Whoever is born of God doesn’t commit sin, because his seed remains in him; and he can’t sin, because he is born of God. In this the children of God are revealed, and the children of the devil. Whoever doesn’t do righteousness is not of God, neither is he who doesn’t love his brother.
—John 3:9
Tuesday began with the same piercing shriek as Monday. ADIH. Demerit. Another Day In Hell. Would I ever get used to that noise? Charles, as usual, was looking out for me.
“Remember not to talk, Taylor. Do you need any reminding about how we start our day?”
Start our day? Where was this guy from? I shook my head.
He finished his morning prayer, grabbed his bathroom kit, and stood there waiting. For me, I supposed. But I’d showered last night. So I shook my head and pointed to the floor like I was going to stay here.
“You need to shower, Taylor.”
I tried several hand gestures (nothing obscene, though it was tempting) to let him know I didn’t need to, and finally I had to resort to my pad and pen.
He glanced at my scrawled message and shook his head. “The Booklet is very clear on this. We shower every morning. It’s in the section on Cleanliness.”
Now, I remembered the Cleanliness section. And yeah, it said something about a daily shower, but did it say in the morning necessarily? I glared at Charles and picked my Booklet up from my desk. And sure enough, it said “All residents are to shower each morning before breakfast.”
I scrawled again. “But I showered last night!!!”
“The Booklet says we shower in the morning. It doesn’t say we can’t shower at night, but it does say we shower in the morning.” And he stood there, patience incarnate, waiting.
This was not a good start to the day. Already Charles had the upper hand. And I couldn’t even argue with him because I couldn’t speak. Man, I came close. But then what? Was it worth getting into trouble so soon just to avoid taking a shower? Of course, lots more than that was at stake, really, in this battle of wills between me and Mr. Sanctimonious, but nevertheless I followed him, looking as surly as possible as he led the way to the bathroom.
To make matters worse, he had to remind me to put a yellow sticker on my shirt before we went to breakfast. Again.
In the dining hall I wanted to veer away from Charles and sit elsewhere, but during my protested shower I’d come to the conclusion that I needed to keep a low profile until I’d figured a few more things out. And certainly until I could speak, which wouldn’t be until Thursday. So I trotted along with him and sat at a table where two girls were seated. Not Jessica and Marie, this time. One of them was Monica Moon, and after Charles’s obligatory grace I found out that the other was her roommate, Dawn Voorhees. Odd name, I remember thinking. I had yet to meet the famous Danielle who was Charles’s nondate for the Friday night barbeque. I’d almost forgotten about her, but sitting with girls over breakfast reminded me. That, and the fact that Dawn brought it up.
“Do you have a companion for Friday yet, Charles?”
Awfully forward of her, I remember thinking. It hadn’t occurred to me to think that of Jessica; don’t know why not. But there was something pointed, or forceful, about Dawn.
“Yes, actually. Danielle has agreed to go with me. And you?”
“Nope.”
Nope? It was the most casual response I’d heard anyone give anyone else since I got here. And there was a note of pride buried someplace inside it. I found myself liking Dawn immensely. I looked at her. She winked.
Shit! This was cool. Maybe she was actually a real person. I looked at Charles to get his reaction, and he looked distinctly uncomfortable. Kind of like he really wanted to say something but didn’t know how to follow Nope with any of his usual lingo. Like she didn’t know how out of place her response had been, and he didn’t know how to get her to see it.
Now, one of the rules that all residents are supposed to follow is not to jeopardize the silence of someone in SafeZone. So far the only people who’d spoken to me had done so like they were walking on eggshells, or by reminding me that I shouldn’t respond. So Dawn surprised me again.
“How are you doin’ so far, Taylor? I’ll bet you’ve been able to form a lot of impressions in safety, since no one can ask you that and expect an answer!” She laughed, a deep-throated, honest laugh. “You started Monday?”
I nodded, delighted that she hadn’t reminded me to limit my response to one head motion or another.
“Monica, too, like you heard last night. Say, that was some scene you two played out for us.” Her glance took Charles in, too, and despite the offhand nature of her words, her expression made it seem she’d been favorably impressed. She turned back to me. “You two should make great roommates, once you’re able to talk. I’ll bet you’re going to give Charles a run for his money!” She chuckled.
Note to self: get Dawn alone after tomorrow and ask what she meant.
Dawn next launched into a story about someone she was working with in the library, but since I didn’t know anyone else she was talking about, I just watched her. I loved the way her whole, big, round face was called into action when she wanted to emphasize something, which was most of the time; otherwise there would have been little about it to notice. And when she laughed her blue eyes squinted tight shut. Even her hair seemed to make some kind of statement. It was very light blonde, and it might have been pretty if she’d let it grow. But she didn’t. It was very short, almost hacked. Like she’d decided pretty wasn’t her style and she was forbidding her hair to dilute her true image. I was a little surprised they didn’t make her wear a wig here. They had rules about Appropriate Appearance for girls and boys, and hacked hair on anyone was against the rules. Maybe they had her on orders to pray every night that her hair would grow quickly into a sweet bob, or something.
Monica looked pretty much the same as she had last night. Except her hair looked clean. Man, if I’d had Dawn for a roommate, I’d be a lot more cheerful. At least, I think so; was Dawn like this all the time, or did she turn into some kind of terror when she was alone with a silent impenitent?
At any rate, I was sorry when breakfast ended and all of us had to move on to our work assignments for the day. On the other hand, I’d get to see Sean again. What a bod. And Shorty, aka Nate, would be in the laundry room, too; he intrigued me, and I really wanted to know what was between him and Leland. Then I remembered I couldn’t talk to anyone, and I nearly said “Shit” aloud. Double whammy if I had; speaking and profanity all at once.
Sean looked just as good as yesterday, and he even smiled when he saw me. I hadn’t known Nate was right behind me, but I saw him as he passed Sean; evidently Nate didn’t need instructions like I did. I glanced at him, hoping for some sign of recognition or acknowledgment, but he didn’t even look in my direction. It hurt, so it made me angry. Fuck you, too, I hurled at him silently. Just one more turnabout for Shorty; consistency did not seem to be his strong suit. I turned back to Sean.
That morning I learned how to clean lint out of the dryers. Big whoop. Sean did his best to make it seem like it was some kind of honor; evidently they didn’t trust just anybody with this task, which was a lot more than just emptying the lint catchers. I had to turn the machines off, unplug them, open up the fronts of the machines and dig in with this special plastic doohickus. So I spent most of my time on the floor, leaning into the innards of the machines, and I didn’t get much chance to look for familiar faces. Even so, I did manage to locate Monica (easy target, I admit), and I even saw Sheldon folding towels—white ones, of course—at one of those white tables. He seemed pretty morose even from a distance.
My back was ready for a break when we all filed into that courtyard with the green fiberglass cloister. Feeling a little more independent today, I walked alone out onto the grassy area, into the sunshine, put my hands on the backs of my hips, and leaned back. Man, but crouching into those dryers was tough after a while. I decided to be really bold, and I got down on the grass and lay on my sore back, eyes closed, soaking in the sun.
Gradually I grew aware of the conversation a couple of guys were having not too far away. One of them sounded like Shorty, but I was damned if I was gonna look. So I just listened. They were going on about some controversy regarding the English interpretation of some wording in the Bible.
“It makes a huge difference!” the guy who wasn’t Shorty said.
Shorty’s voice, calm and patient, replied, “It makes none at all. So what if it should have been rope instead of camel?”
“Look, it makes some sense to talk about how hard it would be to get a rope through the eye of a needle. At least that would be possible, even if you had to strip the rope down to fibers. To say it’s a camel that can’t go through is stupid!”
“It amounts to the same thing.” I could almost see Shorty shrug.
“Prove it. Make sense out of it.”
“Fact is, whether it’s a rope or a camel, to get it through the eye of a needle you’re going to have to tear it to shreds. And letting go of worldly goods tears most people to shreds. And the more you have, the harder it is. The more like the camel it seems. Don’t you know that when the stock market crashes, lots of people lose lots of money, and many of them throw themselves out of windows? Maybe for a less wealthy person, it’s more like a rope. I say that for people too tied to their wealth, it may as well be a camel.”
All was quiet for a stretch, and I thought, “A moment of silence for Shorty’s spiritual intuition.” Then the other guy spoke again.
“Well, you know, there are other areas where people disagree on the interpretation. You’re saying none of that matters?”
“You’d have to identify them. Then we can talk.”
“Aaaaahhh…” The guy made this noise of disgust, and it sounded like he got up and left. Then there was nothing. I barely squinted one eye open, just enough to see that it was Shorty. He got up and walked in the other direction from the guy who had been arguing with him, ignoring me, sauntering aimlessly further out into the yard. So I closed my eyes again. I wondered if this was what Shorty did. What he was known for here—interpreting scripture, applying it, arguing about it. His insights from Prayer Meeting last night were still with me. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t still angry with him. And anyway, did no one here talk about anything else? Just Bibles and barbeque?
When break ended, as I scrambled to my feet I noticed Shorty, hands in his pockets, shuffling back from the far end of the yard, where there was a small stretch of chain-link fence that gave a fractured view of the outside world. Wishing yourself out of this prison, Shorty? See any seagulls? His eyes were on the ground, and if he knew I was there he still didn’t let on.
Praise the Lord, I didn’t have to do any more dryer cleaning. Sean had me portioning out laundry detergent and fabric softener into little containers. Only so much was supposed to be used for any one load, you see, and evidently no one who was actually doing laundry could be trusted to measure it out. It was so boring I almost wished myself back at the dryers with my doohickus. I killed time by humming every hymn I could remember. Quietly.
I’d hoped to avoid Charles for lunch, but there he was, waiting for me. For some reason he led us to a table way over to the side of the dining hall. No one else sat with us, and we just chewed and stared. He didn’t talk to me at all. What a prick. But—did I really want him to talk to me? What I wanted was Dawn talking to me. Even Shorty would have been interesting, even if kind of overfocused on the Holy Writ. He had ideas I’d never thought of, that’s for sure.
I helped Sheldon, my SafeZone comrade, fold sheets after lunch. Two mutes, nodding and jerking our heads to indicate who should do what with which corner. We got into a kind of rhythm, though, and it was so in synch for a while that it was almost fun. Hypnotic. But then Sheldon accidentally dropped a corner, reached too quickly for it, and his whole end landed on the floor. I distinctly heard him say “Sh—!” before he clamped a hand over his mouth to stop the last two letters from sneaking out. He looked at me over the fingers that still gripped his offending mouth, absolute panic in his eyes. Before I could stop myself, I was on the floor.
I laughed and laughed, and then Sheldon started, and the two of us were rolling on the floor giving off these wordless howls, parts of the sheet under us. Sean came running over shouting, “Don’t speak! Don’t talk! Get up!” We were helpless, though, and suddenly Shorty was there. I’d say he was standing over us, but—well, he’s so short. His quiet voice cut through the fading giggles.
“You have wasted soap, softener, water, electricity, and time. Not only your time, but the time of everyone who stopped working to watch you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.
I was on my feet in a split second. “Hey!” It wasn’t what I wanted to say, but I was ready to say a lot more.
Sean was on me, his hands on my shoulders. “Quiet! Don’t say anything else!”
Shorty never even turned around.
I didn’t get to go out into the yard at break that afternoon. Instead I was hauled into the laundry office with Sean. He sat there across the desk from me, head in his hands. Finally he spoke.
“Taylor, I hate this. But I’ve had to report that you spoke. Everyone heard it.”
I shrugged. Then I grabbed a pad and pen and wrote, “I’m putting it in my MI today, anyway.”
Sean read this and nodded. “Okay, that’s good. But they may make you apologize to the group anyway, on Thursday, or they may extend your SafeZone another day.”
“What?” It was out before I could stop it.
Sean’s head snapped up and he glared at me. I grabbed the pad again and wrote, “No!” But then I scratched it out. I mean, if they put another day on, it was that much more time before I’d have to pretend, before I’d have to respond to people who said inane, insipid, dishonest things to me. I threw the pad onto the desk, flipped the pen onto it, and shrugged again. “So fucking what?” is what I wanted Sean to hear.
“You need to stay in here until someone comes to get you. I’m sorry, Taylor.”
I picked up the pad again and scrawled, “What’s with Nate? Who is that guy?”
Sean read it quickly and his hand snapped over the page, tore it off, and then crumpled it. For a minute I thought he might be about to eat it. But he opened it out again and folded it until it was small and flat enough to fit into his front pants pocket, which is where he put it.
“Look, if you’re so hot on writing, then take this time and get started on your MI. I’m going out onto the floor.” And he left.
What’s eating him? I thought. Why is he angry with me? And what did this have to do with Shorty?
There was something really creepy going on in this place, I decided. I felt like I’d landed in the middle of this horror flick, maybe one where some of the people were real people and some were aliens, or had been real people but had been taken over by some supernatural force. It was almost like I could go up to some of them and rip their face off and there’d be this hideous creature underneath.
And the worst part was that I wasn’t sure whose faces were real. I couldn’t tell which ones had hideous creatures inside them. I wasn’t even sure what planet I was on anymore.
Okay, I decided, this was hell. I’d found my way into a little corner of hell. So, who were the devils, and who were just sinners who’d ended up here like me? That was the torture. I might never know.
A sudden bang startled me before I realized it was me. My hand hurt where I’d brought a fist down onto the desk. Quickly I looked out onto the floor to see if anyone had noticed. No one had turned toward the office, so I guessed I was okay.
But—holy shit! This was totally weird.
I stared out at all those kids, desperate for some sign about how to tell the real ones from the fakes. Knowing some of them were devils inside, I looked for red. Anything red. Red…red…red…Jesus Fucking Christ, nothing out there was red! It had been forbidden; it must have. Otherwise somebody would have had something red on! But not even a hair scrunchie on one of the girls was red. Not one blouse, not one belt, nothing. Which meant that by its very absence it was present. It was pervasive.
I stood up, breathing hard, hanging on to the edge of the desk to keep from shouting, “Is nobody out there human?”
Down, Taylor. Down, boy. Down. Sit down.
I sat.
Now, calm. Deep breaths. Close your eyes.
But I couldn’t close my eyes. I felt like I had to know if one of them got too close. If one of them did something really freaky out there, I had to know. What I would have done is anybody’s guess, but I had to know.
Get a hold of yourself! Chill! Knock it off!
I managed to close my eyes, just for a few seconds. But I couldn’t bring myself to turn my back to all of them out there.
I was still standing there when some kid I’d never seen before showed up. He looked for Sean, waved at him, and came into the office.
“You Taylor Adams? Nod or shake.”
Nod.
“I’m Jeffrey. I’m to bring you to Mrs. Harnett.” He turned to leave but waited at the door for me to go out first. I looked down toward Sean, who had suddenly stopped being a potential devil and had started to look like a lifeboat. I shot a pleading look at him: did I have to go? He just looked at me sadly and turned away.
Mrs. Harnett wanted to see me. It had to be about my speaking. And Sean had said he’d had to report me. All I could do was stand firm and brazen it out. I was ready to run, though.
She didn’t give me that warm smile this time. “Shut the door please, Taylor.”
Jesus, save me. If she kills my body, protect my soul.
She didn’t invite me to sit, so I stood.
“I understand you violated SafeZone this afternoon. Do you understand how significant a transgression that was?”
Did I? Not yet, maybe; that would depend on what happened as a result. But I nodded.
“Sean tells me you plan to write about it in your MI for today. Is that correct?”
Nod.
“When I read your MI, which I’ll do later tonight, I’ll determine what the consequences will be. I’ll let you know tomorrow morning. Come to my office after breakfast. For now, you should assume this will mean full punishment, which would mean an extra day of SafeZone. This is to help with your resolution, Taylor. To help you feel the effects as deeply as possible in order to bring about a truer repentance. Do you know what repentance is, Taylor?”
Shrug. I was feeling a little less panicky, and I was getting irritated. What had I done that was so terrible?
She answered for me. “It means to change your path. It means you will not repeat the transgression you are repenting.”
Okay, this was getting to me. It wasn’t like I’d committed some heinous sin. I hadn’t even sworn, for God’s sake. If anyone was at fault, it was Nate for tempting me. I lunged toward her desk to grab a pad of paper. Her hand shot out and held it down.
“Taylor, I’m afraid that you’ve been abusing the rule about writing during SafeZone. It’s intended to be done only in emergencies, and I understand you’ve been doing a lot of it even though you’ve had no emergencies. Now I’m going to ask Jeffrey to walk you back to your room, where you will begin your Contemplation time early. By all means, write; but write your confessions, your repentance. Write to God and convince him you understand what he wants from you.”
Repent what? I wanted to ask. What did I do wrong?
So I sat at my desk to write my second MI, furious, resentful, wanting to hit something. It was a little after two o’clock and I was stuck in here until six. On the one hand, I wanted to get this thing over with, write the fucking MI, and seal it in its tidy little envelope. On the other hand, if I wrote anything right now, it would just get me into more trouble than I was already in. So I hit something.
I went over to my bed and picked up my pillow. I grasped it with one hand and hit it with the other. Over and over again. I wanted to shout. Hell, I needed to scream! So the pillow changed from a punching bag to a muffling device, and I screamed into it. I screamed until I was hoarse.
I can’t say it helped, but at least it tired me out. I fell onto the bed, curled into a ball, hugged the pillow tight, and willed myself not to start blubbering. And then I heard myself say, “Jesus, help me.”
“Taylor!”
Someone was calling my name. Where are they? Who is it?
“Taylor, wake up. You’re supposed to be contemplating, not sleeping.”
It was Jeffrey. I looked at my watch: nearly four o’clock. At least sleep had gotten me through a couple of hours. I nodded to Jeffrey and got off the bed, running a hand through my hair. He gave me a look like he had his doubts, but he left.
Was I calmer now? Was I still going to see devils everywhere? Did I hate Nate or Mrs. Harnett more?
But hate wasn’t something I wanted. Hate just ends up turning back onto you, hurting you. Maybe even hurting your soul. So I dragged myself over to my desk and sat with a pen in my hand, staring at the paper that would become my second MI.
How had she known? How had she known that I was writing things? Are other people, people like Charles and Sean, under some kind of orders to save the papers and give them to Mrs. Harnett? Is that why Sean had kept my question about Nate? But he’d torn it off and crumpled it. Was he trying to help me by hiding it?
Okay, now I was starting to feel weird again. I walked around the room, searching corners for hidden cameras. Under the desk? On the back of the bureau? I looked all over. They’d have to have been those little Minicams or I’d have found them. But then, a camera would have caught Sean putting that paper into his pocket. No cameras, then. So, how? It must be that Charles had been turning over the papers. And Sean, too, except maybe for the one he’d crumpled.
I sat there tapping the pen on the pad, trying to think whether I’d ever seen any pages I’d written on after I’d written on them. I looked in my desk drawers. Then I checked Charles’s. I looked under mattresses and in wastebaskets—which was futile, since they got magically emptied every day. Must be the job of some lucky resident to do that. So—was that how they got turned in? Someone went through the trash?
Note to self: see if you can volunteer for trash duty once you’re out of SafeZone.
If I ever get out of SafeZone.
But I had to know whether Charles had done that to me. It would be just like him to think it was for my own good. But had he done it deliberately, or had he thrown the papers into the trash? And had he ever done trash duty? If so, he’d have known what would happen to them.
Wait! He’d found my wet tissues yesterday. Did that mean he really was going through my trash? And what had he done with them? Had he turned those in, too? Was he, after all, not the honorable man of the proverbs, as he’d led me to believe at Prayer Meeting last night? Or had he flushed them down the toilet to keep anyone from knowing because he’d felt guilty interrupting my Contemplation? Maybe someday I’d be able to ask him; until then, I wasn’t going to figure this one out on my own unless Harnett confronted me with it.
I was beginning to feel decidedly penned-in. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t been feeling that way already; it was just getting worse. A lot worse.
Okay, so writing was no guarantee of privacy. At least I knew that much. But my thoughts, as far as I could tell, were still my own.
Will. I thought about Will. I sat in my chair and leaned back, eyes closed, and thought about Will. You know how a lot of people ask, What would Jesus do? Well, here’s what I asked: What would Will do? What would Will say?
What would Will say about what had happened today? I pictured his face, his lopsided grin, the twinkle in his eyes as he raised one teasing eyebrow and dropped it a few times. And I heard him laugh. He opened that sweet mouth wide, and he laughed, and I heard it. All through the room.
I knew what he was laughing at. It was all these people taking themselves so fucking seriously, thinking they had some corner on Soul, on Good, on God. I smiled.
And then I felt his arms resting on my shoulders and his forehead leaning against mine. And here’s what Will had to say: “Ty, my boy, here’s what you tell them. Say it quietly, and sincerely, and like it’s the most important thing anyone ever uttered. Tell them, ‘Jesus loves you. But I’m his favorite.’”
And he was gone. But behind my closed eyelids, his grin hung, like the Cheshire cat’s. It disappeared slowly, and as it did, the layers of what he’d just said started to peel back, revealing the nasty things underneath.
“Jesus loves you.” Okay, that’s obvious. We hear it all the time. And when you hear it, it sets you up, gets you into that holy mood, that soulful head. Yes, Jesus loves me, you think when you hear it. Jesus loves me.
Then you hear, “But I’m his favorite.”
Wham! It slams you right back down to earth. It’s like, “Daddy loves me best!” coming from the mouth of the younger brother who makes your life miserable, who’s always getting you into trouble and lying because he can get away with it, because Mom and Dad will believe him and not you.
It’s like, “Can Jesus have favorites?”
But most of all, it’s like, “But I thought I was his favorite!”
I heard the sound of my own laughter before I knew I was laughing. It was different from when I laughed with Sheldon in the laundry room. That had been silly, a kind of release, slapstick. This was real. It put this whole fucking place in its place, you know? Everything. And I laughed. I saw Mrs. Harnett’s stern face alternating with her fake smile; I saw Sean panicking and scrabbling at things he didn’t want to deal with, afraid for his life. I saw Shorty standing there trying to make me feel like I’d done something wrong when I hadn’t, just so he could be seen as doing something that was supposed to be righteous. They were all so pathetic!
There was a knock at the open door. It was Jeffrey. He looked scared and determined at the same time.
“Um, you’re making noise.”
At first I was going to pick up the pad and write this: “But I wasn’t speaking, even though you must have been spying.” And then I realized that would be taking this thing too seriously. So I just smiled at him. It was a beatific smile, not a so-what smile. It had all the fake love in it that I could muster.
“You need to stop.”
I wanted to write, “Are you going to report me?” But instead I just lowered my head like some kind of humble martyr. When I looked up again he was still standing there, embarrassed, uncomfortable, not knowing what my response was, really, and probably knowing he’d have to report something. I knew he wanted me to nod and let him know I’d understood and had agreed to behave myself, but I just smiled gently. Finally he left, and I sat down to do my second MI for real.
I probably could have dug up some more stuff, but these were the highlights of the last twenty-four hours or so. And they were big enough: masturbation, talking in SafeZone, abuse of rules. Nothing had been said about my having to put in here why these things were wrong, or how I promised on somebody’s grave never to do it again, so I didn’t go there. I just signed my name and put the thing into its envelope. I didn’t even read it over first.