Mara kicked my ankle under the table and whispered, “Thanks for the birthday present, Mom and Dad.”


“Sorry. Thanks for the game,” I told my parents with as much enthusiasm as I could conjure. “I’m sure I’ll play it . . . a lot.” I placed MLB 2K on top of Tribulation Squad 6. Just seeing the baseball game made me giddy all over again. I tapped my finger on it and grinned at Kane. “Awe-sooooome!”


He beamed back at me, then glanced at my parents. His smile faded. They looked like two sharks circling a fish.


My mother cleared her throat. “Kane, for David’s sake, we weren’t going to use this happy occasion to address your spiritual affliction—”


My stomach dropped. “Whoa, what?”


“But you’re like a son to us,” she continued, “and we want you to know that you have our full support.” Eyes glistening, she folded her hands and pressed them to her heart. “We’re praying so hard for you.”


Kane stared at her, then glanced at my dad, then me, before returning his eyes to hers. “Thanks?”


“I have some pamphlets here in my purse. They might help you in your journey back toward Christ.” She reached into her bag, then whipped out a stack of folded papers. Clearly they’d been stored in a special pocket for easy deployment.


“I’m—I’m okay, really. Thanks, though.” His voice was steady, but the tips of his ears were turning red.


“Kane’s getting confirmed next month, Mom, remember?” I made a shooing motion toward the pamphlets she was still holding out across the table. “By the bishop, no less.”


“Does the bishop know that our friend here is a deviant?”


“Mom!” Mara said. “How could you?”


My mouth was frozen open. I’d prepared myself for arguments, but I wasn’t prepared for name-calling.


Kane let out a deep breath and folded his hands on the table. “Mrs. Cooper, the bishop isn’t aware of my orientation. But Reverend Llewellyn is, and he’s fine with it. Everyone is welcome at St. Mark’s.” He swept his gaze over all of us. “Including you guys, whenever you’re ready to come back. I hope to see you there soon.”


Whoa, masterful turning of the other cheek. I wanted to applaud.


And then my father weighed in.


“You shall not lie with a man, as with a woman. That is an abomination.” Dad recited Leviticus 18:22 in a low, authoritative murmur. My face burned, and I wished that the Rapture or Armageddon or at least a 6.5 level earthquake would happen right then.


But for this sort of attack, at least, I was prepared. “I have a thought about that passage. The eighteenth chapter of Leviticus is telling the Israelites not to live the way the Canaanites did. It lists all the Canaanite religious practices, right?”


My father nodded and smiled, proud of my scholarship, I guess.


“Well, isn’t that because Canaan was their archenemy?” I hold up a hand before my parents can interrupt. “It’s like, if we were having a religious war with Canada, our leaders would tell us not to play hockey. Lots of Americans like hockey, and there’s nothing inherently evil about it—although I think the fights are getting really out of hand—but it’s such a Canadian activity, if you wanted to de-Canada-ize the US, the first thing you’d get rid of is hockey.”


“The land was defiled,” Dad said. “Therefore I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out her inhabitants.”


From the corner of my eye, I saw Kane clutch his empty water glass. “But that’s my point,” I said. “Was Canaan evil because they did those things, or were those things evil because they were done by Canaanites? If it’s the second, then the ban on homosexuality only applies to that time and place, not to our society.”


My dad shook his head vigorously. “For in all these the nations which I am casting out before you were defiled.”


“What your father’s trying to say is that the Lord condemns everything Canaan did, from child sacrifice to incest to—” Mom looked at Kane, then glanced away quickly.


I forced my mind back to my argument before the rage could swamp me. “Listen, I’ve done the research. Back when Leviticus was written, if an army won a battle, it would take its enemy’s soldiers and—” I could barely get it out. “They would be raped.”


“Ugh,” Mara said. “There goes my appetite.”


I ignored her, keeping my focus on Mom and Dad. “I’m sure it’ll miraculously come back when your fried cheesecake gets here.” I turned back to my parents. “Anyway, when the people who wrote the Bible said, ‘don’t lie with a man the way you would with a woman,’ they meant ‘don’t insult him.’ Women were barely above slaves status-wise, so to treat a guy like you’d treat a girl would be like making them low.” I looked at my red-faced sister, then my father. “You can’t sell Mara into slavery anymore. That’s a good thing, right? Which means that loving a guy the way you’d love a girl also isn’t an insult anymore. Is it?”


I challenged my parents with my eyes, daring them to say in front of Mara that women weren’t as good as men. They weren’t that far gone from the modern world. I hoped.


Mom gave her coffee a hostile slurp. My father kept a stony silence. Maybe by digging deeper into the Bible, I had literally stolen his words.


It had happened accidentally. Last year, I’d fallen behind in Bible-study class, so I’d looked up the lessons’ Scripture passages on Wikipedia. The entry not only summed up stories for easy memorizing, it also put them in historical context.


That’s when I got curious and started doing real research in books and articles. For the first time, I saw the Bible as a human creation. Rather than making Scripture seem like BS, this discovery made it even more fascinating. Because what people are trying to say is even more interesting than what they actually say.


Finally Mom slammed down her mug. “The Bible is not some dusty old history book.” She bit out each syllable with curled lips, like they tasted bad. “It is the living Word, which means every word in it applies to us today.”


“Every word?” I wanted to add, Except the words Sophia Visser told you to ignore. But Kane didn’t know my parents were Rushers, and I wanted to keep that secret in the family as long as I could.


The silence was shattered by sharp, rhythmic clapping, accompanied by staccato shouts. The noise was headed my way.


Our waitress led the birthday procession, her hand guarding the top of a tall sundae glass. A candle flame reflected in her eyes as she focused on keeping it alight.


The best thing about the IHOP signature birthday song is its brevity. Amid fading applause, I thanked the waitress as she set a giant fudge sundae in front of me. Mara and Kane blanched as they received the desserts they’d ordered. I couldn’t blame them for losing their appetites, but no way would I skip my birthday sundae.


“We have drunken our water for money,” my father said to the waitress.


She blinked at him. “I’m sorry?” When he held up his credit card, comprehension and relief washed over her face. “Oh, of course!” She opened her billfold and selected one of the white sheets inside. “Here you are, sir. You can pay at the counter whenever you’re finished.” The waitress turned away, instantly dropping her pasted-on smile.


I stared at the candle in my sundae, deciding what I should wish for when I blew it out. A hundred desires and goals warred for supremacy in my head: that my father would talk normally and find a job; that Kane would forget about Nate Powers and start crushing on a guy who felt the same way about him; that I’d get to kiss Bailey a million times; that I’d finally master the knuckle curveball.


All these things I’d prayed for on a regular basis. But birthdays came once a year. This wish had to be huge and audacious, bordering on the impossible.


I closed my eyes and blew out the candle. I wish Mom and Dad could be happy again.In the car on the way home from dinner, Kane texted me from the other side of the backseat: Thx for what you said. LOL @ hockey argument.

I grinned at him over Mara’s head before replying. I came up with that myself.


Kane: I didn’t know abt soldier-raping stuff & treating men like women.


Me: Then how did Rev Llewellyn explain gay = OK?


Kane: He basically said, don’t worry abt it. Most imp thing is love.


Me: He’s a good Xian, haha.


Kane: So are you. But you’re a sucky fundamentalist.One morning in mid-October, I went out before sunrise for my run, since I had a heavy load of schoolwork ahead of me.

I liked some aspects of being out before the world woke up, like not having to dodge cars backing out of driveways. But the silence unnerved me. Too long without sounds and my thoughts tended to run in dysfunctional loops.

So music accompanied each step, keeping me going when my body begged me to stop. It helped me dig deep and remember the Joe DiMaggio quote hanging in my room: “You ought to run the hardest when you feel the worst.”

That dawn was one of those increasingly common times when I felt like I was born inside my skin, rather than feeling like I was meeting my body for the first time. Most days over the last few years I’d looked in the mirror, or heard my voice, or felt a brand-new pain or pleasure, and wondered, Who is this stranger I share a skeleton with? But lately, I’d grown familiar to myself.

I slowed to a walk as I reentered my scarecrow-and-pumpkin-bedecked neighborhood, rolling my shoulders in slow circles to ease the tension that always built up during a run. When I lifted my chin to help stretch my pecs, I saw our silver minivan in the driveway. Dad was packing it. He tossed in a sleeping bag, then returned to the garage without looking my way.

Though my legs protested, I quickened to a jog so I could peek inside before he came back.


In the backseat lay a blue fishing pole and a bag we used to call Sack o’ Tent. I could see its signature bulge in the canvas where one of the poles was misshapen. On our last camping trip, five years ago, I chased Mara with what she thought was a snake (actually a piece of bicycle tire). She’d tripped into the side of the tent, bending the pole.


In the far rear compartment, a boxy object lay under a dark-green tarp, but before I could climb inside the van to see what it was, Dad came out of the garage lugging his fishing tackle. I took out my earbuds, as well as the cotton I used to keep my ears from aching in the cold air.


“Going fishing?” A stupid question, but unlike Mara I still talked to my father, despite my growing dread of his scriptural responses. I figured one day, if I kept trying, the old Dad would come back. Maybe I could save him from floating away into his own head.


He gave me a warm smile, raising my hopes. “He said to them, ‘Come after me, and I will make you fishers for men.’”


So much for hope. “Fishing with who?”


“My brothers, beloved and longed for, my joy and crown.”


I doubted he meant his literal brother—he hadn’t seen his siblings since John’s funeral three and a half years ago. We exchanged Christmas and birthday cards, and that was about it.


“Someone from Sophia’s group?” I asked him.


He nodded and smiled as he set the tackle box in the back of the minivan.


“When are you coming home?” Geez, it sounded like I was the dad and he was the son.


He opened the driver side door. “No one was able to answer him a word, neither did any man dare ask him any more questions from that day forward.”


Ouch. Shut down. “Well, have fun.”


Inside, Mom was gulping coffee and making her usual hurried breakfast of peanut butter sandwiched between two granola bars. “Hi, honey. How was your run?”


“Fine.” My nose was running from the cold air, but I didn’t want to wipe it on my sleeve in front of Mom. “What’s the deal with Dad?”


“Fishing trip in the mountains.”


We’d never fished this late in the year when I was a kid. It was probably deer season now, but my father hated guns almost as much as I did. “When’s he coming back?” I asked her, scanning the counter for tissues.