shrugs it off. He covers the moment with a laugh, but the hand becomes a fist at his side.
Pastor phones her parents that night just before dinner and though Zey doesn’t know what’s said, later she’ll imagine him on the other side of the line spinning his lie, toad-like and sullen as he exacts his revenge. After she hangs up, her mother slaps her at the table and calls Zey outside her name—embarrassment, disgrace, demimonde. Disrespecting the pastor? What kind of example are you? Duck hides in the hallway, listening; Zey sees his shadow on the wall. Her mother says, What you do reflects on me!
Zey tries to explain, to defend herself against her mother’s rage, her own coursing underneath, but her mother’s so ashamed, so unwilling to see. She sends Zey to her room without dinner while her father watches from the living room, complicit in his silence.
Under the covers that night, her bedroom door taken from its hinges, Zey thinks of Ms. Addler, curled around the body of her lover like a snake, soft in her sin. She wishes she could ask her parents if it’s better to be a sinner or a prisoner, but she knows now that her mother is afraid of truth and her father wouldn’t recognize it, even if it invited him inside, offered fresh fruit.
Zey rebels against her parents for their failure to believe her, to protect her, in any small way she can. She refuses food, both physical and spiritual; she won’t step foot inside the church. She lets their punishments slide off her back. Zey makes Lucifer a mantra, speaking the name aloud, blurring it until it becomes nothing more than the language of hisses, her own version of tongues. The vibration fills her stripped room, sinking into the walls and passing through to her brother, who is sad Mama and Pop now leave Zey home on Sundays. He overhears their confusion at her behavior. Their mother wonders if they should send her away.
Duck sneaks into Zey’s room one night, climbing into bed with her, like he used to when he was small. Zey can feel him trying to word his question about why things aren’t how they used to be: Zey packing his lunches with folded notes or borrowing Pop’s car to run an errand to the grocery. He could come-with as long as he sat in the backseat, wore his seat belt, listened to his sister. Now, their parents hover like buzzards and only in the dark hours are they free.
Finally, he says, Why can’t you stop? and Zey guesses at what he means—being changed, being bad. She twines her fingers into the soft mat of his hair. There’s nothing she can tell him that he’d understand, that might bring comfort. It is the nature of light to illuminate, and she can’t, like so many, forget what she’s seen. She wishes this moment of connection was enough, but Duck’s waiting and she has to speak. Truth is beautiful, she tells her brother, quoting Emerson, but so are lies.
Duck now understands the word possessed and tells his two best friends at school he thinks this is what his sister is. He describes how she lies on the floor of her room with her legs straight up against the wall, how that peculiar sound she makes glows in the air around her head like the letter ‘S’ come to life. He tells them how Pastor pulled him aside last Sunday and told him the devil came in many forms, but most shaped like women.
They are his best friends, but he is not theirs. His friends tell other friends until the word breaks out, and suddenly, Rylan stands before him on the playground, fresh-cut fade, fat lips sneering, his father’s gold chains around his neck. His big hands hang loose as if just passing the time, the knuckles cracked and dry. He’s in Duck’s grade but held back—almost fourteen, dumb in his anger at all these smaller boys who belong.
I heard your sister’s on some Exorcist shit, he says. Head spinning around and shit. Duck mumbles, tries to move around him, but Rylan puts a solid hand on his chest. Think that bitch can spin like that on my dick?
The playground erupts, Duck’s classmates pouring one out for his defeat. Duck knows that, next to an insult to his mother, this is the worst a boy can say. He knows he can’t allow this to slide, not here with all the other boys listening. He knows before he steps forward that he’ll lose. But he does it anyway.
When her brother comes home from school, Zey, reading on the front steps, stops him at the door before she loses him to her parents’ watch. She grabs his chin, makes him look her in the face. What happened? she asks. His cheek is already swelling, blood pooling underneath the skin. His eyes are dark on hers. They’re calling you devil-bitch at school, Duck says, and Zey’s head rears back; it’s the first time she’s ever heard her brother cuss. They say you’re going to Hell.
Who says that? she asks. He says, Rylan and them. And Pastor. He pulls away from her, looks at her hard until she falls back and lets him pass into the house. Their mother fusses over him as she holds a bag of frozen peas to the bruises on his face. What happened, she demands, and Duck, ever loyal, tells them of the fight but not the reason. Their mother picks up the phone to call the principal, but their father hangs it up. Don’t shame him, he says and chucks her brother beneath his chin. I’m sure the other boy looks worse. He winks.
Zey sneaks out easily, once her parents are asleep. Though it’s dangerous for a girl to travel this way, she likes how a street can feel at night, clean, almost like she owns it. Occasionally she looks into the quiet sky, her eyes drawn to the brightest lights, and remembers how once in Science her teacher taught the class to tell the difference between stars and planets. Think about “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” he’d said. Mercury, Venus, Mars—the planets never flickered.
She arrives at New Life First Baptist some quick blocks later. In the dark, the small, steepled church looks exactly as it is: hollow, misleading. A stage. She knows the stories Pastor tells are ones he’s learned from other men, passed through generations like a plague until they become mentality, these adopted laws from a blue-eyed, man-dreamt Heaven. She thinks she knows who Ms. Addler’s “they” is, and what they hoped she’d never learn: that she is not second, not of Adam’s rib; that her whole being is God; that Pastor and those like him will continue to shout from the pulpit, raising boys—her Duck—to be hateful and scared.
Zey unscrews the cap of her father’s red canister and breathes deep. She’s always liked the smell of gasoline—when she was a kid, her father used to let her work the pump. She likes the scent of something that can burn. She douses the outsized wooden doors and steps back. Thinks for a moment of the headlines tomorrow: black girl burns down black church, and the ways in which this act will be misread; how all the white folks—some black ones too—will be so thrilled for an excuse to talk about self-perpetuated crime. She hesitates one more moment, and then she strikes the match.
Don’t.
Zey turns to find Duck standing defiant behind her. He’s in his pajamas, one eye a shiny black moon, the other swollen shut. He and Zey stand off, the match still glowing in her hand, the possibility of inferno heavy around them. Duck moves forward and takes her empty hand, and Zey lets the flame fizzle out.
On Friday Zey fakes sick, coughing into her palm, and her parents, tired of fighting, barely question her. You’ve made your bed, her mother says. Once the house is empty, Zey gets dressed, goes into the kitchen and spreads two slices of bread thick with peanut butter and apple jelly. She knows that soon she’ll walk through the door of eighteen, pass through her parents’ house into something she can’t quite see but can sense the murky edges of—the shape of her future. She will pack all her knowledge, strings of inky words—pansophy, verisimilitude—into canvas bags and wear them on her womanly body, where they’ll glow like Tahitian pearl, and when she leaves, her parents will wash their hands of her. Duck will send letters only once or twice a year. He will pen his love on cardstock; he will ask her how she is, but never when she’s coming back. Zey will remember Ms. Addler, and make a point to study her own power, to see the shadows beneath other people’s speech. She’ll remember Pastor, and his fear. At times she’ll regret not having burned the church down, but she won’t deny her brother saved her.
Zey
