Chapter 7

7

S aturdays made me grateful that my family, for the most part, ignored me. While I couldn't escape the house without my parents practically performing an inquisition, at least my brothers had decided I was beneath their notice. My sister, unfortunately, was not so lucky. When our older sisters were still living at home, they'd been just as bad as our brothers, but sometimes I wondered if Abigail was more like me and how damaged childhood had left her. She made a show of acting just as horrible as our mother, but that's how it came off to me. It seemed like an act, nothing more.

The day after Gabe and Stan's visit, I was called downstairs to breakfast, only to find my brothers mocking Abigail in the living room as she tried to convince our father to let her go to the public library to study, as the school's library was closed.

"If you weren't such an idiot, you wouldn't need to study on weekends," David told her with a sneer. "You're such an embarrassment."

"Now now, David," our father said with blatant favoritism as he smiled at his eldest son. "Abigail is a mere woman. Some day, she'll have her husband to think for her." Then he turned his attention to Abigail and narrowed his eyes. "Perhaps you need to pray harder for guidance." There was a silent ‘or else' at the end of his statement, and I had a feeling my youngest sister would get a visit from our father's belt if she wasn't careful.

"I would also like to do some extra studying today, Father," I piped up, my heart beating in my throat as I forced the words out. This was my chance, and I wouldn't pass that up for anything. "May I go with her?"

Abigail looked at me in shock. My brothers turned their scorn in my direction. "All you ever do is study," John snorted. "Even then, I still get better grades than you. You're just as much an idiot as Abigail, and she makes me ashamed to be her twin."

I was mostly hiding in my room, and saying I was studying made for a good excuse, but I wasn't about to tell them that.

"Well," my father said, leaning back in his chair with a hint of a scowl. "I suppose that at least if there are two of you, there's less chance you'll do something you shouldn't." He took a sip of his coffee—which had a strong smell of something I didn't quite recognize but vaguely reminded me of Communion wine—and gave us both a stern look. "Fine," he said. "But remember that the church has eyes everywhere. If I learn of either of you reading something sinful, there will be consequences. If you bring any books home, I will check each for inappropriate content."

Yeah, and if he didn't like what was in them, he'd probably beat us until we blacked out. I glanced over at Abigail to see she was trembling. Since when had she been afraid of our father? "Let's go after breakfast," I suggested, giving her a small smile. She nodded, then spent breakfast staring at the table as the dining room lapsed into the oppressive sound of one of our father's sermons. As usual, I ignored it, but my mind was going a thousand miles an hour.

When breakfast was over and we were finally allowed to leave the table, I made quick work of getting ready. I opened my backpack to throw in a notebook and my pencil case, only to choke down a yelp of surprise. Inside the bag was something that looked like a leather wallet; when I opened it, it was a phone.

I rushed to shut the thing and looked around like someone could be spying on me, then opened it again. A phone. I had a phone. How had that even happened so fast? Hadn't Gabe and I just discussed that a couple of hours ago? I couldn't dwell on it, though, not with Abigail and my one chance to get out of the house and to a place of secular knowledge waiting. So I shoved my notebook and pencil case in, hiding the phone under the envelope Madame Persephone had given me as I did. No one should be able to see it regardless, but I didn't want to take a chance.

Abigail waited for me at the door. She glanced up at me, then returned her gaze to the ground. "You ready?" I asked her.

She nodded, silent.

"I will remind you that you are to behave," our father said, his face stern. "Do not tempt Satan to take hold of you."

Technically, Satan had already done that, given that we'd shook hands the night before, but what my father didn't know wouldn't hurt me.

We got as far as the park before I looked around to make sure no one was around to hear us. "Has he done anything to you?"

Abigail's head jerked up, and she looked at me wide-eyed.

"Our father," I clarified. "Has he hurt you?"

She stayed silent. I sighed and stopped walking. She stopped as well, looking around nervously. "Look," I said. "You don't have to tell me. I know you don't trust me. No offense, but I don't trust you either. You spent far too many years acting just like the rest of them. But if he's hurt you or done anything else..." I let the statement trail off, not wanting to put words to the things I'd seen in those photographs, the things I knew he was doing.

Abigail looked down again, and I sighed. Giving up, I started to move again.

"It wasn't me he hurt. It was you."

I stopped, surprised by the quiet words, and looked behind me. My sister was still stuck in place, looking at the ground.

"Yeah," I acknowledged. "He did hurt me. He and our mother beat me so hard that I blacked out and woke up on the kitchen floor where everyone had left me. For what? For being so upset by something that I couldn't keep down my dinner? Maybe for wasting food, even though I'd told them I'd lost my appetite and they'd forced me to eat anyway?"

The words burst out of me before I could stop them, and that was dangerous. I had no idea whose side Abigail was on, but if she was going to report what I said back to our parents, I was in big trouble. "Well, you're aware that several passages suggest that physical punishments are good so long as they're done with love, right?" I asked with no small amount of sarcasm. I managed to keep from rolling my eyes somehow. That book was useless. I'd have to ask Stan about those sections.

"'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,'" Abigail quoted to me. "Ezekiel, they could have killed you. How is that not the act of hindering you?"

"Well, to be fair, I'm almost a legal adult. I think I'm past the ‘little children' stage of life."

"You're still their child," she whispered. "They kept hitting you and hitting you, and all I could do was sit there and watch because I knew if I'd so much as thought about getting up, they would have done the same to me." I was surprised as a sob escaped her lips. "I'm so sorry," she hiccuped.

People were starting to look at us as they passed by, so I grabbed Abigail by the elbow and dragged her to a bench a little out of the way from the main path. I managed to get her to sit down, then sat beside her.

"You're either truly upset or the world's best actress," I told her. "I want to trust you, but if it's an act and you go back to our parents and tell them anything negative I may say, I could end up dead." I thought about that for a moment. "Though that would solve a lot of my problems."

"Don't say that," Abigail wailed, grabbing my sleeve.

I sighed and patted her hand. "What do you think of what happened that night? What did you think when Father told us what that phone call was about?"

She paled when I asked, though I might not have noticed if I hadn't been paying complete attention to her. "Father says it's a sin," she whispered.

"'Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling,'" I quoted to her. "He was our brother. How does him potentially having loved a man at some point in his life hurt us?" Or, you know, him potentially loving the guy in charge of Hell. The thought made me want to laugh, but I shoved that feeling down. That could wait until I was alone and wouldn't have to explain my highly inappropriate laughter. "He'd be the one going to Hell, not us. ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.'"

She stared at me for a long time before finally asking, "Are you okay with people like that?"

"Last I checked, I'm neither God nor Jesus," I told her. "It's God's job to judge, not mine. Now, if it were an adult taking advantage of a child..." I stared at her, looking to see her reaction. "Them, I'd judge. But a relationship between consenting adults? If it's not my relationship, it's none of my business."

Abigail merely nodded a little, and part of me sighed in relief. Based on what I saw, it seemed our father hadn't touched her like that. Or she was hiding it really well, but I was starting to think something else was happening. "Let's get to the library before we get caught hanging out at the park," I told her. "He'd use that as an excuse to punish us."

Abigail was off the bench like a shot, dragging me behind her. I had to hurry to keep up and was nearly panting for air when we arrived in front of the large building that had been our goal. My sister grimaced when she realized what she'd done. "Sorry," she murmured, letting go of my wrist.

"What changed to make you so afraid of him?" I asked her, unable to keep the words to myself. "Was it just what he did to me?"

She stared at me for a long moment before looking around. After she'd made sure we were safe, she sighed. "Our father has never been a warm man," she finally said, making the understatement of the year. "Despite that, I grew up being told he was doing his best to raise us well because he loved us even if he didn't show it." She snorted and shook her head. "I've seen actual loving fathers. I've always been jealous of my friends with parents who treat them affectionately. When I saw what our parents did to you, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it could happen to any one of us if we gave them an excuse." She looked up then, staring directly into my eyes. "That's not love or guidance. That's abuse and hate and goes against the teachings of Jesus."

I stood there, shocked to my core. I might have an ally in my living family if she was serious. If it was a trick... Well, if it was a trick, I had the emergency ‘go to Hell' card Gabe had given me. I just needed to figure out the quickest route from our house to Denny's. "I hate the name Ezekiel," I told her.

She looked at me with her brow wrinkled in confusion. "What?"

"It's one of my secrets. I hate that name. If I had friends, I'd tell them to call me Zeke." Just like I'd told Gabe and Stan to do. When I thought about it, they were probably technically my friends. So was the other party involved in the journal. Huh, I guess I had friends after all. It was just that all my friends were dead. Well, that was depressing.

Abigail nodded. "Zeke," she said. "I'll call you that when it's just us."

I nodded in return, then took another breath. "I have another secret." I had lots of them, but this one was likely the one that would either make or break this budding siblingship.

She cocked her head and waited.

"I'm gay."

Abigail's eyes widened, and suddenly, she had tears streaming down her face again. I wondered if she'd always been so quick to cry when our parents weren't looking. She grabbed my hand again and dragged me inside. We stopped in a corner of the library that was devoid of people. I looked around and noted that it appeared to be the ‘health and fitness' section, which I found vaguely amusing. Of course that would be the section people would avoid.

I turned my attention back to Abigail, who was pulling her binder from her backpack. "Do you know who Melissa is?" she asked quietly as she searched for something.

I narrowed my eyes in thought. "Has she been to the house?" My siblings were allowed to have friends over occasionally, though mostly they met them at school and church.

She nodded and measured out a height a few inches taller than her own. "Redhead. Hazel eyes. Freckled face."

An impression of the girl came to mind, but I'd always avoided my siblings' friends. "Vaguely," I told her.

"She moved." Abigail's eyes swam with tears again. "Last week. The day before she left, I was allowed to visit her house." She looked up at me, then at the ground. "She kissed me," she whispered.

"Oh," I whispered back, surprised.

"I liked it," she whispered again, even quieter.

This time, it was my eyes going wide. Abigail finally found what she was looking for, hidden away in a corner of her binder that no one else would think to look for something, and handed it to me. "She gave me that before I left."

I opened it up and read. Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you.

I wondered what Ruth's words to Naomi had to do with the situation and gestured for her to elaborate.

She bit her lip. "She told me she didn't think it sounded like the words of a daughter-in-law to their mother-in-law. And she hoped I'd think of her when I read it."

Oh. Oh, this was a love letter disguised as scripture.

"Zeke?" Abigail whispered.

"Yeah?" I whispered back.

"I think I like girls."

I nodded. "Kind of sounds like it."

"Do you think I'm going to Hell?"

It wasn't like I could just tell her, ‘No because our older brother who died lives there now and says homosexuality isn't a big deal. He's also told me that Jesus doesn't just love everyone; he loves everyone, so we're fine.' Okay, technically, I could have, but she would have thought I was either insane or making fun of her, and I didn't want either thing. Instead, I thought about it for a second, trying to find a way to word it that would seem logical to her. "God loves all His children, right?"

She nodded.

"And we were all made in His image?"

She nodded again, looking a little confused. She was probably wondering why I was asking such basic questions.

"And God makes no mistakes?"

"Well, yes, but where are you going with this?"

I gave her a little smile. "If God loves us and makes no mistakes, doesn't this mean we are as we're supposed to be?"

"But what if we're being fooled by Satan?"

I wasn't sure how I managed to hold back a laugh at her question, but I did. Stan wouldn't fool a newborn kitten, let alone a mostly-grown human. "Satan's job, according to the Bible, is basically to make us into bad people and drive us away from God, right? Since he works against God?"

Abigail narrowed her eyes. "Yeah...?"

I shrugged. "Do you still believe in God?"

"Obviously," she said immediately, sounding offended I'd even asked.

"Do you still believe in Jesus?"

"Of course."

I smiled at her. "Then if us being different is Satan's way of trying to drive us away from God, he's doing a terrible job of it, isn't he?"

Abigail smiled a little. "Yeah, maybe."

"There you go, then," I said. "I can't tell you what to think or how to feel or what to believe, obviously. Think of it in terms of the note Melissa gave you. It could be read in at least two entirely different contexts. That book was written centuries ago, and was written by and has been interpreted by people. People make mistakes all the time." I held up a hand when she opened her mouth to protest. "I'm not saying it's all lies or anything. Just that it's open for interpretation."

She closed her mouth and returned to looking at the floor, but this time, it seemed she was thinking over what I'd said.

"Feel a little better?"

Abigail looked up and nodded. "A little," she admitted. "I know I haven't been nice to you, and you have no reason to trust me or even care about me. So thanks for listening and not judging."

The girl was way too trusting. If I'd been one of our other siblings, I could have pretended to care and used her words against her. If she did the same to me, at least I had an out, but she didn't. "Thanks for trusting me," I told her. "Now, did you really want to study, or were you just hoping to leave that house for a while?"

She sighed heavily. "How are you with math?" she asked.

"Hopeless," I told her, grinning. "But maybe we can muddle through together."