Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

  “Oh my God, fine,” he says. “Try not to blow up anyone’s mailbox this time.”

  16

  I REALLY LIKE the day before Christmas Eve. It’s close enough to Christmas that the tree’s already been bought and decorated, but not so close to Christmas that you have family things to go to or new sweaters to pretend you like. I was planning to spend today holed up in my room with hot chocolate, peanut brittle, and video games, but Dad has other plans.

  “You’re not going to leave all your homework until the night before you go back to school, like last year,” he says, turning off my console before I’ve even had a chance to kill anything. “I want you to accomplish something today.”

  Fine. I’ll start with my chemistry project, purely because I can complain about it the most.

  “This can all be done at home,” Mr. Pierini assured us last week, passing out a set of complicated-looking instructions. “And please get pictorial evidence of your experiment before it’s consumed.”

  And then he laughed. Like the vacation-ruining monster he is.

  “My teacher didn’t even say what it’s supposed to be,” I tell Dad as I follow him to the kitchen, clutching the assignment sheet. If he wants me to get this project done, he’s going to suffer through it right alongside me. “How can I do an experiment if I don’t know what I’m proving?”

  “You get the materials and follow the instructions,” Dad says, already sounding weary. Good. I think if parents had to do all the time-wasting busywork their kids have to get through, they’d riot. At least they get paid to do their stupid, time-wasting busywork.

  “The materials are weird, though, look—sodium hydrocarbonate? Does he think people have that lying around the house?”

  “Well,” Dad says. “Most people do.” He reaches into the cabinet behind him and pulls out a box.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sodium hydrocarbonate. Baking powder.”

  Baking powder?

  “Can I see the materials list?” Dad asks, and I hand him the paper. He reads it over and starts to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask as he opens up another kitchen cabinet.

  “This won’t take long,” he promises. “Maybe an hour. I’ll help you.”

  And I almost tell him no, that not only am I not supposed to be getting help on this, I don’t want his help in the first place. But he starts whistling as he rummages around the kitchen cabinets, and I haven’t heard him do that in forever. Besides, the faster I’m done, the faster I can go upstairs and kill CGI Nazi cyborgs.

  He pulls out each item on my list of materials, naming them as he goes.

  “Sucrose—sugar. Mentha peperita—peppermint extract. C6H10O5—cornstarch.”

  I stare at the pile of ingredients. “What, do I have to make a cake?”

  Dad looks down at the instructions. “I don’t think a cake, exactly.”

  The first step is to heat the starch with water and baking powder until it boils. After the mixture boils and I’ve checked and written down its temperature, we leave it to sit.

  “How do you know all of this?” I ask, because I can’t remember Dad once using the kitchen for anything other than making himself a sandwich.

  “The chemical names? I loved science. I minored in chemistry. Didn’t you know that?”

  No. I didn’t. The earliest picture I’ve seen of my dad is from his and Mom’s engagement. We have tons of photos of Mom as a kid, going to the beach, opening presents on Christmas, graduating from high school. But none of Dad. And for the first time, I wonder why.

  “The cooking stuff, too,” I say as he takes the mixture off the stove and adds in the peppermint. “I didn’t know you knew how to cook.”

  “I used to cook all the time, when your mom was at the teachers college and I was working nights. I’d make dinner for both of us, then she’d go to bed and I’d go to work.”

  I knew, I guess, they’d done that, before Dad landed a job that could support all of us. As I watch Dad pour one half of the mixture onto the cookie sheet, I try to imagine them young and exhausted, sitting at a table without me or Sophia, loving each other enough to work graveyard shifts or to go to sleep alone every night.

  “Grab some food coloring from the cabinet,” Dad tells me. “That’s the last thing on your list.”

  I open the cabinet where Mom keeps all the decorating stuff—food coloring and cookie cutters and birthday sprinkles. “What color?”

  “Personally, I’d go with red, for the traditional look.”

  I’m about to ask him what that means when I turn around and see him twisting the now-thickened mixture into long, thin cords.

  “Candy canes?”

  “The final instruction is ‘form into a J-shape,’ so that would be my guess.”

  Mr. Pierini thinks he’s so funny. Be sure to get pictorial evidence before the experiment is consumed. Ha.

  As the candy canes bake, I realize that this is the first time Dad and I have been together, just us, in a really long time. Even before this last move, he wasn’t home much, and when he was, he spent most of his time in his office upstairs. Being alone with him feels good but awkward, like getting on a bike for the first time. It shouldn’t feel like that; it should feel normal. It used to be normal.

  “Hey,” I say, “do you remember that time you said we were going to the dentist, then took me to the water park?”

  A grin spreads across his face. “Sure.”

  “What about—” I pause, pulling a memory from somewhere dark and dusty. “I was eleven. We were in the Agnes Street house. And there was that monster snowstorm.”

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “Everything shut down. Even my office.”

  “The schools, too. So you drove me and Sophia to find a place to sled, but we couldn’t spot a decent hill, so you stopped the car in an empty field. And you took this long rope out of the trunk and tied our sled to the car bumper.”

  He laughs. “I forgot about that. Probably wasn’t very safe—I couldn’t have been going more than ten miles an hour, but still.”

  “It felt like we were flying,” I say.

  The oven timer dings. He reaches in to take the tray of candy canes out. “If I remember correctly, I made you promise to never, ever tell your mother.”

  “I never did.”

  “Obviously not, she would have murdered me—Sophia was what, four? Five?”

  Something like that. She asked to go again and again until it was almost dark out.

  “She was too young.” I pause. “It’s not fair.”

  “What’s not fair?”

  “She doesn’t remember the way you used to be.” He freezes, the tray still in his hand. We stare each other down, both of us hurt, neither of us knowing what to say next. Dad takes a breath in, but then there’s a click as the front door unlocks, and we both look away. He sets the tray down on the breakfast bar. Sophia bounds into the kitchen, her eyes going wide when she sees the candy canes.

  “Ooh,” she says, dropping the shopping bag she’s carrying in her rush to get to the candy.

  “Sophia! There are ornaments in there,” Mom says. She scoops up the bag, and Dad scoops up Sophia before she can get to the candy canes.

  “Hey, let them cool first, you’ll burn yourself.”

  “They look kind of weird,” she says as Dad sets her down.

  “That’s because they’re homemade,” I snap. “And who said you could have any?”

  Sophia whirls around to look at Dad, who raises an eyebrow at me. “You can have some.”

  “Fine, but I have to take pictures first,” I say.

  “Why?” Sophia asks, clearly picking out which candy cane to eat first.

  “Because otherwise I’ll fail chemistry.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  I snap a couple of pictures on my phone before Dad places all the candy canes in a basket. Sophia immediately grabs the fattest one. “Can I eat it in the living room? By the tree?”
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br />   Mom, putting away groceries, hesitates. Food outside the kitchen is her third-greatest fear, after bees and members of her family being harmed. But she looks over at the three of us standing together and closes the fridge door. “Yes,” she says. “Let’s all do that.”

  So we sit in the living room all together, something we’ve never done in this house. Dad pulls out the box of half-broken ornaments Mom set aside when she was decorating the tree and we all listen to Sophia sing a song she’s learned to list all the elements in the atomic table. In order.

  “There’s hydrogen and helium and lithium, beryllium. Boron, nitrogen, and—”

  “Slow down, Soph,” Dad says. “You forgot oxygen.”

  The doorbell rings, and Mom leans over to me. “Can you get that? It’s Sophia’s gift from . . .” And then she mouths the word “Santa.”

  Sophia is ten. Sophia can describe exactly how tectonic plates work. But Sophia still pretends she believes in Santa, and my mom still pretends to believe her.

  I roll my eyes and walk to the door. I’m in pajama pants and have the last bit of a candy cane sticking out of my mouth, but I figure a FedEx delivery guy doesn’t care what I look like.

  Except when I open the door, it’s Lucy.

  “Hi,” she says. I realize this is the first time I’ve seen her out of uniform—she’s in jeans, winter boots, and a green coat that’s a little too long in the sleeves.

  “Hi,” I say back, wishing the first time she’d seen me out of uniform didn’t involve pajama pants and a hoodie I’ve had since middle school. From the living room, I can hear Sophia trying her song again, and my mom and dad laughing. Lucy hears it, too.

  “Are you guys—is this a bad time?” she asks.

  “It’s fine, we were just hanging out by the tree.”

  “I should have texted,” she continues, like she hasn’t heard me at all. “I realized I wasn’t going to see you until after Christmas, so—” And then I notice a package, wrapped with snowman paper and tied with red yarn, under her arm.

  “Michael?” My mom pushes open the door from the living room. “Do I need to sign for—” She stops when she sees Lucy. “Hello.”

  “Mom, this is Lucy.” Lucy waves awkwardly with the hand not clutching the package. “From school.”

  “Oh,” Mom says, suddenly very interested. “Of course, Lucy! It’s nice to meet you, we’ve heard so much about you.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you, too,” Lucy says, shooting me a curious look.

  Mom turns to me. “Michael, aren’t you going to invite her inside?”

  She says it like it’s a question, but it’s definitely not. “I was about to.”

  “That’s okay,” Lucy says. “I was dropping something off.”

  Mom is undeterred. “Just for a minute,” she says, steering Lucy out of the doorway and toward the living room. “Until you warm up.”

  Lucy looks back over her shoulder at me, panicked, but this is now out of my control, so I follow behind them into the living room. Sophia is standing on one of the kitchen stools, trying to find a place for a newly repaired ornament. Dad’s on the couch with the basket of misfit ornaments, trying to fix the wing on a particularly accident-prone angel.

  As soon as we step into the living room, Lucy gets the strangest look on her face. At first I think it’s embarrassment, because I’m embarrassed by my pushy mom and my gross clothes, so it must be way worse for her. But as she glances around the room, at the tree that’s almost too tall for the ceiling, and its lights, and the small mountain of presents piled up underneath, I realize she’s not embarrassed. She looks sad.

  She puts on a smile fast, though, as Mom introduces her to Sophia and Dad, and she shakes his hand. “It’s a beautiful tree,” she tells Mom.

  “It’s a noble fir,” Sophia says. “Abies procera. It used to be called Abies nobilis, but it turned out another tree already had that name, so they had to change it.”

  “I did not know that,” Lucy says.

  “So,” Sophia says, latching her ornament on to a branch way up top, “are you Michael’s girlfriend? He said you’re not, but I think you are.”

  Lucy’s mouth drops open and I brainstorm the best ways to kill my sister in her sleep. Mom rushes toward the tree before Sophia can say anything worse, though I can’t imagine what would be worse. “Don’t hang it there, sweetheart,” she says, throwing a sorry look back at me. “It’s way too heavy for the branch.”

  “We’re about to eat lunch,” Dad says to Lucy. “Would you like to stay?”

  “Thank you, that’s so nice, but I should probably be heading back home to get lunch ready myself,” Lucy says, and it sounds like something my mom would say, not something a sixteen-year-old would. “It was really nice to meet you all. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas!” Mom calls out after us as I lead Lucy back toward the front door.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper to her as we walk. “I am so, so sorry—”

  “Don’t be,” she says. “You have a really nice family.”

  At the front door, I peek outside the window. It’s overcast and so windy the trees are bending a little under the weight. “Are you going home?” I ask Lucy. “I could probably drive you.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not far, and my coat’s warm.”

  Her house is at least a mile away. “Let me take you home.”

  Inside the house, Sophia is trying her elements song again.

  “No, you should stay with your family,” Lucy says. “But before I go—” She hands me the present. “Here, open it.”

  It’s been wrapped and tied so carefully and cleanly that it feels wrong to rip it open, so I take my time as Lucy buttons her coat all the way to the top. I can tell it’s a book, but it’s not until the wrapping paper is in a pile at my feet that I flip it cover-side up to read the title.

  It’s a Bible. I am holding a Bible.

  “Lucy,” I say as calmly as I can. “What the fuck.”

  “Oh, chill out.” She digs a pair of mittens out of her coat pockets. “I’m not trying to convert you.”

  Either all the sugar from the candy canes has gone directly to my brain, or Lucy’s given me the worst present ever. I don’t believe in God. I don’t want to believe in God. I spend five days a week surrounded by God. “Why?” I ask. “Why?”

  “Look,” she says. “You believe what you believe, and that’s great. I don’t think you should stop believing what you do. But you go to a Catholic school and exist in a world shaped by this book. You should know what it says.”

  “I do know what it says. It says gay people are sinners and women are chattel and people like me should be burned at the stake.”

  “That’s not all it says! For better and worse, it says a lot more than that.” She gestures at it. “It’s a pretty thick book.”

  I’m still not convinced, and I think Lucy can tell, because she sighs. “Think of it this way. The better you know the Bible, the better you’ll be able to argue against the parts of it you don’t like. ‘Know thine enemy,’ right?”

  “Let me guess. That’s from the Bible.”

  “That’s from The Art of War.” Stepping very close to me, she opens the Bible to a random page. “And I forgot to say—it’s not a regular Bible. I marked it up for you.”

  I flip through, and sure enough, on nearly every page are annotations in red pen, carefully written out in Lucy’s perfect, loopy handwriting. And I understand, then. I’m not holding a Bible. Not really. I’m holding a little part of Lucy, something she wants me to see.

  “It’s a great present,” I tell her, and she smiles. “I wish I had something to give you.”

  “I’ll give you a grace period,” she says. “Until the party.”

  She flips her coat hood up, covering her red-ribboned ponytail, and turns the doorknob. “Happy holidays.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I say, and watch her walk out into the wind.

  17

  IT TAKES SOME whe
edling, but I convince my parents to let me take one of the cars to the HA party tonight. Dad’s rummaging around in a file cabinet upstairs for proof I’m on the insurance for Mom’s car, and Mom is helping Sophia explore the research database she got for Christmas when my phone vibrates. Avi’s sent a group text to everyone.

  Avi: so we didn’t talk about this before but people are going to have to provide alcohol if they want it tonight bc i checked my cabinets and there’s not a lot

  Eden: totally OK, I can bring some

  Lucy: Should we say a bottle from each of us? That seems fair, right?

  My heart stops for second. I hadn’t even considered Lucy might be drinking. It seemed like one of those things she wouldn’t do, though I know Catholic Jesus can’t have much problem with alcohol, since his blood’s made out of it. But I also know drinking can be dangerous, and not just because you could drive drunk or throw up or eat an entire Carvel ice-cream cake and then throw up. Alcohol makes you impulsive and honest, and I’m scared of what impulsive and honest Lucy is like, but excited, too.

  She might say she secretly hates me.

  She might kiss me.

  I need a drink.

  My parents are both upstairs, so now is my best chance for getting the alcohol. Creeping over to the cabinet next to the dishwasher, I forage through the dozen or so bottles of liquor as quietly as possible.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, but I ignore it. I also ignore the wine at the front of the cabinet, because my mom will notice it’s gone, and I also hate the way it tastes. Ditto with Dad’s scotch. I settle on the dusty bottle of vodka way in the back. Neither of my parents like vodka, so it must have been some gift my mom felt too guilty to throw away.

  I stow the bottle behind the potted plant on the back porch, where I can pick it up before I leave tonight. My phone buzzes again. There are a couple texts from Eden and Max agreeing to both bring alcohol, then a few from Avi.

  Avi: cool sounds good

  Avi: any alcohol is fine but NO WEED bc my mom has a supernatural sense of smell

  Avi: MICHAEL

  Tell someone once that reading Latin might be more fun if you were high, and they act like you’re running your own personal growhouse.