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but I only catch the edge of his sleeve for a second and then he’s halfway across the room. “I could ask the cards about you,” I offer. “About your secret.” I look at the box on the floor between us. “About how you can tell them.”
    He stops.
    I could do this. Just to see.
    “It’s only a game, a parlor trick,” I continue, picking up the cards and showing them to him. I know he’s wavering because his hands are back on his jeans, and I can remember him as a little boy, twisting from side to side in Sunday School as he struggled to recite his weekly verses, his mouth refusing to form the syllables, his hands running lightly up and down across the navy blue corduroy as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut to keep in the tears.
    He shakes his head. “I can’t, Cass. You know it’s not right. Even if you don’t believe in sorcery, you have to see that this isn’t the kind of decision I should entrust to a deck of cards. It’s more important than that.”
    “What are you going to do, pray over it?”
    I don’t mean to say it, really. I especially don’t mean to sound so sarcastic. Okay, so I wish my brother would see how messed up this whole church situation is. I can’t understand his insistence on believing in something that basically condemns him to a life of suffering or self-denial or whatever. But I do love him, and I try hard to respect the fact that these beliefs are, for him, very real and reasonable. I try to hold my tongue. Sometimes it slips.
    “You can be a real jerk, you know that?” Eric says. He slams my door behind him, but a half second later he opens it again and sticks his head in to glare at me. “This is why I can’t talk to you about this. Because you have to act like anyone who believes is completely stupid.” He narrows his eyes, and for the slightest of moments I see his mouth working on his words, and I wonder if he’s going to stutter.
    My stomach clenches. “Eric—” Of course he’s not stupid. He’s my brother. He’s the only one who ever treats me like I have my own thoughts and opinions, or the only one who ever bothers to find out if I do. “I didn’t mean—”
    “You play your card games, Cassandra. But games can get serious sometimes without much notice. And please. Keep me out of it.”

10. If you were to
describe your style …
    Except for the WWJD bracelets and the fact that we gather together on Wednesdays and Fridays for team-building activities, discussions of “teen issues,” and occasional acoustic guitar sing-alongs, the members of my youth group have very little to do with each other outside of church. In Sterling Creek, the Joyful News Bible Church remains a sort of fringe operation
—an oddity to the stolid Minnesotans, whose habit of worshipping in the same congregation as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents means that sometimes there are four or five church services occurring on a single block, several of them the same denomination.
    So, we at Joyful News are thrust together not because we are alike but because we are different: mostly newcomers like my family (okay, so in Sterling Creek that means we can’t trace our roots back three generations or more; in our case, my parents moved here when Eric was a baby and my mother was pregnant with me), or, in some cases, recent converts to Christianity.
    In any case, Drew Godfrey is not my friend, no matter how nice I am to her on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. If only she would figure this out, youth group might actually be tolerable.
    “I heard you got on the newspaper staff,” she says, and then she giggles, like it’s funny. She pulls the end of her messy ponytail over her right shoulder as she sidles up to me, her fingers twining into the split ends. “That’s so cool. I heard Annika and Britney are really exclusive, so, you know? Instant awesome.”
    See, that’s another reason Drew will never be popular. She makes it obvious how much she longs for it—her