by Katie Henry
“You’re an apostate, not a heretic,” Lucy continues, “because apostates choose to reject the whole system.”
“But we’re not changing the group’s name,” Avi says. “So you’ll have to deal with being mislabeled.”
“Don’t worry,” Eden says. “Nobody gets my label right, either.” She looks meaningfully at Lucy, who throws up her hands.
“It’s really long, sometimes I forget it!”
“Please, you can list all the popes. In order.”
“Focus,” Avi says. “We haven’t even asked Michael if he wants to join.”
Join any club that wants you as a member, one half of my brain says. Don’t get too close, says the other half. But what I actually feel is relief. Relief I have somewhere to go, and relief other people think I belong there.
So all I say is, “Yes.” Everybody cheers, and Lucy has me sign the club charter at the bottom, with the date.
“Now you have to stand up and introduce yourself,” Max says. “Do you want my cloak? You’ll look cooler.”
I shake my head and get to my feet. “I’m Michael,” I mumble, suddenly embarrassed by all the attention, and start to sit back down.
“No,” Lucy says, stopping me. “Introduce yourself properly. ‘My name’s Michael, and . . .’”
“My name’s Michael—” I try again.
“Hi, Michael!” they chorus.
“—and I’m a heretic.”
7
AFTER ALL THAT secrecy, I half expect the rest of the meeting to revolve around plots to infiltrate the Vatican or bloodlessly depose Father Peter, but everyone just goes around sharing their greatest grievances with St. Clare’s. Lucy’s worried about the sex ed seminar coming up in December, doubting the accuracy of the information we’ll be given. Eden and Max both take issue with the rigid dress code, and Avi wants to know why Latin has to have so many goddamn declensions.
After an hour, Lucy calls the end of the meeting, and the five of us quietly emerge from the basement. We split up at the front gate, and when Lucy figures out she and I are going in the same direction, we walk together. It’s nice to be alone with her, but my brain feels like it’s tied in knots. After five minutes of walking, the only thing I can think to ask is: “What street’s your house on?”
“Rockwell,” she says, pointing over her shoulder.
“I thought you said this was on your way.”
“It is. I have to pick up my brothers from after-school care,” she says. “My stepdad works late shifts, so I do it.”
“What about your mom?”
Lucy stares ahead. “She’s in New Mexico. Or, she was a while ago. She’s probably not still.” She’s trying to sound casual, but it’s not working. “She’s traveling.”
I think about Dad and all his “traveling.” At least Lucy’s mom is probably having fun, not just working.
“When’s she getting back?” I ask.
“I don’t—” Lucy stops, swallows. “Soon.”
“Oh,” I say, because I don’t know what else I could say. “I’m—”
“I totally support her,” she blazes through, as if I’m barely there. “Everybody should have a chance to see the world, and she didn’t get to before. So she’s doing it now, and that’s great. She’ll by back by Christmas, for sure.”
“Yeah, of course,” I say, and the words sound like they belong to someone else. Lucy’s shoulders relax, though, so maybe they sound real enough to her.
“How many times have you moved?” she asks.
“This one makes four.”
“What’s it like to pack up and leave a place? I’ve never been anywhere but here.”
“Scary,” I say. “Disorienting. It’s like you have to figure out what kind of person you are, all over again. I don’t know, maybe it’s different if you choose it.”
“Do you miss your old friends? The people you left behind?”
I miss places more. The rosebushes and rosemary stalks in House #2’s front yard. The chain-link fence by my first elementary school, the one that made my hands smell like pennies. The city swimming pool where I kissed Rebecca Blanchard when I was fourteen. “It’s easier not to think about it,” I tell Lucy, and she looks away.
We’re quiet for a block but for the sound of Lucy’s patent leather shoes slapping the sidewalk.
“Did something happen?” Lucy blurts out. “To make you not believe in God anymore, did someone you knew die, or—?”
I don’t know why people assume shit like that. Like being an atheist requires some sort of tragic backstory.
“Did something happen to make you believe in God?”
“No, I just always did.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And I just never did.” Lucy looks skeptical. “My family’s not religious. I never believed in the tooth fairy or monsters under my bed, either.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“All I mean is, for good or bad, there’s nothing but us.”
Lucy’s quiet. I wonder if I’m as confusing to her as she is to me.
“You never said why you’re a heretic,” I say, and her eyebrows rise in surprise. “Avi’s Jewish, Eden’s pagan, Max is . . . Max. But you’re Catholic. Why are you there?”
“I am Catholic,” she says. “But I also think what it means to be Catholic should be able to change. That it should change.”
That’s it? “Nobody believes in it all. Except maybe priests. And who would actually want to be a priest?”
“I would,” Lucy says, looking at me out of the corner of her eye.
“You can’t,” I tell her, shrugging. “You’re a girl.”
She stares at me. “I know that,” she says with a hint of hurt. “Obviously, I know that.”
I feel myself shrink, embarrassed for throwing that in her face so offhandedly.
“You could do other things, though,” I say, trying to recover. “You could be a nun, right?”
“Nuns are great,” Lucy says. “But nuns aren’t priests. Nuns can’t celebrate Mass. They can’t hear confession or consecrate the Eucharist. They can’t become bishops or cardinals or popes, they can’t become the people who make the big decisions. How do you change a church that doesn’t listen to you?”
Her shoulder brushes mine as she adjusts her book bag, and I wish humans could tell each other things through touch the way we can through words. I’m not used to my friends caring about things like this, I try to tell her as our shoulders touch for a brief instant. I’m not used to caring about them, either. At the crosswalk, as we wait for the light to change, Lucy clears her throat.
“Heretics are usually true believers,” she says. “Martin Luther was a priest. Galileo was very devout. The only thing more dangerous than someone who doesn’t care about the rules is someone who does—and wants to break them anyway.”
If I didn’t already know her, it would be hard to imagine Lucy, with her hair ribbons and perfectly ironed skirts, as some rebel mastermind. But now I’m certain it was Lucy, not Avi or Eden or Max, who came up with the idea for Heretics Anonymous.
We’re at my house now, and for a second, I consider pretending it’s farther up the block, or past the highway, or in the next county over, just to keep walking with her.
“This is me,” I say, gesturing at the house.
“Oh,” she says. “It’s really nice.”
“Yeah.” It is a nice house, with its brown shingles and slightly overgrown purple wisteria snaking around the windows. “I liked my last house better, though.”
She steps closer to the house and to me, peering at it over my shoulder.
“Are you still sad you had to move?” she asks, pushing a stray bit of hair behind her ear.
I could tell her the truth, which is I’m not so sure anymore. I could tell her that the closer she stands to me, the more I get exponentially less sad about moving and my palms get exponentially sweatier. I could tell her a lot of things, if my throat didn’t feel so dry and my tongue didn’t f
eel so swollen. I shrug.
“Selfishly?” she says, then drops her eyes. “I’m glad you did.”
Without waiting for a response, she spins on her heel and starts up the block. I watch her, red ribbon rippling in the breeze, until she turns the corner.
8
THE BEST FEELING in the world is popping bubble wrap. The second-best feeling in the world is waking up at seven thirty a.m. as usual, realizing it’s Saturday, and diving back under the covers. The worst feeling in the world is sleeping through alarms, barking dogs, and possibly earthquakes to wake up at eight a.m.—and it’s Tuesday.
I spend at least five minutes looking for my tie before finding it under my U.S. history textbook. I skip a shower in favor of breakfast. I’d skip most things in favor of breakfast.
“Mom,” I say as I push open the kitchen door, rubbing sleep from my eyes, “do we have any more blueberry muffins, because I’m—”
But then I stop, and not because there’s a plate of muffins on the kitchen counter.
Dad’s sitting at the breakfast bar.
“Look who got in last night!” Mom says as she carries Dad’s breakfast plate to the sink. It looks like she made spinach and cheese omelets, his favorite. “You and Sophia were already asleep, so I decided not to wake you.”
Sophia, sitting at the kitchen table thumbing through A Brief History of Time, glances up when she hears her name. Dad looks at me, but I concentrate on the plate of muffins.
“Hey, buddy,” he says.
I hate it when he calls me that. I hate it more than snakes, or Catholic school, or anything else, because I’m not five and we’re definitely not buddies. We are the opposite of buddies. We’re anti-buddies.
“Hey,” I say. Not I’ve missed you, because I haven’t, and not welcome home, because he isn’t. I grab a muffin and stuff it in my face so I don’t have to say anything else.
Dad looks tired. There are bags under his eyes and lines in his forehead that I don’t think were there when I saw him a month ago. His hair is the same sandy color as mine, but his is starting to thin at the back. When I was younger and people told me I looked like my dad, I’d puff up with pride, excited for the day I would be as tall, strong, and smart as he was. If someone told me that now, I might punch him.
“How’s school going?” he asks.
“Fine,” I mumble, mouth full of muffin. “It’s fine.”
“Just fine?”
What does he want? Tears of gratitude? “Yeah.”
“Good.” He smiles in a satisfied way. “I know it’s different than your other schools were, but I bet it’s a really interesting experience, right?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “You know, there are people who never see the world outside of a tiny bubble. The experiences you kids have had—it’s pretty amazing.”
Mom nods. This is my parents’ favorite shared delusion: that the way we live is a great adventure. That living out of boxes is a blessing—not even one in disguise.
“So amazing,” I agree. “Why doesn’t everyone move four times in ten years? The experiences they’re missing out on—”
“Enough,” Dad says, then turns to Sophia. “How do you like your school, peanut?”
She doesn’t look up from her book. “It’s good. My science teacher has lots of weird stuff preserved in jars, like leaves and bugs and a tiny baby pig fetus, and she lets you hold the jar if you’re careful with it.”
Mom scrunches her nose. “There you go,” Dad says. “New experiences.”
Catholic school and pig fetuses. We’re really aiming for the stars.
“And you’re making friends?” Dad asks Sophia.
“Sure,” she says. “It’s not like it’s hard.”
“It is for some people,” I say. And, okay, I have made friends, but no need to give my parents the satisfaction of knowing that.
“You will,” Mom says.
“You’ve got to put yourself out there,” Dad says, because there’s nothing he likes more than blaming me for problems he created. “Make an effort.”
“I am, but it’s—”
He’s already rolling over me. “Resilience, that’s what’s key here.”
The speech is coming on.
“In life, you have to adapt and adjust, and learning how to do that is so important, Michael. It’s a life skill—”
Like swimming.
“Like swimming. If someone throws you in the deep end, you’ve got to figure out how to stay afloat.”
The swimming metaphor is my least favorite of Dad’s metaphors, mostly because he never acknowledges he’s the one throwing you in the deep end.
“I know it’s been hard, and I know you’ve been unhappy, but I really think this move, and this new school, is a great thing for you.”
Oh, okay. He thinks it, and if he thinks it, there’s no room for anyone else’s opinion. So I won’t bother. “Sure.” I glance at the clock on the microwave. “I should go, since I’m walking. Don’t want to be late.”
“In the rain?” Mom says, turning around. “You’ll get sick!”
“I’ll drive you,” Dad says. “Sit down for a minute.”
That’s the last thing I want to do. “No, really, I can walk—”
“Michael,” he says in his no-argument tone. “Sit down.”
I sit. I figure Dad’s going to continue pontificating about adaptation and deep water, but he opens the newspaper and starts to read. Somehow, this makes me even madder. Why did he make me sit down, if he’s going to ignore me?
With Mom at the sink, Dad reading the newspaper, Sophia off in her own genius world, I feel like an unnecessary prop in some diorama of family togetherness. We used to actually do this, sit all together, before he started working as much. And he wasn’t always this person, lecturing everyone about resilience and telling them how to feel. He used to be fun. One time, in fourth grade, he showed up at my classroom on the hottest day of the year. He told my teacher I had a dentist appointment but took me to the water park instead.
That’s who he used to be. There’s a tightness in my chest, and it’s because I know that person’s gone.
And when Dad finally looks up from the business section and says, “So, how are your grades?” the tightness bursts, and what flows through my veins is unbridled rage.
“What do you care?” I snap back, even though I know it’s the wrong thing to say.
“Excuse me?” Dad says quietly. The quieter he is, the worse things are.
“If you’d been here at all, you’d know,” I say. “But you haven’t, so I don’t see why I should have to fill you in.”
Mom drops the scrub brush with a clatter. “Michael—”
“I don’t like being away this much,” Dad says. “But that’s part of my job.”
“Right. That’s your job.” I gesture around at me, and Mom, and Sophia, who has closed her book. “And this isn’t, I guess?”
“You need to cool it,” he says. “Now.”
He’s using his no-argument tone again, but I’m past the point of caring. My personal motto has always been if you’ve already dug yourself a hole too deep to climb out of, you may as well keep digging.
“Maybe Sophia doesn’t get that you chose a promotion over us, but I’m not ten,” I tell him, getting up from my chair. “So I know you can’t really be a good dad if you’re only here seven days in a month.”
It’s silent now. Dad is as angry as I expected him to be, but there’s hurt flickering in his eyes, too. I feel a surge of grim triumph.
“You’re grounded,” he says, as if that solves the whole issue. “One week.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, grabbing my backpack and blazer. “When are you leaving, Thursday? How exactly are you going to enforce that?”
Dad gets to his feet, the chair’s legs scraping on the floor, and I take that as my cue to get out of there. As I leave the kitchen, Mom speaks to him in quiet, soothing tones, and I feel bad about dragging her and Sophia into this, but that’s the onl
y thing I feel bad about. I half expect Dad to follow me out the front door and into what has turned from a light drizzle to real rain, but he doesn’t.
I forgot an umbrella, so by the time I get to school I’m soaked through, and my shoes have filled up with water. The school’s heated, but I still shiver all through chemistry and precalc. To make matters worse, we have a group pop quiz, and I’m assigned to a group with Theresa and two other girls I don’t know. I’m not great at math, but Theresa’s worse. She insists on doing the entire quiz by herself, and after she messes up the third problem in a row, I tell her someone who believes in an imaginary God should be better at using imaginary numbers. She glares daggers at me but allows the rest of us to fix her work.
After class, Theresa pushes past me in the hall to catch up with Father Peter. I can’t hear what she’s saying to him over the hallway noise, but she points back over her shoulder at me.
“Mr. Ausman.” Father Peter beckons me over.
Fantastic. I start off toward him, passing by Theresa, who is headed back in my direction. “You told on me,” I say.
“You mocked my Lord,” she replies, and flounces away.
I’m not sure what Father Peter’s going to do first: yell at me for calling God imaginary, or comment on the water still dripping from my pant legs. What he actually says is “Where’s your belt?”
I look down past my half-tucked shirt, and yep, I’m not wearing a belt. I must have forgotten it in my rush to get dressed this morning.
“It’s at home,” I say. “I forgot it.”
“The belt is part of the dress code. Without it, you’re out of uniform.”
I take a deep breath in, trying really hard not to lose my shit. I’m wet and cold and I told my dad he’s a bad father, but clearly what’s crucial here is my lack of a belt.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I’ll still have to write you up. If you receive two more uniform infractions, it’s a detention.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say, too loudly, and people walking by stop to look at me. One of them is a girl wearing pants instead of a skirt, and I point her out to Father Peter as she passes by. “What about her? She’s wearing pants without a belt.”