Re: The Woods: Pesha/Tandy
Religion had been a frequent topic of conversation during family dinners at the Kaufman house, actually. They were Reform by inherited culture more than staunch belief, although they hit most of the requirements: Billy had gone to Hebrew school on the weekends as a kid, and he’d had a Bar Mitzvah in the rented-out ballroom of one of the nicer hotels where a ton of relatives he’d never met had shown up and given him money and talked in garlicky breath about how he was a man now. But his parents were both doctors, academics, and they’d encouraged a healthy practice of critical reflection in their children.
So Billy had learned how to debate the particulars of the Old Testament versus New by the age of eleven or so, and he could get real worked up about the theory of organized religion in general. He considered his faith more of a familial and community system; he didn’t buy the stories as anything more than old-school morality disguised as law, but he was also proud of his heritage. Considered it a part of his inherent identity, even if he was adopted.
“Really? That sucks,” he said with a sympathetic grimace. Billy couldn’t imagine what it’d have been like if he’d gone to school here. “My parents, like, protested and signed petitions when the school board wanted to put soda machines in the lunchrooms. I think their heads would have exploded if some Bible-thumpers had tried to pull that in my school.”
He’d already hopped down the steps, gazing up at the relatively clear sky above the trees. The moon was waxing, almost half-full. Gibbous would have been better, but he felt confident enough that he could make it work given the lack of cloud cover. He was about to comment on the sky when he heard the clunk of what was undoubtedly a skull hitting the wooden support beams that held up his trailer’s ceiling, and turned back to try and peer inside with eyes that had already adjusted to the darkness.
“Shit, you okay? I told you to watch your head,” he chided, brow furrowed with concern. “Do you want an ice pack or something?”