Invisible Boy by Harrison Mooney

Author:Harrison Mooney [Mooney, Harrison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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My mother made me go to youth group that night. I tried to get out of it, but I had nowhere else to be.

I’d been going with Joel on Mondays to Northview Community Church. We were regulars there for months. The richest congregation in Abbotsford boasted the best youth group by far, and the sermon was short—ten minutes, tops. After, it was all fun and games: balloon tag in the bonus room, basketball in the double-wide gym, and finally, a free-for-all at Checkers—the fifties-era milkshake place built into the building, across from the gift shop, where Jones Soda sold for a buck.

Just before Valentine’s Day, I split a root beer with a girl I liked. Her older brother cornered me in the parking lot.

Hey doink, he said, pushing me up against a lamppost, stay the fuck away from my sister. She won’t be dating some shitlegs like you, I promise.

And on the drive home, my mother said: That’s what you get for chasing girls.

I was more of an irregular after that, and I’d stopped attending Northview entirely when a competing youth group was launched at my current home church, Stone Rolled Away Christian Fellowship.

Several former Gateway members had migrated there: Tilda Eubanks, Destiny’s family, the Werther’s lady, and us—returning, it turned out, after more than a decade away. All were absorbed into the Fellowship, which was actually a family church. Adam and Amos Schumacher, the associate pastors, were brothers who married sisters, Eileen and Ellen Stratford. Their father, Milton Stratford, was Stone Rolled Away’s main Man of God. He was a pious and obdurate man who commanded respect from the rest of the Schumacher family. The whole clan lived together in a huge duplex near the airport, along with their nine children, five white, four Black.

The Black kids came courtesy of Eileen and Ellen’s adopted sister, Esther Stratford, the woman from Gateway who swore that we knew each other. My family had first attended Stone Rolled Away when she was just a teen and I was just a wee one, learning how to use my legs. She used to take me by the hand and guide me down the aisle.

But those days were long gone. Esther was a drug addict now, a lost soul, and she couldn’t stop having her drug dealers’ babies. Eileen and Amos adopted each one. It was their obligation and somehow also to their credit. The fourth was brand new, and Esther’s tubes were tied after delivery to prevent any more surprises. She returned to a drug den, no doubt, on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; the baby, whose name was spelled strangely, remained in Abbotsford.

The spelling was amended once the adoption was official.

Eileen and Amos believed the best form of birth control was abstinence, and right around their fourth adoption, they launched a care cell just to say so, meeting Mondays at their house, where the majority of Stone Rolled Away’s young people already lived. But everyone was encouraged to bring their friends.

I’ll stick with Checkers, Joel said, when I asked him.

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