Girls on Fire(52)
She snorted. “Come to my place this weekend. My mom’s throwing some god-awful mother-daughter pool party, it’ll be a nightmare. You’ll love it.”
“I would rather jab a hot knife in my eye.”
“Too bad for you, then, because your mom already said yes.”
LACEY
Endless, Nameless
I BLAME JESUS. AND BEFORE YOU get all uptight about sacrilege, remember that it would be just as easy to blame you.
I should have left without you. I could have: I had the car. Shame on me for giving you more time, for assuming the Bastard would calm himself down. For going home.
Call it a failure of the imagination.
HORIZONS. THAT’S WHAT THE SHITHOLE was called. As in Expand your. As in Learn to see Christ on the. As in Unless you want to be a brainwashed Jesus-freak head case, better run for the.
They dumped me off just inside the barbed wire gate, and I knew exactly what kind of place it was once I saw the ponytailed blonde with the lobotomized smile flanked by two thugs just waiting for a chance to test out their Tasers. I let Thing One and Thing Two frog-march me in to see the man in charge—also blond; they were all f*cking blond. He told me to call him Shawn. The people at Horizons said Shawn the way Shawn said Jesus. This puny, pasty gym-teacher wannabe with the cross-shaped whistle hanging around his neck and the gigantic mahogany desk that said more than he intended about the size of his dick, this was the only guy with the power to send me back to you.
“Welcome to your safe haven,” he said, and I wondered how many of the girls he’d f*cked, hoping it was a lot, because it’s the kind of guy who’s in it for other reasons that you really have to worry about.
He issued me a Horizons handbook and my very own teen Bible, complete with a couple neutered blonds frolicking on the cover, bone-white horse teeth testifying to their oneness with the Lord. “We’ve made a space for you in bunk six, Ecclesiastes. Chastity will take you over there. I’m sure you have many questions—”
“Starting with, are you f*cking kidding me that her name is Chastity?” I had more questions—did he really believe that a few coils of barbed wire could keep out the devil, how much had the Bastard paid for the privilege of dumping me in this shithole, how long would it be before I could go home—but Shawn’s game-show-host grin had gone full jack-o’-lantern.
“—but as you’ll learn from your handbook, you haven’t yet earned the privilege of asking questions.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“This is a hard transition process, I know. So I’ll give you a pass on the language. But my leniency ends now.”
“Is that supposed to scare me?” I said.
He jerked his head at She-Who-Would-Not-Be-Penetrated. “One demerit,” he said, shaking his head in what I eventually came to recognize as Shawn’s Special Recipe Sorrow, because it hurt him ever so much to hurt us.
One demerit meant one chore, of my counselor’s choosing, and my counselor, a mini-Mussolini named Heather, never met a toilet she didn’t think needed a good toothbrush-scrub. So that’s how I spent my first morning at Horizons: on my knees, bent over the bowl, swallowing bile because I was pretty sure that if I threw up I’d just have to clean that, too. As I scrubbed, she walked me through my dos and don’ts: Do love Jesus, do follow the rules, don’t think for yourself, don’t imagine your life is your own, don’t f*ck up or you’ll be sorry.
For each day of not f*cking up, you earned a privilege, and privileges were everything. You needed them to speak to other campers, to leave your cabin without supervision, to send letters, to spend your free time outside rather than sitting at your desk reading the Bible, to go to the bathroom without supervision—“and I don’t want to waste any more time than I have to watching you pee,” Heather said, “so get it together.” No amount of privileges would get you five minutes of any music but Christian rock. You earned privileges by memorizing Bible passages, making your bed with hospital corners, sucking up to your counselor, publicly confessing your sins and taking Jesus into your heart, writing antiabortion letters to your local congressman, and tattling on your fellow campers when they momentarily forgot themselves and started acting like human beings rather than zombies. We lived in bunkhouses named for the books of the Bible, a dozen of us in Ecclesiastes: twelve little girls in two straight lines, call it Madeline and the Jesus Freaks.
Mornings were for Bible study, afternoons were for exercise, then the sing-alongs and sharing sessions that comprised mandatory fun. Meals were for watching your back and learning your place. Twelve girls, and I didn’t need to learn their names or their stories because I didn’t intend to be one of them for long. It was enough to know that the Screamer jerked us all awake at three every morning; that the Sodomite had been caught in flagrante with her soccer team captain; that the Skank was a sex addict, or at least had a diary-reading mother who thought so; that the Virgin had remained so—if only by her own technical definition—by restricting herself to copious amounts of anal sex; that Saint Ann had shipped herself off to Horizons voluntarily, in need of some sinners to save.
The Bastard would have liked the regimented schedule, the drill-sergeant counselors whipping us into shape, a boot camp for the army of God; he would have loved the fact that any trespass was met with flamboyant, Old Testament–style consequences. This wasn’t hippie worship, the guitar-playing, turn-the-other-cheek kind of lovefest he detested, and it wasn’t the bingo-playing, potlucking, pamphleteering morality play that enraged him in Battle Creek. This was a camp created as if in his own image, complete with brimstone and fire and daily viewings of The 700 Club. All I had to do, they told me, was learn respect for authority and for the Lord, and they would send me home.