Free When You Believe by Deborah Bedford

she stood.
    “He’s… who?”
    “Mr. Stains. He’s outside the church right now.”
    Shelby’s face blanched. Her expression changed in an instant from hostility to fear. She caught the soccer ball, held it against
     her like it was the only thing in the world she knew how to hold on to.
    “Does he know I’m in here?”
    For months Lydia would remember the sight of Shelby’s small hands clutching the polygons of the ball. Nubby nails peeling
     and innocent, fingers pale as doves, Sam Leavitt’s dainty promise ring still too big, listing sadly to one side.
    Those eyes, telling Lydia everything that she’d been struggling not to hear.
    “I should have been able to make it stop, don’t you think? I should have been able to do something and I didn’t.”
    “Shelby.” All this time, Lydia had been afraid to touch her. In frustration she gripped the girl’s shoulders, holding her
     there so she couldn’t turn away. “Stop believing that about yourself. Stop believing that you controlled it. Stop believing
     that you’re not worth protecting, that you don’t deserve to be taken care of, because you
are
and you
do.”
    Shelby lowered herself into one of those midget chairs, looking haunted, her knees raftered up to her shoulders, parts of
     her folded frame hanging off the tiny seat.
    “Stop believing that anything about this is your fault.”
    “I used to go to Sunday school in this room once,” Shelby whispered, her voice ravaged. “I used to come here and sit just
     like this and listen to them say that God could do anything. They still tell little kids that these days, you know? I’ve heard
     them.”
    No, no,
Lydia wanted to plead with her.
Don’t talk about God right now. Don’t do it. Because that’s the last place I want to go.
    Like a drone of death, the thought poured into her.
The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.
    The room was a lonely one for all its bright colors and its scribbled drawings, the Little Tyke slide and the wooden play
     stove in the corner. A lonely place, Lydia saw, for a teenager whose childhood was gone.
    A childhood that she claimed had been taken away by Charlie. It always came back to that.
    Charlie.
    He loves me,
she’d remember at odd moments during the day. After which she’d walk a little taller, be a little more honest with people,
     notice more of them glancing up and smiling her way.
    Shelby’s body was jammed into a fetal position on the tiny chair, her elbows folded like a willowy bird trying to deflect
     something with its wings. Kids who’d been hurt the worst, Lydia had known for a long time, could be the most perceptive.
    “You don’t want to report it, do you?” Shelby’s eyes pleading with her even as they accused.
    Lydia had let go of the girl’s shoulders when Shelby sat. Now she stooped to the girl’s level, took the ball, set it on the
     floor. She gripped Shelby’s hands between her own.
    “Maybe not,” she said with great determination in her voice. “But it doesn’t really matter what I want.”

CHAPTER SIX

    Lydia found Charlie on the Big Tree lawn organizing things in his boat.
    He worked with dark determination, his arms up to his elbows in the hull, his expression set as hard as granite. He didn’t
     look her way the entire time he shoved things around.
    He stacked and secured two square lifejackets, one on top of the other, like a mason laying two slabs of stone. He thrust
     the dented first-aid box into a corner beneath the seat. He scraped the empty gas tank toward the outboard with a screech
     that made her flinch and created a new scratch along the keel.
    “Charlie,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice even. “Don’t.”
    “What do you mean, don’t? I’m just balancing the weight.” With angry relish, he thumped three coiled rope loops inside the
     bow. He crisscrossed the blue-and-yellow oars in the middle, blades forward, poles aft, and began to batten them down. “What
     took you so long in