A Place at the Table by Susan Rebecca White Page A

plunging V-neck tops. She sure doesn’t look like Mama or any of Mama’s friends. She looks out of place is how she looks. Which she is. She moved Pete down here from Boston last summer, after she and Pete’s dad split up.
    Even though he’s a Yankee, the white girls at Decatur High like Pete a lot. (Who knows, the black girls might like him, too, but everyone keeps pretty separated.) Despite how goofy he is and the funny T-shirts he wears, he carries himself elegantly, his limbs almost liquid, his fingers so long they border on odd. He has perfectly square teeth that look like white Chiclets all lined up in a row. His hair is blond like his mama’s, worn a little shaggy and grown out on the sides, same as mine.
    Ever since Daddy mentioned to Mrs. Arnold that she ought to come check out Clairmont Avenue Baptist, quietly letting her know that she wouldn’t be judged for being a divorcee, Pete and his mom are at church most Sundays, his mom dressed for a cocktail party, Pete with his button-down oxford half tucked into his khakis. Our family always sits up front. Pete and his mom always arrive late and sit near the entrance. I try not to glance back at Pete during the services, but I can’t help myself. I like knowing he is there. Once I saw Pete with his head tilted back, looking up at the ceiling as if he were counting the tiles. I asked him about it afterward. He said there was a watermark on the ceiling that looked like the state of Massachusetts and he wondered if it was a sign.
    “Of what?”
    “That Ma will wise up and move us back to Boston.”
    “How can you believe in signs left on the church ceiling but not believe in God?”
    God’s existence is an ongoing debate between the two of us. Pete claims he’s an atheist, but I don’t really think he is. I think he’s just trying to annoy me. I kind of like our discussions, though. We get into long arguments about the human nature of Christ (Pete says that if Jesus was a man then he got erections), and the shame of Jimmy Carter pardoning the draft dodgers (which Pete thinks was a good thing and not shameful at all), and Watergate (actually, we don’t really disagree on that; we both think Nixon was a creep). When I debate Pete I try to show absolute faith in my convictions. But lying in bed at night I will sometimes allow myself to imagine, for a moment, the possibility that Pete’s way of seeing the world might be as valid as my own. And then I have to shake my head fast, as if shaking the crumbs off a place mat, because I don’t want the scariest of Pete’s convictions—that there is no God who cares about our lives—to settle.
    •  •  •
    Sometimes after practice Pete and I hang out at his house. It isn’t actually a house at all but half of a run-down duplex on a dead-end street off East Ponce. Today we sit Indian-style on the floor of his bedroom, the green shag carpet soft beneath our legs. Pete has the slide projector going. Images of his family’s long-ago camping trip to the Arizona desert flash against the wall while Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours , which Pete is obsessed with, spins on the turntable. The images of the desert are strange and otherworldly: barren mountains striped with gradations of pink. Pete, gap-toothed, is grinning in every single picture, his dad’s arm wrapped around his shoulder. Pete couldn’t have been older than eight. Back then his hair was so blond it looked almost white.
    Pete says Rumours sounds even better when you’re high, but his mom found his bag of pot and threw it away. I am relieved he doesn’t have any to offer. Relieved I don’t have to say no again. I am forever refusing Pete’s offers of beers, stolen from his mom’s endless supply in the fridge. I use my dad as an excuse, but the truth is, I am less afraid of Daddy than I am of altering my mind around Pete. The truth is, even cold sober it is all I can do not to reach over and touch him.
    But I never let myself touch Pete, not even