Page 13 of Holly Jolly Heresy
“Then whose place is it?” She shook her head, dashing away a tear from the corner of her eye before it could fall. “Those kids have enough to deal with without also wondering if they’ve betrayed God simply by existing. And your Church, the people deputized to spread its teachings amongst vulnerablekids, they aren’t concerned with helping those kids feel loved. Only with their obedience.”
“I don’t care aboutobedience.” The word was ash in his mouth.
“But you don’t stop it. You’re the only one who can and—”
He loosed a bitter laugh. “You think I have far more influence than I do.”
“You said you wanted to serve God by loving His people, but I can’t imagine a God who would want His people to feel the way your Church has made those kids feel. So who are you serving, Caleb? When you stand by and let Bruce Day terrorize our students for daring to not conform to the most hateful of the Church’s teachings, who are you serving then?”
Each accusation pierced his skin, like shards of glass embedding themselves in sinew and muscle, a scrape he would remember each time he pressed on the spot. It’s not that he hadn’t known about the incidents she flung at him, but maybe he hadn’t fully considered their implications, the ways in which his silence had become complicity.
He’d always comforted himself that the more regressive teachings of the Church were outweighed by the good, but for the students she’d named, there was no such balance. And if even one of those students felt less loved because of theteachings he’d devoted his life to, could that wrong ever actually be balanced out?
“And Alex Lambert?” he asked, his throat raw.
“Alex Lambert has been getting detention every day because he refuses to remove a rainbow flag pin from his backpack. If he gets one more week of detentions, he’ll be ineligible for Valedictorian.”
He shook his head, slashing his hand through the air. “No. Withholding the recognition of our best student’s academic achievements for uniform violations is too petty even for Bruce.”
“Is it?” She leaned against the heater at the edge of the room, the disappointment in her eyes so much worse than her anger. “You know the worst part? Alex wears that pin so other students know he is a safe place for them. Bruce told him it wouldn’t be enough to remove the pin. He needed to repent and beg for God’s forgiveness. But what should he be asking for forgivenessfor? For being a good friend? For daring to show kindness to someone the Church has deemed a sinner?”
“That’s not—He can’t—Why didn’t I know this?” Caleb stammered, his stomach roiling.
“I don’t know, Father. How have you turned a blind eye to the harm being done in God’s name all these years?”
“The Church has made mistakes.Ihave made mistakes.” He held her gaze, pleading with her for the absolution he hadn’t realized he needed. “But surely the good I’ve done outweighs the harm?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded so small and helpless he wanted to wrap her in his arms, to comfort them both with the physical closeness he had no right to desire. “How can you stand it? The hypocrisy, the hatefulness disguised as love. That’snotlove, Caleb.”
“I know.” The fierceness of his reply startled them both, and something seemed to settle in her eyes.
“You could love so big, Caleb, if you’d stop letting the Church tell you how.”
“You two are still here?” Caleb looked up to see Father David in the doorway to the classroom. “I thought you would have left at least an hour ago.”
Caleb glanced around the room. It was mostly packed in boxes and bags now, the racks standing empty, but he hardly saw any of it, his mind spinning with the things Molly had said. Guilt congealed in his stomach, mingling with a longing for something he was afraid to name. “We must have lost track of time.”
“You better get moving. The snow’s coming down hard now.”
Chapter five
With Father David’s help, Molly and Caleb loaded their car with as much as it could hold, which turned out to only be a fraction of what they’d packed. The snow was already deep enough to tug at Caleb’s shoes, his feet sinking in up to the middle of his calf as they moved between the school and the car, soaking the lower half of his pant legs. Molly did an admirable job of trying to clear the windshield, but for every swath of snow she cleared, more fell, faster and harder by the second. Off in the distance, the streetlights were hazy in the white glow of the snow. Caleb could hardly see the end of the school’s driveway.
Molly cleared the same area of the windshield for the third time, then dropped the scraper to her side, worry pulling at the corner of her mouth. “We can’t drive in this.”
His heart pounded. “I’m sure it will be fine once we get on the highway.”
Father David re-emerged from the school with the last garbage bag and handed it off to Caleb to place in the backseat. “Badnews, I’m afraid. I just got an alert the highway’s closed to all but essential vehicles.”
Fear slithered beneath Caleb’s skin. What had he gotten them into? “Then we’ll take backroads.”
“Those will be worse. White out conditions.” Father David flipped the collar of his jacket up against the biting wind and driving snow. “I think you two are stuck in Nativity for a while, Father.”
“No, we can’t—”
“We have a spare room here in the rectory, but I think you’d be more comfortable at the motel. It’s less than a mile down the road. If you leave now and go slow, you can get there before the wind kicks up and makes it any harder to see. Just look for the star.”
“A motel,” Caleb repeated. His face was numb in the frigid air.
