Sinner by Sierra Simone

Author:Sierra Simone [Simone, Sierra]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2018-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

“Why do you believe in God?” I ask as I get into my car. We’re at the curb in front of the shelter; I’m picking Zenny up at the end of her shift, and I’ve just kissed her senseless and then helped her into the passenger seat.

She drops her backpack with a thump on the floorboard and twists to buckle her seatbelt. “I see you’re not wasting any time in challenging me.” Her voice is mild, a little wry maybe, but when I look over at her, I immediately feel like shit. She looks fucking exhausted, and she smells like cheap tomato sauce and infant formula. The lumpy backpack between her feet is clearly stuffed with textbooks and there are dark smudges under her eyes that speak to how late I kept her up last night.

My dick fusses at me, but I decide the minute we get home that I’m tucking her into bed.

“That was thoughtless of me,” I admit, starting the car and heading the handful of skyscraper-filled blocks home. “I had a weird conversation with my mom tonight, and it’s fucking with my head. But that’s not an excuse.”

“The conversation was about God?”

“Yes. I found a rosary on her table, and I just…” A tight anger fuses in the knob of my throat. I feel like a parent discovering a bag of meth in a teenager’s room. “How could she?” I burst out. “After what happened to us? After what happened to her only daughter?”

Zenny’s quiet for a moment, leaving us with the echoes of my outburst. I try to swallow it down, I try to reel everything back in, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

“How do you think she could?” she finally asks.

“I—wait, what?”

“You asked a rhetorical question, and I’m asking the same question, only not rhetorical. Place yourself in her shoes, with her memories and her life, and then ask yourself how she could pray the rosary again.”

“The thing is that I don’t know,” I say, frustrated. “How can she forgive God for letting that happen? Lizzy loved God so fucking much before she—” I stop, full of the same wounded anger I felt the day after her funeral, when Tyler and I got into my car and her stupid Britney Spears CD had started playing. Neither of us had realized she’d been the last one to drive it, and we’d crawled in—me drunk as fuck and Tyler hung over—and then we’d heard it. The music that Lizzy had loved, had sung badly in the shower, had saved up babysitting money so she could go hear live in concert—it came spilling out of the radio at full volume, and I’d lost it. Just lost it, like a fucking maniac, kicking the shit out of my dash until I’d finally smashed something crucial and made the music stop.

I still can’t listen to Britney Spears. Not without that memory howling up inside me. Not without feeling like I want to tear apart the world with my bare hands.

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