I pictured the wads of cash that Mr. O’Connor was always stuffing into the collection plate, his face bloated by his own charity. I felt my stomach churn at the image of it, and a roar started in my ears. I raised my voice so I could hear myself over it. “Funny how your dad seems to think that the more money he puts in the plate at service, the godlier he gets. You’d better tell him that my parents don’t listen to people’s prophecies just because they’re rich. They have to be
true
.”
“What my dad said
was
true,” Molly growled. “That means your mom is a sinner and an abomination!”
Anger pulsed through me. I got right in Molly’s face. “Maybe you didn’t hear me before,” I said, “so let me be perfectly clear. Your dad’s full. Of.
Crap
.” Little flecks of my spit hit Molly in the face.
By this time, the freshmen at the end of the table had started listening in again, and so had half the lunchroom for that matter. There was a tiny pause, which happens only sometimes, when, coincidentally, everyone sort of shushes at once. That’s when Molly, her eyes big and angry, opened her mouth to fire back at me.
“My dad is not lying!” Molly yelled.
The outburst was like a gunshot going off. Everyone in the lunchroom—including the teachers and the hair-netted lady behind the hot lunch counter—turned to look at Molly. Her mouth was still open and she seemed unable to close it. She looked at me, horrified.
“Moll—” I started, but she wasn’t having any of it. She jumped away from the table and sprinted toward the double doors leading out of the lunchroom and into the hallway.
I looked at Nat, whose face was the color of a glue stick. But at least I could
see
her face now.
“Uh,
thanks
,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster. “I really appreciate the way you stuck up for me and my family just then.”
Nat stood up. “Excuse me?” she asked. Her emerald eyes glinted under the harsh glare of the lunchroom lights.
“I said it was
really cool
the way you just let Molly stand there and call my mom an abomination. You could have at least helped me defend her or something.”
Nat crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s pretty funny that you would say that, Emma, considering the fact that you
hung me out to dry
in biology class not twenty minutes ago.”
Hung her out to dry? “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I’m talking about the fact that Mr. Pocs was so totally mean to me and you never stepped in either. Not once.”
That? Please. “I thought you knew me well enough to know I’m not the type to just wade in and defend intelligent design,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I thought friends were supposed to support each other. No matter what.”
“Sure. I support you, but in biology class I just didn’t agree with you. That’s cool, right?”
Nat slammed her hand on the table, making me jump. “You tell me, Emma. If I said I believed Mr. O’Connor’s prophecy, would we still be friends? Or do you expect everyone to be open-minded except when it comes to things that
you
disagree with?”
“Except you
don’t
think Mr. O’Connor’s prophecy is true. So this is like apples and oranges or something.”
Nat grabbed the remains of her lunch and shoved them into her bag. “What do you know about it, anyway? Maybe I do agree with Mr. O’Connor. After today, I might just start going around saying Mr. O’Connor is the next John the Baptist.”
I scoffed. “Nat—” I said, but she was done listening to me. She stomped out of the lunchroom, leaving me alone at the table.
Chapter Seven
T
he noise and activity of the campout was all around me, but thinking about Nat and Molly made it hard to concentrate on anything in particular. Yet I knew I couldn’t keep wallowing in my memories for too much longer. Despite the way the images stuck in my brain like infected splinters, I couldn’t sit around and pick at them. I had a story to get, and I had to make it good—Pulitzer quality at least.
No sweat.
Through pools of dim light, I spotted several Harley gangs dotted around the camp. From what I could make out, most of them were tattooed, clad in black, and polishing their motorcycles. They looked like they ’d sooner eat
me
for breakfast than a donut. I craned my neck and could see, beyond them in the distance, RVs freckled with the angular face of Dale Earnhardt Jr., and a bit farther on, a Renaissance crowd fighting each other with swords for the One Ring—the glazed kind.
A stone’s throw away was a group of Harley bikers who were gathered around a campfire. As I stood watching them, an enormous hulk of a man eased himself into a rickety lawn chair. The bandana pulled tight around his bald head had an American flag printed on it, and silver hoops hung from both his ears. His muscles bulged and rippled as he dug inside a tattered canvas bag with
Just Say No
printed on the front of it. He pushed around several items I couldn’t see until, finally, he pulled out yarn and knitting needles.
Okay—good enough for now. It was time to set up camp and get my first interview.
A few minutes later, with my tent staked into the ground, I stepped over to the Harley camp. The smell of charcoal and wood smoke drifted by, as heavy as incense.
“Excuse me,” I said to the group, and five heads—four bald and one blond—looked up from where they’d been concentrating on roasting hot dogs.
“May I help you?” asked the man with the knitting needles.
“Yeah. I mean, yes. Please. My name is Emma Goiner and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions. I’m doing a story for the
Paul Bunyan Press
—or at least I hope for the
Paul Bunyan Press
—about the campout. It’ll only take a few minutes of your time.”
The massive man stood up. He loomed like Mount Rushmore (except with one face instead of four) and was built like the strong man in a circus. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if he’d torn off his leather jacket to reveal a leopard-print unitard underneath.
“I think we can entertain a few questions from this young woman, don’t you?” he asked his gang.
Entertain questions?
This guy sounded like a lawyer addressing a jury. Take away the earrings and give him a suit, and he could probably stand before Judge Judy.
The one woman smiled. “Sure, I think we can handle that.” Her voice was low and gravelly, like she’d smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes every day since birth.
“My name is Bear,” said the giant, setting down his knitting and taking two steps forward with his hand extended.
That certainly was fitting.
I held out my hand and tried not to wince as his enormous paw engulfed it. Instead of crushing all my fingers in a death grip, he shook it gently. I noticed his hands were soft—not rough and gnarled like I thought they’d be. His face was round but lined, and the scratchy five o’clock scruff on his jaw had little flecks of gray in it.
“And may I please introduce Wichita, Rex, Tex, and Anita.”
“It’s nice to meet you all,” I said, trying to remember my manners. Which wasn’t easy. The group was intimidating to say the least. They reminded me of vultures in a circle. Even Anita, who was blond, had thin, patchy hair, like the wind had sucked it away during many hours of soaring for carnage.
“I appreciate this a lot,” I managed to say.
“We’re happy to have you,” said Bear. “Please, sit.” He motioned to the chair he’d just vacated.
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I’m just going to ask a few—”
“No sirree.” That was from Rex or Tex. One of them had a mustache so thick it reminded me of broom straws, but I couldn’t remember who it belonged to. “Sit.”
This issue was not up for discussion. I sat. Bear pulled up another folding chair next to mine and stuffed his bulk into it. I pulled out my notebook and pen from the green knit bag around my shoulder and got comfortable.
“Honey,” said Anita, “just put that notebook down for a while. Ain’t no hurry here. You hungry?”
“Um, I—” The truth was I was famished. I’d only had a granola bar for dinner.
Bear handed me a stick and a soggy pack of hot dogs. “Please, partake.”
When in Rome
, I thought, and took both from him. “Thank you.”
“Are you from the area?” he asked, cramming his knitting back into his
Just Say No
bag. I speared my dog and put it into the fire and, glancing over, noted that one of the books falling out of his bag was
Personal Finance for Dummies
. What in the world was a Harley biker doing reading a book on budgeting?
“Um, yes, actually,” I answered, tearing my eyes away from Bear’s bag. “I live in Birch Lake. How about you guys?”
“No,” said Bear. “We arrived here from New Orleans. We’ve been residing there since the hurricane went through.”
“Really? Why?”
“At first we were helping the Red Cross and volunteering where we could. Then we began working on construction crews to rebuild the city.”
“You’re volunteers?” I asked, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice.
“Something like that,” said Rex-maybe-Tex.
“Why ’d you decide to come to the donut campout?”
“We felt called,” said Anita.
At this statement, the hairs on my neck stood up. I knew evangelical-speak when I heard it, and “felt called” was straight out of the
Bible Beater’s Dictionary.
It meant “I felt called by God to go to X place and do X duty.” Could this Harley gang really be a bunch of evangelical Christians? Surely not.
I had to keep going, so I played dumb. “Called by who?”
“By the Lord,” said Bear.
Bingo.
I stuffed a big bite of hot dog in my face so I wouldn’t have to talk. I also made a mental note to God:
THIS IS NOT FUNNY
. Why couldn’t I go anywhere without finding myself surrounded by people who thought choosing which item to get out of a vending machine required prayer? And
come on
—I came to the donut camp to get away from all that, not to plow into it headfirst.
This was turning out to be a hard-won scholarship. Still, I had a dog to finish and some questions to ask. I wasn’t leaving yet. I swallowed.
“What’s the name of your gang?”
“The Angelfire Witnesses,” said Bear.
I now had my notebook out and was writing furiously, balancing my hot dog at the same time. “Where’d you meet?”
“Wichita,” said Wichita. Only, because he had a little bit of a speech impediment, it came out like “Wichithaw.”
“We tore that town up,” said Anita. “I mean, back in the day, when our gang was called Death’s Screamers. We were bad news until the night Wichita got loaded and crashed into some old lady ’s front porch with his motorcycle. He was cut up pretty bad, and she took him inside, cleaned him up. We all were there when it happened and, of all things, she invited us in after him. There we were, sittin’ around in her fancy parlor, wondering when she was going to call the cops on us, but she never did. Said she figured we could handle this thing like grown-ups, without the law, and we did.”
“She made me cut her grasth,” said Wichita. “And she made us clean thuff too. And go to churth.”
“Let me guess,” I interjected. “An evangelical church?”
“How’d you know that?” asked Rex-maybe-Tex—the one with the broomstache.
I shrugged. “Just a guess.”
“We all found the Lord,” said Bear.
“Mmm-hmmm. But it don’t mean we’re perfect,” said Anita, who lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“I still can cuss like a sailor,” laughed Rex-maybe-Tex, who now had crumbs stuck in his broomstache.
“And I still enjoy the racetrack,” said Bear. Anita glanced up quickly when he said that, then looked down again.
I appreciated their honesty, actually. So many of the people in my parents’ church were just plain fake about their lives and their struggles and never came to terms with what was
really
going on. Like when Lionel Nelson lost his job at one of the local factories, everyone just told him to “believe God” and “have faith” that everything would be okay. No one told him to look for a new job, or reminded him that his wife and kids were depending on him. Lionel took a liking to sitting on the couch, and he and his family eventually lost their house. They stopped coming to church, and once I overheard someone say that Lionel’s wife had left him for someone else.
The blind, fake “church-speak” even got under Nat’s skin when her grandpa died last year. Everyone tried to tell her that her grandpa was in heaven and that she should rejoice that he was now with Jesus.
“I either want them to leave me alone, or tell me how they got through it when they lost someone,” she’d said on the phone one night. “This ‘now he’s in heaven’ stuff is the worst.”
At the camp, it was refreshing to meet Christians who weren’t hung up on the same kind of thing.
“Bear,” I said, “I hope you don’t take this question the wrong way, but you sound very, um, refined. What’s the story there?”
Bear looked down at the ground like he was embarrassed, but Anita wasn’t having any of it. She tossed a pop can at him.
“Aw, come on now. Say what you gotta say.”
With some more prompting from Wichita, Bear finally said, “I was raised in Detroit. In the 1960s.”
“In case they don’t teach you ’bout that in school,” interjected Anita, “that was a real bad time to live in Detroit.”
“I lived on the poverty-stricken side of town with mostly black neighbors,” said Bear. “Rich whites literally built walls to trap the poor people and the blacks in that part of town, and it made the whole city volatile.
“My escape from the situation became reading,” he continued, “and my favorite book was the dictionary. I started expanding my vocabulary and doing crosswords.”