Octavia Boone's Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything Read online

  Ray shook her head.

  “It’s different now, Simon,” she said.

  I’d always thought that Ray was a crisp white name, like cool clean sheets on summer nights or those old-fashioned starched nurse’s caps with the curly brims. Now I thought maybe it was just cold, like ice and snow.

  “What about Octavia?” Boone said.

  Ray took off her glasses and mopped her eyes with her sleeve.

  “I’ll only be fifteen miles away,” she said. “I want Octavia with me. As soon as I’m settled, we’ll work out a schedule so that she can come on weekends to stay.” She turned to me. “Then on Sundays I can take you to the Fellowship for your class.”

  “I don’t want to go there anymore,” I said.

  I didn’t add that they probably wouldn’t have me, seeing as I’d tried to kill Marjean.

  “Well, we’ll see about that,” Ray said.

  Boone’s face had gone stiff.

  “You might have given me a little more notice, Rachel,” he said again. “All these decisions you’ve been making have an impact, you know. It’s not all about you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I’m sorry it worked out this way. But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I know this is something I have to do.”

  It wasn’t until later that it dawned on me what Ray had really said. With Ray working for the Redeemers and not her law office anymore, she wouldn’t be making much money. And without Ray making money, nobody would be paying for our house and groceries and clothes and Boone’s oil paints and all the other stuff we buy. So Boone wouldn’t be able to work on his masterpiece anymore. He’d have to come out of his shed and get a job.

  It only took Ray a couple of days to move out, so it was pretty clear she’d been planning this for a while. She didn’t take much stuff with her to the Redeemers’ house. She already had a lot of things packed up to give away, first because it’s harder for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich person to get into heaven, and second because the Redeemers do not believe in stuff like summer dresses with skinny shoulder straps and music that doesn’t have Christian themes and DVDs that are rated anything over PG-13. She took some books and the rocking chair and a painting that Boone had made for her before they got married and the photo albums with all the pictures of me as a baby. It wasn’t that much, but even so it made the house feel empty. There was nothing left in her closet when I looked in it but some dust bunnies and a bent hanger on the floor.

  Boone and I went and cut the Christmas tree by ourselves, but it wasn’t much fun without Ray, and Boone wasn’t even making any of his feeble jokes, which I actually missed. We hiked through the crunchy snow in our boots, all muffled up with our heads down, and every once in a while one of us would look up and point at a tree and say, “What about that one?” and the other one of us would say, “No, crooked,” or “No, too squatty.” Then finally I said, “What about that one?” and Boone said, “Yeah, okay.” It wasn’t what you’d call festive.

  Jean-Claude Chevalier’s uncle Al gave us the tree for free, because he felt sorry for us, because as I said, this is a small town and everybody always knows everybody else’s business. By then there wasn’t a single kid at Winton Falls Elementary and Middle School K–8 who didn’t know that Rachel Boone had quit her job, left home, and moved to Wolverton to live with the Jesus freaks.

  I knew Andrew felt bad for me, but how he showed it was to talk a lot more than usual in order to distract me. It did distract me some, but not all that much.

  Boone and I decorated our tree alone. I made a paper chain with red and green shiny paper, but we didn’t string popcorn, because Ray was always best at that, and Boone had forgotten to get any cranberries. Then we hung the ornaments, but when we came to what used to be Ray’s special box, with the Santa and the angel and the little sled that said RAY, Boone just sat down all of a sudden in the blue plaid chair and put his face in his hands.

  I’d never seen Boone cry.

  I wondered what it was like for Ray over in Wolverton without any Christmas tree at all.

  In Winton Falls, it was a terrible Christmas.

  AFTER THAT CAME an even lower point in my life.

  Usually I love winter, which is a good thing given the latitude we live at, which is practically the North Pole. In the winter it gets dark before dinnertime, but it’s cozy with the woodstove burning, and Boone makes cocoa — the really good kind that you simmer with milk in a pan. Jean-Claude Chevalier’s uncle Al has horses and a sleigh, that we have rides on once the snow gets deep enough, bundled up under big scratchy plaid blankets that smell like a barn, and the town has a skating rink behind Menard’s Grocery & Liquor Store.

  There’s a sledding hill too, on which Andrew and I once made a bobsled run by digging a sort of tunnel, hooking up five garden hoses in a row so that they’d reach, spraying the slope with water, and letting it freeze. It was great. I never thought it was fair that we got into so much trouble over it. I mean, Jody Boudreau was only seven, so those weren’t his permanent teeth.

  I liked it too that I got to see more of Boone in winter. His shed was cold.

  Not last winter, though, because of the arrangement with Ray.

  That is, Boone’s arrangement with Ray. This is how it worked: during the school week I would stay with Boone and go to school. After school, if Boone was in his shed, I would stay with Mr. and Mrs. Peacock. Every Friday I would get shipped into Wolverton to sleep on the daybed in the house that Ray shared with two other Redeemers named Alda and Geraldine.

  I hated the arrangement and I didn’t like Alda and Geraldine and they didn’t like me. Though I have to say that under other circumstances I might have found them kind of cool. Geraldine was tall and thin and elegant, with perfect teeth and the sort of legs you see on fashion models and movie stars, at least below the knees. She worked at a psychological counseling service for troubled teens. Alda was short and cushiony and coffee-colored. She ran a community kitchen that made meals for disabled people and senior citizens. They were polite to me and everything, and you could tell they really liked Ray.

  Still, I didn’t see how Ray could stand it. They didn’t have any of the things Ray used to love, like cool shoes and guacamole and mocha lattes and television news. They didn’t even have a TV. They didn’t have many books either, and most of the ones they had had titles like Inspirations for Christian Women and How to Bring Our Kids to God. I hoped that last one wasn’t Ray’s, but it probably was, since every Sunday she still dragged me off to the Fellowship of the Redeemer and Mrs. Prescott’s class. I tried citing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but Ray said we hadn’t ratified that treaty yet.

  Ray was flourishing like the green bay tree. That’s what she called it. It’s from one of the Psalms. The bay tree spreads its roots everywhere and stays green even in winter. Mr. Peacock said that all that meant was that she was as happy as a pig in — at which point he pulled up short when Mrs. Peacock gave him a really awful look — and then he said in mud. Mud is what the Redeemers were, as far as Mr. Peacock was concerned. Mr. Peacock said that a real church was a building built proper for the purpose, with a steeple on it and a bell. He also said, when I was in the bathroom and wasn’t supposed to hear, that a decent mother with an ounce of human feeling didn’t run off and leave her little girl, and that if he had a daughter like me, he wouldn’t sit around in a shed painting pictures that looked like something a bird did on a windowpane. He’d get off his rump and go to work.

  It was while I was traveling back and forth between Boone and Ray that I became Subject #3 for Polly Pelletier.

  The Casual Clip Shoppe on Main Street, that Polly’s mother owns, is a meeting place for women, like Pierre’s Barber Shop and Café three doors down is a meeting place for men. People drop in all the time while they’re out shopping and have tea and coffee, because Polly’s mother has a hot plate and a coffee machine, and they sit around on little wicker chairs and gossip and read
the magazines. If you want to know anything about who’s getting married or divorced, or who’s having a baby, or what your most flattering colors are, or whether or not capri pants are still in, the place to go is the Casual Clip Shoppe. You can get diet advice there, like whether to try Atkins or South Beach or Jenny Craig, or find out how to cook eggplants or where to have a chair upholstered, or get a list of names of responsible teenagers who babysit. You can also get a haircut or a manicure or have your ears pierced. Polly also wanted her mother to learn to do tattoos, but her mother said over her dead body. So when Polly and Sara got their matching rosebuds, they had to go across town to Frank and Frank’s Tattoos.

  Frank and Frank are really Franklin and Frances Jane. They have a baby named Harley and two little dogs.

  Polly and her friends hang out at the Casual Clip Shoppe all the time. Polly’s mother lets them try out all the nail polishes and the facial masks and the hand creams, and Polly helps out by putting towels in the dryer and sweeping the floor. I never hung out there much, since I was never one of Polly’s real best friends, but I always liked it when Ray took me there. Polly’s mother would call me sweetie, and once she said I had classic cheekbones like Michelle Pfeiffer. I look about as much like Michelle Pfeiffer as Andrew looks like Brad Pitt, but it was still nice of her to say.

  On Mondays the Shoppe was always closed, so that’s when Polly had the run of it for her science-fair project, provided she cleaned up afterward and didn’t put sludge down the sink. So we all met there after school, Sara Boudreau, who was Subject #1 and dressed just like Polly in black jeans and an Indian top with embroidery, Claire Thibodeau (#2), me (#3), Angelique Soulier (#4), and Celeste Olavson (#5).

  Polly had her project all planned on little sheets of paper, with who got what chemicals and for how long. We all sat in a row on chairs, wearing the Casual Clip smocks, which are bubblegum-colored, while Polly worked on our hair. It took an amazingly long time to do five permanent waves, and at one point Polly’s mother came in to see how things were going and brought us pizza.

  All the time that Polly was wrapping our hair up on different-colored plastic rods and making us sit around with plastic bags over our heads, we talked. Polly told us all about her future line of clothing, Polli with an i, and showed us the sketchbook she keeps in which she records her fashion ideas. One of her ideas was a puffy silver pantsuit that looked a lot like Andrew’s last Halloween costume, the one that said, “Feed me, Seymour.”

  Then we talked about which famous person we would most like to have for a boyfriend, and I picked Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables. Then we all talked about our favorite books and our favorite movies and the qualities we thought were important in the person we might want to marry. Polly wanted someone with style and good taste in clothes, Angelique Soulier wanted someone who is fond of animals, and Celeste Olavson wanted a beefy athlete with no morals, though that’s not exactly the way she put it.

  I said I didn’t think I’d ever get married, which made everybody get uncomfortable and change the subject. Because, as I said, everybody in town knows all about Ray and the Redeemers and Boone.

  Then we talked about the world’s big questions.

  Claire Thibodeau, whose parents have peace-sign stickers plastered all over their pickup truck, said that the biggest question was, “How do we get people to live together in harmony?”

  Claire is a pacifist and is not in favor of nuclear bombs.

  To which Celeste Olavson’s big question was, “Are you totally bats?”

  Celeste, who is the descendant of Vikings and reactionary Republicans, is in favor of all the nuclear bombs we can get.

  Then Angelique, who wasn’t paying attention due to polishing her toenails silver with the Clip Shoppe nail polish, told a story about her grandmother running out in her underwear with a whiffle bat to chase a raccoon off her porch. So by the time we got back to the big questions, everybody had gone giggly.

  Here are the rest of the Casual Clip Shoppe big questions:

  Why is there algebra?

  Why is there braille at the drive-up ATM?

  Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?

  If God is everywhere, is he with you in the bathroom?

  If you throw a blue stone into the Red Sea, will it turn purple?

  How come in Cinderella, when everything changed back to pumpkins and mice and stuff at midnight, the glass slippers didn’t?

  Why isn’t a football shaped like a ball?

  How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

  Then the buzzer went off and we had to get back into the chairs to see what had happened to our hair. That was when, as Mr. Peacock would say, the mud hit the fan.

  My hair, which is so straight you could pull pieces out and use them for a ruler, was curled up so tight all over my head that Polly couldn’t even get a comb through. I looked like Ray’s little faces with the porcupine quills, only curly. I looked exactly like a Brillo pad.

  Sara’s hair, which is naturally wavy, had turned into frizz. She looked like she’d been struck by lightning.

  Celeste, who was frizzy to begin with, was now half frizzy and half straight, like one of those little kids’ books where you can mix and match the pictures, and make faces that are half one thing and half another.

  Claire, who has long limp blond hair, still had long limp blond hair, but part of it had turned orange.

  Some of Angelique’s hair came off with the plastic rods, so she looked as if she’d fallen under a lawn mower.

  Polly looked at all of us and burst into tears.

  Then everybody started yelling and crying and wailing, especially Angelique, who might have been going bald. Sara Boudreau picked up a pizza crust and threw it at herself in the mirror.

  Then suddenly I started to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. We all looked so funny with our awful weird hair and our bubblegum smocks, all stamping and moaning and wailing around like some mysterious tribal ritual out of National Geographic magazine. Then Sara started laughing, and Angelique and Celeste and Claire, and finally even Polly, so that pretty soon we were all roaring and holding our stomachs until Angelique said we had to stop or she would pee in her pants.

  Polly took pictures of us all for her poster with her brother’s digital camera. I thought that as science experiments went, it had been pretty much of a flop, but I figured she might get something for Most Inadvertently Hilarious Project and maybe the rest of us Good Sportspersonship Awards.

  Polly’s mother came in later to help Polly clean up and said that if we all came back tomorrow, she’d fix everybody up for free, and that Angelique shouldn’t worry because a shorter hairstyle with layering would suit the shape of her face.

  But I decided to leave mine the way it was. I’ve never cared that much what I look like, and besides I figured it might shake up Ray and the Redeemers.

  Ray was starting to grow her hair long because there’s a quote in the Bible about a woman’s hair being her crowning glory. If Boone were a Redeemer, though, he’d have to cut off his ponytail. All the Redeemer men went around looking almost as scalped as Julie Laroche’s love object, the essentially bald Jean-Claude Chevalier.

  “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” (I Corinthians 11:14)

  But all the pictures of Jesus always show him with long hair.

  Here is another big question:

  If God is so all-knowing, why isn’t he consistent?

  Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

  — EXODUS 20:12

  This was on the blackboard in Mrs. Prescott’s room a couple of weeks later. In her Sunday school class, we’d been working through the Ten Commandments one by one. We’d already covered one through four — no other gods before me, no graven images, no taking the Lord’s name in vain, and remembering the Sabbath day to keep it holy — and I was just waiting for nu
mber seven, because I was looking forward to watching Mrs. Prescott grapple with adultery. I’d noticed that the Redeemers were a little squeegy when it came to sex education.

  The theme today was number five and obedience, which has never been a strong point of mine, having been raised by Boone and Ray, both of whom — at least until recently — were into encouraging kids to suspect propaganda, consider the issues objectively, and think for themselves. This got me into trouble back when it was time for me to fly up from Brownies to Girl Scouts, because of the Girl Scout Laws.

  The Girl Scout Laws are to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what you do and say, all of which I thought were fine. But then you have to promise to respect authority, which I thought wasn’t fine at all. I mean, what if the authority is wrong? Like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan or even those advertisements on TV that are always telling little kids to eat those cereals that are made out of nothing but sugar and Red Dye No. 2.

  I would probably still be stuck in Brownies if it hadn’t been for Polly Pelletier’s mother, who was the Girl Scout troop leader, and said I could skip that part as long as I promised to use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every other Girl Scout.

  Boone was relieved, because he has a passion for Thin Mints.

  “God tells us that we owe our parents unquestioning obedience because fathers and mothers know best,” Mrs. Prescott said. “That’s God’s plan for the family. As the apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Colossians, ‘Children, obey thy parents in all things.’ Does anyone here have a story about a time when you obeyed your father and mother?”