Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (14 page)

“Do you really think he has a crush on you?” We sit at our old table and I glance around to make sure nobody else is listening.

Emily Friar looks at me over her peanut butter sandwich. “Who? Who’s got a crush on you?” She grins and elbows Cordelia, who looks up from her sheet music or whatever she’s studying and squints at me as though she can’t remember who I am, even though I eat here almost every day.

“Nobody. Nothing,” I say quickly, shooting a nasty look at Kayla. “No. I don’t know. It wasn’t him.”

Kayla takes a bite out of her droopy slice of cafeteria pizza. “Uh huh.”

“It wasn’t.”
Uh huh.

“Are you talking about that boy from the fortune-teller blog?” Emily leans forward, but Kayla shoots her a scathing look and changes the subject.

“You gonna be busy tonight? Speaking in tongues, I suppose,” she says to me.

“Shut up.” It’s not like that. Okay, so sometimes people at church do actually speak in tongues, like every once in a while. Very rarely. I mean, I can remember, like, three times. “I don’t make fun of your religion.”

“You couldn’t. It’s too boring.” She shrugs. “Anyway, I thought I’d see if by some miracle, or anti-miracle I guess, you weren’t busy tonight so we could do something, but whatever.”

“Aren’t we going to a movie tomorrow?” She promised. Saturdays used to be our regular movie and sleepover nights, but ever since Kayla’s dad married Rhonda and bought Kayla that old hearse to make up for it, she’s been running to the Twin Cities to stay with her sister every weekend, leaving me all alone. But this weekend, she promised. My stomach lurches a little at the evasive look on her face and I can’t believe she’s ditching me again.

“Yeah, well. I might have … I might have a sort of date-type thing.” A bit of color creeps over Kayla’s pale cheeks.

“A date?” Emily squeals, determined to get some gossip one way or another. “Tell all!”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” Kayla clams up, and once she’s gone broody there’s no way of getting her to talk again, so we spend the rest of the lunch period mostly in silence. Even Emily gives up after Kayla puts her headphones on and takes out her sketchpad.

I poke at my food with a spork. I can’t believe she’s going on a date instead of having a movie night. I know who it is—that weird Gary kid from her art class who’s always hanging around our locker at the end of the day, being awkward. Kayla’s no stranger to boys, but her type is usually the (much older) musicians who play at the all-age shows she’s always going to down in Minneapolis. From her brief reports, those guys are mostly hook-ups involving varying degrees of sobriety and nakedness. And then there’s Gary. He’s so
weird
. I imagine them sitting next to each other for hours without talking, both of them immersed in their own sketches. At the end of the night, Kayla would unload him from the hearse with the same disinterested wave she gives me, and that would be that.

In any case, my Saturday night now stretches ahead of me wide open and empty, with nothing to distract me from my stupid poetry assignment. My eyes slide over to Emily and I listen to her talk about how she’s going to the roller rink Saturday night with her cousin and her cousin’s boyfriend, but I can’t manage to invite myself.

“We barely ever do anything together anymore.” I pull Kayla’s headphones out of her left ear to whine like a jealous girlfriend. This is pathetic, but I don’t care. She may not be perfect, but she’s my best friend, and I want something to remind me why. And this … this is not doing it.

She shrugs and looks away. “Maybe … ”

“Maybe what?” What is she saying?

Kayla pulls the headphones out of her other ear and sighs, closing her eyes for a second. The sound of her music spills out and I remember the summer the two of us decided to be in a heavy metal band, despite the fact that neither of us played a musical instrument or knew how to sing. I wonder if my guitar is still in the basement, waiting for a new set of strings. I should go and look. When did I become such a shadow of myself? No wonder Kayla’s dumping me.

“I don’t know, Cass. I guess it’s … well? I don’t know.” She picks at her nail polish, little flecks of black drifting down on top of her creamed corn in slow motion.

“Talk to me, Kayla. What the hell does that mean?” I can’t believe this. I’ve been her best friend since second grade. I stuck with her through that awful pixie cut when she was nine, and the slouching when she grew to be six feet tall overnight, and her parents’ divorce, and her dad’s remarriage, and the black makeup and the boyfriends and the obscure comics and the disdainful hatred of everything related to Sterling Creek. And all this without expecting anything from her.

Her shoulders bob up and down again, and she stares down at her fingers. “It means nothing, Cass. It means I have a date, that’s all.”

“So … it’s nothing … with us?” Oh god. Did I really just say
us
, like we’re going out? Maybe I
am
a lesbian.

“Look.” Kayla grips the edge of her tray with both hands and makes eye contact. “We’re fine. But you’re always busy with church, and … well, I don’t know. I feel like we’re … growing apart, a little.”

Growing apart, what the hell? “I can’t help the church stuff, Kayla. You know that. But this … ”

She stands up, holding the tray in front of her. She towers over me. “It’s fine, Cass. It’s only a date. But … well, memories from middle school aren’t always enough to have in common with someone.” And then she’s gone, headed down to the basement art grotto, probably, and I’m alone.

23. When you look
in the mirror …

Dicey leans on me in the pew, her head on my shoulder. It may sound sweet, but she’s totally doing it to annoy me.

“Get off me.” My voice is a low hiss, but of course Mom hears me and glares.

“But I looooove you, sissy!” Her whisper is right in my ear as she leans, leans, leans. I fight the urge to shove her, because that will piss everyone off and give her what she wants, besides—to get me into trouble.

“Lean this way, Dice,” says Eric. I keep staring at his profile, looking for some sign of his discomfort, but he looks happy to be here, his face serene and attentive. He puts his arm around Dicey’s shoulders and pulls her off me. Pastor Fordham spits and sputters, and I busy my fingers with braiding the ribbons hanging out of the Bible in the rack on the pew ahead of me. I’m so focused on my braiding that I miss the actual landing of the projectile, but I certainly can’t miss my dad’s reaction.

“Young man,
what
in heaven’s name do you think you are doing?” This is the first time I’ve ever witnessed my father speaking
out loud
in church when it is not his turn to do so.

My brother shakes his head. “I didn’t … ” He bends to retrieve the tiny, folded-paper wedge that bounced off the side of his left temple and landed on the floor in front of my father. Eric’s face is red as he ducks down into the space between Dad’s knee and the back of the pew in front of us. I can’t see the place where the paper “wasp” hit him, but I would bet there’s a welt forming at this moment. I’ve only been hit by one of those things once, in the middle of my back where my bra clasp is, and it hurt like crazy for days.

I turn in my seat. I can’t believe this. Who shoots a freaking paper wasp in church? Who shoots a paper wasp outside of seventh grade?

The faces behind me are uniform, factory-molded into identical expressions as they wait for the sermon to conclude. Several sets of eyes narrow at me, making small judgments about the type of girl who turns around in the middle of service and cranes her head about, staring at people. Didn’t they see the paper wad come sailing through? I search for a face that looks different—a guilty face. A face that looks almost painfully interested in Pastor Fordham. The pale, freckle-smattered face of Blake Peters.

“It was Blake,” I hiss to Dicey, who tells Eric, who shakes his bowed head a fraction and keeps his eyes on his hands, folded in his lap. I think about that stinging bit of paper he’s folded his fingers around, the way it must feel to hold that piece of someone’s hatred, to know yourself a target. The bruise is fading around his eye. His huddled shoulders are narrow beneath his neatly pressed polo.

Dicey gives me a look, and I shrug. What can I tell her? What can I tell anyone? Dad’s eyes keep moving along the row of us, trying to figure out what’s going on, but all that really matters to him is that there is order. After a while, he places one of his heavy hands on Eric’s knee for a moment—a benediction or a dismissal—and then he focuses his attention back on Pastor Fordham, who is winding up into the part of his sermon where he ties all his scattered points together and binds them up in the reedy cord of his passionate voice. It’s the part that draws murmurs and head nods from the members of the congregation; the ones who especially want to prove they were paying close attention throughout the sermon may add in an exclamation of “Praise the Lord” here and there, in a moderately reserved, Minnesota kind of way.

Friday night isn’t real church; it’s a “brief message” followed by Bible study for the adults and youth group for those of us who are still clawing our way through our adolescence. Most of the time, our discussions on Friday are pretty laid back, and often they’re combined with or followed by a social activity, such as bowling or a movie/game in the church basement. Tonight, though, Terry looks absolutely dead serious as he leads us downstairs to our meeting. We gather around, pushing the two battered serving tables together and sliding into our habitual spots.

Eric hasn’t said a word about what happened upstairs, and he keeps his head down, though I see Blake trying to catch his attention by snapping a rubber band around his wrist. Bile rises in my throat. My hands itch to rip him to shreds.

“Hey, Cass.” Drew scoots in beside me and offers a shy smile. “What’s up Terry’s butt tonight, do you think?”

I laugh before I remember that this is Drew the Shrew, and I’m not supposed to be encouraging her. “Clearly something very sharp and ugly,” I say.

“Wow, you’ve got your Bible for once.”

“Yeah, you know me. I wouldn’t want to make waves.”

Beside me, Eric snorts. The breathy girl across the table listens, her mouth turned down in a little bow.

Drew nods, and I think about the little ripples she makes, the ways she challenges the thinking of this group in small ways. “I’m lucky,” she says. “I’m not here for my parents.”

Drew’s parents aren’t members of Joyful News; I’ve never even seen them. She comes here all on her own, week after week, though nobody ever talks to her. Okay, so I talk to her a little bit, but only because I can’t handle being blatantly cruel to someone that weak. Still, why does she come? I don’t understand, I guess, what would draw a person here without some connection. I’m not saying I think you’d have to be forced, like I am, but it’s not like she started coming with a friend or something. She showed up all on her own.

“I would never be here if it
weren’t
for my parents,” I say. It’s perfectly true, but at the same time it’s false, a statement like that. You can’t really tell the truth about never and always. Who would I be, without my parents? Without my brother, without my friends? All along, I’ve been trying to answer this, but I’m all snarled up in everyone else’s truth, in everyone else’s lies.

Around the table, eyes flicker up to mine and then away. They start to talk about their beliefs, about why they’re here. Everyone who speaks up claims to be here out of faith, out of belief. They look at me, judging.

“What? I’m here, aren’t I?” I want them to stop staring at me. It’s not like I chose to be this person—this rational person who can’t accept their truth without some actual evidence. I didn’t look for reasons to doubt, and it’s not like their disapproving scowls are going to convince me of divinity, either.

Ronnie and Blake have positioned themselves exactly opposite Eric and me. They elbow each other. “If you hate it so much, maybe you should leave,” says Ronnie.

“Yeah, maybe you should.” Blake snaps the rubber band against the inside of his wrist and I look at Eric, at the red mark above his left eye.

Terry clears his throat. “Everyone is welcome here,” he says. “And anyway, this isn’t the topic I wanted to discuss this evening, so if you could just … ”

“Everyone’s welcome?” Ronnie isn’t ready to let it go yet. “What if I don’t feel
welcome
here knowing that some of our members don’t believe.”

“And what if I don’t feel welcoming toward people who are deliberately defying the teachings of Christ?” adds Blake. I hate the way his freckles give him that cute, innocent-kid look. I’d like to scour his face with steel wool. “You’re always telling us that we should keep away from evil influences,” he adds, staring at me.

“Yes!” says Terry, pouncing on the words. “That’s what I want to discuss!” He’s breathless, desperate to get the discussion back on track. “Evil influences are all around us. The images we are fed every day from our televisions, from movies and music videos—these images don’t support a healthy spiritual connection with God.” He pauses for a moment to consult his notes, and I feel a little bad for the guy. I can picture him sitting alone in some efficiency apartment, his nervous preparations.