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Shortly after Cheryl’s first birthday alone, her mother takes a wrong turn on the way to the basketball game and parks right smack in the center of the shadow of a steeple.
“What are we doing here?” Cheryl asks, hating the tremor she can’t keep out of her voice. She’s in her cheerleading uniform; she presses her knees together harder. “The Vixens—”
“Have been informed you’ll be sitting out the rest of the season,” her mother says, dabbing a handkerchief at the corners of her eyes. “Undergoing rehabilitation for a most grievous condition.”
Cheryl’s swallow burns her throat. “I see.”
“Well, we’d best not keep her waiting,” her mother says, and unlocks the car. The parking lot is full to the brim with a silence heavier than the strongest humidity. Not a single cricket chirps. No cicada dares to sing.
Guess their desires are unnatural, too, Cheryl thinks, and sets her hand firm atop some part of herself that tries to gasp for air. Pushes down.
The linoleum tile of Sweetwater United Methodist makes a valiant effort at echoing under Cheryl’s mother’s heels. Cheryl suffers from no assumptions that she could have the same stubbornness; her lungs are already filling with water, each breath more difficult than the last. Remember your baptism and be thankful. She wonders if Jesus ever wished the Jordan had been a little shallower.
The next eight months go like this: once a week, her mother takes her to the church at night, when only one light is on. In that windowless room, on a metal folding chair between a whiteboard and a sparsely populated bookshelf, she listens while a sweet, grandmotherly old lady tells her she’s going to hell. The counselor offers her a tissue every time she cries, which is less and less as the weeks go on. All the tears are inside her now, and Cheryl can’t burn anywhere near bright enough to dry out all that acreage of organs. Instead, she learns to breathe water. A living bog body, dripping moss off every limb. The summer’s endless maw eats her alive.
Betty’s mama’s started going to that new charismatic church in the middle of nowhere, which is too far past the far bounds of respectability for Cheryl’s mother to ever entertain, but it’s enough to convince her to let Cheryl spend the night one weekend at the beginning of their junior year.
“I’m worried about her,” Betty admits as they lay facing each other, head propped up on one hand. “I tried to go with her once, but… Okay, this is going to sound weird, but the trees moved… strangely out there. Like they were alive. I mean, they are alive, but like—”
“Like the Devil,” Cheryl says, face blank, and Betty’s frown deepens.
“Yeah, something like that. Even the birds avoid it.”
Cheryl, for her part, has been seeing Satan through the shower curtain, his twiggy arms calling for the twisted kind of worship she can’t seem to claw out of her chest, no matter how much dirt she gets under her nails. Like: maybe these migraines are the wages of her unrighteous thoughts. Like: maybe the buzzing in her ears is the Holy Ghost. How long until she’s cemetery enough already, anyway? How many waves until the water’s washed her clean?
“Listen,” Betty says, “me and Toni and Kevin, we wanted to check on you—Archie says he hasn’t seen you with the Vixens at any of the football games, and we got worried. I know your mom said last year you were doing physical therapy, is that… Is it getting any better?”
Cheryl sobs so long she thinks she’ll drown.
The Devil’s in the Sweetwater UMC parking lot. So is Betty’s beat-up truck.
Cheryl doesn’t look at his leering face, the grasping branches of his hands, the fabric around his body that billows without a breeze—she sprints across the shadow that’s grown to enclose the doorway, the street, the crucifix burning her feet when she loses her red kitten heels in some staff member’s reserved parking space. She hears Betty unlock the car, sees the rear lights flash, and flings the back passenger door open, throws herself in. Something scrapes against the window as Betty backs out faster than Cheryl’s ever seen, faster than a street racer or the horse Christ will come back on. There are twigs in Cheryl’s hair. She’s soaking wet. She’s sprawled half across Toni’s lap.
“Take a left,” Toni directs, squeezing Cheryl’s hand tight. “Okay, now right.” Against the ancient metal, it begins to rain.
After getting Cheryl into a fresh set of clothes at Toni’s granddad’s trailer—she tries not to think about how their scent, their subtle warmth, is all Toni, and then she tries to stop stopping herself—they go, of course, to Pop’s.
Pop Tate takes one look at her for the first time in the better part of a year and says, “Cheryl, if you don’t mind, I’d like to give you a hug right now,” and won’t let her apologize for getting tears and snot all over the shoulder of his apron. “I keep a fresh one in the back for such a time as this,” he says, patting her on the arm, and once he’s changed, he sets her up with a hot chocolate and two grilled cheeses without her asking.
“Jay-Jay used to dip it in the hot chocolate,” she says, sniffing as she pulls her sandwich apart into bite-sized pieces, watching the melted cheese stretch. “It was so gross.” Betty’s face can’t fit anything in alongside her pity, but Toni laughs. Cheryl glances at her sort-of-cousin, more family after tonight than ever before. And moreso than anybody she’s got left. “Sorry about your car.”
There was a deep, lightning-like gash in the paint and surface of the metal visible when they got out of the truck, as if it’d been keyed. The back passenger window spiderwebbed with cracks.
Betty shrugs. “Gives her character. And gives me and my dad something to work on when I’m at his place for the weekend, I guess.”
“Are we going to talk about what that thing was?” Toni asks, looking between them, and Betty shakes her head.
“We can debrief with Jug later. For now, I think we all need some sleep.”
“It’s not much,” Toni says, flicking on the light in her room at her granddad’s place, where an air mattress occupies over half the floor. They have to climb over it to get to Toni’s dresser, much less out the door.
“It’s perfect,” Cheryl says. In Toni’s t-shirt and gym shorts, the fan rattling and wholly failing to offset the lack of air conditioning, Cheryl dreams of kneeling in front of a fireplace, warm to the core. It’s the best she’s slept in months.