Lay It on My Heart by Angela Pneuman Page A

me more than anything else in the world. “God told my father to marry my mother.”
    The girl blinks at me again, like I’m speaking in another language and she’s not curious enough for a translation. Then she keeps talking like I haven’t said anything at all. “This is my fourth school, though I did go to Clay’s Corner Elementary for third and fourth grade. When my name was Melinda. Now it’s Kelly-Lynn. But my old junior high started in sixth grade, not seventh, so this isn’t exactly my first rodeo.” Kelly-Lynn takes a tube of lip gloss from her small leather purse, uncaps it, and taps it onto her mouth. Her face gives nothing away. It’s possible to imagine that she has already thought of every single thing anyone could say, ever, and every single thing that could ever happen anywhere in the world, and all of it has already bored her.
    This is exactly the opposite of Phoebe, and I am Phoebe’s daughter, and right now I know that I have a face full of divorce. In the book with the missing father, the girl has to pass through an evil, dark specter that’s spreading itself over the earth and even throughout the universe. That’s the way the idea of divorce feels, like a specter creeping over my heart. Beside me, the girl watches cheerleading, her ponytail switching gracefully against her back. In each of her earlobes nests a tiny pearl. Not like a planet coated in evil, but like a clean little moon, still and serene unto itself.
    Â 
    In the ten-minute break before final period, I join a group of about forty East Winder kids outside the lunchroom for a prayer meeting. I’m standing at the back, next to a long, skinny window, and when I peer through it, there he is. Right outside, the Child of God. Cecil. He grinds a cigarette into the dirt with his awkward, booted foot. Three boys tower over him, dressed in jeans and concert T-shirts that you can tell used to be black. Quiet Riot and Iron Maiden. One of the boys flicks a lighter and holds the flame to the edge of a textbook. He looks toward the window, and I turn my head away as fast as I can.
    In front of the group now, one of the long-haired missionary twins stands on an upturned milk carton. “Separation of church and state does not mean we don’t have the right to free assemble,” she pronounces.
    â€œYeah,” holler some of the kids. They raise their fists like they’re protesting something, but it’s not as if anyone’s trying to stop us from assembling. In fact, none of the kids trickling in and out of the lunchroom for study hall seem to be paying that much attention.
    â€œCharmaine, hey,” someone whispers behind me. It’s Mary-Kate with Karen, from church, both clutching their clarinets. “Where were you Sunday?” asks Mary-Kate.
    â€œOut of town.”
    Up front, the missionary twin says, “They can take the Ten Commandments off the wall of the classroom, but they can’t take them out of our hearts.”
    â€œDid you bring a lock for your locker?” Karen says. “I forgot.”
    I shake my head. The twin up front is detailing how the prayer requests will work. You submit your request on a folded-up piece of paper, and each day the person leading prayer will unfold as many as there’s time to pray for. Around me, kids start tearing paper out of their notebooks and scribbling requests.
    â€œWe were going to see if we could put our clarinets in your locker,” says Karen, “but now I’m going to write a prayer request that they don’t get stolen.” I hold both clarinets while Mary-Kate and Karen write their requests and pass them to the front, where the other missionary twin collects them in her bag. Then she reaches in, selects several, and hands them to her sister.
    Behind me, the outside doors open with a heavy
clank
. The high school boy who tried to burn the textbook sneers at our group, lips pulling back