The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (16 page)

Her father opened the front door and came outside. He stood on the door’s threshold, looking out into the evening. He put his hands in his pockets. “Just try it for a semester,” he said. “One semester.”

“One month,” Jory said.

“Three months.”

“One.”

Her father laughed. “Two months,” he said. “And that’s my final offer.”

Jory pushed off again with her feet.

“You’re going to be okay,” he said. “We’re all going to be okay.”

“Right,”
Jory said. She continued to let the swing take her back and forth.

“Come on,” he said. “Walk with me out to the car.”

Jory got out of the swing and they started down the steps together. They walked past the shadowy bridal wreath bush and the hollyhocks and the plum tree. “What do you think of your neighbor,” her father asked as they passed Mrs. Kleinfelter’s house.

“I like her,” Jory said.

“Good,” her father said. “She seemed nice when I spoke to her.” Jory’s father stepped over the curb and walked out into the road. He stood next to the driver’s side of the Buick, and then he opened the car door. “We miss you at home,” he said.

Jory looked into her father’s eyes, which were the exact same color as her own. “You could take us back, then.”

As they stood next to the car, a truck came quickly down the road toward them. They watched its headlights coming closer. It pulled to a stop next to the Buick and even in the dusky light Jory could read the hand-painted lettering on its side. Grip leaned out the truck’s window. He looked first at Jory and then at her father. “Do either of y’all two know how to get to Lone Star Road from here? I seem to be lost.” He smiled in an open-faced way that made Jory’s heart thrum.

Jory’s father moved closer to the truck. “Lone Star’s at least a couple miles in the opposite direction,” her father said, pointing. “Back that way,” he said, “to the north.”

“I must be all turned around.” Grip shook his head. “I never was any good at directions. Not much good at apologies either.” He waved and pulled the truck back out into the street.

Jory and her father watched the truck’s taillights dwindling away. “Not the brightest fellow,” said her father. “He’s still going the wrong direction. Maybe he’s been drinking.”

“Maybe,” said Jory, and squeezed her hands together tightly inside her sweater sleeves. She jumped up on her toes and quickly kissed her father’s cheek. “Bye, Dad.”

“Well, good-bye to you too,” he said, and kissed her back.

Grace was already doing the dishes. Jory’s bowl of applesauce and her sandwich sat on the table. “It’s not warm anymore, but it’s probably still good,” said Grace, turning around.

Jory sat down and picked up the sandwich. She suddenly felt incredibly hungry. “We could get a TV,” she said.

Grace rinsed out a glass. “Pastor Ron says that television is a mind-numbing diversion,” she said. “And that it encourages violence and immorality.”

Jory rolled her eyes. “Oh, really? Well, who was it that used to sneak out of her bedroom to see Barnabas Collins every day at four o’clock sharp?”

“What?” Grace turned and faced Jory, her face and birthmark distinctly rosy colored. “I did not. I was just keeping you and Frances company.”

“You were completely in love with him. Him and his wolf-head cane and his sexy fangs.” Jory made a vampire face and raised her fingers up into claws. “You thought he was devastatingly handsome.” Jory was making most of this up, but Grace, for some reason, blushed even more furiously.

“Anyway,” said Grace, turning back around and intently scrubbing at a dish, “we don’t have any money, so we couldn’t get one even if we wanted to.”

“Maybe I could steal one. I’m supposed to be pretty good at that.”

Grace shook her head.

Jory spooned up some applesauce and stirred it around in her bowl. “We’re reading
Lord of the Flies
in English I. It wasn’t allowed at ACA. It’s a banned book or something. Maybe I should call Mom up and tell her I’m reading banned books.”

“I’d rather read anything than do my trigonometry.”

“Yeah, but you don’t really have to do it. It’s all just correspondence stuff.”

Grace scoffed. “Just correspondence stuff? I have to send all my homework off and have it graded the minute I’m done with it. It’s just as hard as regular school, but without any of the good parts.”

“What good parts?”

Grace turned off the water and turned around. She leaned against the sink. “You know,” she said, and shrugged helplessly.

“You mean like football games when it’s cold and they have a bonfire afterward and the Pep Club sells popcorn and apple cider and cinnamon doughnuts? And then everybody gets thrown in the ditch? And the hayride last year with the squirt guns? Remember when Mr. Vanderwoode let them turn his barn into a spook house, and Lydia Quenzer was too scared to go inside but Brian dragged her in anyway and she cried and her mom had to come get her? And then the time Donna Hazen jumped on the trampoline in her dress on the field trip and so we didn’t get to go into the Kuna Caves after all.”

Grace moved over to the table and sat down in the chair next to Jory’s. “I always loved chapel days and when the choir sang and we lit candles. It felt real. And holy.” Grace smiled. “And the Noontime Bible Study. I felt like I was able to do some genuine witnessing with the other kids then. That I helped strengthen their daily walks with Christ.”

Jory said nothing. Noontime Bible Study—one of Grace’s proudest achievements—had been popular only with the weirdest of the weird: the loners and the bed wetters and the acne-ridden of Arco Christian. Only those kids who would have been relegated to the farthest tables in the lunchroom willingly attended Noontime Bible Study. Ruthann Hoagterp, who wore dresses down to her freckled calves, and sad, silent, already balding Clarence Muldoon were two of its longtime members. Jory had even heard through the junior high grapevine that Art Tolman had told Grace she should start a club called HAHA—Hicks and Homos Association—and that he had left a note in the school’s suggestion box to that effect. Even at ACA—where it was genuinely difficult to seem odd or unusual—Grace had made a career of being the most sincere and determinedly devout girl the school had ever known. Jory had had to work very, very hard to keep Grace’s reputation as an eternally smiling goody-goody from rubbing off on her own. It was a shameful fact, but several times early in her tenure at Arco Christian Jory had tried to pretend that she didn’t know who Grace was. Later, she had resorted to claiming her older sister was adopted, as if this might explain away Grace’s extreme moral rectitude and apparent lack of self-awareness. Worse yet, when
other students would give Jory a half-admiring, half-appalled look and ask whether her sister was “always like that,” Jory would be forced to admit that, yes, she was. She was always like that.

“And Valentine’s Day, when the Service Club took pink carnations around to each of the classrooms and gave them to people from their secret admirers.” Grace was still reminiscing.

“And you got one from Darryl Hofstetter.” Jory made a gagging noise. “‘Dear Grace, I like your face, it’s smooth and pink and soft as lace, your friend, Darryl Hofstetter.’ Remember how he used to sit behind you on the bus each day?” Jory shivered with disgust.

“Oh, he wasn’t so bad. He was actually kind of sweet.”

“Sweet? You could smell him clear at the front of the bus. Everyone had to open their windows.”

“That’s mean, Jory. He lived all alone way out on that farm with only his great-grandfather. He didn’t know any better.”

“He smelled like sour milk! Like wet clothes left all night in a washing machine.”

“Jesus never cared what people looked like or what they smelled like.”

“That’s ’cause he never smelled Darryl Hofstetter.”

Grace threw the dishtowel at Jory and Jory flinched and laughed, catching the towel as it dropped toward the floor.

“But seriously,” said Grace. “Our bodies don’t have to be everything. They’re only part of us.”

“Yeah,” said Jory. “But that’s the part of you that has us living out here, you know.”

Grace seemed to be thinking about something. She gave Jory a crooked smile. “Things smell so weird to me now, and food tastes sort of different too. Even oatmeal tastes strange. Like it almost has meat in it or something.”

Jory made a face. “Meat?”

“And I can’t hold my stomach in anymore.” Grace looked down at her midsection. “It’s like my stomach muscles just won’t do anything.”

“Yuck,” said Jory. “Do you still feel sick?”

“Sometimes when I first wake up I feel like I’m going to gag or throw up, but instead I just sneeze.”

“Wow,” said Jory.

“I know,” said Grace. She laughed and then so did Jory. They laughed and laughed with Grace holding one hand on her stomach. It was a familiar moment, Jory realized—the two of them giggling together—it was just happening in an unfamiliar place and for a very unfamiliar reason. Their laughter died away slowly and they sat silently at the table.

“Are you scared?” Jory asked.

“Yes,” said Grace. She sounded surprised to be saying this. “Sometimes I feel like I’m completely alone.”

Jory was struck.

“And I miss Frances,” Grace said, as if trying to soften the blow of what she had just said.

Jory nodded. “Me too. What if she forgets us?”

“She won’t. She never would.”

“She might.” Jory listened to the loud tick of the kitchen clock. “It’s my birthday next Sunday.” She studied her folded hands, examining the way her fingers folded over each other.
Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people.
“What if they won’t even come and see me?”

Grace stood up and walked over to the sink. She turned her back to Jory and immersed her hands in the dishwater again. “Well, then I guess we’ll just have our own party,” she said, picking up another dish to wash. “All by ourselves.”

J
ory and Grace had spent the last hour trying to find an outfit remotely acceptable for Jory’s second day at school.

“What you have on your body doesn’t really matter,” Grace said, giving up on her search for something that would approximate a pair of bell-bottomed jeans. “It’s how you act and what you say that’s important.”

“Oh, right, here we go again,” Jory said and rolled her eyes.

“It’s true,” Grace insisted. “It’s only your spirit that matters.”

Jory held up a light blue sweater against her chest.

“Well, I want my spirit to look really cool,” she said, and gave the hopeless blue sweater a fling. She was now wearing a pair of brown wool pants that were too small for Grace and a white thermal undershirt–type shirt she had found in the basement in an old box of clothes. It smelled a little strange, like apples left out too long, but Jory thought it looked sort of neat. Or close to neat. She had also borrowed Grace’s black dress boots, but even with two pairs of socks they were a little big, and Jory kept curling her toes inside of them. She felt almost as if she were wearing a costume. As if she were in a play, pretending to be the girl going to school.

Jory jogged down the hill to the bus stop and stood next to an old elm tree at the edge of a large sugar beet field. She waited as nonchalantly as possible, eyeing the few passing cars, hoping that the next vehicle she heard would be her bus. The school had called early this morning telling her where to wait for Bus 17. Why, when there were only four buses, was hers Number 17? Jory chewed at the end of the wool scarf that Grace had lent her.

At ACA, all the girls were required to wear dresses with sleeves and modest necklines and skirts that came down to the middle of the knee. If your dress or skirt length was questionable, if there was any question
about it being shorter than knee length, Mr. Mordhorst made you kneel on the floor of his office so that he could measure it with the yellow tape measure he carried in his pocket. Jory had never had this horror happen to her, but Rhonda Russell had had to kneel on Mr. Mordhorst’s carpet several times already. Pants were strictly forbidden, except during PE class or on field trips to the Bruneau Sand Dunes or the Craters of the Moon, when the girls were allowed to wear culottes or skorts (if they were knee length). Makeup and jewelry were frowned upon. The boys had to wear collared shirts and dress pants. No T-shirts or blue jeans. Last year, Jory had asked Mrs. Mordhorst if black jeans were permissible and had gotten a demerit for it. “Bad attitude,” Mrs. Mordhorst had written on the form she sent home to Jory’s parents. “This sort of sarcasm is unattractive in a young Christian girl.” On chapel days the girls wore dress-up dresses and nylons and the boys wore ties. Jory had never sat in a school desk while wearing pants. She had never sat in a school
bus
while wearing pants. She tied and retied the knot in her scarf. Earlier, Grace had come into Jory’s room when Jory had been sitting on the bed in her wool pants and Grace’s bra as she tried on clothes. Grace had glanced at Jory and then away, saying nothing. Jory had blushed hotly, but she hadn’t taken the bra off.

Jory’s stomach hurt. She hadn’t been able to eat breakfast this morning either. During fourth grade, the awful year of Mrs. Hickerson, Jory’s stomach had hurt every day and she had been forced to give up breakfast entirely. Each morning she stood in front of her father and begged him to tie her dress’s sash tighter. It still felt loose; couldn’t he tie it tighter? “I’m getting blisters,” he said, laughing, but he retied it anyway, resting his large hand on her head before letting her go. One afternoon, after a particularly bad round of Math Slap, Jory sat down at her desk after her turn at the board and vomited across her notebook. A little bit of it splashed against the shoes of Ginny Price, the girl who sat in the desk next to hers. Ginny had jumped up and shrieked as Mrs. Hickerson marched down the aisle and stood next to Jory’s desk. “The nurse’s,” she said. “And hurry up.” Jory lay on the narrow cot in the nurse’s office until the end of the day. When it was time to go home, she stood up, but her stomach hurt so badly that she began to cry. The nurse, who was actually Robbie
Shannon’s mother and only volunteering for the day, went and got the principal. Mr. Steinbroner insisted on driving Jory home in his large black Lincoln. Jory sunk deep into the leather of the front passenger seat, saying nothing as the tears plopped heavily onto the skirt of her dress. Mr. Steinbroner, too, was utterly silent except to ask finally where to turn and which house was hers.

At home, her mother had had to come out to the car and speak to Mr. Steinbroner and listen to his admonitions about getting Jory to a doctor right away. “For heaven’s sake, Jory,” her mother said, once she got her inside the house. Her mother turned Jory around and pulled the knot out of her dress’s sash with one quick jerk. Jory felt immediately better. Her mother shook her head. “Your dress was just tied too tight.” She frowned. “What on earth is wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” said Jory. But they both knew better.

That same night, as she lay in bed, her father had sat next to her and told her about the time he had to switch from a one-room schoolhouse in Kansas to a big public high school in Colorado and how he came home from the first day with a sick headache that kept him out of school for the next three days. He had rubbed Jory’s back as he told her this and said he was sorry she was so much like him. Jory liked the back rub, but even in fourth grade she knew her father was wrong—she was nothing like him.
Grace
was like their father. Brave and good and holy. Jory was more like their mother: moody and angry and afraid. Which was why she and her mother fought and fought. Jory had heard her mother tell her father this earlier that night, from where she sat inside her closet. “I recognize her tendencies,” her mother said in a low voice. “You’d think you’d have more patience, then,” her father said. Jory could hear her mother sigh. “That’s not apparently how it works.”

Once, later that same year, her mother had found Jory sitting on her bedroom floor poking the inside of her mouth with a straight pin. “Jory, what on earth are you doing?” her mother asked.

“Nothing,” said Jory, hiding the pin underneath her leg.

“Why are you sticking that pin in your mouth? Answer me.”

Jory ran the pin down the inside of her knee sock. “I have to go to the dentist tomorrow,” she said.

“So?”

“I wanted to see what it felt like. Getting a shot.”

Her mother dropped the stack of folded laundry onto Jory’s bed. She stood up and put her hands on her hips. “A coward dies a thousand deaths,” she said, “a brave man, only one.” She turned and walked out of the bedroom.

Jory still knew that quote by heart.
A thousand deaths,
she said to herself now as she peered down the road, nervously looking for the bus.
A thousand and one. A thousand and two.
Something that looked suspiciously like an old yellow school bus rounded the far corner and chugged ever closer to where Jory was standing—her stomach aching as if encircled by a knotted sash tied tight beneath her heart.

Jory ate lunch by herself. Grace had made her a peanut butter sandwich that Jory kept in her locker until the lunch bell rang and then she took it and her baggie of potato chips outside onto the grassy patch of lawn between the main building and the gym. She sat down next to a scraggly evergreen bush and peeled the plastic wrap away from her sandwich. She took a bite and chewed dryly. All around her were groups of kids, laughing and yelling and touching each other and doing very little eating. If this were her
real
school, she thought, the one she went to all the time, she would be doing her best to find some group to fit into, but since she had only a few more weeks to go—well, it didn’t matter if she was unpopular, it didn’t matter if she remained a complete outsider, a freak, a loner, an exchange student from somewhere else.

Her stomach hurt.

She left the rest of her last potato chips in the baggie and put it inside the brown paper bag Grace had given her. She glanced around at the endless reconfiguring of the various groups of students. Several boys wearing cowboy boots and tight Wranglers with large belt buckles swooped and ran and slapped each other and yelled as if playing some complicated game. Another group of slightly older looking students with longer, shaggier hair and sloppier patched and unhemmed Levis stood in a tight circle underneath the gym’s overhang, a distinct haze hanging over their carefully hunched heads. One girl with beautiful long black hair
broke away suddenly from this pack and ran shrieking and jumping onto the back of a boy wearing an old plaid shirt and an army jacket. The girl leaned over his shoulder and told him something that made him laugh and tip backward. The dark-haired girl then screamed and hung on to the boy’s back and they both fell to the ground. The kids behind them jumped out of the way, and someone said, “Way to go,
spaz
.” Jory recognized the boy on the ground as the one who had spoken to her in yesterday’s earth science class. She had never seen the girl before. The two of them lay on the ground, still laughing. “God, get up, you freaks,” said a blond-haired girl wearing a patchwork denim miniskirt. “Mullinix will think you’re stoned and come out here.” Mr. Mullinix was the principal. Jory had met him this morning when she’d gone into the office to get her locker combination. He was a falsely smiling man with a face like several potatoes lumped together. He seemed completely harmless to Jory, but she knew sometimes those were the worst kind. Mr. Pemberton, at church, was like that. He had an innocuous gray beard and a cheerful round face, but he was always coming up behind the Junior Church girls and rubbing their necks and telling them they felt tight—did they need a back rub? He had good hands, he said, flexing his fingers. Were they sure? They were always sure, but it didn’t make any difference. Once Jory was standing outside the women’s restroom talking to Olivia Pemberton when Mr. Pemberton came up behind and began massaging the back of Jory’s neck. “Oh, Dad,” Olivia said, her face turning bright red. “What?” he said, rubbing and kneading steadily. “Jory doesn’t mind.” Jory had smiled gamely. She was a chicken and a coward. It was true.

An errant Frisbee thwacked against Jory’s upper arm and dropped to the grass next to her. She picked the blue disk up and a girl in a Doors T-shirt loped over and held out her hand and then ran off again. This wordless interchange made Jory feel like someone visiting from another planet. She didn’t belong anywhere: not with any of the groups here, not with the goat ropers or the popular athletic kids or especially with the long-haired cool kids. She was a freak destined to always lurk on the fringes of everything. The lunch bell rang and the students all groaned and with great deliberation began putting their cigarettes out and their trash in the trash can, or at least aiming it in that direction. In a
straggling, swearing swarm they began heading back toward the main building. Jory stood up, her legs stiff from sitting on the ground for so long.

“Hey,” the boy from earth science said, slowing his pace to match hers. “I didn’t see you.”

“I saw you,” Jory said.

“Oh,” he said and laughed. “You mean back there? We were just fooling around. Jude gets a little carried away sometimes.”

“Jude?”

“Judith Mullinix. Jude. The girl with the dark hair.”

“What, is she related to Mr. Mullinix?”

“She’s his daughter.” He laughed. “How’d you like that—having the principal be your dad?”

“I can sort of imagine it.”

“Really? Not me.” He opened the school building’s front door and they walked inside, heading downstairs toward the earth science room. “My dad’s a crop duster. He’d rather be dead than be cooped up indoors. He hardly ever comes in our house, except to eat dinner. Sometimes my mom puts his plate of food on the back porch step, just to be funny.”

“Are you sure she’s being funny?”

He stared at her. Jory noticed that his eyes were a dark gray-blue and that his lashes were long. Longer than hers. “Maybe she’s mad,” Jory said.

“She doesn’t seem like it.”

“Moms are weird.”

“Girls are weird.” He grinned at her, and then seemed to get suddenly shy. He turned away and let her walk into the earth science room by herself. Jory tried not to look at anyone as she made her way to her desk.

Right as the tardy bell rang, he rushed into the room and plopped down in the seat next to hers. They sat next to each other in silence as Mr. DeNovia handed out the attendance sheet and told them to get out some paper to take notes on. She watched as he wrote his name down on the attendance sheet and then handed it to her.
Laird Albright
. Jory signed her own name and handed it on to the girl sitting next to her. Jory leaned slightly in Laird’s direction. Mr. DeNovia was busy drawing a picture of a subduction zone on the chalkboard.

“I knew a guy whose name was Phil Albright,” she whispered. “His
dad was a missionary and he got eaten by Peruvian cannibals.” She widened her eyes and made what she hoped was a funny face.