I was in my friend Drew’s car, trying to prevent my muscles from tensing up and my mind to disengage from the present situation. It’s October in Chicago, there’s an audio jack and radio in front of me, an ignorant boy to my left, school buses behind me, and an escape door to my right. My gut turns in somersaults and screams at me:
“Get out. Go. Leave. You can find another way home.”
But I stay.
He had never driven me home before, and even though I’d met him as a freshman, we didn't  start talking until our senior year. Drew tries to make me smile and loosen up. With his giant hands, he gives me the audio jack. He tells me I can play “whatever I want,” he tells me we can go “wherever I want,” and, in a final attempt to engage me, he pokes my side.

My mind goes to when I was three, standing outside of the church that my family attended. It was small but homey. You could walk the entire expanse in ten minutes. The chapel had a wooden vaulted ceiling and the walls had stained glass windows of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus and other figures bouncing colors onto the faces of Mr. Baldie and his wife, Mrs. Floral; Mr. and Mrs. Whitehair; their granddaughter, Miss Eliza, the Sunday school teacher; and my own oblivious parents. 90’s bugeye frames line the pastor’s eyes and the choir sings in a layered harmony sweet to the ears of everyone-who’s-over-forty, which was the entire congregation with the exception of my parents. After Sunday school, Miss Eliza would bring us little ones up from the basement classroom to the chapel to find our parents and say The Lord’s Prayer with our families.
“Daddy!” I cry as I wobbly sprint to the front of the chapel. My dad kneels and holds out his arms toward me, waiting for me to launch myself into his embrace.
“Now that is faith like a child,” the pastor says, setting his bible down on the podium. “Now let us say The Lord’s Prayer: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come...”

I slap away Drew's hand in instinct and his face bunches up with his right eyebrow raised in confusion. I hastily explain:
“Sorry, I swear it's not you. It's just that I just have a lot of trouble with people touching me.”
He shrugs it off and we pull out of the near-empty parking lot. He tries to make conversation to ease the tension by bringing up the school play we just left, his fingers subconsciously tapping on the steering wheel.

When I was twelve, my seventeen year old sister Peasie would spend the majority of her time locked in her room making the calluses on her fingers thicker by typing vigorously for hours on end only to come out of her room for three minutes and thirty seconds to walk to the kitchen and make herself a burrito before retreating back to her room at the end of the hallway with the light that only works half the time. Sometimes I hear her changing a CD through the paper thin wall that separates our rooms. We used to communicate through our own version of morse code by knocking on the walls. Now all I hear is her panicked dreams and my mother rushing in to lay in bed with her until she falls back asleep from her nightmares that she doesn't tell us about.
Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven.

    The car door slams behind behind me and my heart rate begins to slow. I fumble around my jacket pockets to find my house key. I find them in the grass just off of my driveway.

Easter. The church would always have an annual easter egg hunt organized by the elders for the little ones out on the lawn of the church. My little three year old wobbly legs never got me anywhere fast enough. My eight year old sister got her friends to set some of their own eggs out back on the lawn, so I could find them and see what sugary treat was hidden inside.
Afterwards, all of us kids went into the basement of the church to sort out candy in a small room with a broken-in leather couch that was just big enough to fit all five of us while our parents went into the fellowship hall to socialize and talk about God knows what.
“Peasie, can I trade you my Starburst for your jelly beans?” I loved jelly beans that year.
“How about you take my Hershey's instead?”
“No, I want jelly beans. I don't have a jelly bean egg and you have four,” I say as I hold up a hand full of fingers. She and her friends laugh. I am not amused. My face bunches up and my shoulders rise to my ears and just as I'm about to burst with frustration my sister saves me.
“How about we go and get you a lemon poppyseed muffin from upstairs?” she says. She knows they're the only treat I love more than jelly beans. I rush to my feet and grab her hand as she leads me down the dimly lit hallway to the stairs leading up to the fellowship hall.

    After finding my keys, I pass the my father's ornithology pictures on the stairs leading to my bedroom and set down my bag of stage makeup supplies next to my bed. My eyes rest for two, three, four seconds as I take a deep breath in, out. I grab my flowery bath towel and head for the shower.

Mr. Baldie and Mrs. Floral were a very odd couple. Mr. Baldie was short and reminded me of a large pear in a brown suit, and Mrs. Floral reminded me of a vulture; she was very frail-looking like a bird, and had the big boney nose to go with it. Her hair was straw-like, probably from using too many of the wrong hair products and coloring it brown too much. I never talked to them, but occasionally my parents would because their son Matt was one of the only teens in the congregation. He was nineteen, and he definitely looked like a sad medium of his parents. He was built height-wise like his mother, very tall, and, if he really wanted to, could be very skinny. But he was pudgy like his father and wore baggy t-shirts and cargo pants. His hair was brown like his mom’s, only his wasn't artificial, and he had rectangular lenses. I hated him.

Hot water makes steam curl over the shower curtain as I step into the bathtub. I take the loofa in my right hand and scrub under my torso where Drew poked me and under my arms out of habit, this time until they're raw. The little beads from the wash circle the shower drain.

Peasie holds my chubby hand as we reach the top of  the stairs that opens up to the fellowship hall. “I'll be by mom and dad right over there, and I'll be watching you the whole time” Peasie said with her reassuring little smile. I give her my little closed mouth smile in return before I skip over to the kitchen window to the tray of mini lemon poppyseed muffins. My eyes level with the top of the counter, and I rise to my tippy toes just so I can reach the tray of mouth watering store bought muffins. Once I have one in my grasp I turn and set my sights on my sister who is across the room watching me, just like she said she would, with the same smile on her face. We exchange a thumbs up when the smile on her face falters. My brow furrows for a split second until I feel two monsterous hands slide beneath my armpits and lift me high above the ground. I kick Matt’s chest in protest and squirm and flail with everything I've got and scream at the top of my lungs while he lets out a lighthearted guffaw. My sister sprints towards us and kicks him in the shin with all her eight year old might in an attempts to save me. Eventually, he sets me down and I run with my sister back to our parents so we can take our Easter candy and return home.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

    My damp hair tumbles out of the towel, and I twist it into braids. With eyelids drooping, I slide beneath the lilac comforter and cold sheet lining my mattress.

Peasie started seeing Donna every Wednesday for two years when she was seventeen. Her nightmares got so bad she made my parents cry, and they sent her to Donna because they didn't know what to do. My parents yelled a lot in the beginning. I didn't hear a lot of the  dialogue, but, in every fight, just before my mom would break, she’d say, “what could we have done better?” They both sounded like hand bells at the climax of Carol of the Bells; chaotic. After a while, the song calmed to a beautiful silence and Peasie’s nightmares got less scary. At least, that's what she told me.
“It could have been Lilly too, David, it could have been Lilly too.” I only heard my mom say that once.
Let us not lead into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

The fall when I turned four after the Easter when I was three and Peasie and her friends gave me candy, and I got my well earned lemon poppyseed muffin, we left that small church with the tiny room with the leather couch and the chapel with the stained glass windows of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus. Our last few weeks there weren't special. We would have Sunday school, I would run to my dad, we would all go into the fellowship hall for socialisation and lemon poppyseed muffins, Matt would playfully lift me up against my will, and we would leave. One day in July I went to get my weekly muffin, and he wasn't there. I didn't object, and, since he wasn't there, I got two. One for me and one for my fearless sister who was always looking out for me. My sister came up from the basement, and we went home. I tried to give her the muffin. She, with puffy eyes, pushed it away and said she wasn't hungry, so I could have it. I didn't think twice about it, shrugged, and devoured it along with my own.

That October, Miss Eliza came to church with a pumpkin under her dress.

Her eyes were puffy and everyone looked at her in shock that day. Everyone except Matt, who kept his eyes down, his fingers fiddling with the pencil from the back of the pew.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever...

The Sunday morning light warms my lilac comforter, and I listen for the familiar tune of the church bells signaling the hour of chocolate chip pancakes and Baby Blues on our dining room table. My father smiles over the stovetop, flipping chocolate flapjacks and humming an old tune. My sister snuggles in the crook of my mother’s arm under her full size blue comforter, light hearted laughs emerging from the waves of fabric. The alarm on my bedside table rings.

Amen.