and I faked a smile because I didn’t wanna be a bummer for her sake. I wished she could have driven home with us, but she had to take the team bus. If Jinny started up again about abortion and baby killers, at least Bee would’ve stood up to her in her own unconfrontational way.
I really felt sick on the way home. Turns out that I was on the first day of a really bad flu.
Jinny was slick, calling to me in the backseat, “I think I owe you an apology, Rory. I didn’t know you were an anti-Life person. Just never occurred to me. Guess I should have known.”
Was that an apology? Fuck. “What would Jesus do? Right, guys?” I said. “Right, Zee?”
Jinny smiled, but I could see in the rearview mirror all the microaggressions on her face. “Christ would weep, Rory. God wants us to save the babies.”
I wanted to ask Jinny if she heard God talking to her through the white noise of her bedroom fan or if He was, like, riding the rotating blades, and didn’t that make them both super-dizzy. Instead, I said, “Those women just looked really scared. What if they were raped? What if it was incest? Anyway, it’s not for us to judge. Judge not lest ye be judged? Remember, Jesus said that.”
“He did,” Dee agreed.
“Jesus said a lot of things,” Jinny said.
“I don’t feel well,” I said. “I think I might be getting the flu.”
“Me either,” Fee said. I don’t know if she was trying to have my back or also felt carsick. “Can we turn up the air-conditioning back here?”
“Fever in the body opens a door for the devil,” Jinny said.
“You’re already a heathen, Rory, so watch out,” Zee said, mostly joking, I think.
Jinny knew I was sick. So of course she goes, “Let’s stop for fro-yo before we go home.”
The drive took forever. I watched the world pass by from the window of the Tahoe, wondering about the people in the cars all around us. I spend a lot of time wondering about people—the voyeur thing again. I really wanted to know why the old couple in the Audi beside us were arguing, and who the bald guy in the Beemer was yelling at in his speakerphone, and if the kid crying in the backseat of the Honda knew his parents were assholes for not putting him in a car seat. You never have to wonder who the Crusaders are. They wear Bible verse T-shirts and put Jesus fish and sword decals on their bumpers and windows. So many of those decals around now, and more as we approached our Calabasas bubble.
On the outside patio at the fro-yo place, as the girls licked Oreo crumbs and frozen oil product off plastic spoons, I sat sweaty, shivering and silent. Jinny wouldn’t give it up. “What we did before the track meet, Rory? That was God’s will. You have to fight for right. You get that? Like, God is waiting for you to come back to Him. And all the stuff you’re saying now and doing now against His will? He’ll forgive.”
“Okay.”
Jinny put her spoon down and said we should all pray that I’d see the light sooner rather than later. Zara looked at me, kinda apologetic, then joined hands with Jinny as she whispered, “Please God, help our sister feel the power of Your spirit. Please lift the curtain on the darkness in her soul.”
Fee and Delaney kept spooning yogurt into their mouths so they didn’t have to take part in praying for my soul.
“I don’t need prayers,” I said. “I just really need to go home.”
Jinny pretended she didn’t hear. “My mother’s best friend was a heathen, you know, Rory. When she was young. Like, she wasn’t raised with God, and she’s the best Crusader I know. There’s hope for you. I’ll never stop praying for you.”
“Okay.”
Zee asked, “So how did she find God? Was it through your mom and dad?”
That’s when Jinny told this story about the best friend of her mysterious mother—who has been working at some mysterious job overseas since they moved to Hidden Oaks. Jinny said that when her mother’s friend got out of college, she took the first job she could get, as a receptionist at an abortion clinic in Chicago—“back when killing babies was legal.”
According to Jinny, one night the woman got home from work then realized she’d forgotten her phone, so she drove all the way back to the clinic to get