Donut Days Read Online Free

can try to start up a Lord of the Rings Bible study,” Mrs. Knickerbacher said, her lips twisted into a condescending smile. A few people nearby cackled.
    I glared at her, since I knew for a fact she had bigger problems than my choice in Bible studies. A few years ago, when I’d been snooping in my parents’ office files, I found out that Mrs. Knickerbacher’s husband had seen my dad for counseling about a porno addiction. A few pages later in the file it said that the couple had been to see my dad for marital counseling.
    There’s a scripture about that, actually. Not about porno and counseling, but about not picking apart everybody else’s life when your own isn’t so picture-perfect. If I could have remembered it right then, standing there in the foyer while Mrs. Knickerbacher made fun of me, I would have quoted it to her. But unless my dad was making me memorize scriptures as punishment, I had a hard time recalling any of them.
    “I have to go,” I said, and pushed my way through the crowd. Once clear, I ran the rest of the way to Little Saints.
    I thought about how Nat told me one time there was an actual medical condition for people who used the Bible as an excuse to talk behind your back all the time.
    “There is?” I’d asked.
    She’d nodded. “Biblical Tourette’s.”
    I’d laughed so hard when she said that, the pop I’d been drinking came out of my nose. But I didn’t feel like laughing now. I felt sick to my stomach, in fact, and I stopped running for a moment, leaning against one of Living Word’s walls just so I could catch my breath and not hurl. My best friend in the whole world hated me, the church thought I was a heathen, and I still couldn’t figure out why Mr. O’Connor had waded into the Minnetonka River on the day of our baptism. Make no mistake, I didn’t think his prophecy was even slightly true, but I couldn’t figure out what his motive could possibly have been for doing it in the first place.
    I was stumped and I needed someone to talk to about all this. And the truth was, there was only one person who I wanted to talk to about this. I took out my cell and gripped it tightly. Could I call him? Could I dial his number after everything that had happened between us? I put the phone back in my pocket.
    I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I needed to wait before I called Jake O’Connor. In fact, I wanted to wait as long as possible before I went near an O’Connor again.
     
     
     
    I stepped into Little Saints and tried to spot Lizzie among all the construction-paper crosses and cotton-ball lambs that were taped to every wall. The room’s overhead fluorescent bulbs hummed happily, spotlighting the permanent marker blotches on all the little worktables. I glanced past all the baby animal posters with captions that read, “Jesus loves a happy heart,” and saw Lizzie sitting on the floor among a handful of other kids. She was playing with a plastic Noah and two of every ark animal.
    I grabbed her hand and said, “C’mon, Lizzie. We gotta go.”
    “No!” she protested. She had just loaded the elephants into the wooden ship and didn’t want to leave.
    “Seriously. Move it.”
    Lizzie can play a typical seven-year-old for about two seconds before she remembers every single Bible verse she’s ever been taught. You could see “obey your elders” ticker-taping its way through her frontal lobe.
    She lifted up her head and her blond ringlets fell away from her face. How she got to be blond was anybody’s guess—both my parents were brunets and my hair at present looked like dark, rotten wood. I hadn’t had much time to brush it before church.
    “Okay,” Lizzie said finally, and stood up. Together we started walking back toward the sanctuary. The crowd had thinned outside the doors, and I exhaled when I saw Mrs. Knickerbacher was nowhere around. Lizzie hummed happily, and I noticed she smelled a little waxy. I wondered if she’d been eating crayons again.
    When we got to the