Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

  That part still doesn’t click for me. And I still don’t think any of it’s true. But if Lucy, the smartest, most logical person I know, can feel something real and powerful when she talks to God, then the whole thing is a lot more complicated than I thought.

  And that’s how we’re sitting, holding hands and thinking about God, when Dad walks in my room without knocking.

  Lucy jumps up. “Hi, Mr. Ausman,” she says, her hand flying up to check the buttons on her shirt.

  “Hello, Lucy.” Dad looks at me the way he used to when I’d sneak Halloween candy before dinner. “What have you two been up to?”

  “Watching TV,” I say at the same time Lucy says, “Homework.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dad says. “Michael, your mom’s almost got food on the table, so if you need to drive Lucy home—”

  “Oh no, I’m walking,” Lucy says, and I help her gather up her things.

  “Normally, we’d love for you to stay,” Dad says to her. “But we wanted to have a family dinner tonight.”

  This is Dad’s first dinner at home in a while. A couple months ago, Mom suggested video conferencing him in for meals. He laughed, and then she did too, but I could tell by the way her lips tightened that it hadn’t been a joke.

  “I actually should have left fifteen minutes ago,” Lucy says, pulling on her green coat. “Chamber orchestra concert. I mean, we’re awful, but I’m first chair for viola, so.”

  I wanted to go, but between the special family dinner and Lucy’s insistence that I didn’t have to watch the orchestra struggle through Bach’s Fugue in G minor, I’m staying home.

  “Break a leg,” Dad says as Lucy and I pass by him and down the stairs.

  I walk Lucy to the door, kiss her good-bye, and watch as she walks away, her book bag slung over one shoulder and her viola case over the other.

  I close the door and turn around to find Dad standing there, his arms folded, smiling a little. He looks at me but doesn’t say anything.

  “What?” I say. Am I in trouble for having Lucy upstairs with the door closed? No one ever said I couldn’t.

  “Do I need to be worried about anything?” Dad asks.

  “Like what?”

  “Like grandchildren before I’m fifty.”

  It takes me a second to figure it out. And when I do, I want to unzip my skin and climb out of it.

  “No,” I say. He raises an eyebrow. “She’s Catholic.” He opens his mouth, but I cut him off. “Very Catholic.”

  “Either way. I’m guessing your school doesn’t pass out birth control like candy.”

  Oh, now he cares about the quality of my sex education. Don’t worry, Dad, Purity Paul covered all of this.

  “So,” he continues as I stare past him, through him, to the kitchen where there is food and no one is talking about sex. “If you ever need anything, to be safe—for both of you to be safe—I want you to come to me, okay?”

  I was wrong. Lucy was right. There is a God, and he hates me. There is a Hell, and I am currently in it.

  “Okay?” Dad repeats.

  “Okay,” I say, and then for no reason at all, add, “Thank you.”

  I can tell Dad wants to do something fatherly like ruffle my hair, but in an act of true mercy, he lets me walk past him into the kitchen.

  “Did Lucy leave?” Sophia asks me, clearing her books off the already-set kitchen table. “I wanted to talk to her about the Merovingian dynasty.”

  My sister has decided she likes Lucy, mostly because Sophia’s been on a huge medieval Europe kick lately and Lucy knows a lot about any time period when everyone had to be Catholic.

  “She had to go to a concert,” I tell Sophia.

  “Merovingian, that’s Charlemagne, right?” Dad asks, uncorking a bottle of wine.

  Sophia gives him a pitying look. “No, Daddy. That’s the Carolingian dynasty.”

  Mom brings out the food. It’s two main dishes instead of one—eggplant parmesan and beef stroganoff—which seems like a weird combo, but I love eggplant parmesan, so I’m not complaining.

  I’m almost done with my second helping when Dad, noticing a lull in the conversation, says, “What do you kids know about Belgium?”

  Sophia and I look at each other. I shrug.

  “You fly there all the time,” I say.

  “The capital is Brussels, the national bird is a kestrel, and it’s illegal not to vote,” Sophia adds.

  “Don’t forget the waffles!” Mom says, twisting her napkin in her hands. “And the French fries. But I guess they don’t call them French fries in . . .”

  Dad clears his throat. “Well. How would you both like to go there?” He glances from me to Sophia.

  And that’s when I know.

  This isn’t how they usually do it. They usually tell us we’re having a family meeting in the living room of whatever house we’re about to leave. They usually give us some kind of warning. But I should have guessed from the meal—eggplant parmesan for me, beef stroganoff for Sophia. Our favorite foods.

  “We’re going to Belgium? Like for vacation?” Sophia asks.

  Don’t say it, I plead, and this is the closest I’ve ever come to praying. Don’t say it.

  Mom and Dad share a glance, steel themselves for the avalanche of shit about to come their way, and Dad says, “Actually, Sophia, we’re going to live there.”

  All the blood is gone from my body. I didn’t feel it drain out and puddle at my feet, but that’s where it must be, because all I can do is sit lifelessly in a chair that traveled in four different moving vans and will now fly across an ocean along with me, Sophia, and all my parents’ other possessions.

  Sophia is frozen for a moment, too. An egg noodle falls off the fork, which never made it to her mouth. She puts the fork down. Looks at her plate. And then bursts into tears.

  Mom rushes to comfort her. “Honey, we’re not going for months. Not until summer’s over.”

  Mom looks over at Dad, panicked, because Sophia hasn’t cried before. She’s always excited—this is all she knows. “Young kids are so resilient,” Mom told my uncle once. As if that excuses anything. Mom’s eyes move to me, and maybe she’s expecting me to be a good big brother and help her, but I don’t have any blood, so I can’t.

  “Soph, you’ll like it there,” Dad says. “I’ve seen the neighborhood we’re going to live in, it’s beautiful, and we’ll be so close to Paris and all the places you know so much about. You can be our tour guide.”

  “And we’ll be together,” Mom adds. “In one place. We’ll all be together.”

  Sophia takes a couple hiccupping breaths. “But I’ll have to learn Dutch,” she sobs. “And it has a very complicated system of compound nouns and I don’t want to!”

  She jerks her arm away from Mom and runs up the stairs to her room. Mom doesn’t follow her. She just sits. Maybe all her blood is gone, too.

  “You don’t have to learn Dutch,” Dad assures me after a moment of silence. “Some people speak English. And most people in Brussels speak French. For God’s sake, Sophia already speaks French.”

  “Fuck. You,” I say.

  Mom’s jaw drops. “Michael!”

  “I understand you’re upset,” Dad says.

  “Upset? I’m—” Angry, surprised, and scared, all rolled into one. The Belgians might have a word for that, but I don’t.

  “And I understand why,” he continues, rolling right over me. “But we are going to talk about this calmly and rationally like adults, okay?”

  He couldn’t drag an adult over an ocean. He doesn’t want me to act like an adult. He wants me to act like a doormat.

  I take a breath. Then two.

  “How,” I say, and my voice sounds raw and ragged. “How could you do this to us?”

  Dad sighs. Mom lays her hand on mine. “This was not only Dad’s decision; it was mine, too.”

  “But not mine or Sophia’s,” I point out.

  “It’s been hard for you, for all of us, to be apart so much,” Mom
says, her eyes wet. “I know it has. This is better, trust me.”

  I can’t believe it, she’s as much of a traitor as Dad is. Mom didn’t want to move here in the first place. She’s far from her family. She misses her friends and hasn’t made any new ones. Then again, maybe that’s why she doesn’t mind going. She isn’t losing anything she hasn’t already lost. But Sophia’s made friends, and I have Eden and Avi and Max and—

  Lucy.

  Dad is talking again, something about his job and the fantastic international school, which is secular, by the way, but his voice sounds underwater. Something cold and heavy is sitting on my chest and I can barely breathe. No blood, no breath. I’m practically not even here.

  There is no Lucy in Belgium. How was she not the first thing I thought of? She was here, in my house, on my bed, a half hour ago, and she already seems a million miles away. No. She’s not gone yet. I’m not gone yet. I just have to make my parents see reason.

  “What about the house?” I blurt out.

  “We’ve got some great leads,” Mom says. “I’ve seen pictures. One has this amazing kitchen—”

  “This house,” I clarify. “What about this house? We only moved in five months ago; how are you going to sell it in time?”

  Mom and Dad look at each other again. I hate that. I hate that they know so much more than me.

  “It’s a rental.” Mom looks down at the tablecloth. “We won’t renew the lease.”

  A rental?

  I pull my hand out from under Mom’s.

  “You knew.” When they look at each other again, I know I’m right. “You knew this wasn’t forever, you knew we were going to leave!”

  “We knew it was a possibility,” Mom insists. “We didn’t know for sure.”

  “Then you should have told me that!”

  Dad jabs a finger in my direction. “Don’t yell at her. If we’d told you, you would have blown off your new school, you wouldn’t even have tried.

  “You’re constantly complaining about St. Clare’s,” Dad says. “I didn’t think you’d be so upset about leaving.”

  Mom tries to grab my hand again, but I pull away. “Your senior year in Europe,” she says with fake sunshine. “It’ll be so much fun for you. An adventure.”

  “You’re already legal to drink there,” Dad adds, and Mom swivels her head around to stare at him.

  Fine. I tried, and they would not listen to reason.

  “I’m not going,” I tell them.

  There’s a half beat of silence, then Mom starts talking about this one house again, with its amazing kitchen, like I’d care about a kitchen. Dad overlaps her, describing the city of Brussels and how walkable it is, and the architecture, as if I’d care about architecture. Did they hear me at all? Does anything I say matter, or is it white noise they can wash over with stainless-steel appliances and Romanesque cathedrals?

  “I’m not going,” I repeat, louder this time.

  “Of course you’re going,” Dad says.

  I shake my head. “I’m staying here.”

  Mom and Dad are watching me, tense and ready, like I’m a dangerous virus under a microscope. They’re waiting for something. They’re waiting for me to crumble like a rockslide, wash away in a flood of tears like Sophia, erupt like a volcano. They’re waiting for a disaster.

  “When you get thrown in the deep end, you can drown or you can swim,” Dad says, and I have never, ever wanted to actually drown someone as much as I do him right now.

  “You threw me in the deep end!” I yell. “You’ve thrown me in the deep end four times and told me to swim and I did and I’m not leaving just because now you want to throw me in the Pacific Ocean!”

  Mom wipes her cheek with the back of her hand. Dad turns his face away.

  “I have a life here,” I say. “I made one. I have friends. I have a—”

  And I stop there, because I’m too close to crying, like Mom is, and I won’t.

  Dad turns to look at me again, the hard lines around his mouth and eyes saying that this is not how he wanted this to go. He wants to make me feel better, but he can’t back down.

  “Michael,” he says. “There will be other girls.”

  The disaster wheel spins and lands on “volcano.” I stand up and shove myself back from the table, knocking over my chair and the glass next to Dad, spreading dark red wine all over the white, ironed tablecloth. I’m out of the kitchen and to the front door before anyone can stop me. I slam the door so hard I think the house might collapse, and then, staring at the still, dark street in front of me, I wish someone would stop me. I don’t know what to do now.

  Lucy will know what to do. I’ll find Lucy and everything will be okay.

  At first, I’m looking behind me every few steps, waiting to see Mom’s slightly dented green Volvo pull up beside me, but it doesn’t. Neither does Dad’s shiny company car, but I didn’t expect it to. They’re probably happy I’m gone, thinking I’ll calm down, cool off. They’re happy to wait for the volcano to stop spewing molten lava and retreat into the ground, dormant.

  But I’m not calming down. I’m not feeling the magma reduce to a simmer inside my stomach. Instead, it’s getting bigger and hotter and ready to explode again. They didn’t even listen to me. Nothing Sophia or I could have said or done would have changed anything, and that’s really what’s making my hands twitch and eyes prick and blur as I round the corner to St. Clare’s. I don’t have any say in my own life. Not even where I live.

  I’ve never been at St. Clare’s after dark before. It makes the whole thing creepier, the way the pointed bell tower juts into the night sky, the saint statues lurking in dark hallways, and the silence. It’s so quiet, except for the whine of string instruments somewhere in the distance. There’s a sign by the admin offices:

  SPRING CHAMBER ORCHESTRA CONCERT

  7 PM, CHAPEL

  It’s seven thirty now. I don’t know how long these things last. Sophia’s recitals would go forever, at least an hour. I might be here for a while, which isn’t good, because I still feel like smashing things, and there are so many things to smash here. That statue of Saint Francis surrounded by birds and animals on the second floor, for instance. He looks so smug for a man who’s probably covered in bird shit.

  I’ll wait for Lucy by the chapel. There’s a bench outside and no statues to smash. I make my way over there, passing by the admin building and the dining hall and the back hallway leading to the HA room.

  I stop.

  Someone is going to hear me tonight. Maybe it won’t be Dad, but someone is going to listen to me, for once, because I’ll make them.

  I’m running down the hallway and I don’t have a plan, but I have molten lava and someone is going to hear me even if I have to melt the whole place to the ground like Herculaneum. My hood starts to slip off my head and I fix it. I need it; I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know I need it.

  I throw open the supply closet door and nearly trip over the boxes of records like Avi did— What are Avi and everyone going to say if— I don’t care, I don’t care—and I switch on the HA room’s flickering light—it flickers like it did on Valentine’s Day, when Lucy— Not now, I can’t think about that now.

  Scotch tape in my right pocket. Red spray paint in my left pocket. The posters, the ones I hid behind the bookshelf, in my arms. Heart pounding, head pounding, too.

  I fly up the stairs again, forget to turn the light off but what could it possibly matter and I’m twisting and skidding down past my chemistry classroom and does this hallway have a security camera? I can’t remember, but my hood’s up and my head’s down.

  I slide to a stop across from the main chapel entrance, where the big bulletin board is, protected by glass, the border decked out in blue and green, same as the stupid plaid on their stupid ties. The music in the chapel gets louder and louder, reaching a crescendo as I wrap my hand up in the sleeves of my shirt and my hoodie and punch through the glass. It goes down without a fight, clinking and shatterin
g as it falls onto the floor near my shoes. The music gets even louder, and I clear away the last bits of glass from the bulletin board and rip down what’s already there, photos from the March for Life and reminders about the PSAT and a flyer for tonight’s chamber orchestra concert. Once everything’s a torn, multicolored mess at my feet, I start taping up the posters in their place. If I’m leaving St. Clare’s, if nothing I do or say will convince my parents to let me stay, then I don’t have anything to lose. This is what St. Clare’s really is, this is what everyone should see.

  I shake the can of spray paint, hoping there’s something left in there. Above each poster, I write out the corresponding sin—LUST and GREED and ADULTERY—but it’s messy and hard to read. I’ve never used spray paint outside middle school art class, and the fumes burn my eyes and throat more than I expected. I stand on my toes to reach above the bulletin board itself, on the dark wood wall, and write:

  HYPOCRITES—WHO ELSE WILL YOU FIRE?

  I underline the word “hypocrites.” Twice.

  There’s applause from inside the chapel. I stare at the wall, marked over all with torn paper, tape, and red. It looks like I murdered it.

  It doesn’t look at all like I imagined, not that I had a plan, but I planned on it not looking like that. This was a bad idea. This was such a bad idea. What did I do?

  The applause is still going, and I can’t figure out why until I hear the scraping and shuffling of feet on wood. It’s over—it can’t be over, it’s too early—but there are people coming my way, closer to me, to the disaster I am and the disaster I created. I scoop up the gutted folders in my arms and run on weak legs back down the hallways and dump what’s left of the folders back into the big boxes at the top of the stairs. I don’t know if I got them all. I don’t know if it matters. My hands won’t stop shaking.

  I sink down next to the boxes. I could walk out. I could walk out the front door with all the other people and maybe no one would know. Maybe no one has even noticed the massacred bulletin board and I can take everything down after they leave. Maybe I can stay here, at the top of the stairs, until Mom and Dad go to Belgium and all my friends graduate. I can be the Hunchback of St. Clare’s.