A canyon of awkwardness yawned between us, so I worked on words that might end this. Before I could produce them, she said, “Your grades are good, right?”

I nodded. I was rocking a solid 3.5 GPA.

“Wanna be my tutor?”

A 3.5 wasn’t exactly Neil deGrasse Tyson. “I don’t know about that, Shianne.”

I thought, Be strong. You’re busy. You don’t have time to do favors right now.

She said, “Because my dad would be willing to pay you.”

“How much?”

“Whatever is reasonable. He told me to find a tutor, and I looked at the list the school keeps. Only a few people do it locally, and they’re all some judgmental bitches.”

“Whoa!”

“Sorry, but many people have loud, horrible, and public opinions about all of us who had kids recently. I’m sure you’ve seen Taylor’s hashtag, so you know.”

“Okay.”

“Going out of town to one of those learning centers isn’t feasible. Not with my kid at home, and Mom reminding me my kid is at home every fifth minute.”

Her tutoring problem was the same as any modern convenience problem when it came to our town. Lack of Green Creek resources strikes again.

If her dad was paying—Shianne’s people had dough, for sure—this could work, considering I’d been getting zero hours at FISHto’s. “Let’s talk about my rates.”

Chapter 11

JAMEER BRIEFED ME ON WHAT to expect at Harvest Fest the following evening. Our typical Tuesday Purity Pledge class was being preempted so all the PPers could “volunteer” at First Missionary House of the Lord’s answer to Halloween.

Since the typical ghost/goblin/monster vibe of traditional Halloween was deemed unholy by Newsome and the congregation, the church did their own thing every year during the last week of October.

After school, I ran home, ate an early dinner with Dad, showered, changed into what was going to have to pass for a costume, then ran out the door to get over to the church. Before I left my driveway, Tyrell sent me a text asking if I could come in for an evening shift because someone called out sick. I was still pissed from the way he sent me home Sunday, so I didn’t bother responding. The Shianne tutoring gig was about to be a thing, so who needed all that FISHto’s stress anyway?

On a normal evening First Missionary House of the Lord would’ve been obscured by dusk. Barely visible against the evergreens huddled behind the building, or the starless night rising over the trees. Tonight it was domed by fluorescence; the light gushing from every open door and window overwhelmed.

Renaming Halloween to Harvest Fest was an effort to snatch some darkness from an accepted tradition, I got that. The pure wattage beaming from the church felt like an effort to destroy darkness period. The bright parking lot forced me squinty and I pawed for my sunglasses.

The front lot had been transformed into a playland with a blue-pink, alluringly unstable bouncy house as its centerpiece. Wind injected the sugar scent of cotton candy and the salt-butter from popcorn directly into my car vents. I rolled my window down because why not, and sniffed the scorched oak from someone’s far-off chimney. The medley smell imprinted somewhere behind my eyes so that for the rest of my life, whenever I came across any one of those smells, I’d think about all of them and what this night meant.