Page 2 of Torn

The sun had turned my cheeks warm earlier, but now they felt like they were burning up from a fever. “I wonder who he is,” I murmured as the boy stepped over to my father with his parents. My father greeted them all with hearty handshakes and a bright toothy smile before leading them into the marquee.

When I lost sight of the handsome boy, I felt a strange pang in my chest. I wanted him to come back so I could look at him again.

Elena turned and stared at me, her eyes flashing with amusement. “You totally like him!” she teased. “Your face is so red!”

“I don’t even know who he is,” I mumbled, but she could see straight through me. She always could.

She leaned down and plucked yet another flower from the garden. “I’ll do one for you. He loves you, he loves you not…”

The first few flowers said the attractive stranger didn’t love me. That wasn’t surprising, considering we’d never even met. Elena was undeterred, though. She grabbed another daisy with a smile, confident that this one would finally prove that the boy would wind up as my future husband.

“He loves you, he loves you n—”

A dark shadow fell over us, and Elena stopped abruptly. I looked up to see my father staring down at us with narrowed eyes. He ripped the flower out of my friend’s hand and crushed it under his black shoe. “I think your parents are looking for you, Elena,” he said stiffly, dismissing her without expressly saying it.

She mumbled goodbye to me and darted away. She’d always been frightened of my father.

To tell the truth, I was a little afraid of him sometimes as well. He could be very loud and passionate about his beliefs, and sometimes he even scared my mother with the things he said and did. I knew because I heard them argue sometimes, and whenever I heard the tinkling of breaking glass or china in whichever room they were in, followed by my mom’s frightened screams and shouts, it made me jump too.

My father would always comfort me afterwards and say that nothing was wrong with their marriage, and they would never get divorced. It was just that Mommy was feeling emotional because she disagreed with some of his teachings and wanted him to stop. That was a woman’s burden, he told me—always feeling emotions instead of logic and reason. That was why we needed men to make the big decisions in life, so nothing became clouded with silly feelings.

Secretly, I wasn’t sure that emotion thing was entirely true. Mom’s best friend from church had two sons around my age, and they were way more sensitive than me. One of them—Danny, the boy Elena talked about before—even cried when he accidentally stepped on an ant the other day.

Also, with the way my father carried on sometimes, yelling and banging his fists on the church pulpit when he delivered his sermons, I suspected he had a lot of feelings too. I didn’t like disagreeing with him, though, so I kept those thoughts private and nodded whenever he spoke to me, pretending to agree.

Besides, he was a very smart man, and he had also been gifted with a great amount of knowledge from our God. I knew that. So maybe he was right. Maybe there were a lot of things I was still too young to understand properly, and a lot of things my mom simply wasn’t smart or logical enough to understand.

“What was she doing just then?” he asked sharply, his eyes still narrowed as he watched Elena run off.

I bit my bottom lip. “Nothing. Just picking flowers.”

He sighed and stooped down to my level. “You don’t need to lie to defend your friend, Jolie. I heard what she was saying. She was trying to use the flower to divine secret knowledge.”

“It’s just a game,” I mumbled, averting my eyes. I knew better, though. My face felt awfully warm with shame, and my lungs suddenly revolted against the humid air, making me let out a nervous cough which only made me look more suspicious.

“It’s not a game. It’s very similar to witchcraft, darling. You don’t want to be an evil witch, do you, my little lamb?” he asked. His voice was light and airy and he’d addressed me with my favorite nickname, but his eyes were steely and his jaw was set. He was in a dangerous mood.

I gulped as tiny spikes of fear rushed through me. “No.”

“Next time she wants to play a sinful game like that, you say no, and you say it firmly. Okay? We only follow the new God here. We don’t let the Devil near us in any form, even if it seems like a fun little game.”

“Okay,” I said in a small voice.

“And no more talk of boys. You’re far, far too young to even think about boys.”

“I told her I like dolls anyway. Not boys.”

He smiled and rubbed my left shoulder. I breathed a quick, quiet sigh of relief. His bad mood had passed as quickly as it came on. “Good girl. Now, I want you to do me a favor. Go and take some beignets to the Ashwoods and introduce yourself. Maybe show them around a bit. I would’ve talked to them for longer myself, but I’m expecting an important phone call in a few minutes, so I have to go inside.”

“The Ashwoods?”

He pointed at the marquee. The new couple and their son were lingering by the very edge now, casting wary glances at the gathered church folk. “Frank Ashwood and I did some business together a few years ago. He and his family are visiting our state at the moment, and he remembered me mentioning where we live, so he thought it might be a nice idea to drop by and visit us.”

“So they aren’t from the church?”

“No. But they are our guests for the time being, and we welcome everyone, don’t we, my little lamb?”

I nodded. “I’ll go and say hi.”

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