“Sure, my momma taught me.”
“You got books?” I asked, taking a step closer.
“We got two Bibles.”
“What’s a Bible?”
“You don’t know what the Bible is?” His mouth opened so I could see a minuscule chip in his front tooth.
“No,” I said. “Else I wouldn’t ask, would I?”
“It’s, like, a big book with stories that God wrote,” he said.
“We got one of those. The Book of Prophecies.”
“But the Bible don’t just have prophecies; it has stories.”
“The Book of Prophecies has stories, too,” I said. “Like Chad and the Golden Bear, and Eric turning blood to gold, and Victor stealing a demon’s pheasant-green slippers that held all its power. And—and Marcus, the first man, who married the first three women, who were born out of three chestnuts in the same lime-colored pod—”
But Jude was shaking his head. “Those sound made up.”
“They’re not. Marcus made all the wheat fields out of the hair of his blond wife, and the trees out of the hair of his brown-haired wife, and fire out of the hair of his redheaded wife. We wouldn’t have fire and trees and wheat if it weren’t for those first wives.”
“That ain’t in the Bible.”
“So?”
“So they ain’t real. They sound like bedtime stories.”
I fell backward a step. Nobody had ever talked like that. If the stories were wrong, the Prophet was wrong, and even thinking that could poison the blood in a person’s veins. God had claimed the Prophet years ago, had cured his astigmatism and taken away his asthma so he no longer needed to puff from his inhaler as he walked across the factory floor. I was there when he took his thick, yellowed glasses in his fists and bent them until they broke. The Prophet was a miracle.
“You—you don’t know what you’re talking about,” I sputtered. “Your Bible’s probably just lies.”
“No, it ain’t! It’s all true and if you think that, you’re not a real Christian.”
“You’re right, I’m not a Christian! I’m a Kevinian.”
“A what?” he asked.
“That’s our religion. Our prophet’s named Kevin.”
“A prophet named Kevin?” Jude scoffed. “Now it’s definitely all made up.”
“How do you know, huh? You’re probably telling tales just so you can be right.”
“No, I ain’t. My daddy taught me everything I know, and he’s not wrong about nothing.”
One of the little twists of his dreadlocks fell onto his forehead and he brushed it aside angrily. All at once, I had to purse my lips to keep down a breathy, giddy laugh. Here I was talking to someone. Fighting with someone. What a novelty. What a prize.
“You didn’t even choose it yourself, then?” I asked. “You just go along with what your daddy says? Some of us make our own decisions. Some of us don’t just think whatever our parents tell us to.” I didn’t mention the fact that everything I believed, I believed because of my parents, too.
Jude’s face fell. “I have to do what my daddy says.” His voice came quiet.
The sorrow that pounded out of Jude’s eyes made me stagger backward a step. It was hard sorrow, hot sorrow, the kind that’s had a long time to ferment. I couldn’t have known that, in that moment, Jude wasn’t thinking of me but of the empty cavern of his mother’s skull, the after-smell of a gunshot.
“I better go,” I said softly. “I’ll get in trouble if they know I left.”
“Okay,” Jude said. “Maybe . . . maybe we’ll see each other again sometime.”
The wind whipped past my ear, and I imagined it was the Prophet’s cold breath.
I wasn’t supposed to talk to people like Jude. He was a Gentile, an outsider, and that meant he was wrong and wicked and wanted us dead.
Worst of all, he was a Rymanite, people the Prophet had warned us about, people God had abandoned centuries ago, and they were the worst kind of evil.
Except, I thought, and after that nothing was really the same again. Except Jude didn’t seem evil at all.
I clenched and unclenched my fingers.
“Yes,” I said, holding my hand up in a wave. “I know we will.”
Chapter 11
“You’re remembering,” Angel says.
I look up at her. “What are you talking about?”
“They don’t prepare you for the remembering,” she says. “You’ll be staring at the ceiling, at some pattern of light on the metal, and without realizing it you’re back in the house you grew up in. And it’s like you’ve walked right back into that place, the feelings, the smells. All that from some pattern of light your brain recognized. Funny, eh?”
She’s lying on her bunk with her head propped on the wall, feet crossed at the ankles so I can see the dirty soles of her white socks.