The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [125]
None of them would know what hit them until it was too late, and any adults smart enough to catch on to the possible cause of it all would never figure out how they owed everything to Simon, one of four newcomers to the church and a poor little feel-sorry-for-him adopted boy besides, regardless of what anyone had heard concerning his questionable past.
While the adults grew fat in worship and wisdom upstairs, and after the older children had been dismissed from their classrooms to join the adults in the second half of their Sunday service, an hour had passed.
And the children remaining below were beginning to behave differently.
***
Simon’s Children’s Study began twice as large as it turned out to be. When the children were first assembled, the girls outnumbered the boys, a fact which became more apparent as soon as the girls shuffled out the door to regroup elsewhere for their morning lesson. When the girls met with the boys together for the first half of the Study, the children PRAISED AND WORSHIPPED WITH SONG, as it was called. They sang songs of inspiration with the inspiration portion on the slow burner and with kid-fun on high flame...songs about how Father Abraham had many sons and how the children in the room were included in his progeny....
Father Abraham had lots of sons, and I am one of them...as we all go marching on with right arm, right leg, turn around, jump up, stomp your feet, say ‘amen’....
And the kids actually marched in place to the song.
Simon had no idea who in the hell Father Abraham was.
In between songs, everyone in the room was treated to chocolate chip cookies and fruit punch, donated by a few teachers and/or parents, whoever’s turn it was that week.
After the kids PRAISED AND WORSHIPPED WITH SONG, the girls in the room rose from their seats and departed and Simon found himself alone with the group of remaining boys.
By that time, an hour had passed.
And, by the look of it, the drug was beginning to take affect.
***
Everyone was guzzling up the punch. Gulping it, sipping it, dipping the chocolate chip cookies into it, kicking it onto the carpet by accident and then migrating back to the punch bowl for more.
The late-teens male leader had accompanied the girls out the door to teach them separately, for the boys to remain with Malmey, whose family Simon had been introduced to two nights before on a dinner date. Malmey had been quite spunky and amusing, but Simon noticed how her eyes never met with his.
Malmey was the first to experience the effects of the punch.
The suger cubes Simon had managed to move from his pants pocket and into the punch bowl had a chance to dissolve before anyone could notice, not that he didn’t swish them around and aid the matter with a metal scooper-spoon when nobody paid attention. He was among those who indulged in the punch before the majority of others, actually, but this was by no means a big deal to him: he’d been assured by the little black boy in his dreams that what would take place with the lot of them wouldn’t take place with someone as particularly gifted as he, who was promised immunity from such a drug. Partaking in the punch was also a damn good alibi for accusatory fingers. So when he’d located the sandwich bag of LSD-laced sugar cubes within his slippers that morning, he’d already known that what he was conditioned to do with them wouldn’t affect him.
Malmey was in the process of erasing the multicolored chalk figures from the black board on the wall at the head of the class. Suddenly, the bulky eraser spilled from her hand and plummeted to the floor and she arched forward in hunchback style, her back towards all eyes, assuming a position to puke.
Simon was seated in the back row of four rows of metal chairs, still sipping his fruit punch in