Page 2

But those aren’t our standards, especially not when I’m bursting out of this thing in all the places that matter.

There’s quiet sympathy in my mother’s eyes as she walks into my room, though she’ll never admit it aloud.

“Are you sure we have to go?” I ask.

“Your father is a light that must shine brightly enough for everyone to follow,” she says gently. “And we’re a part of that light.”

Except that wasn’t really what I was asking.

I’ve spent all of my nearly eighteen years within Bright Covenant’s safe embrace, attending a single gender school where everyone followed rules that would seem rigid to outsiders. Why must my first exposure to the normal world, to my first coed school, be at a pool party, of all things?

I guess I knew the question would get me nowhere. Questions usually do.

“Can you see my birthmark?” I ask, turning away from her. The birthmark on the back of my neck is small and usually covered by my ponytail, but I feel it like a brand. My grandmother used to tell me it was Satan’s thumbprint. It means you’ll need to be more careful than others not to fall into dark ways, she said. And she was right. I don’t always want or feel the things I should, though I wish I did. I’m trying so hard to obey. I’m trying so hard not to resent my father for making us move. If I work on it enough, I wind up feeling nothing at all, however.

That scares me too.

My mother smiles. “You worry too much. It’s tiny.” She places her hands on my shoulders and smiles at our shared reflection—so similar, and yet so different. “You’re the spitting image of me at your age.”

My mother is indisputably lovely, fine-boned and full-lipped as a movie star. Strangers gawk when she passes. They always have. Once, at Wal-Mart—one of the very few places we went outside the boundaries of New Hope—a man followed us into the parking lot, then home, and left an indecent note on our van’s window for her.

I can see some of her in my own face, and we have the same coloring—long dark hair, bright blue eyes, quick to blush— but there’s an awkwardness to me that I doubt she ever had. Things like that indecent note and the gawking she gets make me glad of it.

“Come on,” she says, turning to go downstairs. When we arrive, my younger sisters are chasing each other around the room, too excited to stay still. They’re eager for this new experience, probably because they’re too young to understand the situation.

“Shall we say a quick prayer?” asks my father. It isn’t really a question. Dutifully we all bow our heads and join hands.

“Thank you, Lord, for bringing us to Penhallow and for trusting us to heal the people here,” he begins. He says this every night before dinner, and I know he means it, but I’m not sure how. The school year hasn’t even begun and someone’s already vandalized our house and tried to get him fired.

I’ll never see it as a privilege to be here, to be chosen for this.

“As we begin this journey,” my father continues, “please watch over us. Keep our daughters true to the values we’ve raised them with, and grateful for all the good fortune you’ve bestowed upon them. Please help their mother and I to shine brighter than the stars, that they might find their way if lost, and that they may shine just as brightly to the people they encounter in their new home.”

My mother smiles as she says amen, but the words leave me listless and empty. I have so much. So why do I feel so little? Why can’t I appreciate it all the way I should?

On the way to the car, I add a silent prayer of my own: God, please help me become grateful. I want to feel it.

I want to feel something, anything, at all.

The party is held at a public pool, though half the kids who attend Penhallow are well-off enough to have pools of their own. My father was one of the most powerful members of Bright Covenant, the superintendent of the community schools, but we lived as modestly as everyone else. As he pulls our beaten-up van into a parking lot full of German imports, it strikes me once more: everything is about to change, and not for the better.

“Smile,” my mother says as she climbs from the van, giving my hand a quick squeeze. “You’ll make friends in Penhallow too, I promise.”

I know, logically, that she’s right. Surely everyone here can’t be as bad as Ford James, the boy who vandalized our home. But Penhallow Prep families were furious when management of the school was turned over to Bright Covenant and have been trying to get my father fired ever since. The four of us—me and my mom and my sisters—would have remained behind in New Hope, where I’ve lived all my life, if the transition had gone the way it was supposed to when my father arrived at the end of the previous school year.

Faith runs ahead, pushing the gate open before she glances back to make sure it’s okay. My mom smiles at her enthusiasm, and Faith takes off, too young to worry about the situation at hand—not that she’d worry anyway. She’s the miracle baby, the one who arrived after my mother had given up her dream of a third child. Faith will always believe she’s welcome wherever she goes because she always has been.

Hope and I move more slowly and come to a halt when we reach the gate, faced with the sudden, shocking unfamiliarity of it all: girls my age who look like reality TV stars, with lots of makeup and almost no clothes, dancing poolside in a manner that would never have been allowed in my community. And the boys...look like men. They’re tall and tan and broad and in need of razors. Maybe there are regular people here too, but for a moment, I can’t seem to see them. The pool and grass surrounding it are the only normal things about this.

Heads turn as we walk through the gate and people begin talking to each other, covering their mouths with their hands. My mother draws still for a moment, the only way she betrays her surprise, before she tells us to go meet the other kids, as if it’s going to be that easy.

A long table in the back is spread with food that no one seems interested in. I tug at my one-piece and push my glasses back up the bridge of my nose as I turn to Hope. “Do you want to get something to eat?”

“Sure,” she whispers, edging closer to me.

“The Amish pool party is down the road!” a girl in a string bikini calls as we pass, and the group starts to laugh.

“We’re not Amish,” mutters Hope. My chest tightens as I wrap my arm around her. I don’t want to be here, but what I really don’t want is to see my sisters suffer because of it. “They’re just showing their brokenness,” I remind her quietly, because it’s what my mother would say. “It’s why God sent us.”