Donut Days

Table of Contents

 

 

 

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Published by The Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.). Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England. Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.). Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd). Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India. Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd). Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Copyright © 2009 by Lara Zielin.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Published simultaneously in Canada.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zielin, Lara, 1975- Donut days / by Lara Zielin. p. cm. Summary: During a campout promoting the opening of a donut shop in a small Minnesota town, sixteen-year-old Emma, an aspiring journalist, begins to connect an ongoing pollution investigation with the turmoil in the evangelical Christian church where her parents are pastors. [1. Faith—Fiction. 2. Clergy—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Self-Actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Journalism—Fiction. 6. Sex role—Fiction. 7. Evangelicalism—Fiction. 8. Christian life—Fiction. 9. Minnesota—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.Z497Don 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2008026138

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-03286-2

For Rob

He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus,
but he talks like a gentleman.
—The Killers

 

 

We could not talk or talk forever and
still find things to not talk about.
—
Best in Show

 

 

After the flood, all the colors came out.
—U2

I
’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure Adam—as in the guy who named all the animals in the Garden of Eden—wasn’t a hermaphrodite.

Turns out my mom had a different opinion.

If I’d known my mom was going to give Adam a sex change in front of the entire Living Word Redeemer congregation, I would have stayed away from her Friday night service. I would have just bummed a ride off someone, or ridden my bike, or taken a bus—all the things you do for transportation when you’re sixteen, like me, and you don’t have a car—and headed over to the Crispy Dream donut camp.

Instead, I sat in the front pew in the sanctuary (my gut tightening by the second), listening to my mom, Pastor Sarah Goiner, talk about the Garden of Eden. Normally this wouldn’t be a touchy subject, but with everything going on in the church these days, it would be better if my mom had talked about abortion, or gay rights, or prayer in school, or even a combination of all three.

Next to me, my dad, Pastor Mitchell Goiner, was sitting ramrod straight in the pew. On Sundays he did the preaching, but Fridays it was all about my mom. The panicked way his neck cords were sticking out told me he probably wished he could take my mom’s place at the pulpit—either that or put duct tape over her mouth.

Up on stage, my mom flipped through her Bible, which was so battered and worn that a couple pages floated to the floor like a tree shedding its leaves in the fall. My Bible, on the other hand, had a spine so perfect that it still cracked when you opened its gleaming pages. Every time I went to follow along during a sermon, the noise would practically ricochet through the sanctuary. I’d feel the pupils of the congregation boring into the back of my head, all of them silently scolding me for being the pastor’s kid who didn’t read the Word enough.

“God took Eve from Adam,” my mom said, walking across the stage, “from his
rib
.” The lights above my mom had gels on them to soften their glare, and tonight they looked like they were coating her with blueberry preserves. This, plus the lavender carpet, made her skin seem beaten and bruised.

“And then Adam calls Eve one of his own kind,” my mom continued. “You know what that means? It means her female form wasn’t new to him—rather, she was
familiar
.”

With my peripheral vision I noticed a couple people shift in their seats.
Stop now, Mom,
I pleaded silently.
Please, stop now
.

“Familiar,” my mom continued, her words quickening, “because men and women both bear God’s image.
Both
of them.” There was a half second of silence in the congregation. “Both of them!” my mom repeated, raising her voice a little.

Usually after my mom makes an emphatic statement like that, someone in the church agrees with it—out loud. But this time, no amens erupted from the sanctuary. No one’s hands were waving in encouragement, no heads were bent with furious note-taking. My dad now had a vein throbbing in his forehead and a tiny bead of sweat dribbling down one temple.

And then my mom raised her hands toward the ceiling and tilted her head back and said, “My people, listen to me! Adam had the programming for being female in him all along. And since Adam was made
in the image of God,
that means God is both male
and
female.
Adam
was both male and female! Do you understand what this means? Men and women are
equal
. They are one and the same!”

She may as well have walloped half the congregation in the face with the Old Testament. I mean, take it from someone who’s gone to church twice a week since she was in the womb: the idea that Adam was both male
and
female—at least before God took out his rib and separated the female part—wasn’t something you heard a lot. And even though Birch Lake High, home of the Fighting Saplings, might not be filled with the smartest kids ever, I didn’t get to be number three in my class
and
associate editor of our school’s paper, the
Chieftain
, by missing out on the obvious—which is to say that if you’re a pastor and your church is in turmoil, the way to make your point about everything that’s going on is
not
to say that the originator of humankind had both a penis and a vagina.

“Blasphemy!” someone cried from the back of the church. I turned, but I couldn’t see who it was—they were just a dark shape as they exited the sanctuary. I cringed as a handful of the congregation followed, stomping down the aisle in protest.

“In Jesus’ name, let her finish!” someone else cried.

My dad turned to me with a look of horror. On the stage, my mom was frozen in place, her mouth open in a little O. My dad stood and, not knowing what else to do, I stood too.

Following our lead, the remaining congregants were on their feet in seconds. Some of them swarmed us like religious paparazzi.

“What is going on?”

“Pastor Goiner, you can’t condone this.”

“This was exactly the right thing to do. God bless you.”

My dad and I were starting to get penned in by people. I looked around, debating whether or not I should hurdle the pew and make a break for the back door, when I spotted Nat among the crowd. Nat was my best friend—or
former
best friend, I should say—and at that moment she was walking arm in arm with Molly O’Connor, whose dad was the reason for all the church’s problems to begin with. If Nat and I weren’t in the biggest fight ever, I would have called out to her and maybe we could have done what we had planned to do before our big throwdown, which was go to the Crispy Dream donut camp. Maybe we could have talked about this crazy scene while we drank coffee and chewed on crullers. No O’Connors around for miles.

Instead, Nat clutched Molly’s arm more tightly and leaned over to whisper something in her ear. Molly immediately turned to stare at me, her eyes narrowed. Her lips were pulled into a tight frown until she opened them to mouth a word that I said too sometimes, one that rhymed with
witch,
but that I’d never, ever said inside the walls of church.

I blinked. How could Molly be mad at
me,
after what her dad had done? Her dad with his gobs of money and his car with the license plate that read BLESSD—all from running a soap company called Mollico, named for Molly herself, of course. I was convinced that if Mr. O’Connor had been broke like the rest of us, he never would have been made head of the church board. And if
that
hadn’t happened, I was willing to bet none of the other prophecy drama would have taken place either.

With my face burning, I watched Molly and Nat go. Molly’s blond extensions were piled on the back of her head like a movie star’s, like church was a red-carpet event in her world. How had it come to this? I closed my eyes, thinking how school was going to start in a matter of days, and how I’d have to begin my senior year with Nat and Molly hating my guts. Plus Nat was in love with Carson Tanner, who also hated me, which was another issue altogether.

Fabulous
.

Next to me, I heard snippets from the conversations my dad was fielding.

“Do not be hindered from obeying!”

“God made man in His image!”

“The nations will rise up in judgment!”

What were they saying? What did all that really
mean
? I had no idea.

Then again, I had no idea about a lot of things. Other people in the church, though, supposedly understood just about
everything,
including God’s will, from reading the Bible. But if you asked me, it wasn’t that simple. I mean, the Bible was thick for a
reason
. And when you had people in the church disagreeing about something that was so hard to nail down, let me tell you, I’d take a plague of locusts over that anytime. At least with the locusts you could grab a can of Raid and feel like you were getting somewhere.

M
y dad broke free from the congregants long enough to grab my arm. “Emma, go get your sister out of Little Saints,” he said.