Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Her brother avoided her eyes, especially when he went early to church to dress as an altar boy. She began to wonder if she’d really seen what she thought she’d seen.

When she was eight, she knelt across from Father Lazaria in the confessional box for the first time, just a thin mesh partition between them. Gratefully, she didn’t have to see his face. But his breath filled the whole space: prunes soaked in spirits, a rancid old-man smell. She turned herself blue trying not to breathe it in, but she still felt covered in it. She had to make her First Confession in order to make her First Communion, and Delia still believed back then that the sacraments were holy. She’d desperately wanted to take Communion, because she thought the body of Christ would fix everything that was slipping out from under her eight-year-old feet. She was afraid that God had forgotten her, and even thinking that way made her feel like a terrible doubty person.

Father Lazaria had had to coax her to say the required words out loud: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” He had cut a small hole in the wall just above where she knelt and a curtain hung over it—apparently nobody else had noticed?—as soon as he heard her voice, his hand reached through the secret hole and slid itself between her legs. That first time she had screamed and jumped out of the confessional, but the look on her mother’s face, as everyone kneeling and lighting candles had turned to stare, told her that she was again, somehow, the problem.

Why do you insist on behaving this way? said her mother’s eyes.

After the not sitting on his lap at dinner, and the throwing up on her own shoes, Delia knew the drill. She decided the only thing to do was to stay one step ahead of him.

She became a tiny contortionist, fitting herself into all the different-sized boxes of expectations and disappointments that she now realized made up her family. In turn, they furrowed their brows and began to wonder if she was going mad (but only in the back of their minds, never out loud) as her obsession with fitting gum wrappers together grew more and more urgent.

Every time something happened with Father Monster (his name inside Delia’s head), she made a black mark on her gum chain so that she would know how much time had passed by how many gum wrappers she’d folded. If she folded quickly, she could put more distance between herself and the unspeakable things: Twelve feet. Fourteen feet. Sixteen and a half feet. Her childhood was measured in gum wrappers.

Delia and her brother drifted from their parents’ orbit the way the earth tilts on its axis and the sun and moon never touch, except for the rare eclipse when they stare at each other face to face and the world goes black.

The catered dinner parties also grew old. Delia no longer found them entertaining, and she tried to block out her parents laughing uproariously over the sound of the martini shaker—At what? Who could say?—while the only thing she never got tired of was the soothing, meditative folding and fitting together of gum wrappers. The chain had grown to almost twenty feet by the time the dreaded “being a teenager and everything” began to smack her in the face.

It had been years since her father had told her “There are some things you cannot change, not even with money,” and yet, the gut-punching reality was that he was going to try anyway.

Delia was used to cold hard cash being shoved in her face, but she got even more if she looked like she was on the verge of asking a question or saying anything about anything. A hundred-dollar bill stuffed into the pocket of her boot-cut jeans was her father’s idea of spending money.

For this reason, she wasn’t just the nutty girl with a gum chain. She had plenty of so-called friends who were willing to be treated at the soda fountain or who invited her to go shopping in Casper because Delia was generous and could be counted on to make up the difference on a favorite sweater or jeans from Hickson’s Dry Goods. So what if the other girls whispered among themselves that she was “overly quiet and a little strange”? (She could hear, you know.) She honestly didn’t care. Not about the money or whether people wanted to be her friend. She was too busy keeping herself together. It reminded her of having an ingrown toenail, a thing that was constantly pressing into you, silently, painfully, although nobody else even knew it was there.

Her parents still expected her to go to church and receive Communion from Father Monster’s shriveled, stinky hand. They were firm believers that the host must come straight from the priest in order to be a true sacrament. She dreaded feeling his index finger skim her lip as he placed the white host on her shaky tongue. She tried to snatch her tongue back as quickly as possible, but his hairy knuckle might touch her face if she jerked, and she couldn’t risk throwing up again, right there on the altar, while the line of communicants stretched behind her as long as a serpent’s tail.

She imagined what they’d say, could hear their thoughts as a collective rattle in her head: How dare she grimace at receiving the body of Christ?

Delia no longer wanted to be seen at all, let alone sitting in the front pew. Anyone who looked might have thought she was still the chosen, holy child, head bowed, praying the rosary. But she had begun to bring the gum wrappers to church and fold them inside her bag, much to her mother’s chagrin. It was a kind of meditation, and she believed in it more than in any of the prayers of the rosary. Delia would never think of church as a sacred, holy place again.

Her mother’s hawklike