Barbie was a big, thick girl with her hair pulled back on her head with a rubber band. Susan was delicate and tiny and dressed like a cross between a fashion doll and a Los Angeles streetwalker. Come to think of it, Barbie was dressed like that, too, but the clothes didn’t have the same effect as they did when Susan wore them. Catherine wondered what mothers were coming to. Her own mother would never have allowed her to leave the house—at the age of fifteen!—with enough skin exposed to get a beach tan. But then, Catherine had never imagined that the upshot of Third Wave Feminism, the most wonderful thing that had ever happened in her lifetime, would be this craze on the part of children to look like whores.
Barbie was shifting from one leg to the other. She had started to emit a low-grade hum that was the signal that she was about to get angry, and nobody in her right mind wanted to see Barbie McGuffie angry. Catherine looked down at the lesson plan in front of her and sighed.
“All right,” she said.
“You’re the one who wanted to see us,” Barbie said. “We didn’t want to see you.”
“I know.” Catherine picked up her pen and turned it around in her fingers. Then she put it down again. There was no easy way to do this. There was never any easy way to do it. What gave her a headache was the fact that it kept happening again and again.
Catherine bit her lip. “I had a call from Mrs. Cornish this morning. I talked to Mr. Henderson about it. Apparently, it wasn’t the first call.”
Mr. Henderson was the vice principal. He was not a tower of strength in difficult times. Catherine suspected him, sometimes, of being on the side of Creationism and Intelligent Design, and if not, of definitely not being on her side.
“So,” she said. “Do you want to tell me about it? Mrs. Cornish said that Mallory was very upset.”
“Mallory Cornish is always upset,” Barbie said. “She thinks she’s better than everybody else, living out there in the development with all the rich kids. She’s nothing but a secular humanist.”
Susan made a strangled sound. Catherine closed her eyes.
“Do you know what a secular humanist is?” Catherine asked Barbie. “I mean, can you define it?”
“Sure I can define it,” Barbie said. “It’s somebody who worships the devil and hates America.”
“I don’t think they worship the devil,” Susan said tentatively. “I think they just don’t believe in God.”
“If they don’t believe in God they worship the devil,” Barbie said. “What else? There’s only the two. I bet they have human sacrifices in that basement of theirs. I bet that’s why it’s got a whole kitchen right there on its own. They have human sacrifices and then they eat them.”
Catherine closed her eyes. Her head hurt. Of course, neither Barbie nor Susan had been to any of the houses out in the development. The development children tended to herd together, because most of them did not have a lot in common with the kids who lived in the “real” town. And there was, of course, the money. The people who lived in the development were not rich by absolute standards, but by the standards of Snow Hill they beat anybody but old Annie-Vic.
Catherine opened her eyes again. If this had been forty years ago, she could have required these two young idiots to make a report to the school on what secular humanism was. These days, an assignment like that would only start another lawsuit.
“You cannot,” she said, “harass another student just because you don’t like that student’s beliefs. About anything. You can’t corner Mallory Cornish in the girls’ room and call her names. You can’t follow her to the school bus and throw things at her. You can’t do any of that. The first rule of the Snow Hill public schools is civility.”
“My mother says she shouldn’t even be here,” Barbie said. “And my mother is right. She shouldn’t be. Why doesn’t she go back to where she came from? They’re not even from Pennsylvania, most of the people in the development.”
“They’re northeastern liberal elites,” Susan Clawde said earnestly. “My mama said so. And our pastor said so. They’re northeastern liberal elites and all they want to do is to send everybody in the country to Hell because that’s where they’re going and they want company.”
Susan Clawde had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. Barbie didn’t either. Catherine was willing to bet money that if she asked the two of them to define any of the words they were using, they’d fall flat on their faces. All they really knew was that these words described people who were, by definition, very bad.