The Warm Fuzzies by Chris Adrian

Her parents always gave the new kids a tambourine(小手鼓)and stuck them back with Molly, because it was easy to play the tambourine, though there were intricacies(錯(cuò)綜復(fù)雜)to it that nobody else understood or appreciated, and because she was nice, though she was actually only about half as nice as everyone supposed her to be. The new boy was not very different to look at than any of his predecessors, the black foster brothers and sisters who came and went and came and went, circulating one at a time through her actual family until they were inevitably ejected(驅(qū)逐). She had barely learned to remember Jordan’s name before he was gone, trundled(滾動(dòng))off to a Job Corps assignment in Houston, and now here was Paul, at thirteen years old a little younger than his unmet foster brother once removed, and just as bad with the tambourine. Molly stepped closer to him in the garage and tried to keep the beat in a way that was more obvious and easier to copy, but he didn’t catch on, and though he stayed in tune when he sang, he kept getting the words wrong. “I love you,” Molly sang, coming in with the rest of the family for the chorus. “I love you a lot. I love you more than you can know, but Jesus loves you more more more more!” It wasn’t the hardest refrain to remember, but still he kept singing “I love you so much” instead of “a lot,” and “more than you can imagine” instead of “more than you can know.” It boded(預(yù)示)ill when they couldn’t get the refrain right on this song. It meant that nothing would be easy for them.

It was useless, though, to worry about them, even at this early stage, when you’d think something could be done to help them out, to make them fit in better, or to defuse the inevitable conflicts that would lead to their being sent back to the pound or shipped off to some other family, or a trade school, or the Marines, or to any number of pseudo-opportunities(偽機(jī)會(huì)) that were the consolation prize(安慰獎(jiǎng)) for not actually becoming a member of the musical Carter family of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Molly smiled at Paul, and he nodded coolly at her, which was something different. Usually on the first day, they just gave her a nervous smile, but he seemed to be appraising her somehow, looking her up and down with the nod. Then he turned, swinging his hips one way and his shoulders another, and he gave the same look to her sister Mary where she stood tossing her hair back and forth at the keyboards, using one finger on each hand to play. He did one shake of the tambourine at her—it was out of time—and then at her brother Colin where he was playing the guitar, toward the front of the garage, near their parents. Colin was strumming (漫不經(jīng)心地)彈奏 and dipping from the waist, left and right and left, and hopping in place during the chorus. He was as pale as Molly, and looked sickly, all of a sudden, compared with the new boy. Molly held her breath and closed her eyes and with an effort—it was like squeezing something inside her head—she refrained from thinking something unpleasant about her brother. The new boy did the same thing to Malinda, singing between their parents, to Craig, on the violin, and Clay, on the bass. He turned around to do the thing—a salute(敬禮)? a shake of the fist?—to Chris, on the drums, and to her parents, and then to little Melissa, a moving target since she played no instrument and did not sing but just danced around enthusiastically, and finally to the life-size picture of Jesus taped to the back side of the garage door, where a different sort of family, or a different sort of band, might have taped a picture of a stadium crowd. It was two shakes for Jesus.

He closed his eyes then, and kept dancing in place and mumble-singing the wrong words. “Jesus Loves You More” did not rock very hard. None of their songs did, though their father, who wrote them with minimal input from Mary and Craig, the two eldest, would have said otherwise. Molly did what she could to shake things up. She and Chris had a thing going, where she accented his drumming just so, jingling grace beats that brought out the rhythm underneath their father’s vanilla melody, which was always one of only four melodies. You could do only so much, though. If you shook it too hard, you merely drew attention to yourself in a way that made it clear you had given up on the song or were trying to drag it someplace it just didn’t belong. It was a subtle bit of tambourine lore, not something to be intuited(由直覺知道) the first time you picked one up. But the boy wasstomping(重踩, 重踏) and shaking and spinning and clapping to a song that was the breathless, hopped-up cousin of the one they were playing. Chris and Mary and Clay frowned at him, but the others, standing in front of him with their hearts turned to Jesus, didn’t notice for another minute. The song stopped, not entirely on their father’s karate-chop cue, but the boy did not. His eyes were closed, his hands and his feet were flying, and he was smiling as he sang: “Jesus, he’s my friend, sort of! He’s my kind of sometimes friend. Jesus!” Melissa laughed, and danced along until Mary grabbed her shoulder. “Paul,” their mother said. “Paul!” He stopped dancing and looked at her. “When the music stops,” their father said, “the song is over.”