Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

  Mom grabs my hand. “You shouldn’t have done any of it,” she says. “But I understand why you did.”

  “Marianne!” Dad sounds appalled. “There’s no excuse for this. He got himself suspended, he lied to us, all because he met a pretty girl and didn’t like following his school’s rules.”

  “I didn’t lie!” I protest, because I didn’t. Much.

  “You should have told us the second that girl asked you to join a—a cult, basically!”

  “Don’t be dramatic,” Mom says.

  I decide to ignore Dad calling Lucy that girl, when he obviously knows her name. “It wasn’t about rules,” I say. “Not all of it. They taught us things that aren’t true, they made people feel bad for being different, they were hypocrites. Just because they have rules doesn’t mean they’re right.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Are you saying all rules are good rules?”

  “Of course not.” He runs his hand down his face. “But if you ignore whatever rules don’t suit you, Michael, you’re going to end up right where you are now, again and again.”

  “The living room?”

  Mom digs her fingernails into my palm. Dad clenches his jaw.

  “There will always be people you have to listen to,” Dad says. “There will always be rules you think are wrong or unfair, and you know what? Too bad. You’ll have to learn to make better choices.”

  “Oh, because you’ve made great choices,” I grind out, feeling the molten lava again, knowing it’s going to destroy everything in its path. “Dragging your family across the country, across like fifteen countries, wherever you want to go! Excellent choice.” I wrench my hand from Mom’s grip, because she’s digging her fingernails in harder. “And then not even staying there with them. Getting on a plane and expecting them to deal with new houses and new schools and new everything—just because you want what you want!”

  Dad pushes himself up from his chair. “You think that’s what I want? I get on that plane, I sleep in a hotel bed instead of my bed, I eat dinner alone or with clients instead of my family, because those are the rules of my job. That is what I have been asked to do, by my boss, and by his boss, so I do it.”

  “You do all these things that don’t make you happy,” I say, “just because someone else told you to?”

  “It’s my job,” he repeats.

  “Well,” I say, and look him square in the eyes. “I think that’s pathetic.”

  His face goes slack, then hard and brittle. He steps toward me and I scramble to my feet, then Mom is between us lightning fast. She reaches out her hand toward Dad like a stop sign. He whips around and out of the living room, stomping up the stairs. I sink down on the couch, my heart fluttering in my chest, but Mom stays standing up.

  “God, the two of you,” she sighs, her voice shaky. “Honestly.”

  “I hate it when you say that. There’s no two of us.”

  She sits down next to me. “Extremes, that’s all I mean. All rules are good. No rules are good.” Mom shakes her head. “Has it ever occurred to either of you there’s a middle ground? On anything?”

  She looks out the window at the rain that’s started to come down hard and heavy.

  “You should follow the rules when you can,” she says. “Take a stand when you need to—” I open my mouth, because I did need to take a stand, and Mom holds up a finger. “But broken glass isn’t the only way to change things, honey.”

  There’s a thump upstairs. At first I think maybe Dad’s dropped something, but then there’s another. And another. It sounds like it’s coming all the way from the top floor of the house. From my room.

  “Stay here,” Mom says, but I’m already off the couch. I run up the stairs, past Sophia’s room, then up the shorter, twisty stairs that lead to an attic that’s not an attic. My door is wedged open by a big cardboard box, the kind that stores the printer paper in Dad’s home office. It’s not mine, so I can’t figure out what it’s doing in my doorway, until I see what’s inside. What’s inside is mine—my computer and its power cord, both gaming consoles, and half of my video games.

  I step over the box and into my room to see Dad at my bookcase, shoveling the other half of my books in another box. What the hell? It’s way too early to be packing for Belgium.

  “What are you doing?” I say, panic rising. “Why’s everything in boxes, put it back.”

  “No.” He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t turn around.

  “No?” He can’t actually mean that, he can’t actually be—

  “Since you don’t seem to appreciate all the things my job gives to this family, gives to you”—he plunks the old action figures from my desk into the box one by one—“I will hold on to those things, for now.”

  It’s everything I own, practically, except for clothes and shoes. He’s going to take away everything I own?

  “You can’t do that!” I shout, and I’m not going to cry again, not for the second time today. But, everything? “It’s my stuff!”

  “That I bought, using money I earned from being pathetic, apparently.”

  He ignores me, unplugging my phone charger. He sets the box down at his feet and strides over to me, hand outstretched.

  “What?” I say, even though I know.

  “Your phone.” Two people have demanded my phone today, and I ache, suddenly, thinking of Lucy. He can’t have this, it’s my lifeline to the rest of the world. If one of my friends—if Lucy—decides they’re willing to forgive me, this is the only way they can tell me.

  “Michael.” I shake my head, backing up so my back pocket, and by extension my phone, is protected. “You can hand it over now, or I can call the phone company and have them cancel service, and you won’t ever get it back. Your choice.”

  That’s not a choice. That’s an ultimatum. I give him the phone, feeling every bit of my pride slip away as it leaves my hand.

  “There are consequences to the things we do.” He hoists one of the boxes on his hip and grips the doorknob, preparing to shut the door in my face. “And there are consequences to the things we say.”

  27

  LUCY’S SITTING ON her porch when I arrive, but she’s changed out of her uniform. She’s got gardening gloves on, cleaning up what looks like a bunch of exploded houseplants. There’s dirt everywhere.

  “Go away,” she says as I approach, not even bothering to look up.

  I expected that. I planned this whole conversation out in my head last night. There wasn’t much else I could do, alone in a stripped-down room, kept up late by the monster storm that raged all through the night, but think about what I was going to say to Lucy when I found a way to see her. Sneaking out was unexpectedly easy. I watched Dad’s car peel out of the driveway this morning, then bided my time all day until I heard Mom grab her keys and leave to pick up Sophia from school. I hedged a bet that Lucy would go right home after school. She wasn’t likely to be going to an HA meeting now.

  I hold up my hands in a preemptive surrender. “I just came here to—”

  “I don’t want to talk,” she says, shoving a broken flowerpot into a large plastic trash bag. “Did you get expelled?”

  “No. I go back on Wednesday.”

  “Congratulations,” she says. “Please go home now.”

  I thought she’d at least hear me out, at least let me apologize. That’s how the conversation went in my head. New tactic. Change topics.

  “What happened?” I ask, looking at the broken pottery, dirt, and wet flowers strewn across the porch.

  “I had some hanging planters. The wind knocked them down last night.” She turns away, like we’re done.

  “You have every right to be mad at me,” I say.

  “Yeah, I do, and I am.”

  “And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. But you knew this could happen, we talked about it.”

  “No.” She throws down the trash bag. “I knew we could get caught. I was prepared for that. But the way it happened—what were you thinkin
g?”

  “I wasn’t,” I say. “I was just so angry, about the move and my dad, and everything, so—”

  “Right. Thanks for telling me, by the way.”

  Even trying to apologize for one thing brings up another shitty choice I made. I am a layer cake of failure.

  “Why do you think I was at school?” I ask. “I was coming to tell you, but I got distracted and did something stupid and I’m sorry, Lucy—I’m telling you I’m sorry!”

  She shrugs. Picks up another clump of dirt. “So you’re sorry. Okay. Good-bye now.”

  Lucy must know I won’t give up that easily. She knows me. I sit down next to her, and she doesn’t tell me to leave this time, so I don’t. I start scooping up handfuls of dirt and placing them in the trash bag. I’m about to put a particularly heavy handful of dirt in when Lucy stops me.

  “Don’t!” she says, and swiftly plucks a soggy flower from the dirt in my hands. She blows the dirt off it, and then I notice the paper towel on her left side, covered in damp, half-broken purple flowers.

  “They’re hellebore blossoms,” she says, fingering the flower with gloved hands. “My mom’s favorite. I planted them last spring.”

  There’s another hint of purple in my handful of dirt, and I carefully extricate the flower. Lucy must know these flowers are completely beyond repair, but I hand it over to her anyway, and she cleans it off.

  “I did get in trouble, you know,” I say. She looks doubtful. “My dad took my phone.”

  “You poor baby,” she deadpans. “Someone should alert The Hague.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Then you clearly haven’t done this week’s history homework.”

  Amazing. Even when she’s ready to excommunicate me from her life, Lucy still finds a way to guilt me about school.

  “He wanted to blame it on you.” I don’t know why I’m telling her this. I shouldn’t. “When we were in Father Peter’s office, even though I already said it was me, my dad wouldn’t listen. He tried to pin it on you.”

  This doesn’t faze her at all. “What am I supposed to say? Thanks for not throwing me under the bus?”

  I shake my head. “Just my shitty luck this happens the one day my dad’s actually on this continent. So here he comes, barging in and almost screwing everything up, trying to get you in trouble, because—I don’t know, he’s embarrassed of me, or—”

  Lucy whirls around suddenly and flings a handful of slimy wet dirt at my chest.

  “What the hell, Lucy?” I say, trying to wipe it off my hoodie.

  “You are so fucking clueless sometimes,” Lucy explodes, hurling another clump of dirt at me. I’ve never, ever heard her swear. “He was trying to protect you, Michael. He was trying to keep you from ruining your stupid life, because he loves you. He loves you. He stuck by your side, probably lied for you, because you’re his kid and that means something to him. Why don’t you get it? Why don’t you get how lucky you are?”

  There’s dirt in my mouth, and I spit it out. Her fists are clenched, and so are mine.

  “You don’t have a monopoly on suffering, okay?” I say, my voice rising. “Other people get to be mad about their lives. Your broken leg doesn’t make my sprained ankle hurt any less.”

  “Sprained ankle,” she says. “Your life is barely a toothache. And you don’t even know.”

  I came over to apologize. I tried to help her clean up the mess, I tried to make her feel better, and she yelled at me and called me ungrateful, just like Dad. I am so sick of being yelled at, so sick of people picking at my flaws. I can do that, too.

  “You know what I think?” I tell her. “I think there’s a part of you that needs to be the one suffering the most.”

  “What?” she says, suddenly quieter.

  “See, because I have been my doing my theology homework, and there’s this section about ‘redemptive suffering’ and basically how pain on earth brings you closer to God.”

  “I know what redemptive suffering is.”

  “Which, aside from being massively fucked up and weird, is also why all those saints you like so much were okay with being tortured to death. They thought it made them stronger and holier, and I think you feel like your suffering makes you stronger and holier too, but it doesn’t.”

  Lucy’s big brown eyes have narrowed into slits, but she’s not telling me to stop, not with words and not with a dirt snowball to the face, so I keep going.

  “You let yourself get hurt. You let it happen and you think it’ll bring you closer to being, I don’t even know. Saintly? Perfect? You get hurt and you keep getting hurt because you put your trust in people who don’t deserve it.”

  “Yeah, like who?” Lucy bursts out. “Like who, Michael?”

  “Like God,” I say, and press on even though she throws her hands up in the air. “No, I’m serious, because if God does exist, if He listens to your prayers and still sticks you in this shitty situation, in a church that doesn’t even want you, then He doesn’t deserve your faith. You put all this faith in a God who clearly doesn’t listen to you, and a mom who took off without you and who isn’t coming back, Lucy, she isn’t coming back, and she doesn’t deserve your faith, either!”

  The way Lucy looks at me then, I think she might stab me with one of the broken planter shards, or maybe suffocate me with the trash bag full of dirt. But she doesn’t. Without a word, she gets up, goes inside her house, and locks the front door with a sharp, definitive click. I sit on her porch, surrounded by broken pottery and twisted purple flowers.

  Lucy also trusted me, and I didn’t deserve that trust either.

  Some people drink when they get nervous. Some people pace. My mom cleans. When Great-Aunt Carol got in a car accident, Mom washed every single dish, bowl, and piece of cutlery we owned by hand, did eight loads of laundry in three days, and reorganized the garage. What happened yesterday isn’t nearly as bad as a car accident, but from the smell of lemon Pledge wafting through the open window by the back door, it’s bad enough.

  I push open the door and the kitchen floor is sparkling, but there’s no sign of Mom. Her usual routine is living room, then kitchen, then laundry, so I hedge my bets on her being in the basement. If I can make it up the stairs, she’ll never know I was gone.

  I take the stairs two at a time, replaying the scene with Lucy in my mind. Why did I say that? I don’t know that her mom isn’t coming back, and even if I did, saying it wouldn’t do anything but hurt her. It was useless, and selfish, and now Lucy will never forgive me. She’ll never split sweet potato fries with me again, or let me copy her theology homework, or kiss me, or run her hands through my hair, or—

  “And where exactly have you been?”

  But it’s not Mom standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at me. It’s Dad.

  This doesn’t make any sense. I saw his car leave this morning; he should be on a plane right now, not at home, wearing jeans and a sweater and glaring at me.

  “Well?” he says, and I’m still too surprised to say anything back. “Where were you?”

  “I went for a walk.”

  Dad exhales heavily. “You went for a walk. Without telling anyone. While you were grounded.”

  None of those sentences are questions, but Dad stares at me like he’s expecting an answer.

  “Yes?” I say.

  “Did you think your mother wouldn’t know?” he asks. “Did you think she wouldn’t notice you were gone?”

  “Uh—” I try to think of something else to say besides the truth, which is that it wouldn’t have mattered if Mom caught me. She’d probably have attempted some half-hearted talking-to, but discipline isn’t her strong suit. Her lectures end with hugs. And often snacks.

  “Come on.” Dad gestures for me to continue up the stairs. “Let’s have a talk.”

  We go into my room, and it doesn’t look the way I left it. The bed’s still unmade, but the bookshelves aren’t bare anymore. I don’t see my gaming consoles or my computer, but oth
erwise, the room looks like it did yesterday morning, messy and mine. I look at Dad, not sure whether to thank him—was it even his idea? Then I notice my astronaut figurine, the one Dad used to hide around the house, positioned so it looks like he’s reading through a book on my desk. I pick it up.

  “I can’t believe you still have that,” Dad says.

  I set the astronaut back down. “Of course I still have it.”

  Dad motions for me to sit on the bed. He takes my desk chair.

  “Where did you go?” he says.

  Where did I go? Where did he go, besides Brussels and London and a thousand other places, probably, where did he go, besides everywhere but his own home?

  Oh. On my walk.

  “I went to talk to Lucy.” I might be imagining it, but his face softens.

  “How did that go?”

  “Badly,” I admit, twisting my comforter in my hands.

  “I bet.”

  “She hates me,” I say, and my eyes are stinging. “I just want her not to hate me.”

  Dad opens his mouth, then closes it. “When you hurt people,” he says, “even if you didn’t mean to, you don’t get to choose where they go from there. When you hurt someone, it stops being about you, or what you want.”

  I don’t know if this is a pep talk, but if it is, it’s a terrible one. Just another one of Dad’s lovely platitudes that somehow never seem to apply to—

  “I hurt you,” he says. My head snaps up. “I know I did.”

  Dad is not an apologizer. Mom said once it was because he always had to be so sure, so confident at work, that he couldn’t turn it off at home. This is the closest I’ve heard him come since he accidentally closed the car door on Sophia’s finger.

  “Is that why—” I gesture around at my wonderfully cluttered room. He nods.

  “I was angry,” he admits. “What you said, it really dug at me, and on top of everything else yesterday, I overreacted. But it’s more than that. Moving here hurt you. You rallied, and made friends—questionable friends—but it still hurt you. And I hurt you by not acknowledging it. By not making more of an effort to be home. By not listening to you. And I’m sorry.”