Free The Road to Amazing by Brent Hartinger

bit
chubby.
    The man was wearing tighty-whities and
the woman was completely naked.
    They waved — very friendly, even if it
made the woman's breasts and the man's fat wiggle.
    Tentatively, we all waved
back.
    Then we looked at Duane.
    "Oh, right," he said. "We're a
clothing-optional community." He didn't say this like he'd been
hiding it from us and now wanted to get some kind of prurient
thrill by shocking us. It was more like he'd forgotten. "I hope
that's okay."
     
    * * *
     
    As we were driving away from the farm,
it was impossible not to laugh.
    "I would've loved to see your mom
there!" Min said to me. "Can you imagine?"
    "I know!" I said, even as
I also thought, It meant I would've gotten
to see Duane naked.
    But alas, having our
wedding in Duane's barn really was out of the question. If it had
only been Kevin's and my close friends, that would have been one
thing, but we had a lot of our relatives coming. We knew most of
them had never been to a same-sex wedding before, and the last
thing we wanted was to make people feel even more uncomfortable.
Yes, yes, our wedding was all about us, it was our day, about whatever we wanted. But come
on.
    I noticed that Kevin wasn't laughing
with the rest of us.
    "You okay?" I asked him, looking
across the car with Min between us.
    He clenched the steering
wheel.
    Finally he turned to me. "What about a
church?"
    "What about it?" I said.
    "For the wedding. Maybe we could find
an actual church."
    No one said anything for a
second, and I thought it was funny that it wasn't until now that
anyone had even considered holding our wedding in an actual church, despite
the fact that this was where weddings were usually held.
    On the other hand, it's not like we
were crazy. Given what complete babies most churches had been on
the subject of same-sex marriage over the last few years, who could
blame us? Why in the world would we want to go somewhere we weren't
welcome — or, in some churches, where we're now maybe sometimes
grudgingly tolerated.
    Thanks, but no thanks.
    (Plus, there was the fact
that neither Kevin nor I was religious. I was raised Catholic, but
it never really took. It was partly the anti-gay thing, but that
was only part of it. By the time I was fourteen, religion mostly
seemed silly, like believing that the characters in The Lord of the Rings are real. But I tried hard not to stereotype, because I knew
reasonable people who thought otherwise.)
    Min looked up all the
Vashon Island churches on her phone. "Well, the Catholics are out,
obviously. And the evangelicals, and anything with the word
'gospel' or 'bible' in it. Forget the Methodists and the Mormons.
The Presbyterians could go either way, and so could the Lutherans, and I'm not
sure we want to deal with that." She looked up. "Can I just say how
incredibly depressing this is?" She looked back at her phone.
"Wait! The Episcopalians! They're a bunch of raging liberals,
right?"
    "I think so," Otto said.
    Min did some research on
her phone. "Individual pastors have discretion," she said. "They
can refuse to marry gay couples if they want. Which is, of course,
such a principled position for the church to take, like how when
society decided it was wrong that restaurants were allowed to
refuse service to black people, we all then agreed to let
individual restaurants continue to discriminate. Or, wait, no, we didn't! Because
everyone realized that would be incredibly bigoted ."
    I laughed and realized that even
though Min could be a little sanctimonious, I almost always agreed
with her politics.
    "They won't refuse us," I said. "Come
on, it's Vashon Island! The way this island seems so far, they
probably all take a toke on sacramental bong."
     
    * * *
     
    We found the Episcopal church in a
wooded area right along one of the main roads.
    "Oh, cool," Otto said, pointing to a
sign. "They have a labyrinth."
    "A what?" Nate said.
    "It's a kind of circular maze," Min
explained.
    We parked in the church lot (empty
except for two