Hearing Randy Jessup mention my mama made me go Mister Hyde against the belts. Then either Tweedle-Dee or Tweedle-Dum flipped the foot of the bench into the air, and my brain went like your belly does when you drive your car over a hill too fast, and it makes you float from your seat. I heard the lid pop off the jug and water gush. It soaked the towel, filled my mouth, and I couldn’t recruit the right brain cells to breathe through my nose. It felt like someone tried to jam a mophead down my throat. Waterboarding makes every drowning scenario you had as a kid come to fruition at the exact same moment. If the preacher planned on killing me, I wished he’d do it a little faster.

Then it all stopped.

Cory Eli pulled the towel from my face, and Cody set the bench flush on the floor.

Air rushed to its rightful place. Randy Jessup looked down at me with a sadistic smile on his face. “Where’s your brother hiding, Mack?”

I shook my head back and forth and let them know I didn’t know where Marshall was. The preacher’s cruel smile turned belligerent. “Your lies won’t help your brother none, friend. And it surely doesn’t help your situation.” He lifted another jug and the towel got slapped across my face again, and the bottom of the bench flew back into the air, sharper the second time, so that my mouth filled instantly and rushed down into my nose, making my nostrils burn like I was smoking a roach with an acetylene torch.

That feeling clawed through my body until I begged whoever was listening to die. But death lingered off in the distance and let me suffer hell. The bench dropped to the floor, and the towel fell away.

“Where’s your brother?”

I couldn’t tell him they should check Brystal’s place, there was no way I was bringing her into this. I leaned as far forward as the belt allowed and spit in his eyeball.

“Go get the girl.”

11.

Cory dumped the bench and undid the buckles. The belts fell to the floor, but I couldn’t get away. Cory grabbed one of them, wrapped it around his big fist, and lashed it across my back. My whole body knotted while a new kernel of pain burrowed its roots into me. He grabbed me by a handful of hair and dragged me up to the altar. Cory shoved me into the chair the preacher’d been sitting in before and reached into his back pocket for a pair of handcuffs, and cuffed my wrists to the arms of the preacher’s golden throne. The cuffs scraped away the latex spray paint.

Andy looked like hell. I didn’t dare imagine what they’d done to her. She didn’t say a word when Cody led her down the aisle of the sanctuary. When they reached the front of the church, the preacher returned wearing a polo shirt with the church’s name over his heart. He’d cleaned himself up. Andy wilted like a dying flower when he walked near. He stopped before he reached the end of the aisle, took in the whole scene, rubbing his hands together and humming the tune for The Old Rugged Cross.