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such a grown-up. Her unshakable cheeriness makes him feel childish, and that’s not right—after all, she’s the one who is wrong. He glowers at her from the couch for a while, but she watches her television show and folds his underwear and doesn’t seem to care at all.
    At dinner, Shawn politely declines his father’s request that he say grace.
    “Shawn.” His father’s eyebrows jackknife and Shawn knows he can’t argue.
    “God’s great, let’s eat. And make people be not so covetous. A-men.”
    “Thank you, Shawn.”
    Throughout the meal, Shawn clatters his silverware. Instead of eating he dissects his favorite made-from-scratch meatloaf. Nibbling a bit of the ketchup-glazed top, he proclaims that it tastes like soap.
    “Shawn’s had a bad day,” says his mother, attempting to explain.
    Preoccupied with the mound of margarine he’s folding into his baked potato, his father doesn’t look up from his plate. “Something on your mind, Shawn?”
    “He’s just angry at me. He’ll get over it.”
    “No.”
    His father smirks. “No, you’re not angry at her, or no, you won’t get over it?”
    Laughing, his mother says, “Both,” and then launches into her side of the story: blah, blah, blah, blah and now she’s getting the silent treatment.
    Unable to endure any more slander, Shawn finally blurts out, “Not true! That’s not how it was!”
    “Oh? How was it?”
    “The way she says it makes it sound all different than how it really happened.” But before he can get the truth out, she laughs. Shawn tries to be Christ-like and keep his dignity as enmity gathers around him. “Dad,” he says, “could you please ask Mom to stop laughing at me now?”
    “She’s not laughing at you. She just thinks you’re cute.”
    With an attitude like this, Shawn is horrified to realize, his father might also remain with the camels and sinners, unable to squeeze through the eye of the needle when Judgment Day finally comes.
    Please, Jesus, make Mom and Dad feel bad for being so mean. Make them know that I just want them not to go to Hell. Tell them I’m right and it’s bad to covet and it’s even badder to poke fun at me if they really love me which I think they don’t. Cause, otherwise, why do they do things You don’t like that might make it so that they won’t go to Heaven? Make them please be better so I don’t have to be mad at them. Thank You. A-men.
    Throughout the rest of the meal, his parents chat about the chair, what it looks like, where to put it, did she get a deal. Refusing to eat is the only expression of protest Shawn makes. He shoves the food on his plate from one pile to another, building geometric sculptures with it, chopping the meatloaf, potato and broccoli into tiny fragments of fiber.
    His father reaches over him to take a forkful from the pile. “Remember the rule, Shawn. Don’t take more than you’re going to eat. Or else you have to sit here until it’s gone.”
    He suffers the penalty glumly, all the more so because it’s his mother who, as bedtime draws near, takes the plate away, scraping the cold landscape of mush into the garbage disposal and releasing him with a good-night kiss on the cheek.
    The chair arrives at the house a week later. Shawn’s mother loves it so much she decides not to take the plastic off, for fear that without it the fabric will wear thin and pick up stains, turning tawdry within the year.
    To his consternation, Shawn likes the chair as well. Worse, as he enters puberty, urges he didn’t know even existed start crawling inside him like viruses. He knows they’re sins—virtuous thoughts don’t make him feel clammy. Confused and afraid, and mostly ashamed, he carves God’s rules deeper into his brain. He hoards and displays the parts of himself that exemplify his moral fiber. He fidgets and hovers over his good deeds, as if he’s afraid they’re going to break. He scares himself with Scripture. This is the Shawn for the world to see: Shawn the