Free Hush by Jacqueline Woodson

go to the New World that God’s gonna create after He gets tired of how messed up this one is. No hell, though. Heaven, New World, or dust—those are your options.
    Toswiah and Cameron? Dust. Evie and Anna? New World. Daddy? Already living in another religion’s hell. Mama? Heaven? Who knows.
    Mama says in the New World, there won’t be any more hatred or disease or floods. She says the animals will all be friendly. You’ll be able to pet snakes and hug lions, she says, her eyes getting bright.
    I pulled a dark green turtleneck off the hanger, got some underwear out of the drawers that Anna and I shared—she had the two top ones and I had the two bottom—then headed off to the bathroom, mumbling good morning to Mama and Daddy as I went past.
    Our bathroom here is tinier than the downstairs half- bathroom we had back in Denver and three times as small as the upstairs bathrooms. I’d never thought of us as rich when we lived there, but now I know we had it good. I closed the door, pressed my head against the cool mirror glass and sighed.
    When I came out, Daddy was sitting at the window, eating a bowl of oatmeal. He looked over at me and smiled.
    “Your sister up?” Mama asked. She was pouring pancake mix from a box into a white plastic bowl. In Denver, all her mixing bowls had been the good kind, made out of glass. Here, everything except Daddy’s oatmeal bowl seemed plastic and cheap and temporary.
    I nodded and took another step before stopping. “Mama,” I said, turning slowly toward her. “It’s all wrong, isn’t it?”
    Daddy put his oatmeal bowl down in his lap and stared out the window. I swallowed. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.”
    Mama poured water into the batter and stirred. “What’s guaranteed, Evie?”
    I shrugged.
    “Nothing’s guaranteed, honey. Nothing. If someone tells you something is, don’t believe it.”
    “But I thought—”
    “Did you thank Jehovah for allowing you to wake up this morning?” Mama asked.
    Anna sat down across from me at the kitchen/dining room/den table and made a face. She was wearing a wool skirt that stopped at her ankles and a light blue sweater that looked about two sizes too small. Where I’d gotten taller over the year, Anna had just gotten bigger—not fat, but every part of her body seemed to be “blooming into womanhood,” as Mama liked to say.
    Mama sat down next to me and put a plate of bacon in the middle of the table. I looked at her sideways. Every day I hoped that she would say “Psyche your mind. I was just kidding about the God stuff,” but it never happened. If anything, she got holier.
    “Well, did you? Either of you?”
    “I did,” I lied.
    “Yeah,” Anna said. “Me, too. Like I do every day.” Mama raised an eyebrow at her but didn’t say anything.
    Anna took a bite of bacon.
    “Are you going to say the blessing?” Mama asked.
    Anna bowed her head. “ThankyouJehovahforthis foodandallotherblessingsamen.”
    I laughed, then covered my mouth with my hand.
    Mama took a sip of her coffee. “I don’t think it’s asking a whole lot to be thankful for what we have,” she said quietly, looking from me to Anna. “Sometimes I think if we’d been more thankful—more aware of what we had in Denver—things wouldn’t have ended the way they did.”
    Anna and I looked at each other but didn’t say anything. My mother hardly ever mentioned Denver. When she did, we knew we’d taken something too far.
    “I think the road back is a narrow one,” she said. “A part of me believes that if we do everything right, we can have it again.”
    “But we can’t ever go back there.”
    “Not Denver,” Mama said. She looked over at my father sitting by the window and lowered her voice. “The happiness. It’s not always going to be like this.”
    It all seemed too vague. I wanted definite. Either we got back to Denver or we didn’t. Either we were happy or we weren’t. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that their religion is