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By lunch on Monday, it’s as if homecoming never happened. At Penhallow, they are always focused on the next big thing, and for everyone but me, it’s Thanksgiving break, for which Penhallow gets an entire week off, followed shortly thereafter by a three-week winter break. Both are going to feel endless, without my new friends and class and the sight of Ford grinning at me across a lab table.
“It’s so all the richie riches can go away on exotic trips,” Kappy snipes over lunch.
Lauren barks a laugh. “Says the girl going to Bermuda.”
“I’m visiting my grandmother there!” Kappy argues. “It’s entirely different.”
Thanksgiving was not a big holiday in the Bright Covenant community, so we don’t make much of it. We certainly aren’t taking off for Bermuda. The entire week is spent like any weekend would be: I help my mother clean and take care of Faith, and my father is mostly sequestered off in his office on “important” school business—even on Thanksgiving Day, which no one but me seems to raise a brow at.
By regular text, Kappy sends pictures of pink sand beaches and clear blue water. Over Calcul8, she tells me she’s going to set Karla on fire if “the attitude doesn’t stop” and sends me pics of hot guys she’s seen in town, while Zoe (on a cruise) tells me about Stephan, from Norway, whom she met in the teen club.
LAUREN
When are we going to the Christmas pop-up?
KAPPY
Never if I don’t get into my ED1, according to Karla, but she’s full of shit. That said, we’ve got finals so maybe the first day of winter break?
ME
What’s the Christmas pop-up?
ZOE
OMG you will love it. There are all these outdoor stalls selling amazing food, and a cocoa stand where you get a marshmallow as big as your head, and lots of shops. I got the cutest ring last year. The one I always wear on my pinky.
My stomach sinks. I would love it, even if I couldn’t buy a thing. I just want to see it. I want to see the big marshmallow and the food and the jewelry, and why does it have to be such a big deal?
I ask on a night when my father is in a particularly good mood. When he asks how I intend to earn the privilege, I want to weep into my plate. How much more can I possibly do? I watch Faith almost every day. I bike to the store for my mother, I cook, I help clean the house.
I look from my father to my mother—a look that says What’s left?
“I’ll come up with some things,” she says.
“I want to see this list before I agree,” my father says.
My fists clench in my lap. A year ago, he seemed so...good. So capable. He was respected in our community, and people would stop us wherever we went to shake his hand, to tell me what a special man he was. That doesn’t happen here, obviously, but I don’t think that’s why he now seems so small and petty.
He’s just making us all pay for this decision he made for himself. One none of us wanted in the first place.
Like a king who lashes out when his best idea proves a failure.
It takes a while, but my mother eventually comes up with a list of “extra” things for me to do that my father approves of. I weed the yard, I grease the tools in the garage, I darn socks, I scrub out the freezer, and I am tasked with all the laundry and ironing that needs to be done from now until the pop-up market starts.
I’m pretty sure I’m the only Penhallow kid who’s relieved when school begins again.
Ford’s is the first face I seek in English. His mouth raises on one side, but he looks exhausted. Perhaps I wasn’t the only Penhallow kid for whom break felt a million years too long.
“Did you go anywhere?” he asks, when I take my seat in journalism.
I smile. “You know my family. Where would we go?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe back to your old community? Don’t you have family there?”
I shake my head. My mother’s parents are a mystery to me—they left to live in the Michigan branch of our community before I was born, and Mary Joyce’s parents joined them after she ran away. My other grandmother—the one so concerned by Satan’s thumbprint on my neck—is still alive, but she and my parents had some falling out years ago and we rarely see her.
It’s strange, now that I think about it, that there was never a discussion of visiting New Hope. It’s only a few hours south. We could have made the trip easily.
