Chicken (10 page)

“Yeah, sure. Why?” I want to move my head, but I don’t want to be rude either, so I’m frozen like a hog in a spotlight. 

She lifts her hand. “You just look a little peaked.”

“He’s a ginger,” Brant mumbles around his finger. “He always looks like that.”

“I’m not sure what that means, Brant, but I don’t think it was a very nice thing to say. Apologize to Casper.”

“Sorry.” He grins, finger clamped between his teeth. “That you don’t have a soul.”

“Brant David Mitchell! That is enough! Of course Casper has a soul.”

I want to kick him under the table, but I can’t reach. He’s teasing his mama more than me, but it makes me feel bad anyway because if she knew the things I’ve been thinking, she probably wouldn’t stick up for me. So I glare at him, but he just chuckles and goes back to chewing on his nail. 

Sister Cindy won’t stop staring at me. Like she’s waiting for chicken pox to pop out of my head or an alien to pop out of my chest.

“I’m fine, Sister Cindy. Just a little chilled maybe.” 

“Hold on.” She smiles, touches my shoulder. “I’ve got just the thing.”

She shuffles toward the laundry room where the washer is banging our wet clothes around and the dryer is tossing whatever it was tossing before we got here. 

“You gonna eat that?” Brant points at the two pieces of hotdog left on my plate. There’s a sliver of blood at the corner of his nail.

I scoot my plate toward him, but the second it moves, his hand strikes fast as a rattlesnake. Both pieces are in his mouth, halfway chewed before I take my hand off the plate. He grins, lips flecked with fibers of white bread. Downs his water in one slug and slams the empty glass on the table with a satisfied ahhhh. 

“I bet you turn into a vegetarian one day.”

“Why would you say that?” 

He shrugs. “Guys like you often do.”

“I wish you’d quit this stuff about guys like me.”

He frowns. “I didn’t say there’s anything wrong with being a guy like you.”

“Yeah, but you’re always talking about guys like me doing girl things.”

“Being a vegetarian ain’t a girl thing. Don’t be dumb when I’m trying to say you seem smart.”

“Well. I don’t want to be a vegetarian. You be a vegetarian if it’s so smart.”

Brant gets this look, and I think it’s a sad look, but I can’t be sure, and I must be wrong because that doesn’t make any sense, but then he sighs and says, “I would if I could.” 

This is hard to believe coming from a mouth that devoured seven hotdogs in seventeen minutes and two double-patty burgers yesterday. I search for something witty to say, but nothing turns up. Brant sucks on his bloody nail. I curl my plate like you’re supposed to curl your ballcap, wishing I had my Longhorns one to hide behind right now. Whatever type of guy I might be, it’s not the type who knows how to handle a serious turn in a conversation about—well, about anything really. So I put the paper plate on my head.

Brant smirks. Then he grins. He slaps the table with his hangnail hand. “See what I mean? Conflict resolution. That’s your thing.”

“Were we having a conflict?”

“Inner.” He thumps his chest. “Nothing you’d understand.”

I duck my head, and the plate slips off my damp hair, floats down to the pale yellow linoleum. My stomach clenches, forcing pink hotdog goo into my throat, but I choke it down. If he’s got the same problem as me, even if he ain’t got feelings for me—I need to let him know he can tell me anything, but without saying you can tell me anything because that would definitely be girly. Boys have to be subtle, use codes, and I haven’t figured them all out yet so I’m stuck. 

But that’s dumb because my problem has nothing to do with not being able to be a vegetarian. Does it? I don’t know. Maybe every guy like me grows up to not eat meat. Maybe this is part of the code. Maybe Brant is trying to tell me that he would be a vegetarian with me if he could, but he can’t because he’s got to be a real man and eat lots of meat like his dad. Jesus. That might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever thought, even dumber than having a kitten named Garth Vader Mitchell-Quinn. 

I pick up my plate. The dryer cuts off. The door opens with a squeaky gasp, and I hear the soft thuds of fabric landing in a plastic basket. Then the washing machine shuts off too, and all the sounds that were being drown out become clear. Rain slapping the windows. A beagle snoring on the other side of the screen door. Brant’s saliva squeaking as he sucks on that tattered nail. And the radio talking softly to itself in the windowsill over the sink where the big blue pot is soaking now.

“—popular fast food chain, Wings of Glory, has come under fire in recent months for their donations to—”

One metal lid slams and then the other. Water hisses in the washing machine. The dryer grumbles back to life. We cock our heads, straining to hear the rest of the broadcast, but the radio and the raindrops have disappeared. Sister Cindy returns with a laundry basket at her waist, ratty mauve-and-blue towels piled as high as her breasts. She tosses one at Brant. Drapes another gently across my back, so toasty it kinda burns.

“Mom, what’s going on with Wings of Glory?” Brant takes the towel to his curls, roughly, like he’s trying to scrub them off.

Her shoulders slump and she sighs like she’s going to give us bad news, no, the worst news, the very worst news ever. “They are under attack.”

Brant cloaks his head with the towel. “Like from terrorists?”

She keeps slumping until she’s set the basket on the table. Then she pulls out a chair and sits down, her worried face disappearing behind the laundry. She pushes the basket to the center of the table, so I have to stretch my neck a little to see Brant. He stays behind his towel, only a sliver of mouth and chin visible. Like a Sith Lord. I wish his mom would go away so I could call him Darth Mauve.

“No, not terrorists, but—” Sister Cindy puts her hands together like she’s playing this-is-the-church-this-is-the-steeple. “Well, yes. In a way. Some people want to take away our rights as Christians. I don’t know what could be more terrifying than that.”

 Brant licks his lips, grins. “Who’s stupid enough to mess with a Christian and his fried chicken?”

Sister Cindy tilts her hands forward and suddenly the steeple becomes a gun barrel. “This is serious, Brant. Are you going to listen or run your mouth?”

Brant tucks his chin into the towel until he’s just a fuzzy ghost sitting over there. Sister Cindy watches him, and I can tell she wants him to cut that out too, but she doesn’t want to bring it up and give him a chance to distract her. 

She rests her finger-gun against the table. “From what I understand, the owner of Wings of Glory has been donating money to Christian organizations, and this has got a lot of liberal britches in a bunch.”

“But it’s their money. They can do what they want.”

“Exactly. This is a free country. And a Christian country. Nobody should be questioned, much less threatened, for contributing to the Lord’s work.”

“So like—” Brant massages his scalp with the towel. “He’s in trouble for tithing to his church?”

“Well, no. And he’s not in trouble for anything. These people don’t have the authority to put him there. He’s being persecuted.”

“Like the disciples?”

She smiles proudly. “Just like that.”

A scoff gets out of me before I can stop it. I shake my head fast, like I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s not a lie, just a misdirection. Because I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I’m not a Bible scholar like Brant or his parents, but I’ve sat through enough Sunday School lessons to know that Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified upside down and James was splattered on the rocks when they tossed him off the temple. None of this seems likely to happen to the owner of Wings of Glory, no matter how angry the liberals might be.

“But why?” Brant asks. “I still don’t get it.”

 “Well, I guess you boys are too big to shield.” She takes a deep breath. “These aren’t just any liberal activists. These are—” She lets the breath go. “Homosexual activists.”

Funny how sometimes you only need two words to understand the rest of a story. Wings of Glory has been giving money to organizations that don’t like homosexuals. The homosexuals are angry. And now the Christians are angry that the homosexuals are angry. Simple as that. I don’t know why Sister Cindy couldn’t just spit it out, why she had to be all dramatic and drag us along until the revelation would have been awkward even if one of the boys at this table didn’t think the other boy was beautiful. 

The edges of my ears burn. I fold and unfold my plate. Brant scrubs his scalp with such intensity I can feel the electricity crackling in the towel around my neck too. 

“So he’s giving money to groups that don’t like queers.”

“It’s not that he doesn’t like them, Brant. It’s that he loves them so much—.”

“Do you and Dad give money to groups like that?”

Sister Cindy draws a breath that pulls her lips into a tight, sad smile. “We have. Yes. Because we love them so much we can’t just stand by while they destroy their lives.”

Brant hangs his towel over his neck, grips both ends near his chest. Static puffs his curls up like a golden fleece.  “So what happens if he doesn’t stop?”

“They’ll boycott Wings of Glory. Try to put the whole company out of business.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “Can you imagine? In this economy? Trying to take jobs away from good, honest people just because they believe in something you don’t?”

Brant’s lips pucker, but in an upset sort of way, not a kissing way. “That’s not very nice.”

Sister Cindy shakes her head. “No, it’s not. That’s called bullying.”

I’m not like Brant who has to see Doctor Sister McKee because he gets so mad he breaks things. I’ve never broken anything on purpose in my life so I don’t recognize the feeling right away. It’s in my body, not my brain. Like I’m turning into a fist and need to punch myself through a wall. The paper plate rips and I’m left with two half-moons in my shaky hands. 

Brant and his mother gape at me. The beagle at the door peers in, ears pricked. I drop the pieces on the table, curl my fists into either end of the cooled-off towel hanging around my neck. 

“I’m sorry.”

“It was trash anyway.” Mrs. Mitchell flaps a dismissive hand, then brings it down on my arm. “You were so peaked, and now you’re so flushed. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Casper hates bullies,” Brant blurts. “Don’t you, Cas?”

I nod, real slow, trying to think about the situation and not the fact that he’s never called me Cas before—no one has—and I kind of like it, especially the way he says it with a z instead of an s, but I probably wouldn’t like it on anyone else’s lips, and I hope he doesn’t say it around Mathis or Harry or Colton because they’d use it against me the second he turned his back. 

“I—I sure do.”

She squeezes my arm, but her eyes keep digging around my face like she knows there’s more to it than that. “You’re sure you’re not feeling ill?”

I flip the towel over my head to hide my traitorous skin, get real busy drying my hair. She won’t let go of my arm. Through the hood the towel makes, I see Brant tipped back on two chair legs, looking straight up at the ceiling. 

He lets the chair fall forward, banging his fist on the table at the same time the legs smack the linoleum. “Let’s pray for Wings of Glory.”

His mother beams. “Wonderful idea! Would you like to lead us, Brant?”

Brant shakes his head. “I’d feel better if you did, Mama.”

We both know she was only asking to be polite. Sister Cindy loves praying out loud even more than being humble. She holds our hands and bows her head. “Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask—”

My head is bowed, still under my towel, and since his head is bowed too, I figure it’s safe to sneak a glance over the laundry basket at Brant, but I’m wrong. He’s already looking at me.

Brant’s room is upstairs—is the upstairs. That’s all there is. It started out as a loft looking down on the living room, but someone thought the banister made a mighty fine balance beam, so Brother Dean had to close it in. It’s got a lot of floor space, but the walls are claustrophobically short and dark-paneled. Thick wooden trusses loom overhead, holding up a vaulted ceiling covered in water stains and white, bumpy stuff. A ceiling fan hangs from a long, skinny pole, but it makes such an awful racket Brant never turns it on, not even now when all the heat in this humbly air-conditioned home has climbed the stairs and settled around his bed. 

Last summer, inspired by hipster pictures on Hannah’s Tumblr, he wrapped clear Christmas lights around the trusses and then strung up all the vintage bottles he’s scavenged from long-abandoned deer camps and other backwoods dumps. Sapphire blues, emerald greens, and golden ambers—I’ve never been up here after dark, but I can picture him sleeping like a prince beneath this canopy of shimmering jewels. Right now though, in the eerie green light of the storm, with a forest of wind-bent tree tops right outside the triangular plate-glass windows, the stillness of the bottles feels unnatural and wrong. 

Brant leans against the old, brick chimney coming up through the floor between the windows. An enormous, framed poster of little Anakin Skywalker casting a Darth Vader shadow hangs over his head, flanked by two blue LED lightsabers. His parents are very particular about the pop culture he’s exposed to—sci-fi and superheroes make the cut because aliens and radioactive spiders don’t actually exist so there’s no danger of his interest leading him astray because there’s nowhere to go. Fantasy, on the other hand, is strictly forbidden because the slightest dabble in magic can open a door for evil spirits to pass through. It’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from reading Harry Potter to playing Dungeons & Dragons to sacrificing babies to Satan.   

I’m sitting on the edge of Brant’s full-size bed, smoothing wrinkles out of his puffy gold comforter. Sister Cindy sent me up here to rest before revival, but there’s no way I’m taking a nap in front of Brant. Unfortunately, since computers and TV are major underworld portals, there’s not an awful lot to do up here besides sleep. There’s a bookshelf on the wall across from the bed—the top shelf holds study guides and devotionals, the middle shelf is crammed with folders full of sheet music, and the bottom shelf contains an uneven stack of well-worn board games.