The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  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.

  Laird didn’t glance up from the notes he was making. “Yeah,” he said. “That was my uncle.”

  Jory leaned quickly back. She stared at the chalkboard where Mr. DeNovia was coloring in the oceanic crust with a piece of blue chalk. “Really?” she whispered.

  He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I don’t even remember him.”

  “Your uncle was a missionary?”

  Mr. DeNovia turned with the chalk still in his hand and faced the class. “Am I going to have to separate you two?”

  The girl next to Jory gave a soft snort.

  “When a continent runs into a piece of seafloor,” Mr. DeNovia said, knocking the point of his chalk against the chalkboard, “it’s like a Mack truck running into a Volkswagen. Not very pretty.” The end of Mr. DeNovia’s chalk broke off and fell to the floor.

  A boy in the back of the class gave a brief guffaw.

  Mr. DeNovia bent over and retrieved the chalk. He stood up and smiled ruefully at this lone evidence of class participation. “But at least there’s a clear winner in this wreck,” he said, wiping chalk dust down the front of his pants. “And the seafloor basalt ends up in pretty much the same position as the VW: under the truck—or continent, as the case may be. This may seem like a drag for the basalt, but remember, it isn’t all that happy on the surface anyway.”

  “A drag for the basalt?” Laird whispered the words out of the side of his mouth.

  Jory smiled surreptitiously.

  “This gives it the heat it needs to remelt and complete the differentiation process which was so rudely interrupted at the spreading ridge. And when it cools, guess what forms?” Mr. DeNovia glanced around the room. He picked up the attendance sheet. “Mr. Frankamp?”

  A black-haired boy sitting to the left of Jory frowned. “I don’t know, man,” he said. He jabbed his pen point into the wooden tabletop and made a drilling motion with it. “But you make rocks sound like they’re people or something. Like they’re all happy and sad and shit. Whoops.” He grinned at the boy next to him, who punched him in the arm. “I mean, sad and stuff. ”

  “Thank you for that clarification.” Mr. DeNovia continued on as the class snickered. “The materials that make up the earth’s form may not be living in the way that we, as humans, think of as living, but their processes, just like ours, are ones of progression and change. They are in a state of flux, just like plants and animals and, yes, human beings.” Mr. DeNovia squinted slightly and began waving his hands. “Expansion, movement, changes in temperature and size and shape. Acting upon other elements and being acted upon. I’d call that living, wouldn’t you?” He quit waving and stood quietly at the front of the room for a moment, looking at the backs of his hands. Then he walked over to his teacher’s desk and sat down. “Why don’t you go ahead and begin reading in your textbooks. Chapter Four, I think it is. Let’s just skip over One and Two. You people obviously are already well acquainted with the earth’s crust.” He opened his desk drawer, peered inside, and promptly shut it again. “You’ve been outside. You’ve seen it.”

  As Jory reached into her book bag, she felt a sudden pang. Today was the first day of PE. Just thinking about it made her feel sick. Jory glanced around the classroom at the other girls. None of them seemed like they were worrying about it. One girl behind her had even fallen asleep. Jory clenched her toes inside Grace’s boots and made a soft involuntary groaning sound.

  “What’s wrong?” Laird whispered.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I guess
I don’t feel so good.”

  “Girl stuff?”

  Jory gave him a blank look.

  The girl sitting to the left of Jory leaned forward. “He wants to know if you’re on the rag.” The girl was wearing a beaded choker with a tiny elephant hanging from the middle of it. “Guys always like to think you’re on the rag every minute.”

  “I’m not,” whispered Jory, feeling her face turning red.

  “Well, if you are,” said the girl, “go see the nurse. She’ll give you a Darvon.”

  “No way,” said Laird.

  “Yup,” said the girl, nodding. She glanced over at Mr. DeNovia, who was busily packing papers into his bag. “She has Valium too.”

  “No stinking way.” Laird leaned even farther over the table. “You’re full of shit.”

  The choker girl had begun digging in her suede purse. “Check it out,” she said, unwrinkling a Kleenex and pulling a tiny yellow pill out of the middle of it. She put the pill on the table for inspection.

  Laird leaned past Jory and picked up the pill. “Hm,” he said, turning it over and looking at it closely. He licked the pill once and then put it in his pants pocket.

  “Hey, you freak,” the girl whispered. “Give that back.” She laughed and tried to reach across the table.

  “Dream on,” said Laird, leaning back and laughing.

  “All right, table three,” Mr. DeNovia said. “That’s probably enough fun for this period.”

  Jory sat silently thinking. The nurse. Why hadn’t she thought of the nurse? She could go to the nurse! Jory put her pencil between the pages of The Earth and Its Wonders and told herself, no, do not be stupid. If she allowed the idea about the nurse to take root much longer, she would find herself missing PE and being driven home by Mr. Mullinix. She was squinching her toes together in her boots and trying to will herself into bravery when the classroom door opened. The students all turned their heads at this exciting event.