“Yeah,” Peter says slowly. “Well.” He clears his throat. “You know … I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry that I—”
“I’m sick of prayers!” Iris shouts suddenly, interrupting Peter midsentence. She is wriggling away from Christine. “I want to go back to school!” The room erupts with laughter as Iris bursts into tears. She has wild, curly blond hair and a stubby nose. “And no one’s listening to me! My legs hurt! They’ve been hurting all day!” Poor Iris. She says whatever’s on her mind, no matter what the consequence. It won’t get her into too much trouble here with Christine, but she’s always getting it from her parents, who, after Peter’s parents, are two of the most devoted Believers at Mount Blessing. They have no qualms about telling Emmanuel every single thing she does wrong. Like me, Iris is no stranger to the Regulation Room.
“Go upstairs and lie down, Iris,” Christine says. Her voice sounds tired. “I’ll be up in a minute to rub your legs.” I turn back to Peter and chuck him softly under the chin with my fist.
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “But thanks for saying it.” Peter’s face changes from one of relief to one of alarm as Christine walks up to the two of us.
“Honey,” she says, her dark eyebrows knitting themselves into a line above her blue eyes. “I was just going to have someone go look for you.” She touches my arm as Peter drifts back over to the window. “Are you all right?”
I nod and stare down at the floor. Christine moves her hand up to my shoulder. When I look up, her eyes are rimmed with tears. “You’re sure you’re okay?” she whispers.
I shove my hands into my pockets and shrug. “Yeah, of course. I’m fine.”
I guess Christine has been the closest thing to a mother I’ve ever known. Once, when I had the chicken pox, she stayed up with me for two days straight, taping a pair of mittens around my wrists so I wouldn’t scratch myself. Another time, when my fear of the dark started to get really bad, she brought a tiny yellow night-light in the shape of a heart and plugged it into the wall next to my crib. It was no larger than a belt buckle, and to this day I don’t know how or where she got it, but I still have it. When I was younger, I guess, the fact that she was nice to me sort of canceled out the fact that she also ratted me out to Emmanuel every now and then. But I’m older now. And I know better.
Christine is a huge Emmanuel fan. Huge. Her devotion to him stems back twenty years, when he healed her of some weird compulsive disorder and then convinced her that she couldn’t live without him. I’ve heard her story about joining Mount Blessing at least a thousand times. She used to tell it to all of us when we lived in the nursery, sort of a last-resort bedtime ritual that she would launch into whenever she got bored or sentimental.