When it’s open just far enough, I tumble inside, yank off my muddy clothes, shove them under the bed. I shut the window, jump into bed, pull the covers up to my chin. There’s no time for sleep and anyway I’m too keyed up from how close I cut things. Aunt Aggie will be knocking on my door any minute now, telling me to get up for school.
Sometimes I feel like two different people, loosely attached by the dawn. A girl with a secret shadow half.
When I’m with my sister I don’t have to think about school. I don’t have to think about anything. I can just exist. Breathe in and out. Move through the world. Run until all the stress and worry I’ve built up over the course of the day streams out of me. Sometimes I envy my sister, getting to live that freely all the time.
Usually I have more time to adjust, to move from one world to the other. From the person I am at night to the person I have to pretend to be in the day.
Now all I can do is stare up at the plastic stars on my ceiling, glowing their faint and sickly green, and wait.
* * *
—
Pastor Jones is sitting at the card table in the kitchen when I come out of my room. He’s wearing a faux silk bomber jacket with embroidered tigers and a black T-shirt with a white cross on it. He shoots me an idiotic grin.
“Will you get that toast for me, honey,” says Aunt Aggie, bustling around the tiny kitchen in her plaid robe. She’s making eggs. She only does that when the pastor is over. When it’s just us we have Cheerios.
“Good morning, Jolene,” says the pastor.
“Morning,” I say, which is my way of saying I hate you. I grab the toast right out of the toaster and it burns my fingers.
The pastor never used to stick around for breakfast. When he started staying nights, back at the beginning of summer, he would sneak out before the sun was up. I almost ran into him once in the alley behind the bar. He had that dumb jacket draped over one shoulder and his boots were untied. It was kind of funny: him sneaking out, me sneaking in. Toward the middle of summer, he’d creep down the stairs, wait a while, then make a big show of knocking on the front door. Aggie would greet him, pretend to be surprised, invite him in for eggs. I never commented on it and after a while they gave up pretending.
Aggie spoons a poached egg onto each of our plates. The pastor closes his eyes and holds his hands out over the table.
“Lord,” he says, “you are more precious than silver, more costly than gold, more beautiful than diamonds. Lord, you are darker than coal, you are slicker than oil, you are faster than a Ford Thunderbird. Nothing I desire compares with you. Amen.”
“Amen,” says Aggie.
My poached egg looks like a big lidless eye. I pretend it is the eye of God, watching over me. I poke it in the pupil with my fork and let the yolk ooze out.
The pastor thinks he’s so damn clever. When he first came to Lester two years ago, hardly anybody showed up to his church on Sundays, so he started coming around the bar and preaching to the drunks. Aunt Aggie used to laugh at him, call him a joke, but the drunks loved him, and after a while I guess she did too.
The pastor is shoveling sugar into his coffee. Aggie is lighting her cigarette on the stove burner. I want nothing more than to crawl back under the covers. I’ve started going to bed earlier on weeknights. I tuck myself in by ten some nights, but that’s still only five hours at best before I’m up again and running. Aggie can’t understand why I’m always so tired. She keeps threatening to take me to a sleep specialist, but I know she won’t. The nearest hospital is twenty miles away, in Delphi, and Aggie never goes more than ten minutes outside of Lester.
It’s a superstition she inherited from Grandpa Joe, who she loved more than anyone. He was the kind one, to hear her tell it, the one who protected Aggie and Mama, loved them, encouraged them. He was everything that Grandma Margaret wasn’t. But he drank too much and died of liver failure when Aggie was thirteen and Mama was ten. I don’t think Aggie ever really got over that. Maybe Mama didn’t either.
“I’ll be late for school if I don’t leave soon,” I say, which is a lie.
“Eat your breakfast, Jo,” says Aggie. “The pastor can ride you over.”
* * *
—
“Have you ever seen those pictures of Jesus where he’s carrying a lamb over his shoulders?” the pastor asks me in the car.
“No.” I lean my head against the car door, close my eyes, hope he takes the hint to shut the hell up. The pastor, unsurprisingly, loves to talk about Jesus. I’ve tried silence, sarcasm, eye rolling, but nothing can dissuade him.
“It’s a common picture,” the pastor goes on. “Do you know why Jesus is carrying the lamb?”
Because he’s really into CrossFit? No, the pastor would only take that as encouragement, an opportunity to make some awful joke of his own. I try silence.
“Back in Jesus’s day,” the pastor says, undeterred, “if a shepherd had a lamb that wouldn’t stop wandering off from the flock, what the shepherd would do is break the lamb’s legs.”
I make an involuntary sound of disgust and regret it immediately. It betrays that I was listening.
“The lamb would need to be carried until the legs healed, of course,” says the pastor, cheerily, “but afterward, you can be sure, that lamb would never wander again.”
“Whatever,” I say, to show the story had no effect on me, though the truth is I feel a bit ill. I’m doing my best to commit every word to memory so I can tell Savannah about it later. She already thinks the pastor is a creep, so she’ll eat this up.
We’re only about two blocks from school, but the light up ahead turns red. I silently curse it. The pastor’s shitty old car (vintage, he calls it) squeals to a stop.
“Look,” says the pastor. “I don’t know where it is you go when you sneak out at night. I don’t know what you do. I’m not sure I want to know.”
Well, shit. I stare out the window as hard as I can, but in my head I’m screaming. The goddamn pastor. Aggie’s such a heavy sleeper. Grandma Margaret was, too, when we lived with her. I thought I was being careful, thought I was getting away with it, but I should have realized not everyone sleeps as soundly as them.
“I know you went out last night,” the pastor says. “And twice last week.”
He’s wrong about that part, at least. I went out every night last week. And every night but one the week before. To see my sister, to run with her. I’ve been going out too often. I know that already.
“I can’t make you see things the way I do, Jolene,” says the pastor, “but whatever it is you’re doing, I want you to think real hard about whether it’s worth it.”