You Don't Know About Me Page 3

  “It’s not exactly a trail.”

  “Are you kiddin’?” He pointed at the stairs. “It’s got steep and everything.” He poked me in the chest. “You sayin’ our track isn’t good enough for a pro like you? C’mon, hotshot”—he waved at the stairs—“let’s see you nail the grade.”

  I looked at the stairs and the two cement ramp-skinnies on each side. I’d cleaned stuff like it hundreds of times. “Local or express?”

  “Express!” the R-boys shouted.

  I ground up the hill, bunny-hopped onto the top of the ramp Ben had taken, and held a track stand for a sec while I checked the line. It was twenty feet of rail a foot and a half wide. The only brutal part was the bottom. It wasn’t like I was on a board and could bail like Ben had done. I had to time the impact of the flat just right and ride it out. I pushed my butt behind the cockpit and ripped down.

  While the guys whooped, I heard a loud clack. I couldn’t take my eyes off the ramp to see what made the noise. Flying toward the bottom, I pushed forward so my butt would catch impact on the seat and not the back tire. There was nothing nastier than a rhoid buffing. Of course, moving forward added speed.

  I suddenly saw what had made the noise. A skateboard shot to the bottom of the ramp. My front tire caught it square, popped the board into my frame, and locked my back wheel like I’d hit a brick wall. I endoed over the handle bars. Luckily, I catapulted over the cement and rag-dollied on the grass. I totally pranged, but nothing was broken.

  Case and the R-boys went hysterical. Ben’s face appeared over me. “You alright, dude?”

  “Yeah.” He helped me up. “Who’s the asshole?”

  Case hurried over trying not to laugh through his bolted-on look of shock. “Sorry, man, it was the weirdest thing. My board just shot away from me.”

  I brushed past him. “Yeah, right.” I checked my bike. The front rings were totally potato-chipped.

  Case sounded behind me. “Of course, it could’ve been an act of God. I mean, maybe He was punishing you for lying.”

  I turned and faced him. He was taller than me and had me by thirty pounds. I didn’t care. “What’s your problem?”

  “You bullshitting us. So I’m gonna ask you again. Were you trying to break into school, or were you praying like Mother Teresa on steroids?” The R-boys snickered. “C’mon, gear queer, admit it. You were prayin’.”

  I wanted to flatten his face. I’d dealt with enough bullies to know how this would end. “Okay, I was praying.”

  “There!” he shouted, socking me on the arm. “That wasn’t so hard.”

  I didn’t flinch. “I was praying for you gays on trays to go fuck yourselves.”

  His face froze for a second, then he staggered away, clutching his chest. “Oh, man! Why’d ya havta do that? Now we’re gonna havta wash your mouth out.”

  The R-boys grabbed me and pulled me across the grass. Ben tried to stop them. “C’mon, guys. Give ’im a break.”

  Case snapped at him. “We’re not done with this skinny fuck till I say so.”

  They dragged me to the fountains and held me under one of the bucket trees. Little kids scattered as the bucket overhead filled with water. Case raised his arms and shouted, “In the name of the Fart, the Toot, and the Holy Gas, we christen you … Corndog!” He grabbed my hair and jerked my head back. The bucket dumped its load, drenching me and splashing them. They didn’t care. They were having too much fun.

  They hauled me to a patch of dust, held me down, and threw dirt on me till I was covered from head to foot. Case grinned down at me. “See you around, Corndog.”

  After they left I lay there all hot and shaky, like a volcano wanting to blow. When I sat up they were gone. Except for Ben. He watched from the top of the ridge. As soon as he saw that I’d seen him, he turned and boarded away.

  I pushed my bike out of the park. My brain boiled with revenge fantasies. But a thought kept interrupting. I’d asked God for a sign that He’d heard my prayer. Instead, He’d given me a test. You really wanna go to high school? Prepare yourself. It’s a death march.

  6

  The Prayer Rug

  Before I went into the house, I took a sec to get ready for the grilling Mom was going to give me. I could see her through a front window, arranging things how she liked them. She was banging a nail into the wall. It was for one of our pictures. Most of them were of me, from little-kid ones to the one she took last spring when I graduated from ninth-grade homeschool. She calls it my “class photo,” though I don’t get how one person can be a “class.” A couple of pictures were from the few trips we’d taken that weren’t forced relocations, but real vacations.

  One was taken in San Antonio when we visited the Alamo and the hotel bar that Carry Nation smashed up during her fight against alcohol in 1900. The gouge where she buried her hatchet in the bar was still there. That was cool. We got our picture taken wearing period costumes. Mom dressed like Carry Nation holding a hatchet. I dressed like a newspaper boy in short pants. After the picture taking, we bought a Carry Nation hatchet for twenty bucks. It cost so much because it had TEMPERANCE carved in the handle and was a real hatchet. When we got home, Mom wired it to a board with our picture stuck under it. She always said that if the New J-Brigade ever needed an ax, we would use Carry Nation’s.

  I stepped onto the porch. I hoped she didn’t have plans to use the hatchet on the Mormon temple. But using it on Case and the R-boys would’ve been okay. I opened the screen door and went inside. Mom rushed over and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine.

  “Who did this?” she demanded.

  “I dunno, I didn’t get their names,” I told her.

  She went to the kitchen sink and yanked the faucet on. “We’ll find out who they are.”

  “They jumped me from behind; I didn’t get a good look at ’em.” I was surprised how easily the lie popped out. She came over with a wet dishcloth. I tried to move away. “Mom, I don’t wanna be wet anymore.” There was no stopping her.

  After giving my face a mud-ectomy, she told me to take my clothes off so she could soak them. I was way too old to strip down in front of her. Besides, I’d chalked up so many lies I wanted to give her a chance to even the score. “I’ll take ’em off in a sec. First I wanna know why we moved here.”

  Mom pushed her hair back and stared at me. “We need to pray.” She grabbed my hand and tried to pull me down to the throw rug that always marked where our living room was.

  I pulled away. “I’ll pray after you tell me why we’re here and how things are gonna be different.”

  She flashed me a look Carry Nation probably had sported before she’d swung her hatchet. “I told you yesterday, it’s a shining city on a hill with fine churches and God-fearing Christians.”

  “I’ve seen the place, Mom. The shiniest thing in town is a huge Mormon temple. Did you know about that?”

  “Yes, and I made sure it was on the other side of town.”

  “Are you planning to take on the Mormons?”

  “We do what the Lord tells us to do.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what He’s telling me to do.” I swallowed and went on. “He wants me to go to high school.”

  She took a step back like she’d been pushed by an invisible force. “That’s not God talking, that’s Satan.” She came at me, wagging a finger. “He won’t fasten his grip on you.”

  I darted away and gave her the speech I’d patched together on the way home. “Most kids stop homeschooling after junior high, and go to high school so they can witness and bring others to Christ. I checked out the school; it looks nice. I prayed in front of it. I asked God to send me there and make me like my father. You know, like you said he always preached. ‘Be a fisher of men: you catch ’em, let Jesus clean ’em.’ ”

  She pitched the dishrag in the sink. “You’ve had your say, now listen up. You will not go to a school filled with the wicked. Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”

  “How do you know they’
re unbelievers?”

  “Look what a bunch of them did to you!” she shouted.

  “They’re not unbelievers. They were in church this morning!”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You said you didn’t recognize them.”

  I flushed red—totally busted.

  She stepped close. Her voice went low and scolding. “You lie to me. You covet a school filled with sinners. You dishonor your mother and you dishonor God. Now I know why the Lord intervened and guided me to a decision.”

  I swallowed the dryness in my throat. “What decision?”

  “I picked up a brochure at church this morning, and while you were off getting in trouble I found a pay phone and made some calls. Before you resume your education in this house, you’re going to Bible camp.”

  “Bible camp!” I yelled so loudly spit flew out of me. “It’s almost August. It’s too late for that!”

  “It’s never too late,” she said with iron in her voice. “You’ve fallen away, Billy. Your heart needs to be put right in the eyes of God.”

  “My heart is right,” I pleaded. Then I told her how I’d do extra Bible study and go to church every day if she wanted.

  She wasn’t listening. Her eyes were all shiny with Spirit juice. When she gets that way a verse is bound to drop from heaven and land on her lips. Sure enough, one did. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” she recited. “Who can know it?”

  The answer is that only God can know what’s in your heart. I fought the urge to tell her she wasn’t the lord of my heart.

  She moved to the rug and knelt. “If you can’t see how defiant you’re being, I’ll pray for you alone.”

  When we argued like this it always felt like she was giving me two choices: get down and pray, or run away. When it happened—and it had been happening a lot more—the same two questions popped up. Where would I go? Who would I run to? The fact was, there was no one else.

  So I did what I always did. I invented a reason to obey. On that day, it was easy. Bending my knee and joining her was punishment for the lies I’d been heaping up all day.

  She clutched my hands and prayed for God to rescue our eyes from tears, our feet from stumbling. She prayed for me to get back to growing in Christ. She prayed for God to show us a sign that coming to Independence was His plan. And, when she felt that my prayer wasn’t as Spirit-filled as hers, she prayed for God to show me that kneeling to Jesus never works if you’re still standing up inside.

  That’s the thing about Mom. Sometimes she’s so right. My insides weren’t kneeling. They were back on my bike, wanting to race back to town and leap in that coffin, vacancy or not.

  7

  Stupid Neighbors

  Accepting Bible camp was easier after I got a look at the new neighbors. The house behind us had some ancient couple with closed curtains in all their windows. I sure hoped they’d stay closed. The house out my other window was full of good news–bad news. Good news: not a curtain in the place. Bad news: a few windows were broken. Good news: everyone who lived there was naked. Bad news: they were all bats.

  After a dinner of chicken-fried steak, macaroni ’n’ cheese, and peas, I took my chair out on the porch and put my feet up where the missing pillar should’ve been. I was armed with a plastic straw and the two paper napkins from dinner. At dusk, the bats started coming out of the house next door. They dove around the streetlight catching moths, mosquitoes, whatever flew. I tore off little pieces of napkin, balled them up, and shot them from the straw high in the air. A bat would dive for it thinking it was a juicy moth, then shoot upward when it realized it had been fooled. I shot dozens of paper bullets in the air. The bats fell for it every time.

  Stupid neighbors.

  When I ran out of paper, I watched the flicker of TVs in the other houses on the street. We didn’t have a TV. Having a TV and watching fun shows was one of the things I wanted to do in the future. Mom believed TV was a box filled with profane babblers eclipsing the light of Christ. She also said that when the Antichrist came during the End Times, TV was going to be his favorite tool to infiltrate the minds of the unsuspecting. When I thought about it her way, the TVs up and down the street looked less like flickering portals of fun and more like the glowing eyes of the Beast.

  Stupid neighbors.

  My mother brought her chair outside. I asked her something that had been bugging me. “Why did you unpack my suitcase when you knew I’d be going to Bible camp in a couple days?”

  “I didn’t want you thinking of this place as a motel,” she said. “I want you to remember it as home.”

  It was weird. She never called any place “home” until we’d been there a few weeks. I didn’t tell her I wouldn’t be spending any time at camp being homesick for the one-pillar doghouse. Especially with no neighbors with curves to covet.

  When I asked her about the Mormon temple again, things got wonkier. She quoted a verse I hadn’t heard before. “Never take your own revenge, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

  I asked her if that meant we were going to stop Whac-a-Moling and let God do the whacking from now on.

  “It’s not so black and white,” she answered. “There are followers of false prophets whose armies are so vast that God will deal with them Himself. But He still needs us to perform small missions. We’re His guerilla warriors.”

  I wasn’t convinced she’d taken the Mormons off her target list. But it was good to know she wasn’t planning some insane mission like scaling the Mormon’s hat-shaped steeple and sticking a couple of horns on it.

  Then she told me something that really tweaked my brain. “There are countless ways to reveal God’s glory,” she said. “But the most important is to raise you up as a child of promise, a man of the Good Book. You’re the brightest candle God gave me. It’s my duty to let it shine.”

  She’d never talked like this before. It made my insides feel sketchy. I didn’t want to be anyone’s candle. I just wanted to be Billy Allbright, champion mountain biker.

  She looked out into the darkness, staring at nothing, or a million things I couldn’t see. It was so still and quiet that when she stood up the scrape of her chair made me jump. She walked stiffly to the screen door, opened it, and turned back. “When I said things would be different here, Billy, I meant it.”

  “Does that mean I still have to go to Bible camp?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “But next summer, it’s your decision.”

  Later, I lay in bed and watched the bats under the streetlight. Remembering how they dove for the spitballs filled me with a weird wonderment. I was awed by their beautiful, darting flight, and by how dumb some of God’s creatures could be. Diving for spitballs, realizing they were nothing, swooping back up, then falling for it again and again. I wondered if the pleasure I got from watching such beauty and stupidity was the same pleasure God got from watching His human creations. Swooping and diving for worthless things, then soaring back up, only to fall for the same trick over and over.

  Stupid neighbors.

  8

  Everyday Miracle

  The sunlight filling the room surprised me. Mom usually got me up early for Bible meditation. I threw on some clothes. In the main room, there was a box of cereal on the table, along with a note saying milk was in the fridge and that she’d be back soon. I took a bowl of cereal out on the porch.

  I was on my third bowl when Mom pulled up in front of the house. She jumped out of the car and slid something out. She came around the car carrying a cardboard box. She practically skipped onto the porch. The box was filled with junk mail and magazines.

  She was good about having our mail forwarded to us when we moved. The only time she didn’t have it forwarded was if we left a town where we’d broken a law they might chase us for. So far, nobody had sent a posse to hunt us down.

  The only mail for me was usually from homeschool supply places or some ministry. One time, I
got a Victoria’s Secret catalog by mistake. Talk about make-you-dizzy “neighbors.” The underwear bunnies kept me entertained for weeks. Whenever I felt like they were luring me to hell, I told myself I was doing a Bible experiment to see what it had been like to be King Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines. The experiment ended when Mom found the catalog under my bed and took her wrath out on me and the mailman.

  Mom held the cardboard box like it was a Christmas present. “There’s something for you.” I peered into the box. “Dig down.”

  I fished around till my hand hit something big. I pulled a package out. It was heavy, wrapped in brown paper, and addressed to Charles William Allbright in squiggly writing. Whoever wrote it had a real wonky hand. “There’s no return address,” I said.

  Mom beamed. “There doesn’t have to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just open it.”

  I noticed a corner of the brown paper had been torn away. Something gold flickered inside. I had a hunch what it was; I suspected Mom knew for sure. I tore off the wrapping. It was a fancy Bible, bound in black leather, with gilt edges on the pages.

  Mom scooted into the chair next to me as I opened the cover. There was no note, no inscription, nothing showing who it was from. Fifty-dollar Bibles don’t show up in the mail every day. “I wonder who sent it.”

  “Who do you think? It’s from God, Billy. It’s a miracle.” She was almost laughing with joy. “It’s the sign we prayed for last night. The Lord’s telling us He wants us in Independence.”

  “Mom, if it’s from God, why’d He send it to Tulsa first?”

  “Doesn’t matter. The Book found us here. It’s where the water springs up that makes a well, not where you dig a dry hole. Our new home is going to be a wellspring of hope and joy.”

  I didn’t buy it. I mean, I believe in everyday miracles, like biking through a jungle tunnel, catching a black widow in your helmet, and not getting bitten. Or the miracle of making a friend who’s got a TV and an Xbox. Or the miracle of going rafting at Bible camp, getting pitched out of the boys’ boat, and being rescued by the girls’ boat. But I didn’t believe God had his miracles forwarded by the post office.