Eggs feel like tempting fate. I get them anyway.
I’m done letting these people decide what I'm allowed to pick up off a shelf.
The checkout girl is maybe nineteen, and she scans my groceries without one word, her mouth pressed white, and she sets my change on the counter instead of into my hand so she won't have to touch me.
Like it's catching. Like what they think I“am”could come off on her fingers.
I take my bags and walk out into the bright flat heat of the parking lot, and I almost make it away unscathed.
They're waiting by my truck.
Not all of them on purpose, maybe.
A parking lot is a public place, and people come and go, but enough of them, clustered loosely between me and my driver's door.
The back of my neck goes cold the second I understand what I'm looking at.
Beverly Daughtry is at the front.
She's got her church purse over her forearm and a look on her face I've never once seen there, because the Beverly I've known my whole life wears concern like a Sunday hat—the soft voice, thebless your heart,the hand on your back that feels like care until you understand it's a leash.
That Beverly is gone. The woman standing between me and my truck has let the mask all the way down, and what's underneath is colder than anything the lie ever was.
"Sophie." She says my name like a verdict. "I think you know you've got no business showing your face in this town."
"I'm buying groceries, Mrs. Daughtry." I keep my voice level even though my pulse is going. "Same as you."
"Don't." Her chin comes up. "Don't you stand there and play sweet with me. We've all seen it now. The whole congregation's seen what you are."
A few of the others edge closer. I know most of them.
A man who ushers on Sundays.
A woman whose twins I had in my class two years ago, who cried at the end-of-year program because I'd been so good with her shy one. She won't look at me now.
"What you've seen isn't real." I make myself say it slowly, reasonably, like reason is a thing that still works here. "Somebody made those pictures. There's technology now, you can build an image of anyone?—"
"Oh, here we go." Beverly's mouth curls. "Computers. A conspiracy. You hear that?" She says it half over her shoulder, performing for the cluster of them. "Same thing the sister used to say. It runs in the family, I suppose. The lying does."
The wordsisterhits where she means it to.
"Don't you talk about Hannah." My voice cracks down the middle and I hate it,hatethat they can hear it. "You don't know one thing about my sister."
"I know your family's been a stain on that church for years, and we were too Christian to say so." She steps closer, and the church purse swings, and I smell her perfume, the same one she's worn to every potluck since I was a girl. "Caleb Bradley's mother is a wreck. That poor baby. And you've got the gall tostand in our grocery store with your chin in the air like you're the one who's been wronged."
"I never touched that child." The horror of having to say the sentence out loud, in a parking lot, to people who watched me grow up—it comes up my throat like something rotten. "I never—Mrs. Daughtry, I love those kids, I would never in my life?—"
"Then explain the pictures."
"I can't explain them, they're fake?—"
"Then you've got nothing." She says it softly, almost gently, the old fake-tender voice slipping back in for one terrible second. "And you should go. Pack up whatever you're renting and go somewhere they don't know you, and let this town heal."
Something wet hits the side of my face.
It takes me a second to understand it—the cold slide of it down my cheek, the crack of the shell on the asphalt by my shoe, the yellow of the yolk going splat across the toe of my sneaker.
Somebody at the back of the cluster has thrown an egg.
