Donut Days Read Free Page B

reaction.
    Mr. O’Connor started writhing and thrashing in the water, and my dad had to actually step back from him. “Your women are out of balance!” cried Mr. O’Connor in a deep voice, like he was suddenly the mouthpiece for God. “Your women are too empowered! Repent and bring balance back into the church! I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man! I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man!”
    “Gary!” shouted my dad, trying to get Mr. O’Connor to stop. “Enough!”
    They wrestled in the water a little bit as my dad tried bringing Mr. O’Connor back to shore, but by that time I was probably the only person left in the congregation who was still looking at them. Everyone else was pretty much staring at the one person Mr. O’Connor was talking about—the one woman who, apart from a handful of Sunday school ladies, did the lion’s share of teaching and preaching at Living Word Redeemer.
    My mom.

Chapter Three
    I tried to find a clear path to get to Little Saints, but it wasn’t easy. Even the foyer was crowded with people talking about my mom’s sermon, their eyes wide and their mouths moving furiously.
    A hand like a claw reached out and grabbed my elbow. I found myself face-to-face with Mrs. Knickerbacher, who was raising her overplucked eyebrows at me.
    “Emma,” she said too brightly. “Where are you off to?”
    Mrs. Knickerbacher was what people called a church elder, meaning she’d been at Living Word Redeemer since it had started up. She was also the biggest gossip in the church’s history—at least in my opinion. “She should carry a trowel with her, the way she always tries to dig up dirt on people,” I’d said to my mom once. My mom had clucked disapprovingly, though she didn’t out-and-out disagree with me.
    “I—I have to go get Lizzie,” I said, looking past Mrs. Knickerbacher and trying to figure out how many more people I’d have to fight through before I’d get to Little Saints.
    But Mrs. Knickerbacher wasn’t done tormenting me yet. She glanced around, and all the people nearby tuned in to our conversation instinctively. Then she smiled at me so coldly, I shivered.
    “So tell us,” she said, a little too loudly, “how is that Harry Potter Bible study of yours coming along?”
    Embarrassment erupted in all parts of my body, making me warm. Even my fingers felt heated. I looked down at them and could practically see them changing from white to red.
    It was no secret that a while back, I’d tried to start a Harry Potter Bible study among the Living Word Redeemer teens. I hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. I’d simply wanted to look at the ways Harry Potter wrestled with good and evil and how that was similar to the ways Christians sometimes wrestled with good and evil—at least in the Bible. But then a bunch of kids went home and told their parents that I was trying to get people to read Harry Potter in place of the Bible, and people like Mrs. Knickerbacher had been so worried about me having demons, they’d asked my dad to consider having a special service where they laid hands on me and cast out my unholy spirits. Thankfully, my dad said that it wasn’t necessary, but he did give me a bunch of scriptures to memorize—“for punishment and edification,” he’d said—one of them being from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament: “The Lord God will help me, therefore I will not be confused.”
    For a while there, I’d repeated it over and over, until it stuck to the insides of my brain like flypaper. I’d mumbled it like a mantra. Because, seriously, I wanted God to help me. I didn’t want to make everyone in the church mad at me, and I liked the idea that God could make me less confused.
    But that had been months ago, and by now I knew the truth. God wasn’t interested in helping me. The more I’d spoken that scripture, the farther away God got, and the more confusing life became.
    “Perhaps next time you