Riverine by Angela Palm Read Free Book Online Page B

heart?”
    “Yes.”
    “Will you live your life for Him and sing His praises?”
    The singing was the only thing I enjoyed about the church—that and the fact that it gave me something to do, another place that permitted me to leave the compound of our home. I loved school but found the work boring, always done with tests well before my classmates. Church was more fun than school—it offered music and stories. I could get behind the energy of their music if I closed my eyes. I could make myself believe any story they told me if it meant someone, even an invisible someone, would love me back. I knew this because singing to Jesus, a total stranger professing love to me and anyone else who would take it, made me cry.
    I wondered whether anyone ever said no, no. I cannot carry a tune, in fact. I will have to take a pass on the singing of praises; save that for so-and-so. I wished that my cousin Mandi were with me, but she was four towns away at another church because her parents were getting a divorce. And four towns in the country was something of a drive. Mandi would have made it all seem fun by drawing fancy hats on the Apostles in the workbook pages that followed the saving of souls.
    At home, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was on Satan surveillance. The Baptists warned me that this lower-case “he” would uppercase “Get Inside” any way he could. Their fear followed me home. I breathed through my nose sparingly and squeezed my legs together at the crotch, plugging up all the openings I could think of as often as I could remember. Can he shape-change and slither up into my heart through my vagina? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t trust him.
    I opened one of the Playboy issues in our bathroom. Across a two-page spread, a man bent a woman over the hood of a red Corvette. The woman had platinum blond hair and wore a bandanna around her neck. She looked slightly frightened and slightly excited, as if it wasn’t what she wanted exactly but she was beginning to enjoy it anyway. The man had a small Afro and a huge, erect penis that was aimed at the woman’s rear end. This was how I imagined the devil would take me.
    I stayed on guard all day and later that night. I looked for Satan in my fingertips and in my underwear, I looked for him in the grocery store, I looked for him in my closet while the others slept. I knew that he could make an offer on my soul at any moment. There was one thing I would trade it for: Corey to love me back.
    That following night, Corey babysat me and my brother. I did not understand how, although I could bleed and bear children, I could not be left unattended while my parents went to a party. The three of us played truth or dare. We ate ketchup and peanut butter sandwiches and mouthfuls of toothpaste to prove we weren’t chicken. We admitted our fears and confessed our lies. It was me who left Marcus’s bike in the rain. Corey was afraid of spiders. Marcus had broken our walkie-talkies. Later, Marcus and I pretended to have gone to bed, but we were still playing the game. My next dare was to kiss Corey. I crept down the hallway and into the living room, where he sat on the floor in front of the fireplace. His legs were bent, one arm wrapped around them, the other holding the fire poker. He didn’t look up, though he must have heard me. I leaned in quick, my white nightgown swishing around my legs, and pecked him gently on the jaw. He reached forward and stirred the fire. It crackled and hissed. I ran away and climbed into bed, jittery, tearful, and feeling completely invisible.
    I hid my own soul deep down in my spine to keep it from the Devil. If Corey didn’t want it, Satan couldn’t have it. I folded my hands in prayer. I was passed over, blood safe. Saved. I would go to a chocolate heaven. I waited for a vague notion of death that would take me there and fell asleep obsessing about my own funeral. Who would come? What would they wear? Would anyone cry? Would Corey?
    Covenants,