’t want to work in the garage. I want to go to MIT.”
“My mom won’t let us buy a computer,” Todd said. “She says all kids do with computers is look up porn sites and get themselves in trouble. How does she think I’m going to learn computer programming without a computer?”
I was going to ask if he had one at school. Then I remembered that Todd went to the Redeemer school.
“I think if God hadn’t wanted us to have computers, he wouldn’t have let us invent them,” Todd said.
“Pastor Bruno has a computer,” Ashley said. “He has it in his office.”
“My parents wouldn’t let me read the Harry Potter books,” Kristin said. “But I read them anyway, at my friend’s house. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with them. I thought they were good books.”
I waited for Marjean to say something about the glorification of Satan, but she didn’t.
“He wouldn’t have to pay for my guitar lessons,” she said. “I was going to pay for them myself, with my babysitting money.”
You could tell that Mrs. Prescott felt that things were beginning to get away from her. She had the look of a person who is out walking a very large dog when suddenly the dog sees a squirrel.
“We’re talking about obedience, class,” she said. “We’re talking about how important it is to obey your parents even though you may not want to, because that’s what God tells you to do. What about you, Ronnie? I’m sure you have a story about a time you obeyed your father and mother.”
Ronnie was wearing another of his clip-on ties, this one with a pattern of motorcycles. In a few years, I thought maybe Frank and Frank of Frank and Frank’s Tattoos might like one of those for Harley.
I sat there waiting for Ronnie to tell a story about how he’d minded his parents and God had rewarded him by giving him a five-dollar bill.
But Ronnie got quiet and red, and under his clip-on tie his Adam’s apple started going up and down.
“Ronnie?” Mrs. Prescott said encouragingly.
Ronnie gulped as if he had a hard-boiled egg caught in his throat.
“My father hits my mother,” he said, all in a rush. “Once he gave her a black eye.”
Everybody looked at Ronnie.
Mrs. Prescott froze. You could tell she’d been expecting some story about taking out the garbage or feeding the dog.
“I don’t think that’s right,” Ronnie said. “I don’t think people should hit people like that, no matter who they are.”
“No,” Mrs. Prescott said faintly. “No, Ronnie, that’s not right. That’s something to pray about, Ronnie, and to see Pastor Bruno.”
“He hit me too, when I tried to make him stop,” Ronnie said. “But my mom yelled and told me to go in the bedroom with my little brother and shut the door.”
There was a pause while everyone looked at Ronnie.
“Why don’t we all say a prayer for Ronnie?” Mrs. Prescott said.
“I don’t want a prayer,” Ronnie said. “I just want to make him stop.”
“God will do that if you have enough faith,” Mrs. Prescott said.
I thought that was a lousy thing to say. After Ray having been a lawyer, I knew how to spot loopholes.
“What if his father doesn’t stop?” I said. “Then will it be all Ronnie’s fault because he didn’t have enough faith? I think that’s stupid. I think he should call the police.”
“Yeah,” Ronnie said.
“That’s a big step, Ronnie,” Mrs. Prescott said. “Pastor Bruno —”
“My sister Irene, before she got married, used to date this guy who punched holes in the walls when he got mad,” Cathy Ann said. “He tried to punch Irene too. My dad didn’t pray on it. He went out with a baseball bat and said to leave his girl alone and that bat was what he’d get if he ever showed his face at our house again.”
“Did he ever?” somebody said. Maybe Marie.
“He sure didn’t,” Cathy Ann said. “We heard later that he got put in jail. And my dad told me when I’m sixteen if any boy ever gets mean like that with me, I’m to just let him know.”
“Our session for today is almost over,” Mrs. Prescott said. “Let’s all join in saying a little prayer now, thanking God for our fathers and mothers and asking him to grant us the gift of obedience.”
I poked Marjean in the arm.
“If you’ve already got the money, why don’t you just take lessons anyway?” I whispered.
Marjean pursed up her lips and threw a furtive glance at Mrs. Prescott, who had her eyes closed. But she didn’t say no.
I had a lot to think about. Like how maybe the Redeemer kids weren’t so bad after all. Not like I’d thought they were.
“So what was class about today?” Ray asked.
“Obedience,” I said. Which should have been the O word for the day.
But it wasn’t.
Here were the words I picked instead: Oppose, Outflank, Overturn, and Overcome.
THE NEXT THING that happened was that Boone and Ray made a lot of decisions for my own good without consulting me. Boone didn’t have the heart to tell me about these decisions, so Ray did. Having been a lawyer, Ray was more equipped for confrontations.
I can’t believe they thought I’d just quietly go along with it all. I think maybe Ray was hoping that some of the Redeemer indoctrination about obeying parents had rubbed off. Mrs. Prescott must not have told her what happened in the obedience class.
“Your father and I have had to make some decisions, Octavi
a,” Ray said.
We were in the living room of the house Ray shared with Alda and Geraldine, sitting on the toad-colored couch that at night folded out to make the world’s most uncomfortable bed. When you lay down on it, the mattress curled up around you so that it was like being a hot dog inside a very thin bun. I don’t know what was under the mattress, but it felt like gravel.
“What decisions?” I said.
“About the future,” Ray said. “About where and how we’re all going to live.”
“I like it where I am,” I said. “I like Winton Falls.”
“I know, honey,” Ray said. “But it’s not going to be possible for you to stay there. Finances are a lot tighter now that I’m no longer at the law office. Your father has found another house. It’s smaller than our old house, but much more affordable, and there’s space for him to have a studio. With some part-time work, he’ll be able to handle it and still go on with his painting.”
“I don’t mind smaller,” I said.
“It’s a very small house,” Ray said. “Your father thinks that you might be happier somewhere where you could have a little more personal space.”
It was then that I realized that even though I didn’t have an Ominous Knee, I had an Ominous Stomach. It wasn’t twinging exactly, like Mr. Peacock’s red-hot needles, but suddenly it felt as if it was full of electric eels. It had begun to dawn on me what this conversation was all about.
“Your father and I talked this all out, and we decided that it would be best if you moved in here with me for a while,” Ray said.
I felt sick. Ray had sort of prettied it up, but I could see the bottom line. The bottom line was that Boone was willing to toss me to the Redeemers, just so he could go on painting his stupid masterpiece in his stupid shed. Or in some other smaller, more affordable shed.
“You think this will give me more personal space?” I said. “Living here in your living room on the daybed?”
“I’ve talked to Alda and Geraldine,” Ray said. “There’s a little storeroom at the end of the hall that we’re going to clear out for you. We’ll move your bed into it, and your desk, and we’ll put up some bookshelves for your books. There’s a window that looks out on the yard. It’s really very nice.”
“What about school?” I said.
Because Ray’s house is in Wolverton, which has its own schools.
“I can drive you to Winton Falls for a while,” Ray said. “But eventually I thought you might like to try the Redeemer school. It’s small, so you’d get a lot of individual attention, and you already know a lot of the kids who would be in your class.”
“You want me to go to a school where they do science fair projects called ‘Adam’s Help Meet’?” I said.
I couldn’t believe it.
Then I started thinking about the pod people. They were in a sci-fi story that Andrew told me about. It began with these spores that drifted down to earth from outer space. They would plant themselves secretly in your basement and then sprout and grow into pods that were perfect replicas of you. Then the pods would zap you and take your place. They looked like you and acted like you and talked like you, and nobody could tell that it wasn’t you anymore, but really a pod person. Pretty soon the pods took over the world.
Maybe Ray was a pod.
“I’d like you to give it a try,” Ray said. “I think it would be a good experience for you. I thought you were beginning to enjoy the Fellowship. Janet Prescott says you’ve been interacting well with the other students and sharing more in her class.”
If Ray thought I was enjoying the Redeemers, she’d gone blind as a bat in a sack.
Or she was a pod.
“I don’t want to move in with you and Alda and Geraldine,” I said. “I think this is a terrible idea.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Ray said, sounding hurt. “But it’s really for the best, Octavia.”
Boone’s new house, the one that he had found without even telling me that he was looking for a new house, was just two streets away from our old house, which was now for sale. The new house had an apple tree in the yard and space for a garden, and there were three bedrooms, though one of them wasn’t much bigger than a closet and it would have taken a NASA engineer to figure out how to fit a bed into it. Of the other two, Boone was going to sleep in one and use the other for a studio, since it had a hardwood floor and north light.
“That’s nice,” I said, sounding mean.
Boone was showing me over the place and pointing out how efficient the little kitchen was and explaining how eventually I could come to visit and stay in the closet, which by then he would have figured out how to turn into a bedroom. Probably by shrinking all the furniture dollhouse size, like in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Eventually he noticed that I wasn’t saying anything.
“What’s the matter, Octavia?” Boone said. As if he didn’t know.
“You figure it out,” I said.
Boone sank down on the floor in the room that was going to be the studio and leaned his head back against the wall.
“You know I love you, Octavia,” he said. “It’s just that I’m in a bad place right now.”
Just for an instant, I thought about killing Boone. What kind of a bad place was he in, I thought. Here he was with a house of his own and a place to keep painting his masterpiece and an apple tree, while I was stuck in Wolverton with Alda and Geraldine.
I’d given up on my plan of running away to the bear diorama since Andrew had pointed out that the museum closed in winter and I’d probably freeze or starve to death in there. But I had other plans.
I could live at Andrew’s house without anybody knowing, camping under his bed.
I could lie about my name, claim that I was an orphan, and eventually get adopted by a kindly couple on Prince Edward Island like in Anne of Green Gables. Somebody like Mr. and Mrs. Peacock, only Canadian.
I could win a scholarship to a boarding school somewhere far away, like London, and never come home again, not even for holidays, not even if the cruel schoolmistress made me sleep in the garret like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess.
“I’m so sorry, Octavia,” Boone said.
He sounded miserable and confused.
But I didn’t care.
“I hate you, Boone,” I said.
I didn’t feel like picking any O words that day. But if I had, they would have been UnlOved, ThrOwn Over, AbandOned, and Outcast.
SO THERE I WAS in Wolverton, living with three Redeemers and eight beans, which I watered every day and tried to treat fairly, except for the prayers. I kept track of their progress on a graph. Ray was proud of my interest in botany. She hadn’t realized yet that the point of the experiment was to destroy her new life.
Life with Ray, Alda, and Geraldine was never much fun and sometimes it was just miserable. Part of the problem was that Alda and Geraldine, having been Redeemers a lot longer than Ray, had a lot more opinions about all the things I was always doing wrong. They didn’t like my immodest clothes, which sometimes displayed unmentionable body parts like knees. They didn’t like me arguing or asking questions because that was disrespectful. They were bothered that I still wouldn’t make the Affirmation in Mrs. Prescott’s Sunday school class because that showed that I was not in a state of grace. They wanted Ray to pull me out of the public school, which was a den of secular iniquity, humanism, and unsanctified peer pressure, and put me in the Redeemer school.
And they practically popped a gasket over the List. I wrote the List when I still believed in Andrew’s theory about snapping and deprogramming, when I thought that maybe if Ray just heard enough logical arguments she’d give up the Redeemers. The List was my list of everything I could think of about religion that was bad. This is it:
Octavia Boone’s List of Terrible Things Caused by Religion
The Spanish Inquisition
The Crusades
Centuries of European religious wars
Witch hunts
Suicide bombers
Anti-abortion violence
Denial of rights to women, gays, and lesbians
Blocking the progress of science, like arresting Galileo and preventing stem-cell research
Attempts to deny atheists citizenship
I stuck it on the refrigerator with the Cross of Faith magnets and left it for Ray, Alda, and Geraldine.
I figured that after that Alda and Geraldine would probably want to burn me at the stake, like Joan of Arc. I’d read her biography and part of her problem was immodest dress. She was caught wearing pants.
Instead they sent me to see Pastor Bruno.
Pastor Bruno had a wife named Barbara and six sons, though none of them was in Mrs. Prescott’s class because they were all under ten. Pastor Bruno referred to them as his little Warriors of God, of which at least the little warriors part was right on, since they were all hellions, especially Michael and Gabriel, who were seven and twins.
Pastor Bruno was round and bouncy and enthusiastic and tan, and always reminded me of a cheerleader crossed with a basketball. Ray said he had a contagious energy, but I thought he must have been pretty exhausting to live with, the way he was always popping up and down all the time.
“Well, Octavia,” he said. “I hear you’re having a crisis of faith. That’s what I’m here for, you know. To help people solve these problems. Would you like to talk about it?”
He was sitting behind his desk, which looked like the sort of desk Ray used to have in her law office, and I was across from him in a squishy leather chair.
“Not much,” I said.
I was pretty sure that what Pastor Bruno thought was a problem and what I thought was a problem were two different things. Also I didn’t think my problem was a crisis of faith. To have a crisis of faith, you have to have faith to begin with.