Free Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres

David on the couch and Herb Alpert on the turntable, and while the rest of us boogied across the carpet, David screeched and bounced on the cushions.
    Mother raced downstairs and turned off the music.
    “No dancing for David,” she scolded. “It’s too much for him.”
    He was almost three years old, but he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t talk. He scooted around on his hands and knees. Such was the legacy of his foster-care “families.” When he wanted something, he’d point at it and scream. If we didn’t understand him, he’d hurl himself to the floor in shrieking frustration, and he’d do the same if he didn’t get what he wanted.
    He had other residue from his family services days. He’d bang his head against his crib board and fall asleep in his high chair, face-planting in his oatmeal.
    I appointed myself his warden and his keeper. I pulled him around by his arms until he took his first teetering steps alone, and clapped my hand over his mouth until he learned to pronounce the names of the objects he wanted.
    My name was too difficult for him. He followed me around chanting “Ju-la-la,” and I called him “Baby Boo-Boo” because he was constantly tripping and falling and scraping his skin. I’d kiss away his pain and hush his cries.
    He was my baby.

CHAPTER 4
HOME
    “Jerome’s back.”
    David informs me of this as we cross the back field after school. I’m studying the cover of the September issue of Glamour, which I pulled from the mailbox after we got off the bus. The perfection of the cover model, dark-haired in a pink argyle sweater, knifes me with envy. Anyone that beautiful must be happy.
    Debra got me a subscription for my sixteenth birthday.
    “Filth, fornication and vanity!” Mother seethed when the first issue came. She threatened to ban it from the house, and I’ve been mindful to keep it out of her sight ever since, hiding it under my mattress just as Jerome used to hide his dirty magazines in the basement ceiling. When Dad found his porn stash, he burned them in the backyard—I watched from my window as the dark smoke and ash rose into the hot afternoon sky—before marching Jerome to the pole barn. When Jerome started hollering, I turned up my radio.
    “Did you hear me? I said Jerome’s back,” David says, louder.
    “Yeah, I heard you.”
    “He knocked on the window in the middle of the night, scared the crap out of me. He had a key, but figured they’d changed the alarm on him.”
    “Oh,” I say, scanning an article called “Eat Your Way to Perfect Nails.” The photo illustration shows long blue nails gripping a cantaloupe.
    “Boy, is he gonna get it when Dad gets home.” He pauses before adding in a dramatic voice: “In the country, no one can hear you scream.”
    I roll my eyes; it’s a phrase he’s parroted ever since we moved out here and he saw Dad’s belt hung on the pole barn wall. He stole it from that Alien movie: In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream .
    At the side of the house, Lecka barks and strains at her chain, shivering with excitement at our arrival, and David jogs ahead of me to play with her.
    I imagine the morning’s scenario. Mother would have found Jerome at some point and called Dad at the clinic to recount Jerome’s look and smell and sneering answers to her questions. He’d been gone for three weeks and they didn’t try to find him. Instead, they changed the alarm code, fearing he’d sneak back during the day when the house was empty and burglarize it. Jerome has had a stealing problem ever since he was adopted. When he was little, he stole keys and change from Mother’s purse. Now he steals anything he can get his hands on.
    Over the past year, he’s clashed frequently with Father and has taken to leaving for days at a time, staying with friends until their parents throw him out.
    There will be hell to pay, now that he’s come home again. Our parents’ child-rearing philosophy is etched into twin paddlesthat hang on the basement