“Do you think God can’t do two things at once?” the Prophet asked, his voice rising so my mother’s head finally flicked up. “God can do anything. God can watch every person alive at the same time, and even the dead, and He can walk the earth, because He is God, and He is almighty.”
Suddenly, he snatched Constance up from where she sat beside me. He propped her up on her tiny legs facing me, her expression bundled up in fear. “I said there are consequences for disbelief, Minnow,” the Prophet said, shaking Constance by the shoulders. “But consequences sometimes have a way of missing their target.”
He shook Constance again, a whimper escaping her mouth. “If you ever have a question, Minnow, the answer is always God. Anything you wonder about the earth or the sky, the answer is always God. Always God,” he repeated. “If you doubt, the cure is God. And if you continue to doubt, the fault is yours, not His.”
A heat had crept into my face. I nodded because I knew enough to do that. He turned Constance’s body toward him, smiled broadly, and let her slump back down near me. I could feel her body shaking.
“Remember, God created you and that means you owe Him a life. Yours,” the Prophet pronounced firmly. “You will be in debt to God for the rest of your days.”
Chapter 18
Valentine’s Day just passed. We never celebrated in the Community, but I remembered what it was supposed to look like. Some girls got cards in the mail and some smuggled little candies inside and passed them around beneath the cafeteria tables, and the guards pretended not to notice the wadded-up red foils littering the floor. A few boyfriends visited and passed over fistfuls of carnations wrapped in wet paper towels and, even if they weren’t allowed to touch, the girls looked buoyed for days afterward. They wore the flowers in their buttonholes till they turned brown.
In the Community, holidays frightened me. The one I liked least—Saint Jared’s Day, which celebrated the killing of the last giant in America—called itself a festival. It was always in winter, with a bitter wind that flung the eerie chanting of our voices up into the frozen air. “Killed the giant, yes indeed. Cut his throat, oh yes indeed. Fell to Earth, oh yes it did. Died in agony, oh yes it did.” My feet frozen as a glacier, I carried an icicle in my open palm while the little children made to stab the air like they were killing monsters. My stomach fumbled watching them. It was always entirely too easy for us to imagine killing.
? ? ?
“Do those things hurt you?” Angel asks around a mouthful of corn muffin.
She’s staring at my stumps, lying next to my tray of watery soup and shrunken bread. “Not as much as they used to. Why?”
“Because you got a look on your face,” she says. “Sorta pained.”
“It’s just . . .” I stretch my toes out the side of the cafeteria table. “My bones hurt. My leg bones. They feel like they’re being stretched.”
“You’re growing,” she says. “You’re not the first girl to put on a few pounds in juvie. Most of us aren’t used to three square meals.”
I’ve already grown out of my first jumpsuit. The new one is roomier and has a zipper down the front with a cord that I can grab with my teeth. Going to the bathroom takes less time now that I don’t need to ask Angel or a guard to fumble buttons back into holes.
“That’s the problem with this whole thing,” Angel says, waving her arm. “They want you to be contrite for getting thrown in here, but this place makes a fuck ton more sense than the outside, if you really think about it.”
“Like how?” I ask.
“Like,” Angel searches. “Like this.” She lifts something yellow from her tray.
“Is that a banana?” I say. “I haven’t seen one of these in years.”
“Outside, everything gets so distorted. In here, a banana’s just something they give you because the government says we inmates gotta eat less junk. But, you know what the pastor at my uncle’s church used to say about bananas? They prove the existence of God.”
“How?”
“He said they must’ve been designed by a creator because they’re easy to open and are shaped perfectly for the human hand. But you know what else is shaped perfectly for the human hand? A dick, but don’t try telling them that means God intended people to masturbate because that will get you kicked out of Sunday school. I can vouch from experience.”
A shadow crosses our table. Officer Prosser surveys us, her face beet-colored at the cheeks, tiny orange hairs escaping the knot of her bun.
In her hand, she holds small squares of paper.
“Notices,” she says simply. She flicks one at Angel who catches it in the air. With a serious look, she lets a notice fall to the plastic tray in front of me.
“What’s it say?” I ask Angel.
“It’s your notice of rec time. The better you act, the more you get.”
“What do we get to do?”
“Hardly nothing. The options are lame. You can choose from exercise time in the yard, the library, the TV room, or the visitors’ lounge if anyone comes to visit you, fat chance of that happening. Oh, and youth group.”