by Erica Sage
No amens chimed back.
“Happiness does not seem to be happening here. Lay it on me, my friends with a capital F. What’s goin’ down other than those smiles?”
Charles pointed at my towel.
Jason pursed his lips. “Neal is a Pamper, Charles.”
“Nick,” I corrected.
“Right, right.” He waved me away. “Do you remember your infancy in Christ? In camp? Conviction is like a tulip slowly pushing through the earth. Dormant, then slow, and then boom! Pop of color!”
This is what I was afraid of. If, in their eyes, a fictional character on a towel was a ticket to hell, then I can only imagine what they’d say about Diana. “It’s a towel. About a book. I’m sorry. I don’t care. Can I trade with someone?”
“I’m not trading!” Charles near-shrieked.
“No, I meant with the camp. Is there an extra?”
“It’s already springtime for this tulip! Am I right? Awesome, awesome! I’ll find something in lost and found. Just use your towel wrong side out for now. No worries, Nea—Nick. Got it that time!” he said with a display of jazz hands. “We don’t judge.”
“Amen,” Charles said.
“Really?” I said to Charles.
A face appeared behind Jason. And I was actually relieved to see someone I knew. Or kind of knew. It was the kid from the bus with the broken arm.
“Payton! P-Dog!” Jason shouted.
“What’s up?” Payton said and rolled his suitcase between Jason and the door. He eyed me as he walked by, then took the last lower bunk. There was still an upper bunk left.
“What’s up? Fist pump for Christ, is what’s up!” Jason fist-pumped. All by himself. “Not to mention, the smiles in this room now that we’ve solved the Beach Towel Dilemma! Amen. Let’s get to the pool. It’s awesome out there, folks! HAPPINESS!”
Silence.
“Gentlemen, it’s day one. Let’s try that again. HAPPINESS!”
“Happens here,” a few mumbled.
“It’s just hard, Jason, with the towel still in the room.”
Matthew put his hand on Charles’s shoulder. “It’s fine.”
Jason held out the PC Box. “Any last-minute Ps and Cs for this bad boy before I put it in the sanctuary?”
I thought of Natalie. How easy it was for her to just drop her paper in the box. Then I walked into the bathroom to put on my swim trunks. When I returned, Jason had left.
There were seven of us left in the cabin:
Me: the devil-worshipping Pamper.
Matthew: who quickly took me under his wing (of an angel, obviously).
Charles: math savant and HP-hater (likely a Slytherin).
Payton: who ignored me altogether except for the occasional dagger-tossing glare. (He’s on scholarship, Matthew whispered. Everybody knows the scholarship kids. Matthew was not on scholarship. He was a state tennis champion, for God’s sake. Tennis players are never on scholarship.)
Stewart the Goth.
Chris Cooper: a.k.a Coooooooooop: The Chosen One. The Donkey Jockey. The Prodigal Son.
Dan: our counselor, who was at a meeting.
From the clock by the counselor’s bed, I surmised I had eight hours left till lights out. Anyone could survive eight hours, right?
But it was the first three hours I had to worry about. The Silent Three. Death by boredom. Hell did come before Eden. And there were demons. Or at least one.
PRAYERS AND CONFESSIONS
Charles: Dear Lord, thank you for this week. May Your holy plan for me reveal itself, and may I pass my AP Euro test, if it be your will. And my AP Chem. Though I probably don’t need prayer for that one.
Dan: I worry about these kids. They’re such puss—sorry. They need Your strength, Jesus. Life doesn’t get any easier than in their entitled little worlds. Real life is war. Or at least a battlefield. Thanks, Pat Benatar. Yeah, one of my dad’s favorites.
Matthew: Forgive me for renaming all my songs on iTunes. I mean Drake to Lecrae doesn’t seem that bad, but Jason Derulo to Chris Tomlin? It’s just lies. I feel bad for using talented Christians as a cover for my sinful listening habits. But, dude, my parents blame secular music for my downfall.
Jason: These kids can be tough, Papa. But I know you’re with me. It’s because of you that I can keep this smile pasted to my face. And because of all those summers at drama camp! Ha! Praise Jesus!
“You will not believe who’s here,” I heard from behind me. A fence rattled and, lo and behold, Jack Kerouac was scaling the chain link. He f lopped over the fence and squatted beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper-hissed. We were all supposed to be silent for three hours to ruminate on Jesus’s sacrifice, which the Stage-Jesus had described in slasher-film detail before sending us on our way. The beating, the crown of thorns, the death, the three days in the tomb while His disciples mourned. “I told you not to come.”
“And miss all this?” Jack looked out at the masses of teens, who had so far not exhibited any signs of ADD.
Some had their Bibles open in their laps. Others had journals and pens and lay in the grass, scribbling their ref lections. Some had their eyes closed in prayer.
“Where’s that little white paper you got? The one the girl on pretty road asked you about?”
“The girl on pretty road? You mean, the one with the bandana?”
“The one that got you all wondering and dreamy.”
“Her name’s Natalie.”
“The very one.” He nodded. “Where’s the paper?”
“I put it in the box.”
“Untrue. It’s in your pocket.”
“Why do you ask if you know everything?”
“I’m evaluating your truth-saying.”
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket.
“Are you seriously going to smoke at Jesus camp?”
“They were a gift.”
“Who would give you a gift here?”
“I got connections.” He lit his cigarette. “Like I said, you wouldn’t believe who’s here. Muhammad and Buddha. Some old Indian fella—”
“Native American.”
“Sure, yeah. He talks like he’s got a barrel in his belly, all round and echo-like. I got these here from a fine young woman called Ereshkigal.”
“Oh yeah?” I mocked. “And where’s Jesus?”
“Well, He’s with them, obviously. All friends, doing their thing, one man on earth at a time.”
“Right.” I rolled my eyes and snarked, “Then, please, say hi to my sister.”
“I can’t do that. I’ve already told you.”
“How convenient.”
“Believe what you want.” He took a long drag and exhaled. “You can be such an arrogant little shit.”
“Can you at least smoke downwind?”
He surprised me by standing up and sitting down on the other side of me.
“Look at all those beautiful people, Nicolas. Imagine the depths in their hearts, the secrets.”
“I don’t want to know their secrets.”
“All that truth f lying around their heads like birds.” He was staring off, unfocused, slipping into his poet-self. I wondered for a moment if it was only tobacco he was smoking.
“And we go on shooting it down,” I said in mock poet-stoner voice.
He snapped his head in my direction. “Ah hell, what’s that supposed to mean?”
Jack was always digging around my psyche, and usually I just walked out of my room to get away from his prying. But I was stuck in pretend prayer, so I told him what I thought. “I mean those truth-birds are being shot down by our word-bullets.”
“Ah yes. Metaphor on, Nicolas.”
“Seriously. All our words shooting out of our mouths. Always trying to tell everyone this or that. Hunting down the things we want to say. The things we want people to hear. Just leaving dead bird truths all over everywhere. Nobody knows how to say anything right.”
He clicked his to
ngue at me, obviously disappointed by my pessimism. He fingered his cigarette while he stared out at all the campers sitting around, all meditative. “Man, you are rolling fast down sad hill.”
“I should’ve realized what was happening with Diana. I should’ve known. She should’ve told me. Maybe she did. Maybe words just fail us.”
“We misuse them, misunderstand, misrepresent, miss the target,” Jack singsonged. “And now we’re back to it. This is about your sister.”
“Of course it’s about my sister.” It was always about my sister, and he knew it. He was prodding me. This is why I hated talking to him. Because his words were sharp, and all my packed-up-and-put-away sadness was going to spill out everywhere.
“Well, I can’t always be sure. You’ve been all curled-over obsessing about Leah.”
“Because she’s alive! My sister’s dead. I can’t talk to her.” I sighed. “Leah’s what’s left of my sister. And to Leah, I’m what’s left of Diana.”
“I know—yes—I do know.”
I felt def lated. “At the funeral—”
“Oh yes, I saw what happened at the funeral.” Of course he did. Stalker.
“That’s what I’m saying. That’s all it was. Just grabbing on to what’s left.”
Jack smoked, pondered.
A cricket started off in the dry grass. Someone cleared his throat. The wind picked up the leaves, hanging there like paper coins, the light shifting the color of them.
“Nicolas, that’s what we’ve got. Words. That’s all we’ve got. And if that chasm from soul to soul is as wide as the Grand Canyon, and perhaps it is—ah hell, maybe even wider—then we gawddamn better have a bridge. That’s what our words are. They’re the bridge from me to you, from you to your parents, from you to those lovely girls you met today—”
I rolled my eyes.
“—and that bridge might be rickety-rackety, broken, dangerous to cross. But, ah man, that’s all we have.” Jack stood up, brushed off his pants. “Diana is walking a different road now—long gone and down—and there are no more words or nonwords to puzzle on and figure out.”
I looked up at him. “But I was wrong. I didn’t understand what Diana was saying.”
“No, that’s not it, not it at all,” he said, shaking his head. “There is no right or wrong. There’s just what you do, and what happens after.”
The tears needled. “I don’t like this after.”
“You have something to say, Nicolas, and those words are gonna tear you up or rot you from the inside out if you don’t tell it out. That’s a worse after.”
My throat tightened. I swallowed to keep all the words and all the sadness down. I looked back out at the people with the books and the pens, all the words.
Jack walked past me, following the fence up the hill. “I don’t think I care to sit around and witness your tearfall. There are such times when a young man needs some privacy. But I think you might’ve heard me this time.”
I was not going to cry at church camp. The cliché was too much.
Charlotte would’ve been too pleased.
I swallowed the thick sadness in my throat. I took out my pen and composition book, scratching two lines on the Jack Kerouac tally page. I’d seen him thirty times now.
F lipping to a blank page, I held the pen over the paper.
It hovered.
Then I wrote it down. Just to see how confession felt. The words screamed back at me, rattling around on the page like prisoners. I ripped the paper out of the notebook and stuffed it in my pocket.
A microphone screeched from the center of camp. I looked down the hill into the field, where a counselor stood in the center of the grassy area and tapped on the mic. Thump, thump, thump. “Test.” Screech. “Can you hear me?” Screech. Thump, thump.
The Silent Three was definitely over.
I stood up and headed down the hill toward the counselor calling us to join him. The characters were coming back out of hiding. The leper. The blind man. The lame man on his mat. Jesus milled about. Music blasted from the speakers.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find two counselors, both with long, dark hair, smiling down at me. Both wore robe-like garb, and one had fake wrinkles drawn on her forehead and around her mouth. I hadn’t seen these two when we’d first arrived.
“Have you seen Him?” the young one asked.
“Who?” I asked.
“My son, the Son of God!” the old one said.
Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary?
“He’s over there.” I pointed.
“Come closer,” they urged, all smiles.
I swiped at their hands, unwilling to be part of this skit. Unwilling to drink the Kool-Aid.
They tugged at my T-shirt.
“I got it. I’m going.” I batted Mary Magdalene’s hand away. Both girls fell out of character, struck by my unwillingness to play make-believe.
They lifted their robes to keep them from dragging on the ground and sauntered over to another camper on the outskirts, a girl who willingly followed them into the swarm. I weaved through the campers and characters.
The phones were back out. Mine registered no service, and I wasn’t about to join the throngs for the photo shoot. But I watched.
A group of about ten campers posed with some famous sinners, who stood next to signs the camp had clearly provided to help the Pampers get it. I didn’t need the signs for all the characters. You didn’t need to go to church to know the guy with the noose around his neck was Judas. But there were more difficult characters to peg, like the two thieves from the crosses, plus Barabbas. And the adulteress and her sheet again.
And then I saw Jack, photo bombing the campers, his fingers making bunny ears behind Barabbas’s head. I walked quickly toward him. He saw me coming and darted away like an unruly toddler.
He sauntered across the lawn, and I followed him. I took the paper out of my pocket. I’d show him I’d done it—I’d written it down—and then he could leave. He’d done his job, got me to confess.
But then the music clicked off and everyone turned toward a stage. I couldn’t see what they were looking at.
The chant from the church that morning started up again.
“HAPPINESS!”
“HAPPENS HERE!”
Jack had vanished. I shook my head and walked back toward the crowd of campers.
A man ascended some steps with a microphone in hand. “Goooooooood afternoooooon, Christiaaaaaaans!” A sad attempt at an impression of Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam. Way out of character, because the man with the mic looked less like Robin Williams and more like Robert Redford in his prime. He’d been peeled right off an Abercrombie & Fitch poster. He was the guy they hired for Viagra or Crest commercials.
Everyone cheered and shouted and whooped.
“Where are my Returning Champions?! My reigning Super Bowl Christians!”
Cheers and whoops.
“Where are my Pampers?!”
Delayed whoops from a few, including the Marys fangirl, prompted by a nudge from Mother Mary.
“Are you ready for a Christastic weekend?!”
Earsplitting cheers.
Christastic?
I was finding it hard to know if my parents had signed me up for church camp, drama camp, or cheer camp.
“Then let’s pump it up! Fist pumps for Christ!”
They all threw their arms in the air and pumped their fists, chanting.
Fist pumps for Christ!
Fist pumps for Christ!
These people had an infinity worth of cheers.
The Marys stood at the back corner of the stage, fist-pumping along with them. Their enthusiasm would’ve been more convincing if their beloved Jesus hadn’t died at the end of this story.
The pastor guy gave them each a high five and the three of them exited the stage just as the prostitute walked up, carrying an enormous Bible—like if the Bible took steroids.
Joining her on the stage were two counselors
, a girl and a guy, both wearing Hammer pants and gold chains. It was not MC Hammer music that echoed through the canyon, though, but Sir Mix-A-Lot. I recognized the notes of “Baby Got Back,” and I waited for God to send lightning bolts and strike us all dead. Then I saw the girl put the mic to her face and, glaring at the prostitute character, begin her rap:
Oh, my gosh, Becky, look at her Bible.
It’s, like, so big.
She looks like one of those Jesus followers.
The girl stepped aside, and the boy started rapping. As he did so, counselors walked among the crowd, distributing Bibles. Some campers held out their own big Bibles.
“Fun, right?”
I turned around.
“Did I scare you?” Natalie laughed, and her eyes f lashed. “Boo!” She shimmied to the beat and sang along.
I like big Bibles and I cannot lie,
You other followers can’t deny
That when a friend walks in with a shiny leather case
And those pages in your face—
“And, look, you’ve got your confession ready, even,” she said, nodding at my hand.
I looked down. There was the paper, in my hand. I crumpled it, freaked that it might fall on the ground, or she might grab it.
“Here!” Natalie called to Jesus, who was walking through the crowd, carrying the PC Box.
I tried to turn around. “That’s okay,” I mumbled. But then Jesus was right there. His dark eyes waiting, the slit in the box wide open. Natalie smiled and looked at me expectantly. And there was Charles, walking behind Matthew, headed right toward me.
Deep in the Book we’re reading,
I’m hooked and I can’t stop needing—
Matthew put his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, dude, hurry up. Let’s hit the pool.”
“He’s got to drop his confession in first.” Charles pointed at my clenched fist. Was this payback for Harry Potter?
The paper wilted in the heat of my hand. Natalie’s smile never wavered. Jesus shifted his weight. Patience was barely his virtue.
And Jack appeared, leaning up against the fence across the field, smoking, watching, waiting.
I took the paper out of my hand—“Oh yeah, this. Sure.”—and uncrumpled it. Folded it once, twice. Slipped it in the box.