“Hey, Bo,” I say. “You love baseball, right?”

He peeks up and nods, and Mrs. Whitfield raises her eyebrows at Will.

Later, Will introduces me around. I say hi to Marie Baird from school, and she says she’s glad I came to church today. And then Will’s youth pastor, this huge guy named Lance, shakes my hand like a rattle.

“Welcome to Westwood,” he says. “It’s Game Sunday.”

“Game Sunday?” I ask.

“We clear the tables out of this room and the youth play games. Today we’re gonna play Freeze Tag and Red Rover for sure.” Lance shuffles off.

“Freeze Tag is a terrible idea,” Will murmurs to me.

“Does he not notice that y’all aren’t five anymore?” I whisper.

“Lance is the king of terrible ideas.”

Lance begins moving furniture as the adults and younger children clear out of the room. Soon it’s only people our age. Jenna is flirting with some boy while Paul keeps touching Marie and she keeps batting him away.

Loud Christian rock music tumbles out of the speakers. The drums make the windows vibrate. Funny. Brother John once told us that “heavy drum music makes teenagers act in sinful ways,” so we shouldn’t listen to it.

Will takes the water out of my hand and sets it on a window sill as Lance yells, “Tag, you’re it!” and slaps a younger boy’s arm. All the girls kick their heels off, so I do too. We start running, slipping on the linoleum floor, and I’m laughing like crazy. The boy tries to tag me, but I sidestep him and speed across the room.

“Nice,” Will calls out to me.

The boy takes off after Jenna and tags her. To unfreeze her, Paul tries to crawl through her legs and she’s hollering “Gross! Stop! Stop!” and batting him away.

“Paul! You’re three times her size!” Lance calls out. He’s trudging around the room at a turtle’s pace.

“So?” Paul pauses right between her legs, and it’s such a sight I stop running and I’m dying of laughter. Will is too.

“You think you can unfreeze her? You’re like ten times the size of me,” Paul says to Lance, who laughs.

The boy tags me, so I freeze. “Will! Come unfreeze me!”

He stops, finding my eyes. “Marie, help Parker!”

Marie comes and crawls through my legs, and I can’t stop laughing. After my third game of Red Rover, I take a breather. Will joins me in sitting on the window sill; our feet bang against the wall.

“Why wouldn’t you unfreeze me?” I ask, giggling.

He clears his throat. “I’m a lot bigger than you,” he says, gesturing at his body. “Besides, it’s not a very gentlemanly thing to do. I don’t want to be like Pervy Paul over there.”

“You’re all right, Will Whitfield.” I smile at him sideways.

He blushes, and gestures at his Fellowship Hall. “What do you think so far?”

“It’s fun. But don’t you have Bible Study? Or talk about good Christian behavior and whatnot?”

“Sure, sometimes,” he replies, lifting a shoulder.

“You don’t play games every week?”

He chuckles. “You’re lucky you didn’t visit on Don’t Make Bad Life Choices Sunday.”

“Don’t Make Bad Life Choices Sunday?” I laugh.

“Yeah, Lance had a doctor come in and show us pictures of what lung cancer and STDs look like under a microscope.”

My mouth drops open. “Sounds more effective than telling us we’ll go to Hell if we get trashed or have sex before marriage.”

Will’s face wears a look of horror. “It was very effective. And then the doctor told us about the tests they run to find out if you have an STD.” He swallows.

“I don’t want to know.”

“You definitely do not want to know.” He glances at me, and his face goes even redder. But then he laughs. “Paul was freaking out.”

“Waaaaay too much info, Will.”

“Hey, if I had to suffer through it, so do you.”

“You’re evil.”

“So do you want to watch The Notebook this afternoon?”

His mom invites me back to his house for Sunday lunch. She made baked chicken with lemon, corn on the cob, and cornbread. We hold hands while Mr. Whitfield says the Lord’s Prayer. Will has two other brothers—Trey is nine and Rory is fourteen. Will and I open our eyes during the prayer, sneaking a quick smile at each other.

I love eating a home-cooked meal that I didn’t have to make. And after that, Will and I collapse onto a couch in his basement and promptly fall asleep, like last Sunday. Only this time when I wake up, Will’s head is resting on my shoulder and his hand is draped across my thigh.

A warm breeze rushes through my body, and I feel safe. Safe with him. His hand is on my leg and I find I like it being there.

What if Drew finds out? What if Brian finds out? How could I hurt Drew like that? How could I hurt Brian, who’s risking everything for me?

Just goes to show that a trip to a new church won’t automatically make me a good person. I don’t deserve any of this.

Even if I like Will, and if by some miracle he wants me—which is kinda doubtful, considering how pissed he got that I was fooling around with his friends—I can’t do this to Drew.

getting serious

36 days until i turn 18

No one except Tate calls to find out why I wasn’t at church. Not Aaron, not Brother John, not Laura, not Allie. Will’s right. They aren’t very Christian. Only Tate called—not my cell, but my landline.

“I found your number in the church directory,” Tate says.

“Hi, Parker!” I hear Rachel yell in the background.

He says, “I missed you today.”

“I went to church with Will. You know, Corndog? From JB last night?”

“He seemed nice.”

“He is. We just recently started hanging out.” I tell Tate about how Will and I have been jostling for valedictorian for eons.

Tate asks, “Are you, um, interested in him?”

“My friend likes him,” I say, sinking my head into a pillow. If Drew wasn’t interested in him, and I wasn’t messing around with Brian, and if Will and I hadn’t been rivals all through school, would I be thinking way different thoughts about him? Yeah. But some hands don’t always result in a full house. Sometimes you get two of a kind or an ace high. You don’t get a royal straight flush including two happily married parents, a non-drug-using brother, and a big, slobbering dog, with none of your family members being deathly allergic to said dog.

“So Aaron’s really with Laura?” I ask. I feel bad for hurting him, but I’m ashamed I kissed a guy who was so willing to try to make me jealous.

“For now. He doesn’t like her like he likes you, though.”

“I don’t even get why he likes me.” Why anybody likes me.

He clucks his tongue. “You’re your own person. You wear what you want and don’t bother with people who annoy you. Everyone wants to be like that.”

What? Really? They think I don’t bother with people who annoy me? It was Laura who started those rumors. It was the church ladies who started telling their children to keep away from me, for fear I’d turn out like Mom. Ladies who had once been Mom’s friends.

But even if they did want to talk to me, would I want to talk to them? It’s best to keep people away. Then I remember how I told Will everything last night. Everything. And he still took me to his church. He introduced me to his family.

“Parker? You there?” Tate says over the phone.

“Sorry, I was thinking.”

“About?”

I pick at a loose thread dangling from my duvet. “Do you like our church?”

He chuckles. “Not much. The people are worse than Phillies fans.”

“Harsh. You like baseball? I didn’t know that.”

“It’s hard to talk about anything when we’re always trying to stop Laura from convincing us to burn our iPods because we listen to Coldplay.”

I pause. “Drew plays baseball for Hundred Oaks. Second base.”

Tate exhales. The phone line crackles, as if he’s breathing heavily. “Why’ve you never mentioned him before? Why’d you never bring him to church?”

“Why would I subject anyone to our church?” I say with a laugh. “And like you said, I was too busy trying to stop Laura from burning my iPod to mention friends from school.”

“Ah.”

Tate and I never really talked much before Mom left. Was he lonely? Has our church always made him feel uncomfortable with who he is? Is that why he started hanging out with me? Did he think I’d understand? I flip on my TV and start flicking through the channels, waiting for Tate to add something, but he doesn’t.

I decide to tell a little lie, to get the conversation going again. “Drew said he thought you looked familiar.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Maybe you could look him up on Facebook?”

I hear crackling again. “I’ll do that.”

“His last name’s Bates. Drew Bates.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

I’m grinning as we hang up. I lie back on my bed and decide not to repaint my nails.

Sunday night is Veena Comes Over for Dinner, take two. Dad gave me a warning this time so I can cook something good!

I’m using Gramma’s hashbrown chicken casserole recipe, but I make it my own by switching out the Corn Flakes for Frosted Flakes. The sugar gives it a kick. I’m making a salad to go with it, so I’ll have something to eat after my small portion of casserole.

“Smells good,” Ryan says, coming into the kitchen.

“Thanks.”

He takes a glass from the cabinet and pours himself some water. “What’s the occasion?”

I rarely make this casserole, because it takes like two hours to put it together. “Dad’s friend Veena is coming over.”

Ryan pauses before sipping.

“She was really nice at dinner last week,” I tell him, slicing into a cucumber. “I bet you’ll like her. She’s a nurse over at Murfreesboro Regional.”

My brother doesn’t answer, but he sits down at the table while I work. It surprises me that he’s willing to keep me company.

I prepare a plate of cheese and crackers, which I push in front of him, making him smile a little. “Be right back,” he says, disappearing. When he comes back, he’s changed out of a T-shirt and into a navy blue polo shirt. If he’d cut his shaggy hair already, he’d look exactly like he did in high school, when so many girls liked him because he was so cute. I bet if Macy saw him in a polo shirt, she’d probably recite some Nietzsche quote and go on about how third-world children sew them in sweatshops, and then say if Ryan wears one, he’s the harbinger of the apocalypse.

Then the apocalypse truly happens: Ryan helps set the table.

When Veena shows up, Dad answers the door. I peek around the wall into the foyer, to see them laughing quietly and chatting as he takes her jacket. Dad leans down and gives her a peck on the lips, which makes me wonder what they did after we went to Crockett’s Roadhouse last week.