“A tutor?”
“I believe I know someone who’d be perfect.”
I suddenly had visions of sitting beside some ancient geezer who smelled of Old Spice and mothballs and liked to talk about the good old days. “I don’t want a tutor.”
“Your finals are in January, and there are multiple exams in the next three weeks, including some big ones. I promised your parents that I’d do my best to make sure you don’t have to repeat your sophomore year.”
I hated when adults did the logic-and-guilt thing, so I retreated into the obvious. “Whatever.”
She raised an eyebrow, remaining silent. Then, finally, “Don’t forget that we have church on Sunday.”
How could I forget that? “I remember,” I finally muttered.
“Perhaps we could pick out a Christmas tree afterward.”
“Super,” I said, but all I really wanted was to pull the covers over my head in the hope of making her leave. But it wasn’t necessary; Aunt Linda turned away. A moment later, I heard her bedroom door close, and I knew that I’d be alone the rest of the night, with only my own dark thoughts to keep me company.
*
As miserable as the rest of the week was, Sundays were the absolute worst. Back in Seattle, I didn’t really mind going to church because there was a family there named the Taylors with four boys, all of them from one to a few years older than me. They were boy-band perfect, with white teeth and hair that always looked blow-dried. Like us, they sat in the front row—they were always on the left while we were on the right—and I’d sneak peeks at them even when I was supposed to be praying. I couldn’t help it. I’d had a massive crush on one or the other pretty much as long as I could remember, even though I never actually spoke to any of them. Morgan had better luck; Danny Taylor, one of the middle ones, who at the time was also a pretty good soccer player, took her out for ice cream one Sunday after church. I was in eighth grade at the time and desperately jealous that he’d asked her, not me. I remember sitting in my room and staring at the clock, watching the minutes pass; when Morgan finally got home, I begged her to tell me what Danny was like. Morgan, being Morgan, simply shrugged and said that he wasn’t her type, which made me want to strangle her. Morgan had guys practically drooling if she so much as walked down the sidewalk or sipped a Diet Coke in the food court at the local mall.
The point is, back home there was something interesting to see at church—more specifically, four very cute somethings—and that made the hour pass quickly. Here, though, church was not only a chore but an all-day event. There was no Catholic church in Ocracoke; the nearest one was St. Egbert’s in Morehead City, and that meant catching the ferry at seven in the morning. The ferry generally took two and a half hours to reach Cedar Island, and from there, it was another forty minutes to the church itself. The service was at eleven, which meant we had to wait yet another hour for it to begin, and the mass lasted until noon. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ferry back to Ocracoke didn’t leave until four in the afternoon, which meant killing even more time.
Oh, we’d have lunch with Gwen afterward, since she always came with us. Like my aunt, she also used to be a nun, and she considered attending services on Sundays the highlight of her week. She was nice and all, but ask any teenager how much they enjoy eating lunch with a couple of fifty-odd-year-old former nuns, and you can probably guess what it was like. After that, we’d go shopping, but it wasn’t fun shopping like at the mall or the Seattle waterfront. Instead, they’d drag me to Wal-Mart for supplies—think flour, shortening, eggs, bacon, sausage, cheese, buttermilk, various flavored coffees, and other baking stuff in bulk—and after that, we’d visit garage sales, where they would search for inexpensive books by best-selling authors and movies on videocassette that they could rent to people on Ocracoke. Added to the late-afternoon ferry ride, all of that meant that we wouldn’t get back to the house until almost seven, when the sun had long since set.
Twelve hours. Twelve long hours. Just so we could go to church.
There are, by the way, about a million better ways to spend a Sunday, but lo and behold, as Sunday morning dawned, I found myself standing at the dock in a jacket zipped to my chin, stamping one foot and then the other while the frigid air made it appear as though I were smoking invisible cigarettes. Meanwhile, my aunt and Gwen were whispering to each other and laughing and looking happy, probably because they weren’t slinging biscuits and serving coffee before the crack of dawn. When it was time, my aunt pulled her car onto the ferry, where it crammed alongside about a dozen others.