Chapter Eleven
Youth group met every Wednesday evening in a squat cinder block building behind the church, while the mothers had their women’s studies in the main building.
The yellowed lights buzzed overhead, our folding chairs arranged in a crooked circle.
On the far wall, a hand-painted mural of the Jordan River had begun to chip at the center, exposing gray concrete beneath the blue water.
Sometimes I wondered if it was from age, or if someone had been brushing against it on a regular basis.
I sat beside Andy, our knees touching. His leg swung back and forth with a restless energy that shook my chair every few seconds. He’d been in a mood since the parking lot after school.
I was eternally grateful my stepmother worked the evening at the salon on Wednesdays so I only had one adult to perform for here, if Pastor Sam could even be considered an adult.
He was younger than most of the church men, which made the adults think he was cool by default.
He wore band t-shirts and called us guys like he was one of us.
He stood in the center of our chairs with a Bible tucked beneath one arm and a styrofoam cup of orange soda in the other.
“Peer pressure,” he said, pacing slowly. “That’s one of Satan’s favorite tools.” He paused there, spinning on his heel slowly to look at each of us, letting the sentence breathe like it deserved applause.
“You have to be careful who you surround yourselves with. If your friends are drinking, partying, sleeping around, disrespecting authority—those influences rub off. Bad company corrupts good morals.”
A few heads nodded solemnly. I stared at the stain creeping across the ceiling above him. It looked like a country on a map, jagged and spreading.
What he meant, of course, was don’t make friends with anyone interesting.
Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding because people were bored. That seemed relevant. Nobody ever brought that up in these discussions though. They acted like alcohol had been invented in 1987 by devil worshippers in a basement listening to Nirvana somewhere far away from here.
Jesus also spent time with Mary Magdalene, who they talked about in tones usually reserved for hurricanes and disease. So why exactly was it scandalous if I was friends with girls who snuck vodka into Sprite bottles or slept with their boyfriends—or other girls—I didn’t know.
The church loved to pick which verses to shove down our throats and which ones to chew up privately and spit out.
Love thy neighbor. Honor thy father. Wives submit yourselves.
Funny how often that one came up. I wished my father had picked some other sector of Christianity to hang his morality on other than the one that stemmed from the apostle that said women shouldn’t speak in church.
I was halfway through wondering if all churches were this crooked or if Southern Baptists were simply gifted at hypocrisy when a voice cut through the room.
“But Jesus hung out with criminals.” My attention swung immediately.
Shannon O’Kinzy sat two chairs down from me, hand half-raised though he’d already spoken.
He always dressed like he’d stepped out of an old photograph—pressed trousers, layered button-down shirts, slicked hair.
I’d once seen him in the school courtyard dancing with the redheaded girl he sometimes brought to church, the two of them spinning to music only they could hear while she wore a circle skirt with a poodle stitched on the hem.
They’d looked so committed to their own strange little world that nobody had known whether to laugh or admire them.
Shannon was usually quiet, but when he did speak it came out charged, like he was one sentence away from revealing a marvelous secret. He looked that way now. His knee bounced rapidly as he waited for Pastor Sam’s answer.
Andy snorted beside me. “Well, we’re not Jesus, dipshit.”
A few boys laughed. I jabbed Andy hard in the ribs with my elbow.
“Ow—what?”
“Don’t be ugly,” I muttered. He rolled his eyes and sat straighter in his chair. Pastor Sam cleared his throat, eager to reclaim the room.
“Well, Shannon,” he said, smiling the tight smile adults used when teenagers became inconvenient, “Jesus associated with sinners to save them, not to become like them.”
Shannon opened his mouth again, then seemed to think better of it. His knee kept bouncing.
Sam continued talking, something about accountability partners and guarding our testimonies, but I stopped listening. My attention slid sideways to Andy. His jaw was set tight enough to show muscle. One of his knuckles was swollen and faintly pink, like he’d hit something recently.
I could still see the way he’d gotten in August’s face in my head: Andy crowding him with that smiling aggression boys used when they wanted witnesses to think they were joking. August standing still as a fence post, eyes flat and unreadable.
Had Andy always been this mean and I’d mistaken it for confidence? Had he always carried anger under the skin like a fever? Or was it newer? Taught, or a developed survival skill?
His father was considered practically holy by half the town. Men quoted him, and women fed him casseroles. My own father praised his humility like it was a second gospel.
But I’d seen the way Andy watched doors. The way he apologized before he knew what for. It felt like a different person than the boy who had crowded August against the trunk of my car this afternoon.
August had been so calm as Andy postured at him, he’d looked almost bored.
He seemed to be perpetually disappointed by everything around him.
I thought of the coral blush that rose in his cheeks when I teased him, and wondered who else got to see that side of him.
Did Wyatt, or the two girls that had gotten out of the car last Sunday? Did his family?
I could hear him calling me Sin in my mind like it meant something sacred. I almost closed my eyes at the thought.
The group bowed in prayer around me before I realized Pastor Sam had finished his sermon. Hands clasped, eyes closed, chairs creaked as everyone bent forward in practiced reverence.
I lowered my head too, but I didn’t close my eyes.
Instead, I glanced up through dark lashes to find Shannon staring at me.
He wasn’t smirking like he had been on Sunday, but instead it felt like he was studying me.
I didn’t look away from him this time. We held each other’s gaze, until the group said “Amen.” in unison, the both of us joining in.
From the outside, I knew exactly how to look devout.
Inside, I was wondering how many people in that room were pretending. Even more, I wondered why Shannon didn’t. His mother allowed his brother to skip church, so I never understood why he attended if he didn’t have to. If I had the option, I’d never step foot in another chapel again.
After youth group let out, the room emptied in a rush of teenagers giggling and shoving each other as their mothers called their names from the parking lot. The building always felt stranger once the bodies left it, as if the silence exposed something it shouldn’t have.
Andy and I stayed behind, as we usually did. Pastor Sam jingled the keys in his hand and tossed them to Andy, who caught them one-handed without looking.
“Lock up when y’all are done.”
“Yes, sir,” Andy said.
The screen door shut behind him. Only the hum of the small space heater remained, and the faint scrape of metal as we began stacking folding chairs. I set one chair on top of another building a crooked tower against the wall.
Andy slammed his own stack down harder than necessary. I glanced at him. His jaw had been tight all evening but now his temper moved around him like heat.
I slid another chair into place and asked carefully, “What’s your deal today?”
He whirled on me so fast it made my stomach jump. His face was drawn hard with anger, eyes sharp and bright in a way I hated. For one strange second I thought he might yell.
Then he stopped. His expression changed mid-breath, eyes lifting to something behind me, making me turn. Shannon O’Kinzy stood near the door, halfway through stepping around us.
He moved with the careful awkwardness of someone trying not to startle a wild animal. He held up a composition notebook, four leaf clovers in different shades of lifeless green taped all over the cover.
“Forgot my survival guide,” he said. His voice carried that excited edge, like he knew something the rest of us hadn’t caught up to yet.
He looked at me then. “You good?”
Before I could answer, Andy barked, “We’re fine, O’Kinzy.” Shannon didn’t move. He just kept watching me, waiting.
I gave him a small nod. “I’m fine.”
He studied my face one second longer than comfort allowed, then dipped his chin and slipped past us toward the door as he muttered, “See you later, Sinley.”
Andy rolled his eyes dramatically. “Freak.”
I turned on him with a look sharp enough to cut. He exhaled through his nose, shoulders dropping. “Sorry,” he muttered.
Some of the tension went out of me. I stepped closer and rested my hand on his arm, feeling the firm muscle there, the pulse beneath the skin.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on,” I asked softly, “or am I going to have to work it out of you?”
My hand slid upward, smoothing over the sleeve of his t-shirt. Andy softened the way he always did under gentle touch. It was one of the first things I’d learned about him before I was even old enough to understand the reason. He looked suddenly younger than he had in weeks.
“My dad’s just been on my ass about picking a school,” he said. “And Coach is on my ass about giving my all this season.” He kicked lightly at the leg of a chair. “And kids like that piss me off.”
“Like Shannon?”
“Like all of them.” He gestured vaguely, meaning boys with strange hobbies and no fear of ridicule, boys who dressed wrong and talked back and seemed immune to consequence.
“They don’t know what it’s like to be under this much pressure.
They get to do whatever they want with their lives.
And they assume I’m an asshole because I play football, and my dad’s a pastor.
But I want to get out of here just as bad as they do. It just costs me more.”
I thought of August in the parking lot, all dry eyes and careless posture. He does his stereotype justice.
“Is that why you dislike August?” I asked. Andy’s face tightened again, but only briefly.
“I don’t like the way that kid looks at you,” he said, sounding exhausted.
My stomach dropped so fast I felt it in my knees. I wrapped my arms around his neck before my face could betray me.
“I’ve never noticed,” I said sweetly. Inside, panic skittered through me like mice in walls.
Andy smirked against my cheek, pleased by my answer, and slid his hands to the backs of my thighs. Before I could protest, he lifted me. I laughed automatically, clinging to his shoulders.
“Andy! Put me down.”
“Nope.” He carried me toward the door while I squirmed uselessly, the keys jangling in his pocket.
Outside, the night had turned soft and warm. Crickets sang from the ditch line. The church steeple rose against the stars—a beacon for hypocrisy.
Andy hauled me toward the pathway in the treeline we used to get to the small clearing in the cornfield where we usually hooked up as if I weighed nothing at all.
I clung to him because there was nothing else to do.
Because I knew that letting him have these few minutes where he could feel like he was in complete control was often the only relief Andy Spires ever got in his life.
Over his shoulder, I looked back at the empty church windows glowing pale in the dark and thought how strange it was that a place so full of God could feel so haunted.