Read Online God and Jetfire by Amy Seek - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t mind the slow days; I could conserve energy for what felt like my real job, which began late in the afternoon when I pedaled back up Vine Street toward home.
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    We sat side by side in the back rows of the lab so other students couldn’t see what we were working on. The Web was new—a haphazard database of incomplete information you stumbled upon using search terms: open adoption ; adoption agencies in Ohio . We printed agency web pages and profiles we liked to read more closely later.
    â€œI was thinking it would be nice if they came from the mountains,” Jevn said quietly, and because we always disagreed about whose mountains were better, I knew he meant, specifically, the sharp young Rockies, not the refined old Appalachians. We agreed our child shouldn’t grow up in Ohio.
    â€œYeah, and be outside a lot,” I responded. Both of us loved to hike and ride bikes. I ran as often as I could, and Jevn liked to ski and cycle so much, he had come to school in Ohio to keep from being distracted by those things. “It could also be really good for them to have a child already, so we could be sure it would have a sibling,” I said. That was one very important thing I wouldn’t be able to provide, were I to become a single parent.
    â€œYeah,” he agreed, “and if the sibling is adopted, we’d get to see what kind of relationship they have with the other birth parents.”
    It felt like progress to visualize them.
    We both read quietly through profiles to ourselves. Most couples said that they were Christian. I used to think I was a Christian, too, but our neighbors back in Tennessee were always correcting me. They said my whole family was going to hell. My mother because on top of being Catholic, she let a whole range of social justice issues in this world distract her from her future in the next. My dad because he wasn’t religious at all. Like the devil, he enjoyed nothing so much as fire, and he would chop our neighbors’ dead trees down for them, just so he could have the kindling. And the rest of us, because we were somewhere in between.
    But those neighbors never stopped trying to save me. I’d play Barbies with the girl down the street, and one night her mother knocked on her bedroom door and asked: Do I want to be saved and go to heaven, or not, and suffer eternal punishment in hell? They had illustrated hell for me on many occasions: fire and extreme heat, no family, no friends, no Barbies, no pets. Everything you don’t like—for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. I remember the dim lights and the quiet as they waited for my answer. They’d described heaven, too. Praising God forever. Crowns and gold and gates and glory and seraphim and cherubim. I didn’t want heaven or hell; I wanted to be propped in front of my friend’s four big-screen televisions in her living room, each one encased in faux wood and standing on its own four faux-wood feet, cable blaring from the one that worked, with boxes of Coke and Sprite stacked as tall as her father against the wall. Anywhere but cornered on the bed listening to my friend’s mother talk about the devil, whom I knew to live at the bottom of the hill, before the woods, where the ground was soft and moss instead of grass grew by a tiny creek—more a fissure in the ground that appeared and disappeared—and where it was dark no matter what the time of day. Where we would eventually drink whiskey and try cigarettes. I may not have known much about God, but I knew well to avoid the devil. I lost my hustle whenever the ball rolled down the hill in that direction. I made things as easy as possible and prayed the prayer. But getting saved didn’t mean much more than I was trusted to play with my friend, and then only until I turned twelve and became a vegan, at which point I was abandoned to the devil for good.
    I’d spent a lot of time