Page 27 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“I like to think I’ve gotten better in the last thirteen years.”

I read different emotions in her mismatched eyes. Blue: caution, unease, pity. Green: warmth, softness, empathy. I can’t tell if she’s going to touch me or turn away. I don’t know which would hurt less.

Fifty yards away, the deputy divides searchers into groups of four or five. My father joins Davy Hernandez, two of the Nelson boys, and Desdemona Thompson, an old teacher of mine. When she caught any of us daydreaming, she struck our hands with rulers. I left class with purple, swollen fingers many days, but I didn’t mind much. It hurt less than what happened to me at home. The deputy catches me looking and beckons me over, hand curling into acome hithermotion like I’m a yappy dog that needs to get inside.

I am here for my mother. I take the first step back toward the searchers, but Zoe blocks my path.

“Just wait.” Zoe’s voice is unexpectedly sweet, like biting into a hard candy only to find it soft and fudgy in the center. She brings her hand to my diaphragm. “Give them a head start. That way, when we go back, we can search together.”

She pauses. Then she says, “You shouldn’t have to be out there with him. Not even in a group.”

Our tardiness irritates the deputy, but Zoe’s plan works. He assigns the two of us a small search quadrant, hands us a walkie-talkie and two frozen water bottles, and tells us to be back at the rallying point no later than one o’clock, hell or high water. As soon as the deputy turns around, I tuck the water bottle between my breasts to stay cool. Into the high grass we go.

“Watch out for snakes!” the deputy hollers just before we’re out of earshot.

We walk an arm’s length apart, eyes trained on the ground. Every step I take with only the prairie grass beneath me gives me a jolt of relief. Even though I don’t expect to find my mother here, I can’t banish the thought of stepping on her decaying remains. Carrion. The heel of my boot accidentally tearing flesh from bone.

After half an hour of marching through the prairie, we stop for a water break. I tilt my head back to pour half-thawed ice water down my throat. The sky stretches infinitely overhead, not a whisper of a cloud to be seen. Just blue, blue, blue.

“I still think we’re going to find her alive,” Zoe says, running her hands lazily over the top of the grass. Her face is dewy with sweat. “I’m not just blowing smoke.”

“Hope springs eternal,” I deadpan.

“I can tell you mean that as an insult, but I’m choosing to interpret it as optimism.”

“If someone hasn’t killed her by now, I’m sure the withdrawals have.”

“Your mom is resourceful. She’ll keep herself alive,” she says.

“How would you know?”

She gazes across the horizon, where everyone’s cars are now just colorful specks in the distance. “I talked with her afterchurch sometimes.” She says it sheepishly, turning what should be a source of reassurance for me—my mother had someone who cared about her, even just a little bit—into an admission of guilt.

My resentment is hypocritical. I understand this immediately. That’s why I swallow it down, rotten as it tastes, and try to smile instead. “I’m sure she’d be happy you’re here. Are your parents going to come out and help the searches?”

“They—” She clears her throat, stands up straighter. “They moved a long time ago. They’re all in New York now.”

“That sounds a little worldly for them.”

“They’re five miles down the road from World Headquarters. They love it.”

Zoe’s family are barely even silhouettes in my memory anymore. Her father was almost always at work, her mother was an unsmiling blonde who wore Mary Janes everywhere (even her own house when they had guests), and her brother was a freckled boy with a stutter that years of speech therapy could not treat.

I do, however, remember their head-scratching religious practices. No birthdays. No holidays. No dances. No extracurricular activities. No sayinggood luck, but sayingif it is Jehovah’s willinstead. No sayingbless you. Muting TV commercials with demonic content. Burning objects with demonic spirits attached to them. Zoe could not call me her friend, only her acquaintance, because I was not a Witness. Under another set of circumstances, I don’t think I would have been invited into Zoe’s home at all, but they were the only Witnesses in Annesville, and since I was a regular churchgoer—still a Christian, albeit an astray one—they were willing to tolerate my presence.

Zoe gestures toward the sprawl of the prairie, the expanse of our quadrant we’ve yet to search. “We should probably keep moving. I don’t—”

“Was it me? Was that why you were disfellowshipped?”

Her pained laugh slices the air between us. “What else could it have been?”

We thought we were alone. We couldn’t hear those Mary Janes clip-clopping on the stairs over the rushing blood in our ears. Her mother screamed so loud you would have thought I was murdering her daughter instead of kissing her.

“Why didn’t you—?”

“Fight it? I was already going to college,” she says quietly. “They would have disfellowshipped me over that too. There was no point in subjecting myself to the elder board for … what we did, not if I was going to end up back there in a few months anyway.”

What we did.There it is again, the agonizing euphemism. “Do they—?”

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