ANNIE
So, Luke:
There were few saving graces in Winterton, but chief among them once again was Lexie. She was so much smarter than I, and she quickly figured out how to roll with the punches in that place. I was still fighting to go back to our old school even months after we arrived, but Lexie quietly agreed to attend the community school and set about getting through the curriculum as quickly as she could. Mom kept reminding her as a girl in the community, she could study only until she turned sixteen.
“What’s she going to do after that?” I asked one day. “She’s already doing some high school curriculum, isn’t she? Will she finish it by then?”
“It doesn’t matter whether she finishes or not. The day she turns sixteen, she’ll have to leave.”
“That’s so stupid, Mom.”
“Women should care for their homes and the men. They don’t need to study more than that.”
“Even you went to college.”
“That was a mistake. Lexie will finish school on her birthday, and she’ll get a job with one of the village businesses until she finds a husband.”
When I asked Lexie what she thought about all of this, she’d shrug and change the subject. I figured that she had a plan, because there was no way someone as smart as my sister was going to just agree to stop school because she didn’t happen to be a boy.
Every good thing in that place had a downside. Mom finally went back to work, but now she was my teacher, and when we were at school I was supposed to call her Mrs. Herbert. Every time I called her Mom, she sent me out of class. Then I found the library—which was vast and right near our house—but even as I explored it, I realized that most of the books were theological textbooks, and the handful of novels in the collection were classics for adults.
“Why aren’t there any books here?” I asked Lexie.
“The elders think said novels are worldly.” She rolled her eyes.
“What are we supposed to read?” I asked, bewildered. Lexie picked up one of the ever-present Bibles and pressed it toward me. When I frowned at her, she laughed and withdrew it. “But...”
“Just write your own stories,” she suggested. “Your stories are better than anything you’ll find in this stupid cult.”
For a while, that’s what I did. I had little notepads full of stories hidden in our bedroom and in my schoolbag. I’d slide them inside workbooks so when I was bored in class I could get right back to them. I was writing a series of tales about two orphaned sisters, Tara and Ellen, who were detectives just like Nancy Drew. Day and night, I was thinking about Tara and Ellen. They were all alone in the world, but they were doing okay.
One Saturday afternoon, Lexie and I were in our bedroom talking when Robert threw the door open.
“What is this?” he asked, and he threw one of my notepads onto the desk beside me. I looked to Lexie.
“It’s mine,” she said. “It’s just some stories I made up. No harm done.”
“Yours?” he repeated scornfully. “Alexis, your handwriting would be neater than this even if you wrote it with your left hand. No, there’s only one person in this family with the letter formation of a preschooler and an overactive imagination.”
“They are just stories, Father,” Lexie protested. “It’s harmless.”
Robert turned his attention from Lexie to me, and he crouched beside me and held the notebook right in front of my face. I recognized it then; it was the book that contained the story of how Tara and Ellen escaped from an icy prison cell after being captured by an evil horse rustler.
As an adult, I can see that the symbolism wasn’t exactly subtle, but at the time, I couldn’t actually understand Robert’s fury.
“There must be something very wicked about you indeed for you to need to make up nonsense like this,” he whispered fiercely, and he held the notebook right in front of my face. I raised my chin, stubbornly holding his gaze, and he tore the notepad into two even pieces. I didn’t even let myself blink. “Focus your energies on the Lord and learning your Bible. If I catch you doing this again, there’ll be consequences. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Robert,” I said, and his gaze narrowed. He left the room, but returned quickly with the leather strap from the dining room. I was already well aware by that stage that my disobedience inevitably resulted in serious consequences. The leather belt hung on the wall near the dining room table, and during our first few weeks in his house, Robert had taken it down to fling it against my thighs when I didn’t say “Amen” after grace. That day, he lashed me for forgetting to say “Father,” and then he lashed me again for hiding the notebooks, and then for extra-good measure he hit Lexie, too, for her insolence. Neither one of us cried until he left the room, and then nursing our stinging thighs, we lay on our stomachs on our beds and we offered each other empty consolations.
“I’ll still keep my notebooks,” I said. “I’ll just be more careful to hide them.”
“Maybe a better idea would be to keep making up your stories...but don’t leave any evidence lying around,” Lexie muttered. “Just tell them to me instead.”
“It’s going to get better, isn’t it, Lex?”
“Sure it is. He’s still getting used to us. He’ll back off soon.”
“Sorry he hit you.”
“I’m really sorry he hit you.”
Mom wasn’t kidding when she told us we had dozens of cousins within the community. We met a seemingly endless series of relatives we had no clue existed before the move. But we had almost nothing in common with them, not even with the kids our own age. The children who grew up in the community were compliant and quiet, well accustomed to the strict discipline and dogmatic rules. As outsiders, Lexie and I were also excluded—I overheard an aunt explaining our “odd” ways to her ten-year-old son.
“They can’t help it, son. They were raised in a world of sin.”
I had no idea what this meant as an eight-year-old, only that it wasn’t a nice thing to say, and that it somehow explained why even the friends I made at the schoolhouse kept their distance. It seemed the more familiar I became with the community, the more I realized just how much there was to hate.
But there was a window of time each day when no one really seemed to care what Lexie and I did. Without TV and with limited reading material available, we were supposed to stay in our rooms after school to study the Bible or pray—but we quickly figured out that as long as we weren’t bothering the adults, kids were left to do whatever they pleased in the afternoons. Most stayed at the schoolyard to play, but as outcasts, Lexie and I attempted that only a few times before we realized we weren’t welcome, so instead, we took to exploring.
The woods had been cleared when the village was established, but a small patch of wilderness had been left untouched behind the worship hall. Robert’s house was only a few hundred yards away, so Lexie and I would quietly disappear into the trees.
The first few times we tried it, we weren’t sure if we were breaking some unspoken rule and we were so nervous about being caught that we just sat on rocks and waited for the ax to fall. But as the days passed, and our trips to the woods went undetected, Lexie and I began to relax. She was far too old by then for make-believe, but I needed it. I needed to escape, and there were no books for me to lose myself in and no TV shows to zone out into, and even the boisterous, fun play I’d always enjoyed with my school friends had disappeared from my life. One day sitting there in the woods, I turned to my sister and I blurted, “Can we play ‘mommies and daddies’?”
And Lexie—the smartest kid I’d ever met, well into puberty by that stage and more mature in so many ways even than our mother—stared at me. After a while, she nodded thoughtfully, and then she said, “Deal. But only if I can be the mom.”