Jacked Up

by Erica Sage

  I started after them. I would hunt down this deception.

  “You rose from the dead already?” I turned around and saw Matthew, his hair still wet from the pool.

  It took me a second to realize he was talking about dragging the cross for my punishment. “It turns out they didn’t crucify me.”

  Matthew laughed. “Nope. You just have to do the carrying the cross bit. You won’t be the last. I had to do it my first year here too.”

  “Whatever, it’s pretty effed up.”

  “Kind of, but it’s like an initiation.”

  I didn’t think it was an initiation. An initiation was something everyone had to do, and I hadn’t seen hundreds of kids dragging crosses that morning. Just me. And I felt that fine burning point of exclusion keenly.

  “I didn’t steal that confession.” I regaled Matthew with the story.

  “Why didn’t you tell someone? Or turn it in?”

  “I wish I had,” I said, but that was only true in retrospect. Only because I ended up having to carry a cross. Finding the paper had not expedited my search for the culprit. And now the confessions were all over the campus. Well, except for the one I’d found. Lucky kid.

  I looked over at Jesus setting up his table again, a new audience forming around him. “Why’s that guy doing card tricks?” I asked.

  “Dude, that’s Jesus.”

  “I know,” I said. “Doing card tricks.”

  “He’s performing miracles,” Matthew corrected. “He’ll go hang from a cross on the second-to-last day. He’s ripped under that robe. It’s sick.”

  “He’s not performing a miracle. He’s performing a card trick that eight-year-olds learn.”

  “The tricks get better,” Matthew said earnestly. “And he does this cool magic where he lifts a table—”

  “Wait, magic?”

  “Well, yeah, he’s not literally Jesus doing miracles.” Matthew chuckled.

  “Magic. As in Harry Potter?”

  “No, as in Jesus. It’s different.”

  I looked at Matthew, who was a cool guy, the kind of guy who made this otherwise shitshow of a summer experience actually fun. He didn’t see the hypocrisy. Or he’d settled in. Maybe that’s what people did for a sense of belonging.

  “Card trick miracles? Seriously, the garbage-can prank had more pizzazz.”

  “Sh, Nick, keep your head, man,” he said, looking around. “I’m gonna go shower and get a pedicure or ice cream or something. Wanna come?”

  “A pedicure?”

  “Sampson & Delilah’s Salon. It’s new this year.”

  “Maybe later,” I said. Right now, I wanted to talk to Jesus again. He’d had motive and opportunity and now he’d made that weird Jack reference and said that thing about deception. He was playing me.

  I watched Magic Jesus (gone were the days of Hillbilly Jesus) pack up his card table and walk away a second time, his entourage following right behind. He raised his hands to them in what appeared to be a blessing, and they scurried away.

  He walked around the sanctuary at the far end of camp and disappeared down the path by the medical building (aptly named Healing Hands!). It was the same place we’d filled the garbage cans with water the night before. Not far from the custodian’s office, and the hallway where I’d found that confession. I walked quickly down the sidewalk after him. But when I rounded the corner of Healing Hands!, he wasn’t there. I saw the back door of the sanctuary propped open. I didn’t know if Magic Jesus was in there or the in the medical building.

  I started with the sanctuary. It was lit up, and the stage curtains were open. I could hear chatter and laughter and tears. Standing at the side of the stage, I saw groups of campers in prayer or chattering lightly. Jesus was not among them.

  I headed backstage next.

  “Hey, what’re you doing back here?” It was Dan. “Now’s not the time for pranks, dumbass.”

  “Have you seen Jesus?”

  “No, but I feel him in my heart.” He thumped his chest and held up a gang sign. Or a God sign.

  I rolled my eyes. “The magician.”

  “Look,” Dan whispered. “I’m getting some shiz ready for some pranks, and you’re making it look all suspicious. Go pray, or go home. He’s not back here.” He stood there till I walked out the door to the sidewalk.

  I crossed over to Healing Hands!. The door was closed. I imagined the PC Box inside the building, broken open, with confessions strewn like straw across the f loor. I tried the handle. The door was locked.

  I banged on the door. Magic Jesus had to be hiding in there—unless he’d slipped away while I was searching the sanctuary. If he was in there, then he’d have to come out sometime. Jesus was essential to the pastor’s sermons.

  I could have sat and waited for him to come out, but I didn’t. Because, just then, I spotted Natalie walking up on the hillside again.

  This time, I knew it was her, not just some nameless silhouette. I could see her red bandana.

  And a backpack. I imagined Jesus stuffing that backpack with confessions, Natalie making the signs with her clever designs. Marginalizing our confessions.

  Co-conspirators.

  I set off after her.

  I started up the hillside, following that familiar backpack. Yes, I could get in trouble for being on the hill, but I already had gotten in trouble, and for something I hadn’t even done. At least the small trees dotting the hillside partially hid us from view.

  We climbed, Natalie still unaware of me behind her. After scrambling up and over the ridge, Natalie kept walking, but I stopped. Not because I was out of breath. I was stunned into place by the view. Three giant crosses stood beyond the hill in a small valley in the vast, desertlike landscape. They hadn’t been visible from camp, and they were huge—way bigger than the one I had to carry.

  Natalie slowed as she passed between two crosses, resting her hand on the middle cross. She was not in a hurry. Not to bury the backpack or remove its contents.

  I called out to her, hoping my voice wouldn’t sneak out of the valley and down the hill toward camp.

  Natalie turned and spotted me, clearly surprised. She didn’t smile like usual, and she didn’t wave.

  Instead, she looked back over her shoulder, in the opposite direction from camp, as if someone else was waiting for her. I looked past her, but all I saw was more gray-brown hills of brush and short trees. The sky was turning a soft pink. Natalie turned back around to face me.

  Finally, she turned on a smile, the smile of the bubbly, breezy Natalie. But I could tell that’s what she’d done. Folded up whatever expression had been on her face and put on her smile like a mask. She walked a few steps toward me and called, “You do know you’re breaking a rule right now?”

  I caught up to her. “Birds of a feather and all that,” I said, eyeing her pack.

  “Yeah right.” She smiled.

  I shrugged and smiled back at her. “What is this place?” I asked, tilting my head back to look up at the crosses. They were at least twenty feet tall.

  “Golgotha, obviously.”

  It wasn’t so obvious to me. “What?”

  “Not what. Where,” she said. “It means ‘hill of skulls,’ or something like that. It was the place outside Jerusalem where the Romans crucified their criminals.”

  “Like Jesus.” I hadn’t known the place had a name.

  “Exactly. But it wasn’t just Him. There were thousands of others. It wasn’t a special way to die or anything. It was normal. Like lethal injection.”

  “Your definition of ‘normal’ concerns me.”

  Natalie laughed. “You know what I mean.” She shifted the pack off one shoulder.

  “Well, I can say from personal experience that I’m glad we’ve moved away from crucifixion.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, it still happens. Just like people are still stoned and burned and beheaded.”

  I imagined giant nails hammered through my wrists and feet. Hanging naked and bloody for
hours, until the weight of my body crushed my lungs. The time it would take. How long you’d have to be alone in your pain.

  It was the last moments of death that obsessed me, especially after Diana died. What did the brain think? What did it feel? How much did pain hurt in the last minute of life? In the last millisecond? Was it the worst kind of hurt, or did it not matter at all?

  I put my hand on the thick, wooden pole that reached way up to the crossbeam. “But there are only three crosses that really matter,” I said.

  “Well, technically one,” Natalie said, nudging me with her shoulder. Then she stepped away from me, but continued talking. “We go on a hike up here the day before we leave. You know, to help us really see the sacrifice.” She set the pack on the ground.

  “So you came up here early to really feel it without the masses of bored teens?”

  She narrowed her eyes, looked out and away from camp, decided something. I could see it cross her face. Some concrete plan. And it was just like I’d told Jack during the Silent Three. She had some secret I couldn’t know. The nonwords.

  She unzipped the backpack, and I knew what was going to happen next. Those papers.

  “Picnic?” she asked.

  The pack, which she now held out to me, was full of food. So she was not some kind of confession-runner for Jesus.

  I was relieved because I liked her, disappointed because I wanted finding my confession to be that easy. “Food is always good.” I shrugged.

  Natalie sat down on the ground with her back to the camp and faced the pink sky in the West. She unzipped the small front pocket and took out two protein bars.

  “You like to hike?” she asked, handing me one.

  “Not really. I was just following you.”

  She smiled.

  “I like to fish, though, and hunt.” I said so that she knew I liked the outdoors, in case the answer mattered. “My dad and grandpa go a lot. I’m the only one who packs a book.”

  “That you don’t write in.”

  “Am I belaboring that point?”

  She smiled, bit into her protein bar. “I like to hike. My favorite part of camp is the hike up here actually.”

  “Seems kind of like a nonevent. You just walk up a steep hill.” All hiking seemed like a nonevent to me. Fishing could be boring at times, but it had a purpose. Hunting too. Though I wondered if anyone in my family would go hunting this fall. I didn’t know if my dad or grandpa would be keen on it anymore. After Diana shot herself.

  “No, they take us this really long way around at sunrise, telling stories, preaching, and all that. It’s cool. Then we get up here and someone tells his testimony, and the sun comes up and we all walk back in the light.”

  “The way, the truth, and the light.”

  “Amen.”

  “So when’s this hike?”

  She swallowed another bit of the protein bar. “Friday.”

  “What’s today?”

  She laughed. “Tuesday.”

  “It’s summer; they took my cell phone. Time is lost on me.”

  “As it probably should be all the time.”

  I took a couple bites of my protein bar. It tasted like berry-infused paste.

  “Should I not admit that I followed you because I thought you were a nefarious confessions trafficker for my number one suspect?”

  “I’m f lattered yet again,” she laughed. “But, wait, you have a suspect?”

  I told her about Magic Jesus and his opportunity and his motivation. She listened and complimented me on my cleverness, but she didn’t seem entirely convinced or deeply concerned.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I want them to find this person and put a stop to our secrets being out there. I really, really do. But we have to face the fact that we might not figure it out. We need to plan in that direction. We need to pray in that direction. We can only control what we can control, and I don’t know if you’re going to catch the guy.”

  I didn’t like that answer. I was going to hunt down Magic Jesus. By the end of the day, if I could manage it.

  “So why’d you come up here if we’re hiking here soon?” I asked.

  “This is the prettiest place.”

  We were sitting in an off-limits area, where the grass didn’t grow green, where there were no slides or rap songs or ice cream bicycles or lush cabins or family-style meals. We were sitting in the dirt, looking out at dry sage and too-short trees on a dusty landscape with the horizon painted pink. We were outside of Eden Springs, the part of the desert that men built to show us the beauty of God.

  Natalie was right, though. This was, in fact, the prettiest part. “My brother’s about twenty miles that way,” she said, pointing in the direction we were facing. The opposite direction of camp.

  “You have family that lives down here?”

  “He’s at camp too.”

  “That’s cool.” What does a University of Washington rower do in the desert? “Same kind of camp, or … ?”

  “He’s at zombie camp,” she said and took a bite of her protein bar.

  I laughed. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Well, I guess it is the same kind of camp then. Jesus being the first zombie and all.”

  She smiled, shaking her head. “You’re going to hell.”

  “Raised from the dead, walking around scaring his enemies, and his friends too, frankly.”

  “Lightning bolts are coming for you right now.”

  She pulled four bottles of water from her pack, handed me one, stuffed two back.

  “You were prepared,” I said, indicating the water bottles.

  “I’m always prepared.”

  “For an apocalypse?” I asked as she took out two oranges and some trail mix. I saw a couple of cans of soup or chili or something still in her pack.

  We peeled our oranges in silence. I popped a full slice in my mouth. We sat for awhile, and Natalie’s smile disappeared. The one she’d put on for me. “You know what it’s like to miss someone so much that you feel like you can’t breathe?” Natalie asked. “Like their very absence stole all the air out of your lungs?”

  The sudden question, the fact I knew exactly that feeling, stole my air.

  When my dad first brought me to counseling after my sister died, the psychologist did this weird exercise where he had me tap on my sternum. He instructed me to say certain things I was thinking as I tapped. He told me, You’ll know you’ve hit on the truth when you cry.

  I have no idea what the chest-tapping thing was. I don’t know if we hold our tear bucket under our collarbone, and bruising the shit out of our rib cage is the equivalent of punching a hole in it. Or if it’s some physical distraction that lets the mind wander to what we really believe. I never cried with the counselor, not when tapping my chest or just talking.

  I’d cried only once since my sister died. At the wake. Only two people as my witnesses—Leah and Jack. If Jack counted as a person.

  Natalie had hit on the truth just then. Afraid to talk now, afraid months of tears would spill everywhere, I simply nodded yes. I knew what it felt like to miss someone so much that the breath was snatched from your lungs. To feel claustrophobic with loss, like the universe’s walls were falling in on you. To feel trapped in a world where your favorite person no longer existed.

  “That’s how I feel about my brother,” she said.

  I ate another orange slice, chewed it a long time, focused on the movement of my jaw until I was sure I wouldn’t cry. Finally I said, “You don’t see him?”

  “He’s pretty busy with school,” she said before looking away, and again I sensed words still in her mouth, tucked in her cheeks, and under her tongue. “I go to this camp because he goes to that camp. That way I can be near him.”

  I was obviously missing something. It wasn’t just a college thing. Maybe that family black hole. “Divorce?” I asked, and the word felt sticky in my throat.

  She nodded vaguely. Like Matthew said, a closed
book.

  “Sometimes, I just talk to him, and it’s like a prayer and I think maybe I can hear him talk back. And then I think God probably calls that a sin.”

  I didn’t really know what to say. “I don’t think He judges you.” I didn’t know how to talk about God, so I changed the subject. “I sometimes do that with my sister. I miss her so much that I sit in her car and talk to her.”

  She looked away from me, her eyes settling somewhere across the valley. “You know that feeling when you watch someone walk away? They just get smaller and smaller on the horizon till they’re just a f licker. And even when they aren’t there anymore, you can still swear you see them. Maybe that’s how you know you love someone.”

  “There’s something my sister used to say.” Gawd, I hoped Jack Kerouac wasn’t listening when I quoted, “‘A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction’—”

  “—‘in this too-big world,’” Natalie finished.

  I thought of Leah then. Walking away from my sister and eventually walking away from me.

  Natalie’s face spread out with a smile so big. Real this time. “You like Jack Kerouac?”

  “My sister kind of worshipped him,” I said.

  “I think I like your sister.” Natalie used the present tense, and I reveled in it for a moment, could almost pretend it was true. “I kind of worship him too,” she said, then closed her eyes and raised her hand to the sky. “I’m just hyperbolizing. Sorry, Jesus.” Then she laughed and looked at me with this kind of amazed glowiness all over face. “I can’t believe you know Jack Kerouac. Like, who knows Kerouac these days? I mean, people our age anyway.”

  “I don’t actually like him. Not his writing, and not him really. I mean, from what I know, he was kind of an asshole to people. But I can quote him at dinner parties,” I joked. “I don’t really even know what it means half the time.”

  “Dinner parties”—Natalie laughed at this—“and church camp.” Then she took a deep breath and settled into this peaceful smile. “You’re a funny one,” she said.