the monotonous life of amanda powell

new god church

I got away with wearing high-waisted jeans and an uncomfortably wrinkled floral shirt to church today. 

This lady, this old lady, Willow, always looks at me and Mom weird when we walk into church. She must live near our apartment and smell the smoke or something. It’s likely, theres a ton of old people near us. Mom made me go to the corner store to get her a few magazines one time and it was filled with the stench of looming death. It could’ve been me though. 

It’s humid outside. Like, cold humid. My shirt gets more wrinkled. 

“Mandy, did you bring your phone?” Mom says as we walk through the heavy wooden doors. 

“Yeah,” I say, checking for it in the pocket of my jeans. 

“Turn it off.” A reasonable request. But I still mumble something like “No thanks” under my breath. 

My shirt tugs oddly on my frame. God, I want to put on a sweatshirt. My grey sweatshirt that has my school name on it seems almost immeasurably comfortable in my mind right now. I let my hair down from the awful ponytail but my mom is so close to me so I struggle to put it back up. She’s too busy paying attention. 

The sermon starts and the tall man we see every week, Pastor Lucas, begins to speak. He’s a millennial and he has really thick glasses. I guess he doesn't have a girlfriend or wife to tell him that he looks stupid. 

I look around for anyone remotely near my age as Pastor Lucas’ monotonous voice blends together with the two songs stuck in my head. He’s background noise to the search for ninth graders. 

Malachy Adrian’s sitting across the stage with his grandma. Malachy’s in my grade and I know because he switched out of my algebra class like two weeks in because he was too smart or something. Or maybe he had an error on his schedule and had to get a new one, because that happened to me. I was put in Art I, but I convinced my counselor to switch me to Art II. I’m not even that good at art anymore. I used to be good at art, and Mom would put my art up on the refrigerator, but now there's only one thing on the refrigerator: a coupon for a pack of cigarettes from Costco.