A WYW Club Story Excerpt…
Agnostic Sunday by Isa Glade
Bernadette didn’t even want to go, but it was already decided. She didn’t really like Roger. She didn’t feel good with him. He was tall and broad and mean. But just the night before he had challenged her, saying, “You think you’re better than me, don’t you?” and he knew he had her.
“No.”
She couldn’t even say how she got there to that house, where everyone was in their twenties or thirties, and she was only fourteen. Nobody really knew that. She looked eighteen. The women there rarely looked at her, never spoke to her much. They were fat women who wore blue eyeshadow and would punch you in the face if they felt like it. The hairy, biker men would grab her boney ass and chuckle at her. The women didn’t even seem to care. She slipped outside where she was safe. And there he was sitting on the roof, just around the corner from the door, talking soft and slow, like time stopped for him. He always did whatever he wanted. No one expected him to be anywhere else.
“Sure you do. Think you are sooo much better.” He scoffed, leaning back on his elbows on the roof’s shingles. He flicked his cigarette over the edge of the house.
“No, I don’t.”
“Then give me your number.”
She, on the other hand, lived under her parents’ rules in a nice part of the city, where people had jobs and ate dinner together. She was expected to be home at some point. Guys like him didn’t seem to have any rules. Besides, he was at least twenty-four, ten years older. A fully grown man. She was a straight-A junior high student, not that academics were any challenge in the city schools.
Roger had a lifetime of experience beyond Bernadette. He planned to pick her up at noon the next day….
