Mrs. I.’s door was closed when we got there. I started to knock, but Stevie curled her fingers around my wrist just as I heard raised voices behind the door.
At first I couldn’t make out the exact words. But I could tell that the owner of the male voice was NOT in a good mood. And judging by her muffled syllables, neither was Mrs. Isaacsen.
As Stevie and I stood there, our ears practically pressed to the door, droplets of sentences bled through.
“It is NOT a prayer meeting—”
“—airing your religious convictions—”
“I meet them where they are!”
“Then meet them in church—”
Stevie and I would have stood there until somebody threw a punch if Michelle hadn’t come up behind us and said, “They told me to tell you to move on.”
I knew I had questions plastered all over my face, but Michelle said, “I don’t know anything.”
It was hard to tell whether she did or not, but I knew we wouldn’t be getting anything out of her.
The things I’d overheard nagged at me all day like a low-grade fever that refused to break. Even processing it with Stevie until we both ran out of things to say—which was a LOT of processing—and running it by the BFFs during lunch didn’t ease my mind. We had an extra scene-changing rehearsal that day after school; and by the time I got there, my thoughts were so tangled up I could barely remember what play we were doing.
Who had been in there with Mrs. Isaacsen, chewing her out?
The discussion was obviously about something Christian she was doing. Was there suddenly some kind of vendetta against churchgoers?
It had to be somebody with power over her, or she would have told whoever it was to get over himself. Mrs. I. didn’t put up with people throwing themselves around that way.
But what if it WAS someone powerful? What if she was actually in some kind of trouble? What if—?
That line of thinking put my whole brain in a square knot. And that’s the state I was in when Eve and I practiced a scene change at the end of act one. As we carried a flat onto the stage, she dropped her end. On my foot.
“Dang!” I hissed at her hoarsely. “Could you pay attention?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Just pick it up—pick it up—PICK IT UP!”
Although my voice was all but disappearing, Benjamin barked at us to chill out and get the scene changed. I sighed in Eve’s face and dragged the flat into place by myself.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” I whispered to her later when I found her cowering near the prop table.
“Oh, it’s okay—”
“No it’s not. I was upset about something else, and I took it out on you. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It didn’t bother me,” she said.
“SHHHHHHH!”
I wasn’t sure whether Benjamin was spewing sweat or saliva at us. I pulled Eve through the door and out into the stairwell.
“It did bother you,” I said. “Sometimes I just mess up—I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” The little freshman face broke into a rosy smile. “I think you’re cool anyway.”
What that kid saw in me I had no idea. I talked to Stevie about it as we walked to her car after rehearsal ended, our beach bags in hand.
The night before, Stevie, Celeste, and I had decided we should go to the beach after my play rehearsal ended and catch some sun while we did our homework. It had been Stevie’s idea, naturally. She said it might be healing for my throat. Besides, she could never get tan enough, even when Celeste told her she was going to look like a leather briefcase before she was 30.
“It’s like Eve thinks I’m the Virgin Mary or something,” I said. “Then when I yelled at her, she just, like, crumbled.”
“Well, you are the Virgin Laura.” Stevie’s grin was sly.
“You know what I mean! And after that thing in history—and whatever’s going on with Mrs. I.—I just feel like I’m not handling any of it right. I feel—stupid!”
Stevie slung her bag onto her other shoulder and put her arm around mine. “Bless your heart,” she said. “I don’t think you’re stupid—and neither does God.”
“Can you people never give it a rest?”
We both turned to see Gigi and Fielding leaning against a white Mustang convertible, top down.
There wasn’t a sign of that “may the best girl win” attitude in Gigi’s eyes today. Evidently she saved that for times when her potential voters were present to witness it.
“What needs a rest?” Stevie said.
“The whole God thing,” Gigi said.
I thought I saw her give Fielding a minute nudge.
“I hardly know you,” Fielding said. “But I can already see how holier-than-thou y’all are.”
Her y’all sounded unnatural. It’s probably part of the Gigi clone program, I thought.
Stevie cocked her head at Fielding, matching her tress for tress. “We don’t try to be holier than anybody,” she said. “If that’s the way you see it, maybe you’ve been spending too much time with someone who ISN’T trying to be holy.” She turned to me. “You ready, Duffy?”
After that I couldn’t get myself cheered up, not even sitting on the cotton-white sand at St. Andrew’s Bay, one of my favorite spots on the planet. Not even with the sun soaking through my SPF 40 like a soothing hand or with the water lapping up against the jetties and the dunes with their heads of pampas grass hair that waved hypnotically in the breeze. Not even with Celeste handing out sandwiches that I knew would be to-die-for delicious—if I had any appetite.
“I’m serious now,” I said. “What do you guys think is going on with Mrs. I.? She had her office door closed all day.”
“We really need to talk to her,” Stevie said. “I want to know what my rights are—you know, whether I can even mention God in the classroom.”
“You gonna talk about God in your campaign?” Celeste said. She leaned back and licked some mustard off her forearm.
“Well—I mean, God is what I’m all about.”
“Then we definitely need to find out what the rules are,” I said. “I don’t want somebody like Mr. Beecher getting in your face again.”
“I’ll call Trent tonight,” she said. “He’ll get on the Internet.”
Celeste snickered. “And he’ll tell us more than we really want to know.”
I felt a little better, but there was something nagging at me, and I couldn’t quite hear what it was.
My eyes were definitely opened the next morning, though. When I got out of my car, I saw about 20 people marching around on the school lawn where everybody gathered on warm mornings before the bell rang. More people than usual were out there, and I could feel that something’s-gonna- happen energy before I even got close enough to read the protest signs they were flashing around.
I spotted Trent and Joy Beth at the edge of the crowd and hurried toward them. Whatever was happening, it looked pretty organized. The picketers were walking slowly, unemotionally, and somebody else was calmly passing out sheets of paper to the students who showed up to gape.
One of the sign-carrying kids was Duck. His face was a bilious red, and his head was lowered, as if he were afraid someone might recognize him. I almost hadn’t.
He looks embarrassed, I thought. Maybe he just always looks embarrassed.
“Hey,” I croaked when I got to Trent and Joy Beth. “What’s this about?”
Trent pointed to the sign Duck was holding.
PROTECT SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
“What?” I whispered to Joy Beth.
She just grunted and nodded to another sign.
PROTECT YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS! PROTEST PREACHING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS!
Gigi Palmer turned her head and smiled that plastic smile at me as she carried it past me.