The Warm Fuzzies

Illustration by Zohar Lazar

Her parents always gave the new kids a tambourine and stuck them back with Molly, because it was easy to play the tambourine, though there were intricacies to it that nobody else understood or appreciated, and because she was nice, though she was actually only about half as nice as everyone supposed her to be. The new boy was not very different to look at than any of his predecessors, the black foster brothers and sisters who came and went and came and went, circulating one at a time through her actual family until they were inevitably ejected. She had barely learned to remember Jordan’s name before he was gone, trundled off to a Job Corps assignment in Houston, and now here was Paul, at thirteen years old a little younger than his unmet foster brother once removed, and just as bad with the tambourine. Molly stepped closer to him in the garage and tried to keep the beat in a way that was more obvious and easier to copy, but he didn’t catch on, and though he stayed in tune when he sang, he kept getting the words wrong. “I love you,” Molly sang, coming in with the rest of the family for the chorus. “I love you a lot. I love you more than you can know, but Jesus loves you more more more more!” It wasn’t the hardest refrain to remember, but still he kept singing “I love you so much” instead of “a lot,” and “more than you can imagine” instead of “more than you can know.” It boded ill when they couldn’t get the refrain right on this song. It meant that nothing would be easy for them.

It was useless, though, to worry about them, even at this early stage, when you’d think something could be done to help them out, to make them fit in better, or to defuse the inevitable conflicts that would lead to their being sent back to the pound or shipped off to some other family, or a trade school, or the Marines, or to any number of pseudo-opportunities that were the consolation prize for not actually becoming a member of the musical Carter family of Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Molly smiled at Paul, and he nodded coolly at her, which was something different. Usually on the first day, they just gave her a nervous smile, but he seemed to be appraising her somehow, looking her up and down with the nod. Then he turned, swinging his hips one way and his shoulders another, and he gave the same look to her sister Mary where she stood tossing her hair back and forth at the keyboards, using one finger on each hand to play. He did one shake of the tambourine at her—it was out of time—and then at her brother Colin where he was playing the guitar, toward the front of the garage, near their parents. Colin was strumming and dipping from the waist, left and right and left, and hopping in place during the chorus. He was as pale as Molly, and looked sickly, all of a sudden, compared with the new boy. Molly held her breath and closed her eyes and with an effort—it was like squeezing something inside her head—she refrained from thinking something unpleasant about her brother.

The new boy did the same thing to Malinda, singing between their parents, to Craig, on the violin, and Clay, on the bass. He turned around to do the thing—a salute? a shake of the fist?—to Chris, on the drums, and to her parents, and then to little Melissa, a moving target since she played no instrument and did not sing but just danced around enthusiastically, and finally to the life-size picture of Jesus taped to the back side of the garage door, where a different sort of family, or a different sort of band, might have taped a picture of a stadium crowd. It was two shakes for Jesus.

He closed his eyes then, and kept dancing in place and mumble-singing the wrong words. “Jesus Loves You More” did not rock very hard. None of their songs did, though their father, who wrote them with minimal input from Mary and Craig, the two eldest, would have said otherwise. Molly did what she could to shake things up. She and Chris had a thing going, where she accented his drumming just so, jingling grace beats that brought out the rhythm underneath their father’s vanilla melody, which was always one of only four melodies. You could do only so much, though. If you shook it too hard, you merely drew attention to yourself in a way that made it clear you had given up on the song or were trying to drag it someplace it just didn’t belong. It was a subtle bit of tambourine lore, not something to be intuited the first time you picked one up. But the boy was stomping and shaking and spinning and clapping to a song that was the breathless, hopped-up cousin of the one they were playing. Chris and Mary and Clay frowned at him, but the others, standing in front of him with their hearts turned to Jesus, didn’t notice for another minute. The song stopped, not entirely on their father’s karate-chop cue, but the boy did not. His eyes were closed, his hands and his feet were flying, and he was smiling as he sang: “Jesus, he’s my friend, sort of! He’s my kind of sometimes friend. Jesus!” Melissa laughed, and danced along until Mary grabbed her shoulder.

“Paul,” their mother said. “Paul!” He stopped dancing and looked at her.

“When the music stops,” their father said, “the song is over.”

“My name,” the boy replied, “is Peabo.”

There was a time when they had been just the Carters, and not the Carter Family Band, but Molly could barely remember it. There was a time when her father had been a full-time instead of a part-time dentist, and her mother had been the dental hygienist in his office, when they had all gone to regular school instead of home school, when the family car had been a Taurus instead of a short bus, and when Melissa hadn’t even been born. Then her parents woke up one morning—without having seen a vision or having experienced a dark night of the soul—with a new understanding of their lives’ purpose. They both took up the guitar, never having played before, and started to praise Jesus in song.

There was a time, too, before they made albums or went on tours or appeared in Handycam videos produced and directed by their Aunt Jean, which aired (rather late at night ) on the community cable channel and then, eventually, on Samaritan TV, when Molly liked being in the band, and liked being in the family. She had had Melissa’s job once, and had danced as enthusiastically as Melissa did now, and had felt the most extraordinary joy during every performance, whether it was a rehearsal in the garage or a school-auditorium concert in front of three hundred kids. Then one morning two months ago, she had woken up to find that the shine had gone off everything. It was a conversion as sudden as the one her parents had suffered. She had come to breakfast feeling unwell but not sick, and was puzzling over how it was different to feel like something was not right with you and yet feel sure you were in perfect health, but she didn’t know what her problem could be until she noticed how unattractive her father was. It wasn’t his old robe or his stained T-shirt or even how he talked with his mouth full of eggs; he wore those things every morning, and he always talked with his mouth full—it was just how he was. She kept staring at him all through breakfast, and finally he asked her if there was something on his face. “No, sir,” she said, and a little voice—the sort that you hear very clearly even though it doesn’t actually speak—said somewhere inside her, He’s got ugly all over his face.

Peabo sat next to her at dinner that first night. Molly had just been getting used to the extra room at the table, to being able to eat with her natural right hand instead of her don’t-bump-elbows-with-Mary left hand. She had said goodbye to the empty seat the night before, when their father had announced to the family that they were getting another brother.

“Already?” Chris asked, because Jordan had been gone only three months.

“Already?” their father said. “You mean finally!”

“I miss Jeffrey,” said Malinda.

“His name was Jordan,” said Chris.

“What’s his name?’ asked Melissa. “Is it Jeffrey? Is it Elmo? Is it Sarsaparilla?”

“Paul,” said their father, and their mother said, “Paul Winner,” and Chris said, “Yeah, I bet he’s a real winner.” Colin gave him a high-five, and they were both subsequently disfellowshipped for the course of the meal, their chairs turned away toward the wall, their faces turned to their laps, and their desserts divided between chubby Mary and fat Craig.

Chris and Colin stayed in the corner while all the others got to speak their gratitudes. Mary went first and used up the obvious one: she was grateful for their new guest; she was grateful for the totality of his life and for his spirit. She was always saying things like that. Molly could tell by the way Colin’s shoulders were moving that he was poking his finger in his mouth to gag himself. Clay was grateful for the tension in his guitar strings. Craig was grateful for the color alizarin crimson. Malinda was grateful for the note of D-flat, and Melissa was grateful for fur, but, when pressed by their father to be more specific, she said, “Furry creatures.” Molly had been feeling a little panicked lately when her turn approached. There was a lot to be grateful for—the whole point of uttering one’s gratitudes was just that. It was meant to be easy, a nightly reminder that they lived their lives surrounded by visible and invisible bounty. But sometimes, out of sheer nervousness, Molly failed to think of anything, and sometimes the things that popped into her head were not the things she was supposed to be grateful for: the way her breasts were exactly the same size, while Mary’s and Malinda’s looked like they had traded four markedly different boobs between them; the way it felt when she rested all her weight on the tapering edge of her bicycle seat; the way Jordan’s right eye had been ever so slightly out of synch with his left eye. And lately the voice had been speaking with her, so when she said out loud, “Dandelion fluff,” or “The spots on the wings of a ladybug,” the voice would say poverty, or measles. She said, “This fork,” and held it tightly, as if clutching it could keep her from saying “My asshole.”

“I never thought I’d have to move back in with my parents.”

Peabo was quiet during his first dinner. Colin had predicted that he would be ravenous and nose for scraps off other people’s plates, but he hardly ate, tasting everything and finishing nothing but praising it all politely. Molly watched him, expecting him to pick up his plate and shake it at her, but he only cocked his head when he caught her looking. The family made the usual first-dinner conversation. On their mother’s instructions, they were supposed to let lie all the presumed horrors, and not ask him anything directly about his past, and so the gist of the conversation was something like “I like potatoes, Peabo. . . . Do you like potatoes?” He answered these questions the same way every time, with a solemn nod of his head and “I do.” Molly thought about the presumed horrors anyway. He had a burn on his left arm that she had noticed right away, and though she didn’t stare at him she wondered how he’d got it, and there was a scar on the side of his neck that had healed all bunched up and thick.

It would have been tantamount to suggesting that they cast Jesus out of the household to say that an end should be put to the endless stream of foster brothers and sisters who had been coming and going in the seat next to her for as long as she could remember. But she wondered if it reduced the sum total of anybody’s suffering to keep him around for a few months in a situation that ultimately did nobody any good, that changed nothing in anybody’s life, that only rearranged some things for a little while. But that was like wondering if they should stop playing and singing because their songs did not in fact enter into people’s hearts and make them love themselves and each other and Jesus, who mediated all love of any kind, the love clearinghouse and the love circuit board. Looking at the new boy, she thought that it might be easier for everyone if he just went away right now, and she waited for the voice to add something snarky and cruel to that thought. She waited and waited, but nothing came, and when he glanced her way again and caught her staring she put a piece of broccoli in her mouth and looked at her lap.

“What an unusual name,” Mary said later, when the four girls were in the bathroom getting ready for bed. “Peabo. Pea . . . bo.”

“It’s a dog name,” said Malinda. “Here, Peabo. Here, boy!”

“Here, kitty kitty!” said Melissa, then thought a moment and added, “It has ‘pee’ in it. I bet his middle name is Doody.” She struck a pose in front of Mary and stuck out her hand. “Hello, my name is Pee Doody. How do you doo-doo?” Mary slapped her hand away, and Melissa laughed. It was as typical and ordinary and expected as the dinner questions, or starting the new kid off on the tambourine—it had all happened before, and it would all happen again, the touch of cattiness in the beginning, relatively innocent doo-dooisms that lacked any deep venom. These would fade away little by little, and the giggling denigrations would be replaced by goggling admirations, a slow fade-up that might not be noticed if it weren’t part of the eternal foster cycle. Molly paused while brushing her teeth to sigh expansively.

“What?” Malinda asked.

“Nothing,” Molly said, because Malinda had become convinced in the past few months that Molly thought she was better than the rest of them, and she had taken it upon herself to teach Molly just how un-Christian and bitchy it was to go around heaving big sighs to let everyone know you were bored by your own superiority. That wasn’t it at all, of course. Molly actually felt pretty lowly, compared with the rest of them—just because she was always unwillingly coming up with insults for them all didn’t mean she thought she was better than anybody else. But she didn’t tell Malinda that.

“What?” Malinda said again.

“His middle name is Bo,” Molly said. “I saw his papers on Dad’s desk. “B-O. Paul Bo. P. Bo.”

“You like him,” said Mary, smiling.

“You’re not supposed to be looking at things on that desk,” said Malinda.

“Molly and Doody,” Melissa sang, “sittin’ in a tree.”

“He won’t last a month,” Molly said. She rinsed out her mouth and put her toothbrush back into her color-coded space—blue—in the holder, and went to her bedroom. It was hers that year by lottery; her sisters shared a room. Malinda said that having her own room had gone to Molly’s head.

She turned out the light, neglecting both her regular and her special Bible study, neglecting to kneel at her bed to pray, and only very quickly (though not insincerely) asking a silent blessing on all the people in her family, flipping their faces through her head like a card deck, instead of turning each of them over in her mind like a little statue. She considered the new boy last, picturing him on a card all his own, in his tambourine pose, in mid-shake and mid-benediction or threat, whatever it had been, and she let her mind go quiet for a moment while she held on to that image of him, as if inviting the voice to say something cruel about him. But again nothing came. For the rest of her family, she prayed for happiness and a long life, and that they be gathered up to Heaven if they should all die that night in an earthquake or a fire (and she briefly imagined them buried under the earth, and with burning hair). For the boy, she just asked that things work out for him here after all. Then she went to sleep.

When she saw him standing at the foot of her bed, her first thought was that it was strange to be dreaming about him, since he was interesting but not fascinating, and sad but not troubling. She stared at him for a while before she realized that she was awake. She sat up. “What are you doing here?” she asked. In answer he did an explosive move, throwing his arms up and out three times, slapping his heel, and spinning in place. She flinched but didn’t cry out; he did it again, and then something more complicated and harder to follow, and yet she did follow it, and preserved every move, the pointing and the spinning, the way he made double guns of his hands and fired them all around her room and then blew the imaginary smoke from the tips of his finger pistols, the splits in the air and the brief air-guitar solo and every blocky motion of the robot dance. He smiled at her when he was done. She stared back at him, not smiling, with the covers drawn up to her chin, and watched as he danced out of her room, doing a perfect curving moonwalk right out the door, which he left open. She stared at the open door for a while, considering it evidence that he had been there, since she made a point of closing it every night before she got into bed, and trying to think of what she should say to herself about what she had just seen. She didn’t know what to say, so she waited, instead, for the snarky, dissatisfied voice in her to say something, fully expecting it to be something more cruel and more vile than anything it had yet dared to say. But the words, when they came, were Nice moves.

She considered those moves as she sat the next day with her mother and the other girls sewing the costumes for the new video. They were in the garage, the only place in the house with enough empty floor space to lay out the fabric, though today they were just sewing spangles on the jumpsuits, all sitting cross-legged on cushions nipped from the living-room sectional. She had wondered, until she finally fell asleep, if she should tell on him. It was probably her duty, after all, to get him whatever help he needed to keep him from entering relative strangers’ rooms at night, uninvited. And maybe she ought to tell on him for her own sake, since any variety of bad behavior might be in store in him, and the little dance only a fluid, grooving prelude to a lifetime of deviance.

And yet it had only been a little dance. That was all he had done. There were Christian households where that was a crime, but this wasn’t one of them. There had been some kind of infraction; she was certain of that. But what exactly it might be was not clear at all. Whatever it was, ejection from the household on only the second day of his tenure seemed too severe a punishment, and that was what would likely happen, since she knew that her father would regard the situation with considerably less sophistication than she did. She found that she cared whether or not he stuck around, because it had been nice to hear something from the voice that she could agree with. Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.

“Pay attention, honey,” her mother said, because she was about to sew a spangle fish on backward to the sea-blue one-piece, zip-up-the-back jumpsuit. The girls had lost an argument with their father about how the fishes should be placed. “The fishes all swim the same way,” he said. “Up, toward Jesus.” It would have been pleasing, Molly thought, to have them going every which way.

“Sorry,” Molly said. Her mother handed her the seam ripper, and Molly began to undo the stitches, but she was imagining Peabo dancing in a suit of haphazardly swimming fish. Her mother was still staring at her when she handed back the seam ripper.

“Well?” her mother said.

“What?”

“You’re the only one who hasn’t shared yet,” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Huh?”

“Well, what do you think about the latest addition to our family?”

Molly shrugged. “He seems nice,” she said.

“And?”

Molly shrugged again.

“And she’s too fancy to share her opinions,” said Malinda. Their mother shushed her with a wave of her hand. “Mary,” she said. “Tell your sister what sort of family she’s living in.”

“A Christian Democratic Union,” Mary said, not looking up from her work.

“And what does a Christian Democratic Union rely upon?” She looked at Malinda now, but it was the voice that Molly heard answering first: Every citizen being perfectly ugly and perfectly boring.

“The open and honest loving communication of information equally shared among all participants,” Malinda said. Molly sighed, and Malinda glared at her, but she was sighing at the voice, not at her sister.

“So,” their mother said to Molly. “Once more, with feelings!”

“Did something bad happen to him?” Molly asked.

“Bad things happen to all of us,” her mother said.

“Something especially bad,” Molly said. “Something tragic?” She hadn’t read any further than the first page of the file on her father’s desk, and didn’t know anyway if they put that sort of thing in it, the list of his lifetime of problems: dead mother, dead father, beaten by auntie, contracted out to a sweatshop, punished with burns.

“Not everybody can be lucky like you,” said Malinda.

“Or like you,” said their mother. “Or you or you or you or you.” She pointed to each of them, then to Malinda one more time, and then she suggested that they take this as an opportunity to say their love, and so Molly turned to Mary and Melissa and said it, and finally suffered Malinda’s stiff hug.

“I love you,” Malinda said, and leaned close to whisper, “Even though you totally suck.”

“I love you, too,” said Molly, and she tried hard to mean it.

Later, during the afternoon rehearsal, she kept expecting Peabo to do the dance again. But today he was copying her exactly, doing the one-two, one-two shuffle in perfect time with her, and singing in tune on the signature piece of the new album, which was the reason they were rehearsing every day, and sewing costumes, and blocking out a video. They would start a tour in two weeks.

“It won’t happen again, sir.”

“The Ballad of the Warm Fuzzies” was the most complicated song her father had ever written. It didn’t involve any more than the usual four chords, but it was seven minutes long, and the lyrics told an actual story. The tale of the Warm Fuzzies and their battle with the Cold Pricklies unfolded in twelve verses, with half the family squaring off against the other in song. Peabo, along with Molly, was among the Pricklies.

All day, Molly had watched him as closely as she dared to, given how closely she was being watched by Malinda for evidence of snootiness or lack of charity toward the boy. Her mother had told them that Jesus would help them along to a place where they couldn’t even see that he was black, that with perfect love would come perfect color blindness, but every time Molly saw him standing next to one of her brothers or sisters it was all she noticed about him, how different he looked. Black is beautiful, the voice kept saying, which made her shake her head.

He talked to her in the same way he talked to all the girls, politely and never for very long. He joshed and roughhoused with the boys, and seemed to settle immediately into companionship with them in a way that belied the remote gaze he had trained on everyone during the first rehearsal and dinner. She watched him at play with her brothers. It was as if there were two boys, who didn’t jibe with each other. There was the boy who had sneaked into her room to offer up the little dance for her interpretation, and then there was the boy who arm-wrestled with Craig and did algebra equations for fun with Colin. She could understand if there were two boys in him, since she had felt there were two girls in her, one for the regular voice that said regular things about people and one that spoke a language made up only of cruel insults. If she stared in the bathroom mirror long enough, she thought she could catch that other girl’s features superimposed in brief flashes upon hers: her eyes were small and her nose turned up like a pig’s, and her mouth was a colorless gash in her face. Malinda caught her staring at herself like that once and said, “You think you’re so pretty, don’t you?”

Molly tripped up on the beat, and came late to the chorus:

Are you a warm fuzzy?

Are you a warm fuzzy?

Are you gonna be a warm fuzzy?

Or a cold, cold, cold, cold prickly?

At first, it seemed no one had noticed that she’d missed a beat—Chris was the only one who usually cared, anyway—until Peabo did the same thing, just one beat off, but didn’t look at her. He did it again: another missed beat.

She missed one back, and then threw in an extra one at the end of the next verse, and then for the rest of the song they were trading omissions and additions, having a conversation above and below and around the song that no one else, not even the snarky voice in her, could understand, and it occurred to her, just before the song ended, that they were speaking tambourine.

“Off the charts!” their father said, because they all stopped playing at exactly the same time for once, and everyone had been in key and no one had forgotten any verses; even Melissa’s flailing dance had been more graceful than usual. “He is risen! He is risen! Off the charts!” he said. Peabo was nodding soberly as they all put down their instruments and began to exchange hugs, something they usually did at the end of the rehearsal, though they were only half done now. It was one of those moments that Molly would really have appreciated a couple of months before. They were all hugging with breathless abandon, entirely caught up in how much they loved the music, one another, this day, and Jesus, of course. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Molly said to herself, but the voice said Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey, which lent a new emergent sense of alarm to her effort really to feel what they were feeling, and with her eyes shut tight she tried to feel it by sheer force of will. She strained, and there was a sensation in her like a bubble popping, and clear as day she had a picture in her head: a lizard sunning itself on a rock, staring rapt and remote into the distance.

They went to church that evening. Molly sat there, looking around without moving her head. It was worse here, surrounded not just by her family but by the whole congregation, hairy Mrs. Louque in the row in front of her and ancient Mr. Landry behind her. The church, which was as big as a warehouse, because it had once been a warehouse, was full of good, normal people who put her to shame by their example. Up on the stage, Reverend Duff was a lightning rod for the voice. There once was a reverend named Fudd, it sang, and she tried to do the mental equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing la la la.

It was a different sort of Jesus time than the one they had had that day at home, but Molly was failing at it just as badly. Her mother was trembling and ululating and her father was shaking and barking and her brothers were yipping and her sisters were mewling, and beyond them the whole congregation was similarly taken up, and Molly would have to listen, later, as they all talked about how wonderful it was for them when they spoke the spirit that way. She closed both eyes, then opened one to a slit to watch Peabo, who was standing quietly next to her. The limerick about Reverend Duff faltered and was silenced as she watched him. He doesn’t look stupid like the rest of them, the voice said, at the same time that she thought, He doesn’t look stupid like me. Molly looked ahead at the back of Mrs. Louque’s head. The lady was dancing in place like a little girl.

Their hymnbooks were touching and their elbows were touching and their knees were touching. But Peabo didn’t look at her, and he sang the hymns without any extra notes or extra syllables that could be put together into a message. When it came time to exchange the peace, he turned to her mother, and hugged Colin and Chris and Clay and her father, and he reached past her to hug Mary, but he didn’t even look at Molly. That would have been too obvious, she told herself, and she tried to think of some clever way of communicating with him. All she could think was to tear a piece of a page from one of the hymnals and fold it into the shape of a snake, which would signify something, though she wasn’t sure what, exactly. Her failure to imagine what that was made everything feel useless and dumb, and she was sure, all of a sudden, that she had imagined his unique advance. She closed her eyes, and shook her head, and found herself wanting to scream.

It would have been fine to scream. You were supposed to express the spirit however it came. This usually took the foster children by surprise, even though they were briefed about it before they came to church for the first time. But he seemed to take it all in stride. Molly did her usual thing, swaying back and forth with her eyes on the ceiling and muttering times tables in pig Latin to herself. She tried to distinguish the voices of her brothers and sisters from the cacophony. She heard Malinda saying something like “Edelweiss!” She heard her father saying “Omalaya!” and her mother saying “Paw-paw!” and then, finally, she heard Peabo, right next to her, saying something that sounded like “I love you I love you I love you I love you.” There was an altered, electric quality to his voice. She did not open her eyes, or look at him, but she slipped the words into her times tables. “I-ay ove-lay oooh-yay.” She kept on with the oooh-yays until the very end of it all, when folks were passing out, and the last hymn was starting up slowly, rising in various places around the hall from those who had recovered enough to sing. When she opened her eyes, she saw Peabo standing straight and tall next to her, mouth agape with the hymn, shouting it as much as singing it.

She went to his room that night, after she was sure everyone else had fallen asleep. It was the little room that they put all the foster kids in, not even really a bedroom, since it didn’t have a closet, just a wardrobe. There was a dresser and a small chair, but no space for anything else except the single bed. The drapes were open, and by the light of the street lamps Molly could see Peabo stretched out in bed, on top of the covers in his pajamas. She stared from the doorway for what felt like five minutes, but she couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not.

She didn’t say anything, because he hadn’t said anything, and it seemed like it would be cheating to use words. She didn’t know what words she would have used anyway, though it was clear what she wanted to say. She did the message: reach, reach, dip, kick, leap, leap, leap, every time a little higher, though not too high, since his room was right above her parents’ room. But she went high enough to kick her feet—one, two, three times—and when she landed softly she dropped into a squat and then exploded upward. This was a move from the video for “Jesus Loves You More.” Her hands were supposed to stretch out, and then fall, fingers fluttering, to her sides. But the same not-part of her that spoke with the voice that was not a voice took control of them just as she was stretching, and her hands opened up at the top of her reach into two perfect “Fuck you” birdies, aimed not at Peabo but at the whole world.

He didn’t stir the whole time she danced, which wasn’t very long. Her dance was even shorter than his had been, and she regular-walked, not moonwalked, out the door. Back in her bed, she wondered if he had been awake at all, not sure if it would be disappointing to talk to him at length, now that they were communicating at a higher level. She imagined going on forever this way, through his successful fosterhood and eventual adoption, through weddings and family reunions and funerals, proceeding in parallel past family milestone after family milestone. She imagined them at Malinda’s funeral, softly jangling their tambourines at each other, communicating shades of irony and grief not contained in the mundane verbal condolences of the others. She had nearly fallen asleep, and was sure she was about to enter a dream in which, knowing it was a dream, she could enjoy Malinda’s death, and say things like “No, I don’t miss her at all,” when she felt a pressure on her mattress, and awoke with a start.

He was sitting on her bed. “Do you want to see my Jesus?” he asked her.

“Do you need an anthropomorphic car with a monkey chauffeur in the city? No. Do you want it? Definitely.”

“Darkness,” said Aunt Jean. “And light! Light . . . and darkness!” She was doing Molly’s makeup for the video, painting half of her face black and half of it white for the concept portion of the shoot, which involved the family taking turns presenting their black faces and their white faces to the camera as they sang in a black-and-white checkered “dreamspace.” That was a sheet that Jean had colored herself with a reeking marker. Melissa, who had insisted on having her face done first, kept sniffing at it curiously. Jean had paused in front of Peabo, a tub of makeup in either hand, and said, “Why, the dark is built right in, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and gave her a neutral stare. In the end, she painted him just like the rest of them, but his black side was darker, and his white side more startling, than everyone else’s.

“Cold,” Jean said, throwing her head back and raising her hand to make mouthy little singing motions with it as she showed them her black profile. “Warm!” She pivoted sharply on her heel to show them her white face. Molly felt sure that the total effect, with the checkered background and their swiveling Kabuki faces, would make people dizzy, or possibly give them a seizure, but she didn’t say so. And the voice didn’t say so, either. It had been quiet all day. She didn’t really care anyway if someone had a seizure. She didn’t really care if she was playing well, during the fish-spangled band-shot portions of the video, when Jean roller-skated around the garage with the video camera to her eye. She didn’t care if she kept the beat or not, and she didn’t care if Peabo did, either. If he was throwing her grace beats, she ignored them.

“Everything will be different, after you see Him,” he had said, and that was true. As Molly had tried unsuccessfully to sleep, with the Jesus swinging languidly in her mind in a five-second arc that measured the minutes until dawn, she tried to see how she could not have understood what he actually meant, and she pictured herself on trial before her family, with Malinda seated as judge and the others in the jury box, listening with impassive faces as she attempted to explain. “I thought he meant he was going to share his Jesus with me. His own, personal Jesus. His experience of Jesus.” And it had been true that part of her thought that that was going to be the case, and that same part had wondered what it would be like to show him hers. She could only imagine the obvious thing, opening her chest to show him the very shape of her heart.

Everything looked the same. Her father looked the same, singing with his eyes closed and strumming those same four chords on his guitar. Her mother looked the same, shimmying in place. Chris and Craig and Colin looked the same, and Clay looked the same, thrusting his chin out like a lizard while he played the bass. Mary was stabbing, the same as she always did, at the keyboards, and Malinda was managing to open her pinched-up little mouth just enough for her weak voice to slip out. Melissa was dancing around like a fool who didn’t have a clue what was in store for her, and Peabo . . . it didn’t even matter what Peabo was doing. They were all hideous, and she knew without a mirror to tell her so that she was uglier than any of them. As soon as the video shoot was over, she found her father in his study and told him.

They started their tour in the auditorium of the New Calvary School, which was where they started all their tours, because it was down the street from their house, and because it could be relied upon to provide a crowd that was both sympathetic and constructively critical. Though the family had technically abandoned the institution, the principal was still a good friend of their father’s and a member of their church, and he passed out evaluation forms, dutifully completed by all the students, which scored their performance from one to ten in areas like musicality and spirit and goodness of news. More than a week after Peabo’s departure, there was still a shadow on the performance, though Melissa was the only one who said that she missed him, or that they had played better with him around, or that the music sounded different without him. “Don’t be stupid,” Malinda said. “He only played the tambourine.”

All their parents would say was that he had done something that demonstrated that it wasn’t in God’s plan for him to live with them, which was what they said about everyone who got sent back or sent away, but the children suspected that it must have been something horrible, because no one before had ever been sent away after only a week. “I guess you were right about him,” Malinda said to Molly. “He didn’t last a month.” She gave Molly a hard stare.

“I guess so,” Molly said, finding it easy to stare back blankly at her sister as if she’d had nothing at all to do with Peabo’s ejection. It was exactly as easy as it was to stare blankly at her parents, together and separately, when they asked if anything else had happened besides just a viewing. Aunt Jean took her shopping, though she wouldn’t buy any of the things Molly picked out for herself. The special attention almost gave away that something had happened to her, and Molly hid the condolence barrette that Jean had given her, after a weepy interrogation in the car. “It must have been so horrible for you!” she said, and Molly said, with perfect calmness, that it was.

They opened with “Sycamore Trees” and then played “Jesus Loves You More” before their father talked a bit to the audience. He wasn’t a preacher, but he liked to give sermons, and he told stories meant to throw the message of the song into starker relief. He was saying something about choices, which led into “The Ballad of the Warm Fuzzies,” and Molly had a moment in which she thought that she could hear the silence into which the voice should be speaking an insult to him. But it had been silent since Peabo left, as if it were sulking. She didn’t miss it, but she didn’t feel any better now that it had shut up. She wondered where Peabo was. She had been succeeding fantastically at not thinking about him, though not about his Jesus, which accompanied her everywhere. It was not exactly that she could not stop thinking about it, or even that she saw it in cucumbers or carrots or bunches of bananas. It was with her in a way that was hard to describe, because nothing had ever stayed with her this way before, a permanent afterimage not perceived with the eyes.

The music started without her; she had missed her father’s cue. She came in late, and settled down into an unthinking rhythm. She looked around at the audience, and found herself searching for Peabo, but there were only three black kids in the whole student body, and they were all girls. “Don’t you miss him?” Melissa kept asking. Molly could swear that she did not, but now she thought she might cry. That was O.K. Her father approved of tears, though not sobs, during a performance. She missed the chorus the first time around, waiting for the tears to come, but not a single one fell, even though everywhere she looked she saw the shimmer and the blur of them. Her family were moving all around her, and she didn’t know why, until they squared off into their fuzzy and prickly sides. They sang at her, cocking their heads as they asked if she was going to be a warm fuzzy, but it was clear from their faces that they were asking what was wrong with her.

I don’t know, she tried to say, right into her microphone, but something else came out, not even a word but just a noise made in a voice that did not sound like her own voice, though it was very familiar. It was lost in the singing. The family stepped expertly back to their original positions and started the second verse. Melissa picked up a bag and started to throw Warm Fuzzies—really just plush kittens with their hair teased up and their legs cut off, bought in bulk from the five-and-dime—into the crowd. Molly spoke again, louder this time and clearer, so it might have been heard over the music if it hadn’t been lost under the noise of the crowd. “Bitch!”

Malinda turned around to glower at her, and raise her hand to her lips in a gesture denoting not “Shush” but “Shut up and sing.” Molly shook her tambourine at her, two shakes off the beat. Malinda furrowed her brow and stamped her foot, which warranted another shake of the tambourine and a spoken response: “Bitch! Bastard! Bitch!” Then her mother turned around. She got a shake as well, and then Molly gave one to everyone in the family, one here and two there, and then a scattering of them to the audience. She imagined her family in the audience, and imagined herself in the audience, and imagined Peabo in the audience, and imagined his Jesus in the audience, and now she was singing to all of them. It was a whole audience of delicately curving, uncircumcised Jesuses, and each of them was asking her a question. “Fuck!” she answered. A twisted moan, it hardly sounded like the word, but it was the answer, as she shouted it, to every question she could ask. Where did he come from? Where did he go? Where had the shine gone when it disappeared off everything? What was wrong with her? The noise she was making—“Fargh! Foo-ack!”—was the answer, and then it was the question, too. She stood up straight and tall, shaking her tambourine and singing for a long time after the music had stopped. ♦