Page 49 of Possibly Texas

“All of us—humans—we’re not all that great.” Auggie turned to me with a smile. “But if we really try. If we’d just pause. We can be loving, caring, kind people. Take a second to consider how you’re behaving—give yourself a moment to take a breath—and you’ll realize you don’t want to be the person you’re being. That’s all it is.”

“Oh, yeah?” I scoffed.

“The woman in the grass in the toga?” Auggie ignored my tone. “No one forces her to be there. She’s kind of like our preacher or pastor. She’s also an artist. She enjoys representing God.”

“So,” I snorted, “God is a woman?”

“Why not?” Auggie shrugged. “God is all things. Some of those things are female. Why can’t God be female? Also, we can’t really expect God to come to The Pueblo each Sunday. They have better work to do.”

“This town is—” I stopped myself.

Auggie didn’t jump in to remind me that I shouldn’t say what I was going to say.

“We’re different,” Auggie said. “No one is going to make you go back to church at The Pueblo. No one will think differently of you one way or the other. But that is our way of having church. We’ll all still love you and accept you here even if you decide it’s too weird for you.”

“Why?” I muttered. “Don’t want to lose a cult member?”

Auggie laughed. “You know we’re not a cult.”

“No.” I sighed and plucked a piece of grass. “I just—it was—it bothered me.”

“Why?”

“Really?” I snorted, though I still avoided his eyes. “Seeing somebody attacked like that? Screamed at? That’s not right, Auggie, it’s—”

My eyes finally connected with his. Auggie was just staring at me, waiting for me to finish the realization I’d come to on my own.

“—it’s not what God would want.”

He produced a gentle smile.

“And you never have to participate if you don’t want to,” he said.

“Why do you?” I demanded, though I tried to keep my voice calm.

“I don’t,” he said. “Not always. Actually, a lot of us don’t throw the fruit at her on other days.”

“Why today?”

“Today I—a lot of us—needed to be reminded what it feels like to be cruel,” Auggie said. “So that we remember it for a very long time.”

“Can’t you just—crap, I don’t know—remember without doing it?” I grumbled, prying more grass out of the ground.

“Sure.” He shrugged. “I guess? But since it’s safe to explore our feelings at The Pueblo—and no one really gets hurt—sometimes it helps to throw the fruit.”

A deep sigh escaped my throat as I considered everything Auggie had told me. Did I feel differently about my friend now that I’d seen him scream and throw rotten fruit at a helpless woman who was supposed to be playing God? The snarl of his lip and the anger in his eyes as he stood next to me, grabbing fruit maniacally and throwing it at the woman in a toga flashed through my mind. But the aftermath—the sorrow in his eyes at what he’d done—the urgency with which he hugged her quickly after, washed away the first memory.

“I guess I get it,” I relented. “I wish you had told me first.”

“Well,” Auggie answered, guilt riding his tone, “it doesn’t have quite the same impact if people know about it first. If people know that it’s going to happen and what it means to other people, they tend to not take it seriously. It doesn’t make them think.”

“Yeah. I guess I understand that, too,” I said. “It just…it was violent and scary and…I felt a little betrayed. Like, why wouldn’t you warn me?”

Auggie stared at me.

“I know we’re not, like, friends yet.” I shrugged, heat rising in my cheeks. “But it kind of hurt that you didn’t warn me first.”

“Another lesson, then.”