Leaving Fishers by Margaret Peterson Haddix
“Fishers of Men. It’s wonderful.” Dorry knew she was supposed to invite him to join, too, to pray with her and assure his own eternal salvation. But she didn’t know how to say it, so she just stopped talking.
Her dad’s TV show came back on with a burst of sirens and gunfire. He turned back to the TV. “Look, I’ve got enough to worry about right now. Don’t bother me with this stuff, okay?”
“Okay, Dad,” Dorry said obediently. She went back to her room and flopped down on her bed with the homework she’d neglected all weekend long. She’d done it. She’d told her dad. Angela would be proud. God would be proud.
Dorry just felt foolish.
Chapter
Eleven
THE CALLS BEGAN FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER.
“We pray for Reenie Stevens, that God will heal her and cradle her spirit in His arms,” the strange voices said over the phone, one after another.
They came at five-minute intervals, as if everyone in Fishers had synchronized their watches and signed up for a certain time.
“Who’s that?” Dorry’s dad growled after the fifth call, the fifth time Dorry picked up the phone and then said nothing but, “Hello?” and “Thank you. Good-bye.”
“Just some people from my, uh, church,” Dorry said. “They’re praying for Mom.”
Dorry’s dad grunted. Dorry picked up the phone again. “Hello,” she said. “Thank you. Good-bye.”
Each call warmed her like a small ember. She didn’t recognize any of the voices, but these people cared about her mother. She was touched that they called. She was touched that someone, probably Angela, had bothered remembering Dorry’s mother’s name. Dorry must have mentioned it sometime over the weekend.
The phone rang again. “Hello?” she said. “ . . . Thank you. Good-bye.”
Dorry lost track of the number of calls. She was beginning to feel overwhelmed. On the couch, her father was clearing his throat and coughing in ever-louder expressions of disgust. Finally, in one call where the voice sounded vaguely familiar, there was a pause after Dorry said “Good-bye.” Dorry didn’t hang up.
“Uh, Dorry? This is Lara. We’re not supposed to do anything except pray, but I just wanted you to know how sorry I am.”
Dorry hadn’t seen much of Lara since the first Fishers party. “Thanks, Lara,” Dorry said. She wondered if Lara was still a kleptomaniac, or if she’d reformed again.
Dorry’s father was suddenly right behind her. “I don’t care if that’s God Himself,” he said. “You tell those people to quit bothering us.”
Dorry felt stung. She was trying to decide what to do when Lara said quietly, “I heard that. I’ll tell the others just to pray amongst themselves, not call. See you at school. Bye.”
Dorry hung up. She glared angrily at her father, but his back was turned so the effect was lost. She wasn’t a good glarer anyway. And under her anger was a little relief. She didn’t want to spend the whole night answering the phone either.
Back on the couch, her dad flipped through the TV channels. “We’ve got to keep the phone lines open, in case there’s news from the hospital,” he said.
That was the closest he’d come to an apology, Dorry knew. Once when she was about six or seven, he’d accidentally driven his pickup over her pink Barbie bicycle. The way he’d apologized then had been to tell her that he’d never thought the wheels were attached right anyway. But at Christmas there’d been a new bike under the tree.
“You could have told me,” Dorry grumbled now. She went back to her homework. The phone didn’t ring again.
The next few days Dorry felt like she had two entirely separate lives. Part of the time, she all but lived at the hospital, spending endless hours by her mother’s bed. She got used to the nurses constantly interrupting, the automatic blood pressure cuff inflating and deflating on her mother’s arm, the trays clattering outside in the hall. It would have been unbearably boring if it hadn’t been so terrifying. They kept a heart monitor on her mother, and Dorry couldn’t keep herself from watching it. What if its soothing pulse of green light turned into one long streak? What if its low, steady beeping turned into a sudden, high-pitched screech? Dorry had seen that happen thousands of times on TV She knew what it looked like when people died. It was always a relief to walk out of the room, out of sight of the monitor. Yet Dorry clutched an almost superstitious belief that as long as she watched, the monitor and her mother’s heart would go on as usual. So she never wanted to leave.
In her other life, Dorry barely thought about her mother. She answered people’s questions automatically, as briefly as possible. In her other life, she was a Fisher.
“You’re doing so well,” Angela raved at lunch on Tuesday. It was just the two of them, because Dorry was having her first discipling session. “I can tell you’re going to be one of the best new Fishers.”
Dorry squinted at Angela. All she’d done was correctly answer a list of test questions: Who is your savior? Why did you need to be saved? Angela had given her the questions and answers to memorize the day before. It was no different than memorizing the Bill of Rights for American history.
“Maybe you’ll even be ready for an E Team soon,” Angela said.
“A what?”
“I’ll explain some other time. We have too much to do today.” Angela took out a sheet of paper. “How much time have you spent praying since yesterday?”
Dorry thought back. She’d gone straight from school to the hospital, and stayed there until visiting hours ended. Then she’d gone home and studied, because she had an algebra test. She had done her bedtime prayers the way Angela had told her, only quicker. But she’d slept too late to pray in the morning.
“Ten minutes,” she said, though it had probably been only five.
“Oh, Dorry,” Angela let out a great sigh of disappointment and put her pen down. “You need to pray at least an hour every day. How can you expect God to give you the time of day in heaven if you won’t even give him one twenty-fourth of your time on earth?”
Dorry thought that sounded like a Pastor Jim line. It worked. She felt guilty.
“Maybe it was fifteen minutes,” she said. “I had that algebra test, and then with my mom in the hospital—” She wanted to say she’d sort of been praying in the hospital, hoping so fervently that her mother would get well. But she didn’t think Angela would count that.
“Dorry, Dorry, Dorry.” Angela was shaking her head. “Do you believe that algebra is more important than God?”
“Of course not. But—”
“And I’m not saying you shouldn’t visit your mother in the hospital, but you know Jesus did say, ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’ Matthew 11:37. Dorry, Fishers has to be the most important thing in your life.” Angela wrote something down on her sheet of paper. “You must pray at least an hour and a half for the next five days to make up for this. Okay?”
Dorry bit her lip, holding back rebellious words—Who died and left you in charge? What right do you have to tell me what to do?—but she knew the answers. She’d just repeated them for Angela. Jesus had died. Angela was her discipler. Angela knew what Dorry had to do.
“Okay,” Dorry said.
“Good!” Angela rewarded her with a smile so radiant it could have been an angel’s. Then she turned back to her paper. “Now, what sins have you committed?”
“What?” Dorry said.
“What sins have you committed?” Angela asked again. She spoke slowly, as if Dorry was a foreigner who had trouble understanding English. She tapped her pen on the paper. “We have to keep track of your progress as a Fisher, and one way to do that is for me to write down all of your sins at every discipling session. I give a number to each sin depending on how bad it is, and then we can see how your numbers go down as you become more faithful.”
“Like grades,” Dorry said.
“Sort of.”
“Don’t I get any credit for doing good things, too?”
“Of co
Dorry looked around. They were smack in the middle of the cafeteria, with other kids on either side. She’d noticed them sneaking strange looks at Dorry and Angela as it was. “Here? Can’t we go somewhere more private?”
Angela looked to her right and to her left, as if noticing for the first time that they weren’t alone. “God’s opinion of you is the only one that matters,” she said, then shrugged. “But you’re new. We can move, if you want.”
They shifted to a section of table with several empty chairs on each side. Dorry felt like confessing quickly, before anyone else sat near them, but she hesitated again. “Who else sees what you write down?” she asked. She didn’t want Brad knowing all the bad things about her.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Angela asked, with a ripple of laughter. “Oh, Dorry, I thought you trusted me more than that.”
Dorry remembered that she hadn’t really let herself fall during the trust exercise. But that was before she was saved.
“I promise you,” Angela said. Tour secrets are safe with me.”
“Like Catholics having private confession?”
“You can think of it like that,” Angela said.
Dorry looked into Angela’s perfect blue eyes, and still hesitated. What counted as sin? If she had, say, picked her nose, would she have to confess that? She’d never tell Angela something like that. Never.
“Let me help you,” Angela said. She took out a new piece of paper and wrote “Categories of sins” in bold, looping letters at the top. Then, down the side, she wrote: “Pride, greed, sloth, selfishness, sins of the flesh, disobedience of God’s will, worship of false gods.”
“Look at these and tell me what you’ve done. I’ll write down ‘disobedience,’ because you didn’t pray enough, and ‘worship of false gods,’ because you cared more about algebra than God.”
Dorry wanted to protest—she had hardly been worshiping algebra. But Angela was already saying, conciliatorily, “I’m sure you’ll do better next time. Remember, I’m not judging you, I’m just keeping track. For your own information. What else?”
Dorry gulped. “Well, I don’t know where you’d put it, but I didn’t do a very good job of telling my parents about being a Fisher,” she admitted. After the disaster with her dad, she’d only told her mother, “I went ahead and joined this new church.” Then a nurse had come in to check her mother’s medication and, somehow, when the nurse was gone again, the conversation went off in a different direction.
“But you did tell them?” Angela asked, her pen hovering over the paper.
“Ye-es,” Dorry said.
“Well,” Angela said forgivingly, “that’s the first step. You should be witnessing to them constantly, so you’ll do better there. I won’t write anything down.”
Dorry felt guiltier that Angela hadn’t judged her guilty. She looked back at the list. “Selfishness,” she said. “I’ve been selfish. In the hospital, when I should be concerned about my mother, I just keep thinking about myself, how awful it would be for me if she died.”
Angela nodded approvingly, as if relieved that Dorry recognized how bad she was. She wrote on her paper, and Dorry felt a strange mixture of pride and shame that that sin was worth recording.
Her eyes traveled down the list. She felt compelled to come up with more sins. “Maybe this is sins of the flesh,” she said. “Or maybe not. But I kind of have a crush on Brad.” She kept her head lowered. She couldn’t look at Angela, confessing that. “And at the same time, there was this one guy, Zachary, at the retreat, that I was kind of interested in. Is it wrong to be attracted to two guys at once?”
Angela tilted her head, thinking. “Yes,” she said. “Usually. It can be a sin to be attracted to just one, if you’re lusting after him. Do you feel lust for Brad?”
Dorry couldn’t look up. Her face burned. Why had she said that? “Maybe,” she whispered.
Angela patted her on the back. “That’s okay,” she said. “In Fishers, we try to remove a lot of that temptation. Boys and girls are kept separate in many of our activities, especially the ones for new Fishers who are more likely to be troubled by sexual feelings.”
“Oh,” Dorry said. “So no one’s allowed to date?” She was embarrassed by the whole subject. What if Angela laughed and said, “What? You think someone would want to date you?” But Angela shook her head and answered seriously, “Of course people are allowed to date. But only the Fishers who are more mature in their faith are encouraged to. You must be secure in your relationship with God before seeking anything else.”
Angela wrote something down on her paper. Dorry pretended to be intent on the list of sin categories. She had to say something else. She grabbed on to the next sin she could find. “I guess this counts as greed,” she began. “Now that my mom is sick and can’t work for a while, we have to really watch our money, and that bothers me. I don’t think it’s fair.”
As soon as she’d said it, Dorry felt ashamed again. How could she tell that to Angela—Angela, who owned a sports car, whose father drove a Mercedes? She reminded herself what Angela had said about not judging her friends by money. And in her short time in Fishers, she’d already heard a lot about Jesus’ wealth being entirely spiritual.
Angela lowered her pen, Dorry’s sins of the flesh forgotten. “Are things really bad?” Angela asked compassionately.
“Not really, really bad, but—oh, I guess so. My dad said I should get a job myself if I want to save any more for college.”
Dorry didn’t explain the rest. It wasn’t really the idea of working that bothered her—she didn’t think it’d be that hard to flip hamburgers or run a cash register. But even with the confidence of being a Fisher, she still dreaded the thought of going into stores and restaurants and having to ask for applications or an interview or whatever you had to do. Applying for a job wouldn’t have been that bad in Bryden, where she knew the guy who managed Wendy’s and she’d gone to school with the kids of the woman who ran K-Mart. But Indianapolis was overwhelming enough without thinking about searching for a job.
Angela chewed thoughtfully on the end of her pen. “Let me talk to some other Fishers,” she said. “I’m sure we can find you something.”
Dorry blinked and leaned toward Angela. “Really?”
“Sure.” Angela made another note on her paper. “Anything else?”
A thousand potential, small sins flitted through Dorry’s mind, but they all seemed more embarrassing than sinful. “No,” she said.
Angela looked at her watch. The lunch period was almost over, and the tables around them were clearing out. “We’ll have the next discipling session on Saturday, right before Bible Study.”
“Bible Study?”
“Didn’t I tell you? You’re ready for that now. You’ll go into a Saturday afternoon session, to start with.”
“Don’t I get a choice?”
“Well, sure, but I know all the Bible Study groups, and I know this one is best for you.” Angela’s voice held a slight note of impatience, as if Dorry shouldn’t have questioned her.
“Okay,” Dorry said obediently.
“Now let’s pray together,” Angela said.
Dorry looked around, hoping no one was watching, before tardily bowing her head. Angela was already praying. Dorry only half listened, because she was trying to figure out what to say when Angela’s smooth flow of words stopped and it was Dorry’s turn. She wanted to pray for forgiveness, for resenting the way Angela took charge of everything, but she couldn’t say that in front of Angela. And, Dorry reminded herself, Angela was going to get her a job. She was only trying to help. She knew a lot more than Dorry did about being a Fisher.
Chapter
Twelve
TWO DAYS LATER, DORRY STOOD ON A wide brick porch and tentatively lifted and dropped a heavy brass knocker. It
“Nervous?” Angela said beside her.
“Sort of,” Dorry said. “I mean, I’ve baby-sat before, so I know I can do the job. But I’m not really good at meeting new people.”
“You’ll do fine,” Angela said.
They were in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city—at least it looked nice to Dorry. All the houses were big and widely spaced, with generous yards and large trees. Someone from Fishers—Dorry wasn’t sure exactly who—lived one street over, and knew that the woman who lived here, a Mrs. Garringer, needed a baby-sitter three or four afternoons a week.
“Okay, okay, you can watch, but you have to turn it down,” someone was shouting inside as the door opened.
Dorry straightened up and smiled, trying to look presentable. The woman on the other side of the door was young and exotic looking, with short, dark, curly hair and kohl-lined eyes. She was wearing green leggings and a white T-shirt, and had a baby balanced on her right hip. A little girl clung to her left leg, alternately hiding and peeking out. The sound of Big Bird singing the alphabet welled from another room. The woman winced.
“Jasmine, I’m not joking. Turn that down, right now, or I’ll turn it off,” she yelled.
Big Bird got about a half a decibel softer.
The woman turned back to Dorry and Angela and made a face. “Welcome to the madhouse,” she said. “I told the kids they needed to behave, so they wouldn’t scare the new baby-sitter, but that didn’t work. Come on in. I’m April Gar-ringer. This fat guy is Seth, and the one pretending to be shy is Zoe. Which one of you is Dorry?”
“I am,” Dorry said, as Angela explained, “I’m just a friend who brought her. Just tell me where to sit to be out of the way.”
Mrs. Garringer laughed. “If you like Sesame Street, the family room is open. If you want to be able to hear yourself think, you can come into the living room with us.” She bent down to the little girl. “Zoe, are you sure you don’t want to go watch TV with Jasmine?” The little girl shook her head and clung tighter. Mrs Garringer shrugged. “Okay, but you’re going to think this is dull.”