Jesus Land (33 page)

“No way you’ll get home by the end of summer with that attitude,” I warned her today when I found her sulking against a wall between classes.

“Whatever,” she said, and walked away.

She’s sore at me, too, because I now outrank her, even though she’s been here four months longer than I have.

She glances back at the closed sliding glass door behind her as I dump my rock, now yelling my song.
I don’t care anymore. You see, I don’t care any mo-oh-ore.

I know we’re not supposed to sing pop songs or even mention the names of bands, because the staff believes secular music leads to all manner of depravity, such as perverted dancing, fornication, and drug and alcohol addiction, but right now, I don’t care what they think.
I don’t any mo-oh-ore
.
You hear
?

When I return to the driveway, still crooning loudly, Bruce steps out from behind a pillar with an a-ha expression on his face. Susan is gone.

“What’s that you’re singing?” he demands.

My heart sinks, because I know Susan betrayed me.

“A song,” I say, cradling my rock tighter against me.

Bruce takes a step closer.

“A Christian song?”

I chew my bottom lip.

“A, um, radio song.”

“A Christian radio song?”

“Well . . .”

“So, a check song!” he shouts. “A secular song!”

I hug the rock to me and look at my feet.

“You just earned yourself a casita, eh? When you finish the pile, start running.”

Susan refuses to look at me at supper, and sure enough, when our points are tallied up at the end of the day, she gets a 5 in the Being a Helpful and Positive Influence box and I get a 0.

I was an easy mark, I know, but I thought things were different between us.

David was right: Trust No One.

“Thank you for being a friend,” I sing bitterly as we wash up for bed. She towels off her face without looking at me and goes to curl up on her mattress with her back toward the room.

Later, when her muffled sobs rise from the bottom bunk like the gasps of a drowning woman, I’m the one who tells her to shut up and let the rest of us sleep in peace.

We have this thing called “The Weekly Challenge” where we’re supposed to come up with some personal defect that we can vanquish in seven days’ time, such as zit-picking, or hatred of staff, or forgetting to pray before bed.

On Sundays, we meet individually with Becky to tell her the foible we plan to conquer, and she checks our progress throughout the week.

“How’s the Challenge coming?” she’ll ask.

“Well, I’ve got five pimples now, but I haven’t touched a one since Tuesday,” I’ll respond, for example, lifting my bangs to show her the red lumps straining to liberate themselves from my forehead.

“Good girl,” she’ll say. “Keep striving.”

As the weeks have worn on, it’s been harder and harder to come up with new material. I’ve already used my hatred of Bruce (several times), of certain teachers, and of most of the other girls. In a hatred challenge, Becky has us make a special
effort to be nice to the person we hate by complimenting them, or giving them a backrub, or helping with their homework or chores. I clean Bruce’s shoes a lot.

I’ve also used forgetting to pray (no way to prove that one), gluttony (mistake—she made me forfeit dessert for an entire week), pride (bigger mistake—she made me switch house jobs with Jolene), envy (she made me write a list every day of ten things I was thankful for), and all the other deadly sins except for lust—which I do often in my bunk as I think of Scott or Tommy and rub the swelling place between my legs with a nail polish bottle. It helps me sleep better.

And I’ve used zit-picking and forgetting to pray so many times that Becky says they are no longer valid challenges.

One Sunday when I keep drawing blanks, I finally tell her that I need to work on my hatred of my brother Jerome. When she asks me why, I stupidly tell her the truth.

The next day, I find myself in the school therapist’s office during Work Time, instead of hauling rocks. Susan, Rhonda, and Brenda are also there. We are all, the therapist says, “victims of incest.” She makes each of us share our story, but when my turn comes, I can’t pull the words from my mouth.

“My brother, but he’s not really my brother,” is all I can say before a loud buzzing fills my ears. The noise is new since I entered The Program, and it happens during stressful situations, like during two
A.M.
sessions or when I see staff shoving students around. Sometimes the sound is like a waterfall and other times it’s like a thousand tiny bells ringing, but mostly it’s just a buzzing, as if a wasp were crawling inside my head. It prevents me from thinking too hard about whatever is happening, and in that way, the noise is soothing.

The other girls were also molested by male relatives living in their households, and this surprises me since they all come from upstanding Christian families. But then again . . . so do I.

During the hourlong session, Marie has us do mental exercises. She gives us a word like “bedroom” or “future” or “vacation” and has us draw pictures with crayons. I know she is looking for disturbing colors and images that signal a disturbed mind, so I draw her flowers and rainbows and baby animals, so she’ll know I’m okay. See the cute little puppy? I AM OKAY.

Other times, she’ll play a symphony with a heavy drum track and have us write a story to go along with the music. Again, she is looking for violence and despair, and I give her spring rain and fields of poppies. REALLY, I AM.

“Hmmm, interesting,” is all she ever says when we turn in our stories and drawings. Afterwards, we’re supposed to discuss “feelings.”

I find these exercises disturbing. I’d rather haul rocks than haul these memories from my head. Does she really think she can wipe the past clean with crayons and Verdi’s “Requiem”? The only way to get over the past is to stop living it. But she won’t let us.

And it gets worse.

A few days after I start therapy, David marches over to me during afternoon break. I’m sitting on a bench in the courtyard, cramming for a Spanish quiz. I look up and he just stands there for a second, with an anguished look on his face.

“Did Jerome sexually molest you?” he finally asks.

I’m looking right up at him when he asks this, I’m sitting on a concrete bench with both feet on the ground, and suddenly it seems like I’m tipping over, head-first onto the brick patio. I grab the bench with both hands and the buzzing begins. The
bzzzzzzzz
gets louder and louder until David’s face fades and recedes, until the buzzing is all there is. Next thing, I’m stumbling
into the empty Spanish class with my textbook smashed open against my chest.

David tries to talk to me in the following days, but I walk away from him again and again. I feel dirty in his presence. I will never look him in the eye again. I wish a jungle creature would leap over the barbed wire fence and kill me.

I ask the therapist why she told him about Jerome, and she says, “Oh, I thought he already knew,” and I think, “Oh, you idiot.” I tell her I’d rather do Work Time than therapy, and she hesitates before agreeing.

“If you’ve got the wrong attitude, you’ll just waste everyone’s time, anyway,” she says gruffly.

David sets the letter beside me on the picnic table as I’m finishing lunch. I see his brown hand slide the envelope next to my plate and I stiffen, but he walks away without saying a word.

“Family feud?” asks Tiffany.

I glare at her and stick the envelope in my backpack.

During Free Time, I read it on Starr’s patio.

Julia
,

I know that what hapenned is not your fault. Please don’t feel bad.

You are my big sister, and I will always look up to you, no matter what.

Love,

your cuddly little bro,

Dave

My heart uncrimps and I gaze up at the crescent moon and the stars and feel peace rain down on me in their soft light. David knows this about me. And he still calls me his big sister.

Family was always crucial to David.

He loved
The Brady Bunch
and would convince me to sneak upstairs with him while Mother napped to watch it in Dad’s study. We’d huddle side by side on Dad’s swivel chair in front of the small black-and-white television on his desk, the volume low, poised to hit the power button at the slightest noise downstairs.

The moment the giddy music cued up (“Here’s the story . . . of a lovely lady . . .”) and the kids and parents started grinning at each other from their little boxes, we entered a trance. Our family was like the Bradys in many ways: We both had three boys and three girls. We both had been thrown together by fate (theirs by remarriage, ours by adoption). We both lived in the suburbs. And like Bobby and Cindy, David and I were the youngest.

But the similarities ended there; the Bradys were a happy bunch and we were not.

When the Brady kids got in trouble, their parents didn’t hit them or tell them they were counting the days until they moved out. They got grounded, not whupped. They got talked to, not threatened. There were no stomach-churning wait-until-your-father-gets-home pronouncements. And by the end of the show, everyone was back to smiles and hugs as the giddy music cued up again.

In our minds, they were the real family and we were the fakes. We wanted to be the Bradys. We created alternative homes—under the ping-pong table with a blanket draped over it, in piles of leaves we’d raked together, behind the sofa—where we’d reenact scenes from the show.

Years later, when I was the one counting the days until I could move out, David kept his faith that someday, somehow, our family would pull it all off.

There’s not much to do on weekends between church and chores, as we are sick of playing Scrabble and writing letters that don’t get answered, and reading books about sinners who find Jesus Christ. We are young and restless, and we crave fresh air and movement. But there’s no playground in our barbed wire pen.

Ted Schlund comes up with a solution.

“I miss playing basketball and I’m sure you do too,” he announces one Sunday at Vespers. “So I’ve decided to suspend classes this week so we can build ourselves a decent hoop court.”

A hush smothers the chapel. Bugs sizzle and pop in the gas lamps. On the pew next to me, Tiffany grimaces down at her freshly manicured pink nails.

“Let’s hear it for basketball!” Ted shouts from the pulpit. He pumps a fist in the air, grunting “Bask-et-ball! Bask-et-ball! Basket-ball! Oh-oh-oh!”

The staff applauds politely, and, after a lag, the students join in. We are leery of any change in our routine, which may be harsh but is comforting in its predictability.

The next day, we rise at dawn to begin work. When I slide out of bed, I notice Susan lying unmoving in the bottom bunk, and remember being woken several times to the vile backfiring of her bowels in the bathroom. She’s got a bad case of the blues.

Chronic bouts of diarrhea plague everyone at Escuela— there’s always someone sprinting to the john with a jagged face, hands clutching their gut, terrified the angry shits will erupt before they can bare their ass over a toilet. It’s been known to happen. It’s part of the Third World experience, along with three-inch cockroaches and the dire lack of shopping malls.

But the blues also have an upside: weight loss. I once lost eight pounds in a week. You can pork out with impunity when you have chronic diarrhea. Back in Indiana I used Ex-Lax for the same effect, but the blues are much more effective.

Susan’s lost so much weight that her ribcage pokes through her nightie. She gazes up at me with glassy eyes, and I give her a dirty look and thrust myself into my clothes. She’s neither my friend nor my responsibility. She’s a nark. As I join the downstairs stampede to fetch my cleaning utensils, it dawns on me that if she dies, I could nab her foam pad, which is a good two inches thicker than mine.

A half hour later, the entire student body assembles on the lumpy slope southwest of Starr, minus Susan. She’s running a temperature, so Bruce took her off points for the day; it’s not fair. When we left the house, RuthAnn was crouched beside her bunk, spoon-feeding her lime oatmeal.