Tami Hayes was fifteen when she decided she'd had enough of being the pastor's good and proper daughter.
Her father wasn't the problem, really, it was her mother. Her mother was the one who sat in the front pew with the girls while Reverend Hayes preached and prayed and prepared the elements. Her mother was the one who kept Tami, quite literally, under her thumb, sometimes driving the pointy appendage right into Tami's shoulder when she got too squirrelish. Once, when Tami was just six years old and her sister Shelley was but three, Mrs. Hayes had hissed to them, "If you girls don't sit still and behave, your father could lose his job!" Those words had haunted Tami for the next twelve months.
So Tami learned to smile a twinkling, southern belle smile, to shake adults' hands, to ask politely after their families and their latest bout with illness, to behave well, sit still, never swear, and dress and act like a lady. She learned that even if an elder's kids dropped the f-word or a deacon's kids went to an R rated movie, or the organist's kids played a little poker, that didn't mean she could. Because if she was seen doing such things, that same elder, that same deacon, that same organist would come to her father, eyebrows raised, and tsk, tsk, tsk.
"A man who can't control his own household," Tami's mother warned her, "won't be trusted with a church."
It was Tami's mother, also, who told her, when she turned 14, "Boys are going to be interested in you something awful. Your father says you can date when you're sixteen, if he meets the boy first, but if it was up to me, you wouldn't be allowed out of the house with one. Teenage boys only want one thing. But remember, sex is for the marriage bed alone! If you so much as touch a boy in an inappropriate way, you could wind up in hell!"
"Oh calm down, Linda," her father had said, just then walking into the living room where Tami was receiving her lecture. "Tami's a good girl. She's not going to do anything foolish. Stop telling ours girls they're going to wind up in hell."
"Edward, you know full well that teenage boys are always thinking below the belt," she told him. "Don't tell me it isn't true!"
"Oh I know it's true," he said. "I know all too well. " He tapped his forehead. "They should really use their sense more often." When Tami's mother left the room, her father muttered underneath his breath, "Then they wouldn't end up marrying nothing but a pretty face and a pair of lovely legs."
But Tami grew weary of being a good girl. She grew tired of the double standards, the expectations that seemed to apply to her and Shelley but no one else's children, the rules, her mother's ever-growing lists of thou shalt nots.
She longed to be free.
And so it was that, her sophomore year of high school, Tami Hayes started hanging out with kids who were not active in the church youth group, friends who were not pre-approved by her mother, older kids who gave her advice on how to sneak out of the house. It wasn't hard to do. Tami's mother usually went to bed early, and her father was always buried so deeply in his concordance or his Bible or his commentaries, with the door to his study tightly closed, that he hardly heard a sound.
It felt so good to be out from underneath her mother's thumb that Tami did it again and again. She went joy riding with older friends, laughed and cussed and ended up at parties, where she flirted with boys and took her first drink of alcohol. She began failing her classes, forging her report cards, and …falling in love.
His name was Boone, and he played the guitar. Not just the guitar, but also the drums. And he was tall and gorgeously blonde, with stunning blue eyes. At a party, she watched him play in silent admiration, giggling with her girlfriends about how adorable he was, and he smiled at her and said hello. At least, she hoped he'd smiled at her. Every girl standing in her circle prayed she was the one at whom Boone had directed that dazzling smile on his way to the kitchen.
At the next party, he actually spoke to her. They had a conversation while she sipped her beer straight from the can and tried to pretend she didn't still find the taste bitter. He didn't believe in God, and he wasn't afraid to admit it, even in a small west Texas town. He was too smart and daring and honest to pretend he believed any of that nonsense. Tami laughed and batted her eyes and flicked her strawberry blonde hair over her shoulder. She straightened her back and, when he wasn't looking, pulled down her shirt to reveal just a little more cleavage.
Then, at the following party, he sought her out. Boone was seventeen, and even though Tami was two years younger, she managed to catch his eye. She was the one he asked to go upstairs and look out the bedroom window at the stars with him. She was the one he couldn't help but kiss. She was the one he swore to have been watching for weeks, to have fallen head over heels for, to need with every fiber of his being. She was the one whose smile made his heart patter and who he just wanted to lay down and hold, just hold….for a while…and maybe a little more, a very little more…. She was the one.
Until the next hour she wasn't.
[*]
When Boone pretended not to know her in school on Monday, Tami wanted to blame the beer for her foolishness, but the truth was, she hadn't even been that drunk. She'd been free.
But now she was just empty.
She told no one, and was grateful, at least, that he'd used a condom.
And just as she had grown tired of being the pastor's good and proper daughter, Tami Hayes tired, too, of being the pastor's rebellious daughter.
She stopped hanging out with her new friends. She started trying to pull up her grades, but she would have to keep forging her report cards, or her parents would know how badly she'd done the first three quarters of her sophomore year. She prayed she could get away with it, but she'd been seen at her last party, by a deacon's college-aid kid, who told his mother he'd seen her there. The young man's mother decided to respond to this news not by upbraiding her own son for partying with younger high school girls, but by approaching the Reverend's wife and saying, "Do you have any idea what your daughter's up to?"
When her parents confronted her, the truth poured out of Tami like a river bursting through a damn. All of it. The new friends. The sneaking out. The parties. The drinking. The failing grades. All of it except her lost virginity. That secret she held back.
Her mother lit into her, a torrent of reproach billowing from her mouth, while her father stood silently by, until at last, he said, "Enough, Linda. It's enough. She'll be disciplined."
"You could lose your position!" Tami's mother cried. "Karen will start talking! And when the congregation finds out Tami's been drinking, and partying, and – "
"- I'm not going to lose my position!" her father interrupted, his voice raised in that rare way that always frightened Tami, because it was so unlike his usual gentleness toward his daughters. "No one wants my position. Trust me."
Tami's father said nothing more to her that night, though she could feel his disappointment lingering in the house like a heavy cloud choking out the light.