“First you leave your church without telling Mom and Dad, or me for that matter, and then one of your only friends lives in a commune. And I haven’t even mentioned your other friend, Jazmine, whom I’m convinced is a lesbian. Who are you, and what have you done with my sister?” Amanda giggled so hard her eyes watered.
The last month had been the weirdest experience of Amanda’s twenty-five years. She had moved to Cambridge, Montana, expecting to find herself just as stifled as she had been at home in Oklahoma. Quite the opposite had proven true.
“You’re exaggerating,” Mary hedged.
“How? Explain to me what I’ve misunderstood. You haven’t told me what happened with your church, by the way. Or did you ever even belong to it? Was it all a giant fib to keep Mom and Dad happy?” She hadn’t thought of that. The idea was so juicy, she wiggled her eyebrows, hoping for confirmation.
Mary rolled her eyes. “No. Of course not. I went there for six months. And then I realized I had very different views from most of them.”
“You just now realized that? You’re almost twenty-nine years old. You’re just figuring out the entire thing is a hoax?” Amanda really was shocked. She never would have expected her sister to break away from tradition.
“It’s not entirely a hoax. It’s just that particular denomination is a little whacked.”
“Whacked? They spew damnation and fire and shit, Mary. That’s insane. Not whacked.”
“You don’t have to start cussing just because you moved out of Mom and Dad’s house.”
Amanda groaned. “God. Not this. Which is it going to be? Are you going to lighten up and join the more progressive members of society to reflect all your new hip friends, or are you going to frown at me all the time with pursed lips until you have early lines across your forehead like Mom does?”
“Neither. Can’t I be down the middle somewhere?”
“Sure…” Amanda didn’t want to be a bitch about it. She could tell by the look on Mary’s face that her sister was trying to evolve and figure things out. Teasing her and harassing her wasn’t going to help. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be a nag. Now tell me what happened with the church.”
“They got a little carried away.” Mary shrugged nonchalantly as though it were no big deal. “When Laurie moved to town, many of them got all up in arms about her being mixed—”
“Mixed what? You sound like you’re a hundred.”
“Half Native American and half Caucasian.”
“So?” What the hell was Mary insinuating?
“So the members of the Church on the Hill are a bit backward. They didn’t want Laurie working in this area, and they didn’t approve of her lifestyle.”
“The commune thing?”
Mary audibly sighed. “It’s not a commune.”
“What is it then?”
“I try not to pry in their business, but it seems like they live in groups of three.”
“Three.” Amanda waited for Mary to continue, confused. Three?
“You mean like two women for every man? Polygamy?”
“No. More like two men for every woman.”
Amanda’s jaw dropped open, and she widened her eyes. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. Like I said, it’s their business, and I don’t let it affect my friendship with Laurie. We met under tough circumstances when both the white community and the Native American community to the south were ostracizing her. It made me question things. They’re good people. I try not to be judgmental.”
“Wow.” Amanda was still so stunned she couldn’t think of anything else to say. For Mary, that was beyond not being judgmental. It was a stretch even for Amanda to grasp, and she considered herself to be far more tolerant than her parents or her former sister—the one who had occupied Mary’s body until recently. She had to bite her lip to keep from chuckling at the idea.
Amanda had spent most of the last seven years on her college campus. She still commuted from her parents’ home, but she preferred the atmosphere of the campus and the tolerance level of most of the students, so she made up any and every excuse to stay there as much as possible. Many hours a day were spent in the library or sitting under a giant oak tree in the quad.
She’d met all sorts of people and branched out significantly in her beliefs. If she hadn’t at least spent her days with normal human beings, she shuddered to imagine how she would have turned out from the influence of her parents and their church alone.
She shook thoughts of college from her head and let Mary’s words about Laurie’s extended family sink in further. Two men and a woman? Why did the very idea send chills of excitement down her spine? Thoughts of the two delicious specimens she’d been dreaming about made her nipples tingle. She squeezed her legs together and shook her dream men from her brain.