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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2020 by Chelsea Bieker
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-948226-48-6
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by
Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946561
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
Harper, Finn, and Brenon,
forever
Remember this, for it is as true as true gets:
Your body is not a lemon.
INA MAY GASKIN
Contents
To have an assignment, Pastor Vern said, you had to be a woman of blood. You had to be a man of deep voice and Adam’s apple. And you should never reveal your assignment to another soul, for assignments were a holy bargaining between you and your pastor and God Himself. To speak of them directly would be to mar God’s voice, turn the supernatural human, and ruin it. So not even my own mother could tell me what her assignment was that unseasonably warm winter, wouldn’t tell me months into it when spring lifted up more dry heat around us, and everything twisted and changed forever.
I longed to know where she went when she left our apartment each morning, returning in the evening flushed, a bit more peeled back each time. I imagined her proselytizing to the vagrants sleeping on rags in the fields at the edge of town, combing the women’s mud-baked hair, holding their hands and exorcising evil from their hearts. I imagined her floating above our beloved town of Peaches, dropping God glitter over us like an angel, summoning the rain to cure our droughted fields. I imagined all these things with a burn of jealousy, for I had not received my woman’s blessing yet, the rush of blood between my legs that would signify me as useful. I’d just turned fourteen but was still a board-chested child in the eyes of God and Pastor Vern, and so I prayed day and night for the blood to come to me in a river, to flood the bed I shared with my mother. Then I would be ready. I could have an assignment too.
THAT SPRING PASTOR VERN decided we were due for a congregation-wide revival. We filled an abandoned bathtub behind the church with liters of Check Mate Cola and one by one he held us under just long enough for the lungs to burn, for fearful desperation to set in, and we came up gasping and sticky, his face the first face we saw, a God to us. Our tongues darted to catch the sugar drops falling from our brows. How we cheered as the sugar dried on our skin under the ruthless burn of the sun. There was no wasting water, and so the soda
