Queen Esther & the Second Graders of Doom. Allie Pleiter

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      And on Some Sunday Afternoons…

      “I’d never eat fish for lunch. Yuck.” Decker made a face as the Doom Room pondered the Bible story of the loaves and the fishes.

      “Not even fish sticks?” Essie ventured. She fondly remembered the special days of fish stick and French fry frozen dinners on folding trays in front of the television. They were one of the great treats of childhood to her. She and Mark-o would usually have a competition of sorts as to who could glob more ketchup on a fish stick. Essie usually won.

      “Fish sticks are gross,” Decker replied. “Besides, Mom says they’re fattening. She makes me eat Sam Man—you know, the pink fish—every Tuesday for dinner, but I hide it in my napkin and give it to Sparky. What’s ‘brain food’ anyway? I’m not eating that Sam Man’s brains, am I?”

      Essie guessed that either Decker’s dog or cat was eating very well on Tuesdays lately. Salmon versus fish sticks. It sounded like a bad country song—

      I’m just a fish stick gal,

      Caught in a salmon fillet world…

      “Salmon, Decker, is a fish, you’re right. But, no, it’s not brains. It’s good for your brain like lots of other kinds of protein—those are the types of foods that give your brain the energy it needs to do its job.”

      “I think better eating cookies,” Dexter proclaimed, clearly unswayed.

      Essie dragged the discussion back to the topic at hand. “Well, then, it’s a good thing you’ve all had a cookie or two, because we have lots of thinking to do today.” She clasped her hands. “Now, we’ve already read the story about this boy and how he brought his bread and fish to Jesus.” Decker opened his mouth, presumably to start up again about the grossness of fish for lunch, but Essie held up a silencing finger. “Almost everyone’s dad was a fisherman there, so bread and fish would have been like…like peanut butter and jelly to us. Everybody ate it.”

      “I’m yullergic to peanut products,” pronounced Peter with a resigned voice. Just as Essie knew he would. Peter, it seemed, was “yullergic” to just about everything. Some days all Peter could add to a conversation was a list of relevant items to which he was allergic. On those days he would sigh, speak without enthusiasm and generally look as if the entire world was gunning for his immune system. How he reconciled such an outlook with his love of bugs and other slimy creatures, she couldn’t really say. An image of Peter, foraging under a rock with latex gloves on, flashed uninvited in her brain. Focus, Essie, focus.

      “Okay,” she continued, “what he ate isn’t really the point here. The point is that he gave what he had for Jesus to use, even though it didn’t seem like much at the time. “David,” Essie said, turning to Cece’s son in an attempt to get things on the right track, “do you think five loaves and two fishes is enough to feed thousands of people?”

      David scrunched up his forehead in thought. “You’d have to break it into really tiny pieces.”

      Essie had to laugh at that one. “Even then, what that boy had just wasn’t enough to go around. Remember, it said that there were baskets of leftovers even after everyone had eaten. That’s why it was a miracle. Jesus took that food and made it able to do something very special. Something only God could make happen.” She looked around the room, trying to catch each boy’s eyes. “Sometimes the stuff we have to do in life feels like more than we can handle. Like we don’t have what it will take to do what needs to be done. Does anyone have an example?”

      Justin’s arm shot in the air. “My baby sister. Sometimes she cries so much, I think I’m gonna explode.”

      Essie thought about Josh’s most recent teething episode and could only nod in sympathy. “Babies are a handful, aren’t they?”

      “I heard Mom telling Dad she thought she’d never, ever get to sleep again. When I told Dad we ought to make baby Megan sleep in the garage, he told me not to say that in front of Mom, but he was smiling when he said it, so I know he thinks we oughta try it.”

      Essie could only imagine.

      “My dad has a new job this month, and it’s making him really nervous,” offered Steven Bendenfogle. “He gets grumpy a lot. And sometimes he doesn’t come home till way after my bedtime. And he brings home lots of homework, besides. I think he feels like it’s too hard.”

      “New jobs feel too hard lots of times. You could really help cheer him up, Steven.”

      “I don’t know.” Steven shook his head. “He’s really grumpy some nights.”

      “Well, now you’ve got something that feels too hard now, too, don’t you? It feels like it may be too hard to cheer up someone who’s really grumpy, doesn’t it? That’ll take Jesus’ help, too.”

      Steven thought about that for a while, but then nodded.

      “It’d be too hard,” said Stanton loudly, “to beat Jesus in a jumping contest, ’cuz He’s God and He’s got superpowers and stuff. He’d beat you at anything!”

      Well now, superpower was an odd definition of deity, but it must have rung true to the average eight-year-old, because the other boys all immediately agreed. Instantly, boys began shouting examples such as “I bet He could spit a watermelon seed around the world,” or “He could kick a soccer ball through a brick wall,” and even several instances of X-ray vision.

      “Or,” interjected Essie in a voice loud enough to cut through the din, “transform one little boy’s lunch into enough food to feed thousands of hungry people.”

      Everyone had to think about that for a moment. Then, very quietly, Stanton said, “Yeah. Cool.”

      Was it okay to think of Jesus’ miracles as superpowers? She hoped God didn’t mind a little creativity, because clearly Jesus just went up a couple of notches in the “cool” department for a few of these boys. And that was the whole point, wasn’t it?

      “Superpowers aren’t real,” she said, because she felt it ought to be said. “But Jesus, and the things He can do with us when we believe in Him, those are real. And yeah, Stanton, they are cool. The older you get, the more you believe, the cooler it gets.” Nods and a few amazed faces.

      Zing. It sunk in. Score one for the crazy mom from New Jersey.

      And the very cool God who brought her here.

      As she put away the workbooks after class, Essie pondered how overwhelmed she had felt about this “Doom Room” class. Hadn’t she felt like it was way too much to handle?

      Suddenly, it wasn’t exactly clear who was teaching whom.

      Cool.

      Oh, it was cool all right, right up until Mark-o’s phone call that evening.

      “Congratulations, Essie, you made it four whole weeks before the first call. That may be a record.”

      Essie put down the stain stick she was using to try and get the Baby Tylenol stains out of a batch of Josh’s onesies. “What?”

      “I was just congratulating you on going a full four weeks СКАЧАТЬ