Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

Another busload of students walks by. One of them throws a spitball at Pastor Clive. “Dickhead,” the kid says.

The pastor wipes it calmly off his face. “They have already been brainwashed,” he says. “The school systems now teach even babies in kindergarten that having two mommies is normal. If your child says differently, he’ll be humiliated in front of his peers. But it doesn’t stop in schools. You could wind up like Chris Kempling-a Canadian teacher who was suspended for writing a letter to the editor stating that gay sex poses health risks and that many religions find homosexuality immoral. He was just stating the facts, friends, and yet he was suspended without pay for a month. Or Annie Coffey-Montes, a Bell Atlantic employee who was fired for asking to be removed from the e-mail list of gays and lesbians in her company that advertised parties and dances. Or Richard Peterson, who posted Bible verses about homosexuality on his office cubicle at Hewlett-Packard and found himself out of a job.”

He is a cheerleader for the cheerless, I realize. Someone who doesn’t gather people to his cause as much as drive them there with paranoia.

There is a rumble of disturbance at the edges of the crowd, an undulation like a puppy under a quilt. I am elbowed by a woman who has a large gold cross hanging between her breasts.

“Your right as a Christian to embrace your own beliefs is being curtailed by the homosexual agenda,” Pastor Clive continues. “We must fight back now, before our religious and civil freedoms are a casualty, trampled by these-”

All of a sudden, he is knocked over by a blur of black. Immediately, three of his suited thugs pull him to his feet, at the same time that the two cops grab the attacker. I think he’s just as shocked as I am to see who it is. “Lucy!” he cries. “What on earth are you doing!”

I can’t figure out how he knows her name at first. Then I remember that she goes to his church.

Apparently under duress.

Shoving through the crowd, I step between Clive and the policemen, who are totally going for overkill with Lucy. Each of them has one of her arms twisted behind her back, and she weighs all of a hundred pounds. “I’ll take this from here,” I say, my voice brimming with so much authority that they actually let her go.

“You and I aren’t finished,” Clive says, but I shoot him a look over my shoulder as I lead Lucy into the school.

“Take it up with me in court,” I tell him.

I bet Lucy’s never been so glad to have the doors of the school close behind her. Her face is flushed and mottled. “Take a deep breath,” I tell her. “It’s going to be all right.”

Vanessa comes out of the main office and looks at us both. “What happened?”

“Lucy and I need a place to calm down,” I say, keeping my voice as even as possible, when what I really want to do is call the ACLU or Angela or a proctologist, anyone who has experience in dealing with assholes like Clive Lincoln.

Vanessa doesn’t even hesitate. “My office. Take as long as you need.”

I march Lucy into the main office-a place where she’s spent far too much time, being disciplined by the assistant principal-and into Vanessa’s cozy space. I close the door behind us. “Are you all right?”

She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “I just wanted him to shut up,” Lucy murmurs.

She must know, by now, that I am the center of this storm. There have been articles in the papers about the trial. Last night when I was brushing my teeth, there was my face, on the local late-night news. And now, there’s picketing on the steps of the school. I may initially have tried to keep my private life from her because of our therapy relationship, but now, doing so would be like trying to sandbag the ocean.

It makes sense that Lucy’s heard about all this. That people at her church are bad-mouthing me, and that she feels torn.

Torn enough to tackle Clive Lincoln.

I pull out a chair so she can sit down. “Do you believe him?” she asks.

“Frankly, no,” I admit. “He’s like something out of a circus sideshow.”

“No.” Lucy shakes her head. “I mean… do you believe him?”

At first I am shocked. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who can listen to Pastor Clive and not take his words as utter lies. But then again, Lucy is only a teenager. Lucy goes to an evangelical church. She’s been spoon-fed this rhetoric all her life.

“No, I don’t believe him,” I say softly. “Do you?”

Lucy picks at the unraveling black threads of her leggings. “There was this kid who went to school here last year. Jeremy. He was in my homeroom. We all knew he was gay even though he never said it. He didn’t have to. I mean, everyone else called him a faggot often enough.” She looks up at me. “He hanged himself in his basement just before Christmas. His stupid fucking parents blamed it on a D he got in Civics.” Lucy’s eyes glint, hard as diamonds. “I was so jealous of him. Because he got to check out of this place for good. He left, and no matter how many times I try, I can’t.”

I taste copper on my tongue; it takes a moment for me to realize this is fear. “Lucy, are you thinking of hurting yourself?” When she doesn’t answer, I stare at her forearms, to see if she’s cutting again, but even in this mild weather she’s wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt.

“What I want to know is where the fuck is Jesus,” Lucy says. “Where is He when there’s so much hate it feels like concrete drying up around you? Well, fuck you, God. Fuck you for going when the going gets tough.”

“Lucy. Talk to me. Do you have a plan?” It is basic suicide counseling-get someone to talk about her intentions, and it’s possible to diffuse them. I need to know if she’s got pills in her purse, a rope in her closet, a gun under her mattress.

“Can someone stop loving you because you’re not who they want you to be?”

Her question stops me cold. I find myself thinking of Max. “I guess so,” I admit. Has Lucy had her heart broken? It could certainly account for her latest downslide; if I know anything about this girl, it’s that she expects people to leave her, and blames herself when they do. “Did something happen with a boy?”

She turns to me, her face as open as a wound. “Sing,” Lucy begs. “Make this all go away.”

I don’t have my guitar. I’ve left everything for music therapy in the car-the crowd that had gathered outside commanded my attention. The only instrument I have is my voice.

So I sing, slowly, a cappella. “Hallelujah,” the old Leonard Cohen song from before Lucy was born.

With my eyes closed, with every word a brushstroke, I do the kind of praying people do when they don’t know if there is a God. I hope, for Lucy. For me and Vanessa. For all the misfits in the world who don’t necessarily want to fit in. We just don’t want to always be blamed, either.

When I finish, I have tears in my eyes. But Lucy doesn’t. Her features might as well be stone.

“Again,” she commands.

I sing the song twice. Three times.

It is on the chorus, on the sixth round, that Lucy starts to sob. She buries her face in her hands. “It’s not a boy,” she confesses.

When I was small I got the strangest Christmas gift from a distant aunt: a twenty-dollar bill inside an acrylic puzzle. You had to pull knobs and twist levers in different machinations until you found the sequence that would release the catch and let you take the bounty. I was tempted to smash it open with a hammer, but my mother convinced me that the pieces would fall into place, and, once they started, it seemed I couldn’t make a wrong move. Boom boom boom, one door or latch opened after another as if they’d never been locked in the first place.