Church. Read online

  CHURCH.

  Stylo Fantôme

  Published by BattleAxe Productions

  Copyright © 2018

  Stylo Fantôme

  Critique Partner:

  Ratula Roy

  Cover Design:

  Najla Qamber Designs

  http://najlaqamberdesigns.com

  Copyright © 2018

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  It is the copyrighted property of the author,

  and may not be reproduced, copied, re-sold, or re-distributed.

  If you're reading this ebook and did not purchase it,

  or it was not purchased for your use only,

  then this copy must be destroyed.

  Please purchase a copy for yourself from a licensed seller.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  DEDICATION

  EMMA.

  1

  2

  CHURCH.

  3

  EMMA.

  4

  CHURCH.

  5

  6

  CHURCH.

  7

  EMMA.

  8

  9

  CHURCH.

  10

  EMMA.

  11

  CHURCH.

  12

  CHURCH.

  13

  14

  CHURCH.

  EMMA.

  15

  CHURCH.

  16

  16

  17

  18

  MORE FROM THE AUTHOR

  SOUNDTRACK

  Book Two

  The Kane Series

  DEDICATION

  For Nanci and Jennifer and Rebecca.

  Thanks for all the laughs.

  CHURCH.

  Book One

  EMMA.

  My mother got married again.

  She has awful taste in men, and that includes my father.

  It shouldn't matter to me. I'm old enough to not need parents. I shouldn't even be living at home.

  But when you're white trash that's been done dirty since before you were born, you just get stuck.

  I don't know, maybe I didn't get enough nutrition as a kid.

  Maybe I got dropped on my head.

  Her new guy is a step up, I suppose. He won't hit me. Or touch me. Or look at me.

  He won't do anything, judging by the way things have been going. He goes to work somewhere, I don't know where. He wears the same tie and the same short-sleeved button up shirt everyday. There's a coffee stain on the pocket. I stare at it when I'm in a room with him.

  A guy going to work everyday is a step up for Margo. Most of her husbands usually live off her disability checks. Not Jerry. Jerry is solid middle class. Lives in a three bedroom bungalow in a cul-de-sac in an okay neighborhood, in an okay town.

  Of all the motel joints in all the world, though, he had to walk into hers. It was love at first check-in.

  Margo is pretty, I suppose. Big tits, blonde hair, nice eyes. A cheap Marilyn thing. The closest Jerry's ever been to a pretty girl is probably a b-rate porno. B-rate because hey, this is Jerry we're talking about. Wheat bread is the fast lane for him. That made my mother like the Indy 500. Like a sweep in Vegas. She batted her eyes once and he was all in. He proposed after the first time they had sex, or at least that's what she claims.

  Whatever. It meant we got to live in a real house for once. It meant I had my own room. It was Jerry's old office, I slept on his pull out couch. He didn't use it anymore, but his scratched up metal desk and his boxy old Apple were still in there, taking up my breathing space. No closet, so my clothes hung on a rack. No dresser, so I used the empty desk drawers. It wasn't so bad.

  At least he didn't touch me.

  But there was a second bedroom. After I dropped off all my shit in the office, I stood in front of the other room. It was a guest room, with a double bed all made up. Perfect particle board furniture is standing untouched in there. An empty bulletin board hangs above a clean desk. Why am I in the fucking office when there's a spare fucking room?

  Yeah, I asked that same question, and I got an answer, too.

  It's not a spare room.

  It's Paul's room.

  1

  Emma straddled a bench in the dining hall. She absent-mindedly picked at her thumb nail while she stared out the big windows. They were dirty. They were always dirty, she'd noticed. Smudged brown from the grease in the air, they gave the world a dusky filter, no matter what kind of weather was outside.

  “Hi.”

  Startled, Emma looked across the table.

  “Oh. Hello,” she managed to blurt out, a little startled to see Stacey Cummings sitting down across from her. Emma had barely spoken to anyone, but she was very observant. Stacey seemed like the type of person always doing her best to make everyone feel included, a one-woman-welcome-wagon, as it were. She was the leader of a lot of different school organizations, and she was always throwing parties and get-togethers. She seemed to love a charity case, and few people needed charity more than Emma.

  Emma supposed she could be getting attention from worse people. Stacey certainly wasn't the most popular person in town, but she was liked and accepted by pretty much everyone. It didn't hurt that she was also blonde, tall, and shapely. The two of them shared a freshman level math class together, but had barely spoken before that morning.

  “It's going to rain today,” Stacey commented, nodding her head at the windows.

  “You think?” Emma mumbled, her stare drifting back to the outside.

  “Emma, right? I'm Stacey.” Emma stared at her for a moment, then shook her hand. “I've been meaning to say hi, but I was on academic probation after last quarter, I was just so busy scrambling to bring up my grades. You're super new, right?”

  Super duper new. Part of her new life as an upstanding suburbanite daughter was going to college. She'd started courses a couple weeks before, at the beginning of the second quarter. It was only a community college, but hey, it was a step up from flipping burgers at McDonald's. Jerry's business had hooked her up with a scholarship, so even though she was twenty-two, Emma was finally hitting the books.

  She went to class and she got good grades, but it just seemed like a waste of time. The only reason Margo wanted her daughter in school was so Emma could get a degree. A degree she could then hopefully use to get a job that would get her out of her mother's hair once and for all.

  So she went and she did well, but she also put in job applications everywhere. The moment she got a decent one and made some money, she'd be out of that house so fast, they'd forget she was ever even there.

  It was a small city, so the college was small. A lot of the students knew each other from the area. They hadn't quite known what to make of Emma. Someone who was old enough to be graduating joining the freshman ranks.

  Stacey was twenty-one, enjoying her third – and hopefully last – year in the school. She babbled away while they sat there, explaining how she was getting her bachelor's degree in marketing, asking what Emma was studying. Of course, Emma didn't really know yet; she'd just started, after all. Six months ago, college hadn't even been on her radar. She'd figured she could take this first semester to sort of get her bearings and figure out what kind of degree she should work towards.

  Stacey nodded her head the whole time, saying she understood, claiming she'd been the same way. She still remembered how hard her first weeks at school had been, and she'd lived in that town her whole life – how hard it must be for Emma, being the new girl! Stacey was officially going to make it her personal mission to welcome Emma into the town's social life. In f
act, she was throwing a party that night, and Emma just HAD to go.

  “I won't know anyone,” she responded to Stacey's invitation.

  “Well, duh. And you never will if you don't go out and meet people,” she pointed out.

  “I hate meeting people.”

  “That's silly! If you don't meet people, how can you ever know anyone?” Stacey laughed, shoving her gorgeous hair over her shoulder.

  Emma didn't laugh. Stacey didn't understand. Emma had met lots of people in her life, and almost every single one had screwed her in some form or fashion. She didn't do so well with people. Maybe it was because she wasn't exactly normal. She'd never been popular, and she wasn't some bubbly blonde. She'd long since learned that she and the general public didn't mix, and it suited her. If she didn't interact with other people, they couldn't hurt her.

  And even more so, she couldn't hurt them.

  But she could tell Stacey wasn't going to let this go. She was terminally chipper, determined to make everyone else around her happy and sunny. She didn't realize that some people on this earth were put there just to be gray.

  “I'll think about,” Emma finally offered. “I have a lot of work to do, though, a lot of catching up. I'm a quarter behind all of you. Give me your address, and I'll let you know if I can make it.”

  “Deal.”

  Before they could continue with the conversation, though, there was a commotion at one of the exits. They glanced over and watched as kids crowded around the doors.

  “I wonder what's up?” Emma asked. Stacey shrugged and stood up.

  “Let's go check it out.”

  Most of the people has disbursed by the time they got up there, but a couple guys were still hanging out in a circle. Stacey elbowed her way right into the middle, leaving Emma to stand in her wake.

  “What's going on?” she asked, shoving a platinum strand over her shoulder. The guys all looked like geeks and seemed a little shell shocked at her presence.

  “Hey, Stacey,” one of them, the clear leader of the group, said coolly. “You didn't hear?”

  “No, Chet. What's up?”

  “Church is coming back.”

  Stacey's eyebrows went up. Everyone nodded. Emma felt like she was missing something important.

  “Church?” she finally asked.

  “Not a church,” Stacey started to explain.

  “The Church,” Leader of the Geeks interjected, and everyone cracked up.

  “She's new, okay?” Stacey snapped, and that shut everyone up. “And what do you mean?”

  “I mean, he's coming back and he's gonna go to school here.”

  Ah, so Church is a someone, not a something. Who would name their son Church?

  Stacey burst out laughing.

  “Why on earth would Church go here?”

  “Dunno. All sorts of rumors. Maybe you should ask him when he gets here.”

  Stacey snorted. “As if.” And then she was walking away.

  “You gonna explain all that to me?” Emma asked, hurrying to keep up with her new “friend”.

  “Church is ...” Stacey took a while to choose her words. “Strange. I don't know how else to describe him.”

  “Um, try hair color? Height? What makes him strange?” Emma suggested, and Stacey laughed.

  “He's got amazing eyes, but I can't really remember his hair. Dark, maybe? He's good looking. Really good looking, but that doesn't matter.”

  “Why doesn't it matter?”

  “Because he's ... strange. Look – he's smart, okay? Really smart. I'm talking Mensa candidate, Ivy League, perfect SATs, all that shit kinda smart,” Stacey explained.

  “So because he's smart, he's strange,” Emma filled in the blanks.

  “No, that makes it sound horrible.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Seriously!” Stacey laughed as they walked outside. “I can't explain it. He's super smart, but was super quiet growing up. I don't think I've ever heard him talk, and I went to school with him from like third grade to graduation. He never joined any clubs or teams or anything like that. Marci MacIntosh swears she slept with him once, and there was a rumor he beat up some kid for teasing him, but those are probably the only normal things I've ever heard about him.”

  Emma didn't say anything, just thought about everything she'd heard. So this Church character was very quiet and super smart, and possibly acted like a typical boy.

  The suburbs are weird. They think normal is strange out here.

  “Remember,” Stacey started speaking as she unlocked her vehicle and opened the door. “Party tonight. You promised.”

  “I didn't promise. I said I'd try.”

  “Close enough for me. C'mon, it'll be fun. I'm fun, I swear. Give me a call if you need a ride!”

  Stacey prattled off her phone number, then dropped into her seat, giving one last little wave before starting up her car.

  Why does she want to be friends with me? Can't she see I'm not like her?

  Later that night at home, Emma's mother was excited to hear her daughter might possibly be going out for the evening.

  “A party, how wonderful! It's a pity you couldn't live in the dorms,” she commented, glancing meaningfully at Emma.

  Jerry's amazing scholarship program hadn't covered rooming costs.

  “Don't worry, Margo,” she sneered back. “I'll be gone soon enough, and then you can really pretend like your old life never happened.”

  “Don't call me that! The way you talk to me is awful, Emma,” her mother complained as she took a seat at the dining room table. Jerry sat in his usual spot, his face buried in a newspaper.

  “That's the point of all this, right?” Emma asked, gesturing to the faded carpet and wood paneled walls. “Big step up for Margo Hartley! Don't want any of your new friends to know you came from a trailer.”

  Jerry glanced up at that statement and his wife's eyes flicked to him before going back to Emma. She scowled and stood back up.

  “You shut your mouth right now,” she hissed, grabbing her daughter by the arm and roughly yanking her across the living room. “After everything I've done for you? Everything we've done for you? And this is the thanks I get?”

  “Is that a fucking joke?” Emma laughed loudly. “I should thank you for everything you've done for me? How about we start with John, hmmm? Shall I thank you for husband number two? For all the things he did for me? Or should I say to me. Moving to suburbia and pretending to love some piece of middle management doesn't change what a shitty fucking mother you are, or what you let grown men do to -”

  She got slapped across the face.

  Emma and her mother fought all the time. Constantly. But it had never turned violent. She'd had plenty of visions of kicking her mom's ass. Taking a baseball bat to her, even. She'd never done it, though. She'd always lifted her chin and taken any arguing in stride, because that's what an adult would do.

  Apparently fucking not.

  They stared at each other for a second. Margo looked a little horrified at her actions. Or maybe she was scared of what her daughter's reaction would be.

  Emma didn't move. Her cheek was on fire and she was breathing fast through her nose, but she held herself in check. Just stared fire down at her mother.

  “Oh, baby, I'm so sorry, I didn't -”

  Fuck that, Emma would rather get hit again. She turned and walked away. Once she got through the front door, she slammed it behind her. She hurried down the walk, and when she heard the door open and her mother call out to her, she just kept going.

  SOMETIMES, EMMA almost felt like a normal young woman. Once upon a time, she'd liked drinking and dancing and meeting boys and having fun. She was sexual, almost boldly so. She'd never been afraid to approach a guy, to be the first to make a move, to lead when most girls would only follow.

  And it had always worked. She was pretty, she supposed, but not overwhelmingly so. Not classically, like Stacey, or even uniquely. She was almost ... wholesome looking, which was hilarious.
She had mossy green eyes and sandy brown hair, which almost looked ruddy sometimes, but not quite. It hung long and straight, refusing to curl under any conditions, but it was amazingly thick, so she was content with it.

  A smattering of freckles blanketed the bridge of her nose and spilled over onto her cheekbones. Sometimes she covered them with makeup, other times she didn't care. Her mouth was angry and full of razor sharp words, but its appearance was the opposite. A top lip that turned up at the crest, giving her a permanent pout and a funny little smile. Wide, round, expressive eyes accompanied a button nose, which completed the “Made in America!” look.

  For whatever reason, though, people seemed into it. She was on the tall side and lean, with long limbs. She'd been asked multiple times if she'd ever modeled, and all through junior high, her mother had pushed for it. But then Emma had grown a back bone and told her mother to fuck off.

  Those days were in the past, though. All of them. No more parties and no more boys. She'd spent so much of her life thinking if someone just paid attention to her, just thought she was pretty, it would be enough. It would make her a whole person. So she'd always thrown herself into relationships and friendships. Life at home had always been so awful, she'd needed something amazing to counterbalance it.

  It never worked out that way, though. The nightmare inside her home, inside herself, it was just waiting on the outside, too. It just disguised itself better. Her disgusting mother and her army of exes had taught Emma to think of herself as a piece of meat. As a tool to be used and discarded. So any attention was good attention, right?

  Wrong.

  She was tired. At the ripe old age of twenty-two, she was so fucking tired. Tired of the world chewing her up and spitting her out. She wasn't good enough for anything. For anyone. It had started to make her fester. Rot.

  She wasn't a quitter, though, so after Margo had gotten married to Jerry, Emma had made a decision. If she wasn't good enough to be loved by anyone, then no one was good enough for her love, either. Not her love, not her attention, not even her time.

  If she could just get through the next year. Get a job, get some money saved up, then she could get away. Go somewhere near the ocean, away from people and crowds. Away from this obsessive need to be loved. Maybe, just maybe, if she could hold still for a moment without the weight of the world crushing her, she could finally learn how to love herself.