Sex on the Moon Read Free Page B

serve God.”
    He had been sent home the next day.
    And now here he was: sitting in his parents’ van, numb to the snow and the cold. Thad considered making a run for it, but then he’d never see Sonya again, and that seemed like something worse than the shame and the embarrassment—worse, even, than a bullet from his father. So he just sat there and waited. Five minutes became ten minutes became half an hour, and soon he lost track of how long he had been in the van. The snow began to pile up, blanketing the vegetable garden and the cow pasture and even the house, turning everything a brilliant shade of white. The air in the back of the van was becoming frigid, and Thad could see his own breath freezing into little starbursts of crystal on the windowpane—but still he sat there, his mind a jittery mess.
    Not until the air outside started to dim, and the snow piled so thick against the van’s windows that he could no longer see the house, did he decide that he had no choice but to follow his parents inside. Maybe his dad had decided that killing him out in the driveway was too public; this was something you had to take care of in the privacy of your own home.
    Thad collected his single duffel bag—a couple more white shirts, some toiletries, a handful of copies of The Book of Mormon , and maybe a half-dozen ties—and exited the van. The snow stung his bare cheeks and neck, but he barely noticed. He crossed the front yard that led up to his house in a trancelike state.
    He found his parents in the kitchen. His dad was sitting at the table, his mother next to him. Neither looked at him as he entered the room. Nobody spoke, and Thad stood for a moment just inside the doorway, listening to the melting snow drip against the porcelain-tiled floor. Then he let his duffel bag drop and took a seat across the table from his parents.
    His dad glared at him, and the fury in the man’s eyes was so nearly palpable it all but knocked Thad out of his chair. His chest was heaving, but he felt like he couldn’t breathe, his stomach churned and the heat rose up his back in vicious twists that truly felt like flames. His mom was staring at her reflection in the glass table, refusing to meet his eyes. This wasn’t about his mom, anyway. It was about Thad and his father, and what had to happen next.
    “Because we’re loving parents,” Thad would remember his dad saying, through clenched teeth, “we are giving you two months.”
    Thad felt the air come back into his lungs. Two months? He wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it wasn’t the barrel of a shotgun. His father wasn’t going to kill him, at least not today, and that felt like a good thing.
    “Two months,” his father repeated. “And these are the rules. You aren’t allowed in your old room. You aren’t allowed to have any of your old possessions. Just that duffel from your mission.”
    Thad nodded. So far it wasn’t so bad. He was alive, and he was home. But his dad wasn’t finished yet.
    “You will sleep in the basement. You are not to talk to any of your brothers or sisters. You can’t even look at them. No eye contact. No notes. No phone calls. No communication at all. Because you, Thad, are going to hell, and any communication you have with the rest of us will only make us go to hell, too.”
    Thad opened his mouth but couldn’t find any words. It was a hard thing to hear, so explicit and out in the open. Hell, to his father, was not some arbitrary religious concept that you learned about in church; it was physically real, fiery and violent, and forever. And that was where Thad was headed.
    “You will leave the house by six every morning,” his father continued, his voice even and low. “You won’t return until after ten at night. I don’t care what you do during those hours, but you will not be here. No one will know you are still living in this home. No one will talk to you, or see you, or think about you. You simply do not exist.”
    Without another