Michaela and I skipped down the hotel hallway, relieved to be assigned to the same room. I should’ve preferred to share with someone more devout, but it was hard to get along with the few girls at the youth group who were more pious than me. Though I told myself it was because they were uppity, a deeper part of me knew they were reminders of how I fell short, whereas being with Michaela made me feel like a good Christian.
I followed her into the room that smelled of air freshener and freshly vacuumed carpet, removing my shoes the way Dad taught me, even when Michaela kept hers on. She placed the card in a slot by the door.
“The lights won’t turn on if you don’t put it there,” she explained when she caught me looking.
“I know that,” I said, even though I didn’t. It was my first time staying in a hotel.
“Which bed do you want?”
I glanced from one twin bed to the other. One was propped close to a window that featured skyscrapers like the pillars that Samson knocked down. Only, instead of supporting a roof, the tall buildings lifted the sky. As I neared the casing, I tried to make out any smudged traces that would confirm the existence of a layer of glass, but I didn’t see any. Though I knew it must be there, I didn’t want to take the risk of leaning against it.
Michaela cleared her throat. “Shelly, did you hear me?”
“Yeah. Do you mind if I have the one closest to the bathroom?” It was also the one safely tucked next to a solid wall.
“Sounds good. I like to be as close to the view as I can.”
Her flowery perfume caught up to me a moment before she did. As soon as she arrived at the window, she ran a finger against the glass, and relief washed through me. One less thing to worry about.
A tall building loomed across the street. I couldn’t remember ever being that close to a skyscraper—all the buildings in Hillside were squat and flat like a set in a John Wayne movie. Pixels of an image began to form in my mind, though I tried to resist them. If they came into focus, I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, but there was no way of stopping them. First, a foot sharpened, sole poised at a 45-degree angle, as if the man were doing a backflip to kick a soccer ball in mid-air. Slowly, the rest of his silhouette materialized: one leg bent in a triangle, torso a blurred beige, hands absorbed by the speed of over a hundred miles per hour in seconds. Parallel, vertical lines impale him to the center of the image, though he is ever moving. Though he died over a year earlier, he is ever falling.
Sophia had asked Dad if the Falling Man was going to hell. He’d responded that he didn’t think so, since the Lord knew the man’s intentions.
“But, technically, it’s still a suicide, even if the only other alternative was being burned alive. You think God would make an exception?” she’d asked.
“God knew who the real killers were,” Dad said, calmly. “Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.” He’d left the room before Sophia could ask another question. That was one of the first times I’d noticed doubt on her face. Gradually after that, she’d stopped asking his opinion on matters related to existential dread.
I hadn’t realized until now how having a room on one of the higher floors could put us at risk.
“Doesn’t it make you feel like you’re on top of the world?” Michaela asked.
“Yeah. It’s pretty amazing.” I backed away towards my bed.
Michaela went to the mini fridge and cracked open a can of Coke.
“You want one?”
“Those aren’t free, are they?”
She shrugged while she sipped. I told her I’d pass.
We had some down time before the opening praise session, so I opened my Teen Bible while Michaela deepened her raccoon-eye makeup. She glanced at me as she finished her Coke.
“Would you like some?” She pointed to her makeup kit: several different-sized brushes, a palette of eyeshadow colors, eyeliner, blush. The works.
Any moment could be it. The slight rattle of the windows. A gradually increasing shake of the brushes on the table, until one fell. A whirring sound. And then the exploding contact with the plane. Showers of ash and brimstone pouring down over Broadway Avenue, but we wouldn’t be around to see it. Wouldn’t it be better to die reading my Bible, instead of getting my face painted? I shook my head no.
“I’ve never seen you with makeup. I’m sure it’d look good on you.”
My knuckles were white as they clutched the Bible, thinking that Michaela’s eyes did seem bluer now that the coat of eyeshadow was heavier. Ever since the mean girls in fifth grade had told me I had a unibrow, I’d been looking for a non-vain way of transforming my face. At the time, I’d taken Dad’s mustache clippers and trimmed off what turned out to be the wrong halves of my eyebrows.
Watching Michaela dip her brush into the eyeshadow, I couldn’t help thinking that Sammy would be at the convention. Spending the rest of my days rereading Luke 21 about the signs of the end times might make me seem like someone to turn to if dragon-like beasts started puffing fire from the heavens, but that wasn’t enough to make me come across as a cute, cool girl that Sammy might ask out. If anything, it might have the opposite effect. So I squeezed shut my Bible, said why not, and set it down on the nightstand.
Sitting in front of the mirror, I tried to convince myself that Michaela was an experienced enough makeup artist not to poke me in the eye. The mascara brush squished as she scooped out more darkness from inside the metallic container. Cool goop against my eyelids. The smell of her Juicy Fruit as she smacked bubbles between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. No shaking. No ashen smell. No burning.
“What do you think?” she asked.
I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror as she made approving grunts, impressed with her work. The mascara made my eyelashes appear longer than they actually were. I knew I should go wipe it off, but I didn’t. Something about the idea of being a slightly different person, if only for a few hours, appealed to me.
“Tight,” she said.
Downstairs in the lobby, we huddled up the way football players do before a game, our hands on our neighbors’ backs. Pat’s beer belly, improbable for a teetotaler, jiggled up and down as he asked God to move us. Sammy’s hand so warm on my back, keeping me from concentrating on what his father was saying, as I wondered if he noticed my makeup.
Inside, strobe lights and fireworks; the music so loud that my stomach jumped with the basses. Screaming kids as far as the eye could see stretched out hands seemingly not to a cross, but to whoever was covered in the smoky darkness of the stage. The thick, salty sweet tang of teenage armpits. A spotlight illuminated center stage. It wasn’t Jesus or Beyoncé, as the context clues led one to think, but a middle-aged man with jeans too baggy for his age and a Bible in his hand.
“Welcome to Acquire the Fire! How’s everybody doing?” he boomed into the microphone, and we yelled louder. He paced the stage and told us that God had amazing plans for us this weekend, his eyes like marbles being shot at the thousands of teenagers before him. The way he smiled out at us and saw that all of us were watching him, trusting him to give us meaning, some of us already crying and moaning in anticipation. That power. He had it. Him, the Leader, telling us that we’re God’s army. Singing Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war. With the cross of Jesus going on before.
“Jesus has amazing plans for this weekend!” he repeated. The stadium shook under our thundering feet.
Over and over, the Leader repeated that Jesus was following our every move, pursuing us. He wouldn’t let us out of his sight or his grip. That was how much he cared about us, never willing to give up on us.
Over the course of the weekend, we listened to a woman tell us girls that this was our chance to remain pure. That we’d experience all kinds of temptations, but we should keep in mind that no one would buy a cow when they could get the milk for free. A lady with bubbled scars webbing her face told us how her mother had tried to kill her when she was still inside the womb, the doctor injecting her with saline solution, and burning her. By God’s mercy, she’d survived. “I want you to know that I’m happy to be alive here today,” she said, and we clapped and said amen. She told us that over half a million unborn babies were murdered in the US that year alone. “Years ago, I was almost one of them. Can you imagine?”
Yes, I could, and I did. I thought of piles and piles of small, dismembered babies in trashcans, their lids only half-hiding the corpses. Help us, help us, they called out, but it was too late. My older sister could’ve been one of them if Mom had chosen differently when she found out she was pregnant at the age of seventeen. It scared me, the possibility of her not existing like that. Of my not existing. It was so close, a shadow permanently lurking in our blind spots. Why we got to live, and others didn’t. It didn’t seem right.
Sammy patted me on the arm, not looking at me, and part of me wondered again if he’d noticed my make-up. If he saw how it had melted down my face. Through the colored neon lights, I could see that his face was red from crying.
During praise sessions, you had to be ready to show people just how holy you were willing to be, to sacrifice as much of yourself as you could to be worthy of God’s love. Taking shortcuts didn’t get you anywhere. Were you willing to put your hands in the air during the praise songs? To shout, no matter who could hear? To kneel down? To prostrate yourself, your nose to the carpet that had been trampled by so many Conversed and Doc-Martened feet?
I prayed for the strength to not care about what others thought as I knelt down, just like everyone else, sure that at least somebody was watching me, as the Leader told us that we needed to “surrender everything to Christ.” That sounded like, if I didn’t hold up my part of the bargain, I’d be cut off. Left behind.
During a break, I headed to the restroom, Michaela at my heels, and we waited in a long line of girls. Images of tiny, bloodied hands were still jumping around in my mind when Michaela asked me if I ever thought about going into the men’s room. Leave it to her to say something so crude like this now, to ruin the moment. I wished she’d lower her voice so that the other girls wouldn’t hear.
“No,” I said.
“You’ve never been in the men’s room?”
“No.”
“Sometimes I do it. The line to the girl’s is always so long.”
I wanted to say, well why don’t you go ahead, then, but that wasn’t a very Christian way of thinking. Instead, I said, “Aren’t you ever afraid of getting caught?”
She laughed. “That’s part of what makes it so fun.”
Ahead of us was a girl with a braid wound so tight it seemed to work as a natural alternative to botox. She glanced at us severely without saying anything, her braid whipping over her shoulder. When she turned back, Michaela whispered, “What’s her problem?”
“Let’s talk about this later,” I mouthed.
A flash of bloody hands. When Michaela wasn’t looking, my nails dug deep into a dry section of my scalp. Relief as I jiggled a scab free and worked it out of my hair with my thumb and forefinger as tweezers.
Finally, one of the stall doors opened and the girl in front of me went in, her long braid bouncing against her bottom. I wanted to dig deeper into my scalp, but fought the urge. Michaela would’ve seen. When it was my turn, I locked myself in a stall and sat on the toilet seat, not even bothering to put down any toilet paper to protect from whatever diseases the previous user might’ve had. Silent sobs shook me as I recalled everything that made me a horrible person. How I’d told Sophia in elementary school that she couldn’t sit next to me on the bus. Pretending to suffocate every time I wanted some of her candy, because I’d finished all of mine. Hoping people wouldn’t realize we were related when she didn’t brush her hair. Never had I been the sister she deserved.
Then there was the boy craziness. Trying to cast Sammy and so many boys in the role of my future husband. Wanting them to touch my hand. Imagining how their lips would taste. How it would feel for Sammy to press his body against mine. Hoping that his body, or anyone’s, would be able to take mine on.
Staring forward, a cold toilet seat against my bare legs, my pants hunched around my ankles. Thinking how lazy I was, how it felt like I could never do anything right. The refrain you are worthless seesawing in my head as I read the graffiti of my peers: “For a good time call: 816 –XXX-XXXX”. “Mandy’s a whore.”
Warm pee streamed into the toilet, my thighs shaking. I imagined a dead baby starting to fall out of me, its gray face dangling towards the bowl. It would get stuck, I knew. Of course it would get stuck, to punish me for never being what God wanted me to be.
“That’s impossible,” I mumbled to myself. Babies happened when you had sex, which I hadn’t. In that moment, I thought I never would. But, even if I were pregnant, the unborn baby wouldn’t just appear like that, would it?
Someone flushed. The sound of the hand drier whooshed, girls chatting even louder to be heard over it.
Snap out of it. I was imagining the Virgin Mary spreading her legs in a field, pushing. The Lord’s will be done.
I closed my eyes as tight as I could, wondering if one of my eyeballs might come popping out. In the darkness of my mind, I saw the outline of a bloody, shrunken, unborn baby. Praying, “Lord, please take these dark thoughts away,” but my words went unheeded. So I pinched my thumb and forefinger together and brought them towards my right eye. Then I yanked one eyelash out and set it onto my left wrist. That was better. Now I needed another. I jerked a second one out—longer this time—and set it next to the first. Then a third, for the trinity.
A shopping list of things to do in my head: I needed to get up, zip my pants, flush the toilet, open the door and shut it behind me, wash my hands and dry them and go back to my seat, but it was too much to do. I was frozen.
“Shelly? You okay in there? I think it’s going to start back up soon.”
Michaela’s voice gave me the strength to leave the stall.
At first, I felt better when we settled back in our seats. Then the lights dimmed, and loud drumming began. Five silhouettes appeared behind a white screen with the shadow of a cross in the middle. Four of the shadows whipped the fifth, but he didn’t scream. They pushed him down, jerked him back up, then lifted him to the cross. The sound of nails pounding into the wood synchronized with the drums.
I shook, but I couldn’t get up and leave. My anxiety was nothing compared to what Christ had suffered.
The lights went out. Slow worship music. Spontaneous cries sounded throughout the auditorium.
The Leader returned to the stage, talking over the music, telling us that even though it might feel like it, God had not forgotten us. That he’d sacrificed his only son for us. “Maybe you’ve pushed Him away. Maybe you thought you were strong enough to handle things on your own, but you feel tired. It could be that some of you are struggling with pornography, with lust, or jealousy, and that you’re too ashamed to ask for the Lord’s help.”
Dad telling Mom she could use to lose some weight—the deep sadness and guilt it triggered when I wondered if there was a way God had gotten it wrong, binding together two people who made each other so unhappy. How many times had I wished I wouldn’t have to worry about my parents’ problems? Because I wasn’t strong enough. What a horrible person I was, when I thought those things. I didn’t deserve to have a roof over my head, food in my mouth.
I was unworthy of God’s love.
Now, it was like the Leader was talking to me, telling me that I could have murder or hatred in my heart, and God would still love me. If I gave everything to him, he would make things right.
Shaking, I lifted my hands, and fell to my knees to show I was ready for the real deal. I wondered if people were looking at me, if they could see how committed I was as I asked God’s forgiveness for lusting after Sammy. For wanting to go on a trip to the Caribbean, like my classmates. For my anger towards my family.
I could’ve asked forgiveness for existing, for breathing. For eating food that someone else might’ve eaten if I hadn’t been born.
“For all of you who have drifted astray, pray with me. Dear Heavenly Father, I want You to know that I love You. I know that I don’t deserve Your love, that I’m a sinner, and that I can never be perfect the way You are, but You are merciful. You sent your one and only son to die on the cross because You loved me that much. Take me back, Lord. Don’t let me fall out of your hands.”
My right pinky shook. The Holy Spirit touching me. I was so glad to be one of the chosen ones who the Lord deemed worthy of touching directly.
The worship team returned to the stage, picking up shiny guitars and adjusting microphones. Michaela hugged me, her body warming mine. Music filled the aisles and the spaces between the seats, gluing us together as one, our hands swaying, our heartbeats synchronizing. So many invisible flames brought together now, glowing from inside us, burning, making us think this is our redemption—that we were the world’s light.
That fire felt like all we needed. We didn’t realize we were its main course as it spread through us, lapping at our intestines, nibbling on our lungs. Its teeth stung, but we thought that was what made us feel alive. We didn’t realize that it would bite through the flesh around our hearts, leaving them dangling, ready to snap.