Hell Followed with Us(41)

Kimberly Jones was a writer in the early Angelic movement—still alive, I think, in a settlement in California—who got really popular a few years before Judgment Day. She was especially beloved by white women thirty and older and was one of the best propaganda machines a fascist Evangelical terrorist cult could ask for. It’s amazing how locking down one key demographic, white people in rich countries, means you can get your claws into the world so tightly, you can tear it all to pieces around you.

This is what’s best for you, Mom told me. It was that or be shamed for giving up my body before marriage. As if I hadn’t been forced to give up my body to something far, far worse.

I could at least pick Theo. I could pick the when and how.

I’d never gotten that anywhere else.

By the time I reach Reformation Faith Evangelical Church, it’s late. The moon is high in the sky, cradled by the Milky Way and all the thousands of stars. Maybe Mom is looking at this same sky right now, thinking it will all be okay when she brings me home.

Me, with a knife to Theo’s throat. I’m not going back with you.

I step through the back door to find nothing. No ambushes by death squads, no Angels lying in wait. I hate that I was thinking it, but I’m always thinking it.

Anyway, Reformation reeks. It smells like bodies and Flood. The nest howls my arrival, rattling all the dead of Judgment Day. I’m sorry, I whisper. I didn’t mean to disturb you. It quiets, slowly, murmuring and rasping through the rafters.

I take the bobby pins out of my hair like a housewife taking off her wedding ring before meeting up with her boyfriend.

“Theo?” I step into the dark hallways, into the belly of the church. “You still here?”

“In the back.”

He’s in one of the Sunday school classrooms, sitting on the teacher’s desk and reading an illustrated kids’ Bible. We didn’t have those in New Nazareth. Kids don’t need to be able to understand the scripture. Nobody’s asking them to understand, just obey. He’s pilfered clothes from the donation pile, and it’s the first time I’ve seen him in something that isn’t Angel whites. Bulky shorts that cut off at an unflattering place near the knees, which, same. A plain T-shirt that’s a little too big on him. And his hair has grown out since he was torn from the death squads, finally long enough that a pale, little curl falls over his forehead.

My stomach turns. I want to kiss him. I want to be sick. I want to hold his jaw in my hands and feel his body heat against my skin. I want to pretend he never hurt me, that everything is fine, that this is something we can move forward from. I’m scared; I don’t want him to put a single hand on me, I don’t want him to exhale in my direction; I want to wrap my arms around him and stay there forever.

I want things to be how they used to be. It would be so much easier that way.

Why does this have to be so hard?

“Oh,” Theo says, because he’s looking at me. Really looking at me. He has the time to take it all in.

He slides off the desk, and I think he’s about to rush to me and wrap me up in a hug, the way people used to do in old movies. But he stops halfway. Teetering. Not exactly sure what to do with me. He’s got that confused look in his eyes, fumbling between wanting to touch me and wanting to back away. One mistake, and we’re back to the beginning of our relationship: kids who were thrown together and just don’t know what to do with themselves.

“Um.” I hold out the backpack. I want this thing away from me. “I brought some stuff.” I stole some stuff. “Thought you might be hungry.”

He takes it like a starved dog takes meat from an outstretched hand. “Thanks. You look…”

“Like hell,” I finish for him.

“No. Just different.” He gestures at the back of his neck. “You cut your hair.”

Instinctively, I touch where my braid used to be. My head felt so light when Dad cut it all away, as if he’d taken off some terrible thing that’d been dragging me down for years. Which was true, in a way.

Theo says, “You actually look like a boy.”

My first instinct is to snap, I was a boy before I cut my hair and stopped wearing dresses, and I’d still be a boy if I hadn’t, but I don’t. I can’t be mad at him for saying the same thing I thought when I looked in that bathroom mirror. He’s just being nice.

“I look awful,” I say. I force a smile even though he can’t see it, not really. “I guess that’s the same thing as looking like a boy, right? I’ve worn cargo shorts three days in a row. If that’s not awful, I don’t know what is.”

Theo snorts. “How did I manage to land a straight guy?”

“How dare you imply I’m heterosexual. I am disgusted and appalled.”

And we’re quiet again, because we got close to the way things used to be and neither of us knows what to do with that.

Theo clears his throat. “Did you come here alone?”

“Of course I did.”

His throat bobs. I get the urge to pick out from under my nails blood that isn’t there anymore.

“Benji, I…,” Theo says. “I’m so sorry.”

I’ve been doing pretty good at not thinking about Dad. What would thinking about him do, anyway? It won’t change anything. “It’s fine.”