Free Sunday Billy Sunday by Mark Wheaton Page A

teaching and, at first, she’d raise their child on his salary. When she turned sixteen, maybe she’d get a part-time job and see if her mom wouldn’t babysit afternoons so she could earn some extra money. Elliott would be home by four, (he’d made her call him “Elliott” even though she liked calling him “Mr. Guardino” in bed) so she could work some kind of late afternoon or evening shift. It just might work.
    Out alone under the stars, she tried to comfort herself with this fantasy when she heard footsteps behind her in the woods. She figured it would be the boy who lifted her over his head, Albert? Aaron? Something-‘A.’ She knew he’d be there hoping to have sex with her and she began to mentally prepare herself. She didn’t really want to have sex, but she realized that she didn’t particularly want to be alone, either.
    She turned around, trying to look as coy as possible, as if it had been her idea to lure him out there in the first place and now her seduction was coming together ever-so-perfectly.
    What she saw, however, wasn’t the boy with the pale, zit-covered ass, but a tall man in a black jumpsuit, gloves and bandages covering his face holding an iron spike.
    He put a finger to his lips and whispered, “ Shhhhh... ”

IV
    Faith woke up early Monday morning, even before her travel alarm went off, and climbed out of bed to take a quick shower before heading to the kitchen to cook breakfast. She looked over at Maia, who was still sleeping, and snuck out the back door to the showers.
    Faith had a system when it came to the showers, same as she did in gym class. She hated her body, there were no two ways about that, so she always brought the clothes she’d be changing into as close to the shower as possible. At Camp Easley, that meant hanging them on towel hooks outside the individual stall. She would strip down, hop into the shower, bathe as quickly as possible, and then turn off the water and towel down, generally while standing in a puddle. With some difficulty, she then got dressed, trying not to let her underwear or shorts touch the floor or walls of the stall, though this didn’t always work – leaving her clothes with water stains that would, admittedly, dry out completely within the next ten minutes, but still led her to presage countless embarrassments. If this all went well, she’d then walk out of the stall fully clothed except for socks and shoes, which she’d put on after toweling off her feet a little ways away from the showers.
    There were plenty of girls who simply walked out to the showers naked except for their towels carrying their bathing accoutrements in little baskets and then would walk back to their respective cabins similarly clad to change there, but Faith found this incredibly immodest. It wasn’t so much the idea of the camp’s boys seeing her, though, but the other girls.
    One of the reasons she had first signed up for the breakfast meal-prep job way back when was because she knew it would mean having the showers all to herself in the mornings.
    But as she stripped down, she suddenly heard the back door of Cabin 6 click shut ever-so-gently and looked over to see Maia walking over with her shower basket.
    “How come you didn’t wake me up?” she asked, but then reversed herself. “Well, you did wake me up with all your clattering around, but how come you didn’t wake me up on purpose? ”
    Faith half-laughed at this, but as she was already almost undressed, she very quickly finished the task, hanging up what she wore as pajamas on the hooks and dove into the nearby stall before replying.
    “I thought you might want a few more minutes,” Faith said. “You had your own alarm set, right?”
    “Oh, I’ve been awake since around four-thirty,” Maia said as she stripped off her pajama shorts and t-shirt and entered the stall next to Faith’s.
    The walls were short enough that Faith was a little uncomfortable, but as she was determined not to come off this