“I’m in eleventh grade,” I say.
“And how did you wind up at Prodigals Academy or whatever this school is called?”
Coya Knutson, and Nell is kind of echoing my own thoughts when I found out my mother didn’t want to send me to any of the big, regular high schools. “It’s not for losers,” she assured me, “it’s artsy.” I’m not convinced those two things are mutually exclusive, but whatever. “My mother and I moved around a lot,” I say. “So, I don’t have enough science credits, and I have American literature on my transcript three times and other weird stuff like that.”
“I hate Minneapolis,” Nell says with what sounds like some actual sympathy for my plight. “I’m from Lake Sadie, which is up near Brainerd. Where’d you move from?”
“New Coburg, Wisconsin.” I skip the rest of the list. “Why’d you move here?”
“My mother…” She swallows hard as her voice gets unsteady. “My mother is missing.”
“Missing?” I ask. This is the sort of revelation that makes me instantly super curious while also not sure how many follow-up questions I can ask without being a jerk.
Nell makes herself take a deep breath and says, “Brother Daniel thinks she was taken by the infernal rabble. My grandmother thinks she just took off. All we know for sure is, she didn’t come home on New Year’s Eve and when the police found her car, she wasn’t in it.”
The infernal what? I am trying to frame a question that would turn what she said into something that makes sense, and what comes out is, “Does your brother go to Coya Knutson, too?”
For a second, she stares back at me with the same utter bafflement I’m feeling and then says, “Brother Daniel isn’t my actual brother. He’s one of the pastors of the Abiding Remnant, along with Brother Malachi and the Elder.”
“Is the Abiding Remnant a church?” I ask, still trying to make sense out of what she’s saying.
“Of course it’s a church,” she says. “The infernal rabble call us a cult because they refuse to listen to the truth.”
I feel like she’s answering a question I wasn’t asking, which is even more confusing. “What are the infernal rabble?”
“Enemies of the Remnant and the rest of the true church.”
I try to go back to the part of the conversation that made more sense to me. “What happened on New Year’s Eve?”
“My mother went with some of her church sisters to a New Year’s Eve prayer meeting, and they all left a little after midnight. Everyone else made it home. My mother’s car was found on a road leading out of town, but she wasn’t in it. It snowed overnight, so there weren’t any footprints.”
“That’s really weird,” I say.
“Yes. Really weird. It wasn’t the road back to the house, for one thing. But if she just took off, like the police think, then why didn’t she take the car with her?” Nell lets out a shaky breath and takes a drink of her milk. A strand of hair has worked itself loose from Nell’s braid, and she tucks it back behind her ear. “Anyway. My grandmother has never liked the Remnant. She says it’s a cult. So she called my father and told him to come get me. I don’t know him very well. I hadn’t seen him since he left when I was ten.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That sucks.”
“She said it was just to let him know in case he saw my mother, you know, but then on Saturday, he and my stepmother showed up with a car.” She drinks some more of her milk and eyes me. “When we got back to Minneapolis, I found out they share a house with my father’s girlfriend and also my stepmother’s girlfriend.”
One of the many things we’ve discussed in the Clowder is polyamory: excellent relationship model or inevitable drama-fest? Firestar likes to point out that plenty of monogamous relationships are drama-fests. I think that whatever works for you is fine, but polyamory sounds like a lot of work. From the tone of Nell’s voice, I think she thinks the whole idea is completely disgusting. This is probably not surprising, given that everything about her cult—church—whatever—makes me think they’re probably really conservative.
The more urgently relevant question for me, specifically, is whether her disgust here is because the stepmother has a girlfriend. I have a girlfriend, even if she’s currently 145 miles away, and I don’t think I want to bond with the other new girl if she’s just going to turn around and reject me for being gay. I have plenty of experience with rejection and decided a long time ago that it’s less unpleasant if you get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
It ought to feel higher stakes now, since Mom has promised that we’re staying here. If things go as planned, I will graduate from this high school. It’s hard to take that promise seriously, though, especially given the “if things go as planned” caveat.
“The worst thing about leaving New Coburg was leaving my girlfriend behind,” I say.
Nell’s response is not quite what I expected—her eyes go wide, but rather than drawing away from me, she leans in and whispers, “Me, too.”
“The sort I kiss,” I say, just to be absolutely sure we’re on the same page. “I don’t just mean a friend who’s a girl.”
Nell nods. “I get it,” she whispers, swallows hard, and leans back in her chair. “Our parents just think we’re friends. The Abiding Remnant—they’re not, I mean. It’s not.” She gets sort of tongue-tied and finally takes a bite of her food, maybe so she has an excuse not to talk while she’s eating. I’m pretty sure I got the gist, anyway.
“That sounds hard,” I say.
Nell swallows and leans forward again like she’s going to tell me some other secret. “The Abiding Remnant make women sit in the back just in case one of us speaks accidentally, since women aren’t supposed to speak
