Taking Flight by Maley Siera

Author:Maley, Siera [Maley, Siera]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Published: 2015-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Pastor McKinley was a dorky guy in his forties with an ugly checkered shirt on that quite literally hurt my eyes, but I didn’t really care about him. We exchanged a couple generic greetings and he told me he hoped to see me back every week, and then I took a seat with Cammie, Scott, and Jill in this circle of chairs that surrounded the pastor.

The person that did catch my attention was an older boy I instinctively knew had to be Trevor. He noticed me too, while I was talking to McKinley, and I saw him watching me as I took a seat. I felt slimy just having his gaze on me after hearing Cammie’s story about him.

Cammie noticed me glancing his way and stiffened, then murmured a quiet, “Stop. Please.” That was enough to make me force my gaze to Pastor McKinley.

He stood in the center of the circle of chairs as they continued to fill, and when at last it seemed like everyone had arrived, he began his lesson for the day. I half-dozed through most of the opening remarks, and tuned in just in time to hear him ask, “So, a show of hands: How many of you know where exactly your name comes from?” He surveyed the circle as a few hands came up, then pointed to a small boy in a suit. “Joseph, go ahead.”

“All of the guys in my family are named Joseph. I think it goes back at least three or four generations.”

“Okay, so family tradition. How about you, Tina?”

“My mom was a big Tina Turner fan.”

There were some chuckles at that. Pastor McKinley swiveled around to Jill. “Yes, Jill?”

“My mother found it in a baby book.”

“Excellent. My point here is that we’re all named for some reason. Some more significant than others, but a reason all the same. How many of you are familiar with the story of Jacob?”

He went on for a while after that, telling the story of Jacob from the Bible and how he’d tricked his father at one point and his name basically meant “trickster,” and I honestly didn’t pay very much attention. I wanted to just get through church, especially on my first day, and more importantly, I wanted Trevor to stop looking at me.

McKinley ended, a while later, with the moral of his story: that names held important meanings, and that we should be careful of what we call each other and other people. I guess it was nice to know there was a positive message in there somewhere.

We went out to lunch with Jill afterward, and I stayed mostly silent. Cammie talked a mile a minute, running over every little detail of McKinley’s sermon with her mother, and I realized with a start that it was the first time I really saw any semblance of a bonding moment between Cammie and Wendy. So church was their thing.

We got back to the farm in the afternoon and I slept for a while, exhausted both after waking up early for church and actually attending it.

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