The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly by Stephanie Oakes Page B

And shaving. He came home with new ideas and the word “Prophet” on his tongue. And soon it was like my father had stepped into a new identity. He wasn’t Sam anymore. He was Deacon Samuel, suddenly sober, suddenly bearded, suddenly righteous.
    My mother became pregnant with Constance, and the house grew quiet with my father’s praying and my mother’s sitting in silent rooms not moving. I thought she was praying, too, but now I wonder if it was something else. The Prophet told us soon after that we were to take the bus to a rest stop, walk into the trees and never return.
    By the time we got to the Community, my mother was round and immovable. While the men raged against the trees and the earth, the wives gathered in a circle in front of the A-frame structures of the first versions of our houses to sew simple baby garments for her.
    One of the wives handed me a tiny muslin dress to bring to my mother where she sat on a felled log. I held it to her ballooned stomach. “My baby,” I said.
    â€œNo, Minnow, your sister,” my mother corrected in a voice like a croak.
    â€œMy baby,” I said again. Nothing belonged to me, not really. My mother belonged to my father and my father belonged to the Prophet. This baby, I knew, was supposed to be mine. She was the closest thing to mine I’d ever had.
    The day she was born, her hot body made steam in the frigid morning air. My mother passed out on the dirt floor of the new-hewn house so I was the first to hold her, all scum-covered and wailing with her flat livid gums, tongue waving like an angry fist. Holding her felt like cradling a part of myself, my liver or kidney, outside my body.
    When my father ran outside to shout, “Another saint is delivered to the righteous establishment of the Lord,” I held Constance tighter. I decided, right then, that I would protect her like the vulnerable, screaming thing she was.

Chapter 21
    T he next day, after showering and stuffing myself, half damp, back inside my jumpsuit, I sit on my bed and try to pick through my hair with a large yellow comb held between my stumps. Benny offered again to cut it for me. Easier to manage, she says, and I know she’s thinking a handless girl ought to have priorities above vanity. But it’s more than that, something muddied that I can’t sift out. Jude never knew me without hair like this.
    â€œBly!” Officer Prosser calls from the skyway. She’s holding a thin piece of paper. I throw down the comb and catch the paper as she drops it inside the cell.
    I turn to Angel. “Can you read it?”
    â€œIt’s a class schedule,” she says. “Looks like they’re finally making you go to school.”
    I’m only signed up for one class, which meets on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. It’s called Reading Is Power. I didn’t know classes could have names like that, in complete sentences, but all the classes here do, things like “Cooking Is Cool” and “Math Is Fun.” Angel told me about a group therapy session she’d had once called “Coping Mechanisms Are for Rock Stars!”
    After breakfast, I walk in line toward the bay of old classrooms in the west wing of the detention center, the only area of the repurposed school that’s actually used for its original purpose. A youngish teacher in a violet cardigan stands at the doorway of the classroom. She shakes the hand of each student and looks them in the eyes, pronouncing their names easily. When she sees me, she puts her hand behind her back.
    â€œMinnow?” she asks. “I’m Miss Bailey.”
    â€œHow do you know my name?”
    She nods. “Your file showed up in my mailbox today.”
    â€œYou’ve read my file?”
    She shakes her head. “I choose not to read students’ files.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI find it helps with the idea that detention is the start of a new life, not the continuation of