needs us to urgently plan a bake sale, and I get put in charge of making six different kinds of pie.
We met in our living room—we always meet at my house when Aunt Mandy doesn’t want to bother opening up the church—only to discover that the real reason she wanted us to meet was to plan a pep rally for the first day of school. Not for a sports team, though. No, no, she wants us to hold a pep rally about gay rights. Except she called it a pep rally about “militant homosexuality,” and she tried to act as if it was all our idea.
“It’s important that we hear from you young people,” she said, after she passed around the same bowl of stale popcorn we have at every youth group meeting, “in a public demonstration of your support for the sanctity of the Christian family. Particularly now, when that man is threatening to take over the government up in San Francisco. You’re the ones most affected by the threat these deviants pose, and it’s important to show the world where you stand. Channel 7 already said they’ll cover it.”
Typical Aunt Mandy. My stomach started shrinking as soon as she started talking about you, Harvey, and all the other “deviants,” and it only got worse when she mentioned the TV station. Obviously, Aunt Mandy would call her friends in the press about the youth group’s event before she said anything to us youth.
Channel 7 is her new favorite, ever since that radio reporter went on the air and called our church “a minor player in Anita Bryant’s army.” My aunt doesn’t take being called “minor” sitting down—she called in a favor and got him fired a week later.
It’s so obvious this is all a vanity project for her. How am I the only one who sees it?
My mother, who was sitting next to her on the couch tonight, kept bobbing her head approvingly, as though every word Aunt Mandy said came straight from the Bible itself. Mom’s her big sister, but she does whatever Aunt Mandy tells her, as if she has no mind of her own.
Have I told you the story of how she started our school, Harvey? I researched it all for a project during the big celebration for New Way Christian’s tenth anniversary. I found a ton of stories about it in old newspapers, so I guess the adults around here must remember how it happened, but no one talks about it now.
It started when my aunt had only just graduated from the local public high school herself. She and my uncle got married that summer, and soon afterward she organized a church committee to protest the school district she’d gone to for its “progressive” methods, like teaching evolution and sex ed. She talked to the newspaper about how a couple members of the school board belonged to the ACLU, and her committee ran an ad campaign that kept them from getting reelected. Apparently that wasn’t enough for her, though, because two years later, she opened her very own private school right next to the brand-new New Way Baptist Church, of which her husband just happened to be the pastor. The school and the church both just happened to be funded by generous donors from Aunt Mandy’s committee, with help from the Ocean View Development Company, whose newest junior partner just happened to be Aunt Mandy’s brother-in-law.
(He also just happens to be my father. There’s always been a whole lot of incestuousness with money around here.)
The first student to enroll at New Way Christian School was my oldest sister, Laura. She was in first grade then. Aunt Mandy’s committee never stopped working, though. Now my mom’s the committee chair, so her whole life is spent at my aunt’s beck and call.
I swear, Harvey, my mother used to think for herself. She was even kind of fun, once upon a time. With so many kids in our family, she used to schedule “special days” with each of us where we could go out with just her. On mine, we always went horseback riding on the trail near the golf course. We’d talk for hours out under the trees. It never occurred to me back then that things would ever be different.
God,