way to work off all that sexual frustration.”
“Don’t swear, Mel,” I scolded, but the warning sounded hollow and hypocritical, even to my own ears. We both knew better than to curse in public, but there was no one at home to hear or report us. “Profanity is a sin.”
Melanie rolled her eyes. “Everything worth doing is a sin.”
“I know.” And honestly, it was kind of hard for me to worry about the state of my immortal soul when my mortal body’s need for food and shelter was so much more urgent.
I plucked the two slim silver rings from the top of our dresser and tossed her one. Melanie groaned again, then slid her purity ring onto the third finger of her right hand while I did the same. “Nina Kane” was scratched into mine because I’d “misplaced” it four times during the first semester of my freshman year and Sister Hope had engraved my name on the inside to ensure that it would be easily returned to me.
Ours weren’t real silver, and they certainly weren’t inlaid, like Sarah Turner’s purity ring. Ours were stainless steel, plucked from the impulse-buy display at the Grab-n-Go one afternoon when I was fourteen, while Melanie distracted the clerk by dropping a half-gallon of milk in aisle one.
Fortunately, the sisters didn’t care where the rings came from or what they’d cost, so long as we wore them faithfully beginning in the ninth grade as a symbol of our vow to preserve our innocence and virtue until the day we either gave ourselves to a worthy husband or committed to celibate service within the Church.
I knew girls who took that promise very seriously.
I also knew girls who lied through their teeth.
I didn’t know a single boy who’d ever worn a purity ring. Evidently, their virginity was worth even less than the stolen band of steel around my finger.
I grabbed my satchel on my way out of the room, and our conversation automatically paused as we passed our mother’s door. In the kitchen, I pulled the last half of the last loaf of bread from an otherwise empty cabinet, and Melanie frowned with one hand on the pantry door, staring at the calendar I’d tacked up to keep track of my erratic work schedule—I worked whenever the nursery needed me. “What’s today?”
“Thursday.”
“Thursday the fourth?” Her frown deepened, and I had to push her aside to grab a half-empty jar of peanut butter from the nearly bare pantry. “It can’t be the fourth already.”
“It is, unless four no longer follows three. Why?” I glanced at the calendar and saw the problem. “History test?”
“What?” Melanie sank into a rickety chair at the scratched table. “Oh. Yeah.”
“You didn’t study?” I set a napkin and the jar of peanut butter in front of her, then added a butter knife and one of the two slices of toast as they popped up from the toaster.
She shrugged. “It’s just a fill-in-the-blank on the four stages of the Holy Reformation.” But the way she spread peanut butter on her bread, her gaze only half focused, said she was worried.
“And those stages would be …?”
Melanie sighed. “The widespread decline of common morals, the subsequent onslaught of demonic forces, the glorious triumph of the Church over the worldwide spiritual threat, and the eventual unification of the people under a single divine ministry.” She was quoting the textbook almost verbatim.
“Good. Come on.” I took the knife from her and made my own breakfast, then tossed Melanie a modest navy sweater and herded her out the back door, where the town perimeter wall was easily visible between the small houses that backed up to ours. The wall was solid steel plating fifteen feet tall, topped with large loops of razor wire. In the middle of the night, I heard the metal groan with every strong gust of wind. I saw the glint of sun on razor wire in my dreams.
But clouds had rolled in since my predawn activities, and the sky was now gray with them.
“December eighth, 2034,” I said around a mouthful of peanut butter and bread as we rounded the house and stepped over the broken cinder block hiding the emergency cash I kept wrapped in a plastic bag. If Mom knew we had money, she’d spend it on something less important than heat and power, two resources I greatly valued.
“Um … the first televised possession, caught on film at a holiday parade, before the Church abolished public television to support and protect the moral growth of the people.” Melanie shoved one arm into her sweater sleeve, then transferred her toast to the other hand and pulled the other half of her cardigan on over her satchel strap. “So, how dangerous could secular programming have been, anyway? It’s just a bunch of videos, like the discs in Mr. Yung’s basement, right? Stories being acted out, like we used to do when we were kids?”
“I guess.” But according to the Church, those videos tempted people to sin.
Mr. Yung had an old TV and a disc player that still worked. I’d seen one of his videos once, but the disc was badly damaged, so I only caught glimpses of couples swaying in sync with one another, dressed in snug clothes. At the time, I’d been scandalized by the sight of boys and girls in open physical contact with one another—those would be secret shames in our postwar world. But the adults in the video didn’t seem to care, and no one was driven to wanton displays of flesh or desire, that I could see.
There was no sound on the video, though, so I couldn’t hear what kind of music they’d had or what they were saying.
Maybe the sin and temptation were more obvious in the parts I couldn’t hear.
We turned left on the cracked sidewalk in front of our house, and I eyed the dark clouds in the sky, struggling to bring my thoughts back on task. “September twenty-ninth, 2036.”
Melanie held her toast by one corner. She still hadn’t taken a bite. “The first verified exorcism. Established worldwide credibility for the Unified Church, whose exorcist—the great Katherine Abbot—performed the procedure in front of a televised audience of millions.”
“Good. June—”
“Did you know that wasn’t even her real name? “Melanie said suddenly.
“What wasn’t whose name?” We turned left again and followed the railroad tracks between the backyards of the houses a block over from ours. The train hadn’t run since long before I was born, but little grass grew between the rails, which made it an easy shortcut on the days we were running late. Which was most days, thanks to my sister.
“Katherine Abbot. Her name wasn’t really Katherine. The Church renamed her because they thought her real name didn’t sound serious enough, or holy enough, or something like that.”
“So what was her real name?”
Melanie shrugged, and her uneaten toast flopped in her hand. “I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know it wasn’t Katherine?”
“Adam told me.”
“Adam, who needs your help to add double digit numbers?” I said as we cut through the easement between two yards and back onto the street.
“He’s bad at math, not history. His dad says the Church does it all the time—changes facts. Mr. Yung says history is written by the victor, and if the elderly don’t pass down their memories, eventually there won’t be anyone else left alive who knows how the war was really fought.”
I stopped cold on the sidewalk and grabbed her arm, holding so tight she flinched, but I couldn’t let go. Not until she understood. “Melanie, that’s heresy,” I hissed, glancing around at the houses on both sides of the road. Fortunately, the street was deserted. “If Adam Yung and his father want to risk their immortal souls”—or more accurately, their mortal lives—”by questioning the Church, that’s their business. But you stay out of it.”
Skepticism