Read Online Sunday Billy Sunday by Mark Wheaton - Free Book Online

pushing her tangled hair out of her eyes as she smiled up to Faith and Phil. “Oh, my God – he was right! It’s freezing!”
    “More reason to stay up here in the sun!” Faith cried back.
    “Whatever!” Maia yelled, splashing her way over to Mark who was still surprised that she’d so easily followed him down as he thought what he’d done required the height of courage.
    Phil watched as Mark and Maia dared each other to swim underwater or race or something, but then looked back at Faith, shaking his head. “They’re made for each other.”
    “You think she likes him?” Faith asked.
    “What’s not to like?” Phil replied. “But he’s still stuck on that girl, Rachel and probably will be for awhile.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Faith nodded. “They were a thing, right? I couldn’t stand her.”
    “Hah,” Phil said. “She was okay. That said, not sure your friend is really his type.”
    “Because she’s funny?” Faith asked. “Or because she’s black?”
    “But she’s not black , right?” Phil countered, not realizing Faith was joking. “Not all the way, anyway. Maybe black and Mexican, but then something else. She did say she was military, so maybe she’s half-Vietnamese.”
    Faith shrugged. “I don’t know what she is, but I do think she’s pretty.”
    “Oh, me, too,” Phil said quickly, realizing what he was saying. “I’m just thinking about for Mark.”
    Faith didn’t reply and Phil looked down at his shoes, knowing how awkward he’d made the back-and-forth when all he’d wanted to do was have a nice couple of moments with Faith to tee-up something for later. He thought about apologizing for sounding like an outright bigot, but Faith was just staring out at the lake, perhaps giving him an exit, probably wanting him to leave.
    “Hey, I didn’t mean in the way it sounded,” Phil began. “I know she’s your friend. I wasn’t trying to be racist.”
    But before Phil could finish, a number of the jocks who had formerly been tossing the football around on the beach bounded up the boulders to do some cliff-diving of their own.
    “Watch this!” cried one of the guys, a big, linebacker-type, who did a comical kind of skydiver-style leap, arms straight out, stomach exposed for the world’s worst belly flop, which — just at the moment before striking the water – he rolled into a clean, thread-the-needle-style dive, barely making so much as a splash as he plunged beneath the lake.
    Naturally, this was followed by a host of one-upmanship boastings by his comrades, all of whom began flying off the cliff into the water in a variety of dives, ranging from the clumsy to the passably expert. Faith, whom the jocks didn’t seem to notice any more than Phil, rose to her feet and picked up her book.
    “It’s fine,” she said to Phil, quick and dismissive as she retreated towards the trail leading down.
    Phil tried to come up with something to say back, something that would fix his error and restart the conversation, but came up dry.
    “Dammit!” he cried, getting him a couple of looks from the pack of jocks that stood on the cliff’s edge.
    “What’s wrong, man?”
    Phil looked up and saw that one of the jocks was actually a skinny, deeply-tanned boy named Colby Keating who Phil had known since they were either five or six and who’d always been a friend to him.
    “Nothing,” Phil shrugged under-his-breath, before heading down the path after Faith.
    Father Billy thought he’d been about nine or ten when he’d learned that what killed you in a crucifixion wasn’t the fact that you had long spikes driven into your ankles and wrists that made you bleed out, but had been told that death was actually caused when the body succumbed to asphyxiation as it became increasing difficult over time for a victim to inhale. It was only much later that he heard that this wasn’t the case either and that most of those crucified died from rapidly-spreading infection resulting from exposure or