2

“She got what? Got ‘saved’? What is that?” my mom said into the phone. It was the Monday after I returned to my home in suburban Dallas, and Jessica’s mom had called to report what had happened at camp. After they were finished talking, my mom turned to me. “Did you do it?”

I froze with a forkful of syrup-soaked waffles halfway to my mouth.

I was pretty sure that the correct answer would be “no,” but I wasn’t positive. My mom could be unpredictable about this kind of thing. On the one hand, she strongly disapproved of people pushing their religion on others. She came from the Northeast, a place where evidently it was not common for people to ask one another to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior as part of casual conversation. Unlike my dad, my mom wasn’t an atheist; agnostic probably wasn’t even the right word. She considered spirituality to be a private matter and seemed to see the particulars of religious dogma as irrelevant. She and I didn’t talk about religion, but if we did, she probably would have said that what matters most is simply being a good person. Why wait for the rules of a religious belief system to tell you how to treat others with love?

But even though she wasn’t religious, and she didn’t seem to have a problem with my dad’s atheism, I would occasionally find out the hard way that she harbored a certain respect for religion. When our public school invited a Christian group to offer pocket-sized Bibles to students, I grabbed one from the stack to use for arts and crafts projects. At home, I tore out some pages, cut them into little stars and hearts, and glued them to poster board as part of a collage that now hung on the main wall in my room.

When my dad noticed it, he thought it was creative. When my mom walked in with an overflowing basket to put away my clean clothes, she gasped when she saw my artwork, almost dropping the laundry. She stared at it as if I’d spray painted swastikas on my wall and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not to cut up any more Bibles.

So, what was the right answer about getting saved? Was it bad etiquette not to accept someone’s religious figure as the Lord of your life? Not able to think of any lie that would guarantee a good response, I just told the truth: “No?” I waited for her response.

“Thank God,” she said and shook her head. “I’m sorry they pressured you like that. It’s deplorable.”

I sighed and resumed chewing my waffles.

After I finished breakfast, my mom whisked my dishes to the sink, slid her watch onto her wrist, and left for the optometry office where she worked part-time as a bookkeeper. We said goodbye, and I went to call one of my friends to see if she wanted to get together. I stopped in mid-stride. All of the kids from the neighborhood were gathering for a Bible study that afternoon, so they wouldn’t be available.

We’d only been back from camp for a few days, but a distinct chill had descended on my relationship with my friends. It seemed that summer camp had strengthened all of us in our beliefs: them in their Christianity, and me in my atheism.

For years, I’d strongly suspected that other people’s belief in God was preventing me from climbing the elementary school social ladder. When my dad’s latest construction project management job took us to Dallas, just before I entered third grade, I’d been certain that this was the place where I would finally take my rightful place as the queen of popularity. I pictured pajama-clad friends packing my couch at sleepovers, all of us giggling at inside jokes while tossing popcorn at one another. At school we would gather in the halls between classes, recognizable by our matching acid-washed blue jean jackets, hushing our conversations when the poor fools in lower social circles walked by, so that they wouldn’t hear any confidential in-crowd information.

Things had not gone according to plan, and I was certain that it had nothing to do with the fact that my height left a few inches of white skin perpetually visible between the bottom of my pegged pants and my neon-pink socks. My attempts at teasing my bangs into poofy perfection ended up looking more like I was wearing a failed taxidermy experiment on my forehead, and my self-consciously stooped posture and size 9 shoes inspired my classmates to call me “Bigfoot” so frequently that new students didn’t even know my real first name. Still, I saw no reason why any of this would prevent the popular kids from wanting to spend lots of time with me. Other people’s religious hang-ups were the only possible explanation for the fact that I could count my friends on one hand.

There had been tension surrounding this issue from the first day we’d moved into the neighborhood, when two families stopped by and asked us where we went to church. My first day at school, I was asked the same question four more times. My excuse that we were “still looking for a church home” had been getting less effective since we hadn’t managed to find one in three years. Now, thanks to the camp debacle, it was all out on the table: We didn’t go to church. We were never going to church. We were not a Christian family. And now, I had no one to hang out with.

I spent the next couple of weeks roaming through the house, haunted by the absence of my friends who were off at Bible studies. We used to pass hours together while our parents were at work. Our favorite pastime was prank calling the Home Shopping network, and we rejoiced when Jessica’s brother convinced the operator to put him on the air so that he could yell “FART ON MY BUTT!” on national television before they disconnected the call. We spent entire afternoons dancing around my living room, flailing our heads and jerking our arms to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. Now my friends had traded all of that wholesome fun for religious brainwashing activities, and I was alone.

* * *

My dad tapped on my open bedroom door and came in for our nightly reading session. He settled onto the bed next to me and picked up our current book from my bedside table, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. We’d begun reading it just before I went to camp, the timing of which was probably not a coincidence. He cracked the hardcover book open, smoothed the pages flat, and prepared to read from the chapter about Johannes Kepler’s work calculating Mars’ orbit. He paused, shifted uncomfortably, then closed it.

“There’s something important I want to talk to you about,” he said.

Whatever it was must have been big, since he was the king of understatement. My dad lived most of his childhood in the jungles of Mexico, where he and his friends regularly carried guns in their daily wanderings, the threat of running into a bandit or a jaguar ever-present. As an adult he was a Special Forces demolition instructor and high-altitude parachute jumpmaster, and later in life he became an engineer. The man was wired for cool, logical thinking, so the fact that I saw a slight wrinkle in his brow caught my attention.

“I heard you got a lot of pressure from the religious kids at camp. Does that kind of thing happen a lot? At school, or with your friends?”

“Usually they just call me a Satan worshipper.”

He nodded slightly and thought for a moment. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. He recounted the events of Christopher Columbus’ shipwreck of 1503 in what is now Jamaica. The natives had grown tired of the Europeans’ constant demands for supplies and had stopped sharing their resources. Columbus saw in an almanac that a lunar eclipse was coming up, and dramatically announced to the natives that his God was so enraged with them that he’d cover the moon with blood and snatch it from the sky. A few nights later, at the exact moment Columbus had predicted, the moon turned red; unbeknownst to the natives, the earth had moved in front of the sun and its atmosphere tinted its rays. Then the earth moved into position to block out the sun’s light altogether, and the moon disappeared. Pandemonium ensued, and the panic-stricken natives offered Columbus whatever he wanted if he would please ask his God to forgive them and give the moon back.

“That’s kind of awesome,” I snickered.

“Not if you’re one of the Indians!” my dad said.

“Well, that’s true.”

“And that’s the thing: The Indians weren’t stupid; they just didn’t have the same knowledge Columbus did.” He looked over at me and nudged my leg with his index finger to emphasize: “What happened with Columbus is a nutshell of the whole history of religion. People realized early on that if you fill in the gaps of other people’s ignorance by saying it’s the work of some god, and then claim that you’re in tight with that particular god, you have almost unlimited power as long as people believe it.”

“Wow.”

He thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully since whatever he said might be repeated with the opener, “Yeah, well, my dad says. . .” next time I got in a playground spat with my religious friends.

“Belief in gods and angels and stuff like that is a comfort to some people,” he continued. “I don’t blame them for that. It’s okay. It makes them feel good. I just don’t like to see them pushing other people into it, especially when it’s my kid.”

“It’s not like I’d—”

“Just make sure you don’t fall into that. Make sure you don’t start believing things just because someone says it’s true, even if it’s coming from me. Question everything.”

Did my own father really think I was that stupid? My expression must have revealed my thoughts, because he threw up his hands in playful defensiveness. “I know. I know! I’m just telling you that things will change as you get older. When you’re an adult, your life won’t be easy like it is now. You might be surprised at how tempting it is to believe whatever will make things easier.”

“Okay,” I said, drawing out the word to indicate that his advice was unnecessary.

He opened Cosmos back up and flipped to the previous page to make sure we didn’t miss anything. He began reading, his words softened by a touch of a Texas accent. I sunk back into his shoulder, leaned on his arm, and listened to my dad’s gentle voice tell me of the wonders of the universe.