responsibilities and lives that bore no resemblance whatsoever to my own.
In truth, school itself became an escape for me—an escape from Mom and the frequent eruptions of her caustic temper. This was a fact that I acknowledged to myself uneasily, with a deep awareness of how foolish, how melodramatic I was being. I had a good life, I was always told. The best life, one filled with people who loved God and hated evil and would teach me the truth about the world, unlike my misfortunate classmates. Still, I couldn’t deny the relief I felt when we’d finally pile into the van at the end of the often-nightmarish period between waking and school. It was nearly impossible to get through those two hours without a meltdown of some kind, without at least one of us at the other end of Mom’s razor tongue or even the big paddle—a three-foot-long, one-and-a-half-inch dowel rod she’d started using on me in second grade, when I’d spent fifteen seconds admiring a cousin’s gingerbread house after school instead of coming straight to the van (my delay forced her to hold up traffic on the narrow street in front of the school). The expectation of total obedience may have been the same in every Westboro family, but no one exacted it as vigorously, tenaciously, or continuously as my mother. I harbored few desires stronger than the one for her approval, but her standards seemed always to be shifting, tightening like a noose until I felt choked with the futility of my own rage.
I wasn’t the only one. Just sixteen months apart, little Bekah and I were sworn enemies all through grade school, engaging in sisterly combat at every opportunity. On one particularly explosive morning when I was eight or nine, she and I got two beatings each—for fighting, and for insufficient progress on our piano lessons—and they were bad. They were the sort that left big red welts, the kind that would bloom into bruises of blue and purple and black and finally yellow as I examined them before my bath each night. The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil. Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying. After the beatings that morning, I was the first to make my way to the van for school, relieved to be getting out of the house and away from the immediate danger, but my sister was furious. Bekah was a matchstick of a girl, yet what she lacked in size she made up for in the force of her temper—and that day it was directed at our mom.
When Bekah slammed the van door behind her, waiting for Mom to climb in and take us to school, her pixie face was a bright red splotch. She clenched her jaw, teeth grinding, and erupted: “I’m going to tell my teacher about this! FUCK. HER!” She let out a wild, wordless scream with all the rage her runty self could muster. Mom came out the door and down the steps a moment later.
I wanted Bekah to tell. I was petrified Bekah would tell. I envisioned a black and white police car pulling up to our driveway to take us away from Mom and Dad, and my heart surged, clutching for them. No one made hot chocolate like Mom, who was always standing over the stove singing and stirring a pot full of it when we came back from sledding the big hill at Quinton Heights. And no one could do bedtime like Dad, pretending to be a helicopter as he cradled us in his arms, vroom-vrooming us one at a time from the living room, up the stairs, around the big banister, and down the hall to our rooms for bedtime stories that always ended in tickle fests.
And then I imagined the cops themselves in our driveway—the same cops we serenaded with accusations of “corpulent coward!,” the same cops who let those big oafs punch and choke us on the picket line. I knew what I had to do. We only made it a few blocks on the way to school before I told Mom of Bekah’s threat, even though I was terrified of what Mom would do to her for it.
“DO YOU REALLY THINK THE LORD IS GOING TO LET YOU SABOTAGE US?”
My face flushed hot and I felt sick as I watched the van pull away from the school with Bekah still in it. I wouldn’t have wished Mom’s unbridled