I don't fear God.
The car won't move, engine in full song, its death knell chiming against the bonnet.
'God fucking damn it.' Dad's hands slamming on the wheel in rhythm with his divine invocation, a mile from school. 'Jesus fucking Christ.'
I fear being wrong, being imperfect, being dirty, being ungainly. I fear the weight of the heavy green blazer pulling my shoulders into my collar bones with a bone-grinding ache, fingertips brushing the velveteen lining because it's two sizes too big. I fear the prickling sweat matting my puffy dress shirt to my underarms, soaking my black tights, squelching in my blunt lace-ups as blisters burgeon, and I fear the headmistress's office where her strangely fanned bangs and tapered bob shake as she shakes her head at me. I missed chapel.
'It was an important service for your peers,' she says. Not for you, mind, heathen.
Her blazer fits, as tailored as the humiliation. A deity in business formal. But her fingers are gnarled, torn at the cuticles with red scabs at the corner of each thumb, telling of the hours during which she'd sat at the desk and let anxiety win, whittling her own skin down to stinging raw dermis. I stare at the hands and with haste, she hides them in a prim clasp behind her back.
'Our car broke down,' I say.
'Whose job is it to be here on time?'
'Mine.'
Lipstick creases and cracks and shows the gummy grey underneath like milky hot chocolate. It's the price she pays for a smile that stretches too wide for the camera, the price of a mouth that rolls its vowels around too many colonial plums, of lips that purse when she hears me speak, and the others: the girls whose families' cars break down and who are late and whose accents make her wince and who don't take Communion. I don't fear God because while He noted my father's request and made His way up the hill to damn the car (and what a magnificent job He did of it too, the engine destroyed beyond repair and steaming hotter than the deepest pits of Hell), I had already set off in the other direction, afraid only of His representatives.