If anyone in Bottom Springs assumed life inside the Cornier house was different—that within the private walls of our two-story clapboard, the three of us shared a special familial intimacy, that my parents granted me a leniency and tenderness they gave no one else, the kind of loving indulgence a mother might give a naughty child who’s snagged a sucker from the grocery store—they would be wrong. There were moments of tenderness when I was young, evenings when my father would allow me to rest my head on his knee while he read, mornings when my mother’s fingers would soften and slow as they combed through my hair, but these were fleeting moments, dandelion seeds in my palm, lost the second I stopped clutching. For the most part there was no one my parents watched closer than me, looking for any hint of immorality or wantonness. And when they found one, there was no person on earth they would send to Hell quicker, Hell being twelve lashes with my father’s rattan cane, followed by a week locked inside my bedroom.
It was therefore wise to be a wisp. Even if my severe quietness meant that at school, I was as unpopular and friendless as poor Samuel Landry, whose Tourette’s syndrome made him a target for the crueler students, and Everett Duncan, whose ratty clothes, intense stare, and stubborn refusal to answer questions when called upon made it clear he was following in the footsteps of his ne’er-do-well father, one of the town’s chief church-shirkers. But it hardly mattered that no one invited me to drink Coors Light out in Starry Swamp on Saturdays. My whole life, I’d tried in timid overtures to find other people I could relate to, someone to call a friend, but I’d always failed. In such a small town, the pickings were slim. I wasn’t my parents’ kind of girl, not on the inside, but I wasn’t anyone else’s, either.
So instead of friendships, I cultivated quiet rebellions. Most came in the form of books. At Sacred Surrender High School, the library was tightly controlled by the church elders. It contained no suggestive books, no books that glorified sins like rebelling against one’s parents or sex before marriage. But most of all, it contained no occult. No boy or girl wizards or tales of monsters or werewolf love stories.