by Erica Sage
He continued to look at me—not with fury, but with what I thought might be pity. Then he nodded and said, “I may mess them all up. But you’re an asshole.”
My mouth dropped open.
He raised his eyebrows at me. “Did I get that word right?”
I tried to muster indignation, but he was right. He had that one right.
Jack was no doubt somewhere nearby, offering another standing ovation.
PRAYERS AND CONFESSIONS
Matthew: Sarah wasn’t tits and ass. She was—is—beautiful. Her voice when she sang. Her smile when she looked at me. I do miss her.
Dan: The next time I punched someone, it was my dad.
Pastor Kyle: It’s the impact, that metal on metal, that jars me from sleep. It’s thinking about Gabe in his car seat in the back that keeps me from falling asleep at all. A simple text and I could’ve killed my favorite little guy.
Pastor Kyle led me back from the medical building, down the sidewalk to the sanctuary. He fiddled with the lock on a door, and I stole a glance into the custodian’s office. Holly was inside, stacking toilet paper on a cart covered in canvas. She started when she heard the pastor’s keys jingle. When she saw me, her face softened, and she dropped the sheet over the cart as she stepped toward the door.
“You missed the mud pit?” I asked, kind of hoping she hadn’t witnessed the scene.
“Not the whole thing. Just had to get this for—”
“For Jesus.”
“Let’s go,” the pastor said, tugging at my arm.
Holly smiled slightly. “I’m sorry about all this.”
The pastor pulled me into a room I hadn’t been in before. A dim light barely glowed from the ceiling; the walls were gray and rough.
“Is this a cave or something?”
“A tomb, yes.” He waved toward the risers. “Have a seat.”
I picked the ground-level bench in the center and wondered about the room’s purpose.
Animal sacrifice, perhaps.
Pastor Kyle sat across from me and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands together. He looked into my eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry for calling you an asshole.”
I shrugged. “I deserve it.”
“Something is going on with you.”
Well, it didn’t take a behavioral expert. I had wrestled with Jesus in a puddle in the grass raging against a hose.
“Nothing is going to get better if you don’t confide in someone.” He sat up, held up his hands. “I know it doesn’t seem that way, with what’s going on at camp right now. And I’m not saying I’m that guy for you. Not at all. I believe grace comes through Jesus. But I also believe that we can be that for other people too. I know you reached out to your sister the other night on the phone, and obviously you didn’t get what you were hoping for.”
I shook my head. But I hadn’t really been hoping for grace from her. I had wanted her to ask for mine, honestly. But like Jack said, maybe you couldn’t ask that of people. You just had to say the thing and see what happened.
“Maybe when you get home, you can talk to your parents. I can help with that if you want.”
There was no way I was talking to my parents. I’d gone months withholding what would only cause more hurt to them. But I said, “Yeah, sure,” just to make the pastor happy.
He was dubious. He didn’t know all his grammar, but I think he knew people.
“You know where we’re sitting?” he asked.
“A tomb,” I repeated. And then I got why he brought me to this creepy place.
“That’s right. The tomb where Jesus lay for three days while the world waited for Him.” He nodded, leaned back, and looked at me again. “We all need the dark times to recognize His light.”
I didn’t believe in what he believed. I didn’t believe in Jesus as the son of God. I didn’t believe in a God who thought we had to hurt just so we could heal. Who set us up to hurt for the benefit of healing us. That just sounded like codependency.
“We have to wrestle with our demons, we have to spend forty days in the desert, we have to carry our own cross. This is religious jargon to you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess. No offense or anything.”
Pastor Kyle smiled. “I believe it, though.”
“I would hope so, given your job and everything.”
“Yes. But that’s not what I mean. Not as a man of God. I believe it as a human. I don’t think you can see if you haven’t been blind. I don’t believe you can recognize grace if you haven’t been stuck in a tomb.”
“Wait.” Panic cracked my voice. “You can’t lock me in here.”
“Is that what you think?” He laughed. “Now that’s crazy, locking you in some jail cell.”
My jaw dropped again. I wanted to point out the Donkey Lottery, the selfies with prostitutes, and Judas with his noose and coin purse. Rap turned into gospel. I had just been told to kneel before a teenager dressed like Jesus while some other hot teenager strutted around in a shiny red leotard.
Locking me in a tomb seemed par for the course.
He slapped his knees. “I am going to leave you in here now, but I’m not going to lock the door. You stay as long as you like. Or follow me out.” He scratched his jaw. “Anyway, I don’t think I need to lock you in a dark place. I suspect you’re in one now. Quiet time is a gift, so take it if you want.”
Quiet was torture. Boring at best, it invited memories and ghosts and guilt at worst.
But I guess that was his point. The being alone with yourself, the silence poking at you, beating you, torturing the truth out.
Pastor Kyle stood up and opened the door. He turned around one more time.
“My job is not about words, by the way. Preaching is not about all those words.” He pulled out a small book from his back pocket. “It’s about the Word. And I pray before I use it so that I get it right.” He slipped the little Bible back into his jeans. “Grammar gods be damned!” At this, he laughed and pulled the door closed behind him. It clicked in place, and then everything was silent.
Really silent.
I couldn’t hear the campers or counselors, birds or planes.
I wanted to stand up and leave, but I honestly had nowhere to go. I’d embarrassed myself out by the mud pit, and I was afraid to face Matthew. I owed the two counselors an apology, but I wasn’t ready for that either.
I lay down on the bench, and I felt the silence and memories tear into me like bamboo under my fingernails.
After my sister’s wake, after everyone had left what remained of my family in our silent house, we sat at the kitchen table while my mom poured some wine for herself. My dad drank something dark with whiskey.
It’s my fault hung like cigarette smoke over the whole house, heavy and thick.
My dad pulled something from his front pocket. He slid it across the table at me. At first I thought it was a coin, from the metallic drag it made across the wood, but then I recognized it as a key.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“Hide it,” he said.
I looked at my mom, and then we both looked at my dad.
“Hide it anywhere in the bedroom.”
“Honey, what’re you doing?” my mom asked.
“I want to try something.”
“How much whiskey have you had?” My mom asked. My parents didn’t drink often, and when they did, they didn’t drink a lot.
“What does it matter?” My dad was not the belligerent type, but he’d just been to the funeral for his daughter, who shot herself. “Nick, I said hide the key.”
I picked up the key. “I don’t really want to do this,” I said.
“It’s like hide-and-seek, Nick. You hide it. I seek it. How hard is it to find this key?”
My mom teared up, sank into a chair, but she didn’t tell him to stop.
There was something else thick in the room, beyond the guilty haze. I was scared of it. It was a tension I’d never felt. My parents had stood united their w
hole marriage—through the chaotic kid-taxiing, my dad’s layoff, selling the house, the Charlotte drama.
But the death of their child.
Diana’s suicide.
Like a sharp blade ready to cut the fragile string that kept everything peacefully tethered.
I scooted my chair back, the legs scraping against the linoleum, and walked out of the room.
My dad watched me, dark-eyed, but eager for some sick game where he tried to find a small key hidden in a small room. My mom walked over to the kitchen sink and poured her wine out. They both followed me to the living room. She stood against the wall, arms crossed, and watched my dad sink into the couch. I continued down the hall to my parents’ bedroom, where my dad had always hidden the key.
The shades were drawn, the lights still out, the air stale. I sat on their bed and looked around the room. I wasn’t pondering a hiding spot. I was waiting for the requisite amount of time to make it seem like I was pondering a hiding spot, to make my dad think I was playing his game.
It was ordinary, this room. The closet door, open a bit. Dark dressers, a jewelry box, a photo album. It was an old album, filled with Diana’s school pictures, the one my mom pored over regularly.
I counted thirty more seconds and then walked over to closet, pulled out the old Monopoly board game. I opened the box—the edges of the lid were broken—and set the key next to the metal dog and car game pieces, the little plastic hotels. I put the box back up on the shelf and walked out of the room.
That’s where he always kept the key to the gun cabinet, and I knew he’d never look there.
“I’m not one for Bible-thumping, but I dig what that cat’s got to say.”
I opened my eyes.
Jack.
“Nice demonstration out there, by the way,” he said to me. “You really showed that hose.”
“I’m really exhausted.”
“You just napped.”
“By you.” I sat up. “I’m exhausted by you.”
“Yes, yes, yes. Where’s your catalyst friend, Natalie? She has great taste in literature.”
I rolled my eyes. He’d clearly heard what she’d said about him up on the hill.
“What was that book she gave you?”
“It wasn’t one of your books. You wouldn’t call what she gave me ‘literature.’”
“She’s a fire under your ass, that’s what she is.”
“Don’t say something perverted here.”
“She burns bright, doesn’t she? All firef ly and firelight and sunglare.”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Like your sister. Matthew too, a little bit, though I’m not sure you like him the way you like Natalie.” Jack winked at me. “Or maybe so. I do not judge.”
And it was true he didn’t. But on this point, he couldn’t. Rumors f lew all over about his romances, with women and men alike.
He stood up and walked around the room, running his hand against the wall.
“You know that poster in your room. The people who read that poster, who read that book—” he spit the last part out, his mouth curled in disdain.
“On the Road,” I said for him.
He nodded. “They’re thinking that was me, that I was mad and crazy and capricious and destructive and distrustful and irrevocably wild and wistful. Because I wrote the damn book, they think I was a Roman candle,” he said.
I hadn’t read the book. But yes, I believed that too. He was the author, after all. Of a book about freedom and living and lust and debauchery. And finding yourself within and without all of it. About liberty.
“I was and was not that. I was and was not a Roman candle.” He continued, “I was quiet, I observed, I appreciated everything around me. I loved God, I missed my brother, I looked for angels, I was scared of God and ghosts and my mother.”
He paced for a moment. “If it weren’t for the mad ones, if it weren’t for the Roman candles, I might never have taken to that road. You hear me?” He turned from the wall to make sure I had.
I nodded.
“I was as much the guy on that road as I was the man stuck in his bedroom, mute fingertips against the typewriter, digging around in my brain for the Great American Novel. I needed Neal, I needed Alan—you don’t know who they are, but trust me on this point—or I don’t hop in a car and go back and forth across the continent and down into Mexico.
“And I see that in you. That dichotomy. You’ve got the madness in you. I see it. Your sister saw it. But you need other people.”
“Like my sister,” I said.
“And like Natalie. They light you up, make you brighter. We’re not all Roman candles, but we’re all meant to burn bright.”
“My sister burned herself out.”
Jack looked at me warmly, offered a slight nod. “That she did. But you won’t.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe what my sister had told me when I was a boy, that I had ten lives and I just had to choose to live big. “But I don’t do anything. You say it yourself. So how do you know I’m mad too?”
“You must be, or I wouldn’t be here.” He sauntered down the risers. “We’re all mad here. You’re mad. I’m mad.” He was clearly reciting something.
“Did you write that?”
“The Cheshire Cat.”
“Lewis Carroll?”
“The very one.”
I hadn’t read that classic either, but I’d seen the movie. A rabbit’s hole, pills and libations making Alice bigger, then smaller, talking f lowers, a caterpillar smoking an opium pipe. “He was pretty messed up,” I said.
“The great ones always are. And they are vilified and adored for it.” Jack was suddenly standing at the door. “So, how long are you going to hide in this dungeon?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Find the box.”
“Have you been listening and seeing?” he asked, dark brows raised.
“Uh, yeah, but it doesn’t help.”
“Then you’re listening without ears.” He opened the door. “And seeing without eyes.” When he walked out, he left the door open.
Listening without ears. Seeing without eyes.
I’d been able to investigate the custodian’s office. Maybe I needed to check the barn. I’d been in one cabin; I could sneak into the others. I needed to keep at this. I needed to find Magic Jesus. After all, I was in too much trouble to get into more, and everyone already hated me.
There was liberty in being the outsider—like standing at the edge of a cliff. It kind of made nothing matter. I wouldn’t let Dan tell me to stay and play games. I’d skip the pastor’s evening message. I wouldn’t show up for the Trust Circle or the pranks. Instead, I’d stay up all night, if that’s what it took to find that robed savior-custodian.
But first, I had to change my clothes. Bits of mud still stuck to my legs. And I needed my shoes.
I walked down the sidewalk and was halfway through the grass when I stopped dead.
There was Magic Jesus. Just ahead of me, setting up his table. I walked toward him as he settled in the middle of the field next to the volleyball courts. His entourage hadn’t spotted him yet. Perfect timing.
“Hey,” I said.
“How’s it goin’?” It was his Hillbilly Jesus voice.
The campers were done with the mud pit. Some were being rinsed off in an industrial setup like a car wash. Some had already done that and were heading into their rooms to change. Doors were slamming. Open, closed. No one was approaching us.
“I looked up that Bible verse,” I said.
No one was at the pool. Everyone was going into the cabins. Coming out, running down stairs.
Jesus looked around him. Now he’d noticed the running. “There’s a few of those.”
“The one you told me about,” I said.
No one was playing volleyball or buying ice cream. They were just running in and out, to their own and then other peop
le’s cabins. In and out.
What the hell?
Shouting, tears.
“Nick!” Matthew shouted. “Get up here.”
“We’ll talk later,” Jesus said. He folded up his table and headed off across the green.
I ran up the stairs to our room. Charles was sitting cross-legged on the ground, crying.
“What’s going on?”
“The confessions,” he sobbed. There was red paint on his palms.
I heard voices in the bathroom and walked in, Matthew behind me. Payton and Chris stood looking into a stall.
Oh, gawd. Had Jack left another graphic illustration of the crucifixion?
I peeked in, over their shoulders.
No. It was words. Blood-red words painted on every stall wall.
Charles had paint all over his hands. “And he blamed me,” I said. It was obvious from the get-go that he’d wanted me to get in trouble. But he’d been caught. Literally red-handed.
Chris said, “This is bad.”
They were all staring at one painted confession:
Please forgive me for threatening the school. I wasn’t really going to shoot the teachers. I want to go back to school.
Wait.
There was only one kid who wasn’t in school, public or private.
Oh.
That’s why Charles had been crying. He hadn’t been caught painting. And that’s why he’d been all fidgety lately. He’d had another confession in the box.
“Charles was the first one in here,” Goth said.
“Trying to wipe it off.”
And they kept talking. But I wasn’t listening anymore.
The paint.
The custodian’s office.
The paint was all on that shelf in his office. That’s why Jesus had been just standing there. He’d been watching the chaos he’d created unfold. And then he’d f led the scene.
He had opportunity. He had motivation. And now I had the evidence. But before going to the pastor, I was going to go to that office and get my confession.
I headed toward the door, but Payton grabbed my shoulder. “Where were you when this was painted?” Payton asked.
“What?”
“You left the mud pit.”
“I know. I was with the pastor.”