Seven Sins

by Piper Lennox

  A piece chipped off in my fingers. If the deer could eat this, couldn’t I?

  It was salt. I let it melt on my tongue and remembered the potatoes I’d had at home. Already, it felt like years ago.

  I wondered if the community was looking for us. If Mother was looking for me.

  The salt doubled my thirst and tripled the nausea. I pulled myself up and sat on the trunk to inspect my feet. They were covered in popped blisters. My shoes, simple fabric slip-ons, were filled with blood. Its metallic smell made me gag, but nothing was left.

  Everything spun. My heart pounded with exhaustion and one relentless thought: that I would die out here.

  “If your soul abhors my rules…I will visit you with panic, and with wasting disease and fever that consume the eyes and make the heart ache.”

  “I will punish you sevenfold for your sins.”

  Tears filled my eyes again. I shouldn’t have left. At least Crown Plains was safe. I had shelter, and food, and clean water right on my doorstep. I had my mother.

  Hours dragged on as I dragged myself forward. Was I still going forward—any direction that was away from the Plains? I wished I knew more about nature: what was safe to eat and drink, or how to know my direction by observing rocks or trees. The best I could do was judge the time based on the lightness of the sky, and that was useless. What good was it to know it was roughly dinnertime when I had nothing to eat, or to know I’d walked about an hour when I had no idea how many miles lay ahead?

  Finally, the brush turned to rocks. Maybe I was close to a trail, or another creek—anything.

  My head was spinning again, worse than before. I lost my balance; my foot caught between two rocks, and I fell.

  Pain tore through my knee and ankle. I landed face-first against a jagged rock, feeling it cut my cheek.

  Keep going.

  It was getting dark again. I knew I couldn’t survive another night out here. Not on my own.

  The last piece of my journey is gone. I’ve tried to remember it: how far I walked, or how I managed to walk at all. Maybe it was miles. Maybe it was only a few feet.

  When I saw a light through the trees, amber and hazy, my winded heart seemed to start beating again, like it had fallen asleep because the rest of me couldn’t.

  When I saw him, it seemed to stop.

  Maybe, for just a second, it did: everything went blank. I felt the gritty dirt under my face and heard his voice, calling into the distance for his father.

  When I finally opened my eyes, his face was the first thing I found in the soft, rumbling darkness.

  “Name?”

  The orange juice singed my throat. I drank every drop, then opened the apple juice on the tray in front of me and drank that, too.

  Everything ached. The doctor said I was lucky: my wrist, knee, and ankle were badly sprained, but not broken. Only one cut required stitches. The rest were held shut with butterfly enclosures, like the one on my cheek that made it hurt to smile. Not that I’d tried.

  “Juniper Summers,” I told him, finally. I asked if I could have more juice. He ignored me.

  “Birthday?”

  Why I didn’t make one up, throwing out any old date as easily as I threw out the name I never got, I had no idea. All I could do was tell him the year and shrug at the rest.

  He asked more questions. At the time, I really couldn’t remember much; my brain felt like it had been pushed through a sieve and stuck back in my head, all shriveled and misshapen.

  But even when my memory stitched itself up, I didn’t tell anyone about Crown Plains, or the reverend and Unity Light.

  “She belongs to the community. Remember that.”

  For all I knew, I really did belong to the church. Its rules still swam in my head; I tested them constantly in this new world, wondering which, if any, still applied.

  Baubles and stains were everywhere—tattoos on the wrists of the night nurse, a lip ring scar on the physical therapist who visited. Girls in the hallway wore tiny shorts, mixing fabrics and showing skin, but no one made them change. They cursed under their breaths, and apologized to no one.

  The boy I’d found—Had he found me?—came in with a haircut one morning, his jaw-length hair now shorn on the sides and resting beautifully on his forehead. When I asked if he’d had to get an elder to cut it with special scissors, he laughed and tilted his head at me.

  “Elder?” he snorted, folding his arms on the railing of my bed. “I guess. I mean, it was a dude about my dad’s age. But no special scissors, or whatever. Just clippers.”

  Things are different out here, I realized.

  Wonderfully, terrifyingly different.

  Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me: for years now, I’d questioned Barton’s interpretations of the Bible and his so-called visions. Of course he had no influence outside the borders of Crown Plains.

  That was why he’d put them up.

  But I was surprised that even the seven sins didn’t get treated like big deals out here. Everyone seemed to agree they were bad, but acted like they were partially unavoidable. Sometimes, they even applauded them.

  When I ate seconds of almost every meal, the nurses were thrilled. They said I was underweight and “needed meat on my bones.” No one mentioned gluttony.

  Television showed people lusting openly after one another and called it a crush, or chemistry. Greed was called ambition.

  On the ranch, I saw Van refuse to help with chores until his father yelled loud enough to rattle the windows. Sloth. Wrath. They made up by dinnertime.

  When I still roomed in the farmhouse, Van spent hours teaching me about this world. About himself. He was boastful.

  I adored it, the way I adored the photos of him filling the walls. Unity Light taught that pride was the worst sin, but I wanted so badly to have the confidence that Van did. To feel special again. To be enough, without anyone having to tell me I was.

  Envy. I wanted to be like him so much, I studied him in his sleep.

  Reverend Barton told us the seven sins were deadly because they kept us from living the way we were supposed to, and we had to do whatever we could to avoid them. Nearly every religion I studied after I left, trying to figure out what I believed in, said something similar: that the purpose of being human was to strive to be anything but.

  Nature, I noticed, wasn’t like that. It worked with what it had and accepted everything as it was. Deer weren’t told to stop being deer. Fallen trees weren’t forgotten; they grew new life.

  I still believed in something greater than ourselves. Nature seemed too well-designed to occur by accident. But I stopped trying to figure out that Something’s name a long time ago, the way I stopped categorizing people by the deadly seven.

  Yes, I was envious and Van was vain. But some days, he was slothful, dishonoring his father with sarcasm and refusal to do the simplest tasks.

  Some nights, when I lay awake and thought of all the time I’d lost to Crown Plains, I felt like I’d drown under the weight of my own wrath.

  Sometimes he looked at me with lust, or perhaps greed: wanting me all to himself, however he could get me. My sweet, sinful protector.

  We did all seven and then some. Every last one of us. I learned there was great irony in calling those things “deadly,” because it seemed impossible to live without them.

  A noble idea, perfection. But I had seen where striving to be perfect could get you: standing on a hill, your idyllic little empire burning at your feet.

  In the years after I left Crown Plains, whenever I got caught up wondering what I really believed in and who I wanted to be...I thought of Van. He was always streaked with mud or coated in dust when he came home.

  “You sure you’re not made of dirt?” Howard often joked, clapping his back so a cloud would rise off him.

  “So was Adam,” Van would quip, and cross himself with sarcastic reverence.

  Sins were marks along our souls, Reverend Barton told us, like soot or dirt. He acted like only his teachings
could scrub us clean.

  But I was starting to like the dirt. If it was where we came from, and where we would return, then I wanted to live in it the way Van did, embracing it for all its honesty. Like the rest of nature, dirt didn’t pretend to be anything it wasn’t.

  I decided I’d still atone for what I did wrong. That’s what I’d believe in.

  But unlike Unity Light, I wouldn’t make myself do it for arbitrary transgressions. The only sins I would fix—the only marks I’d wipe from my soul—would be the ones that hurt others.

  Reverend Barton was right when he said the outside world was imperfect and dangerous. But so were humans. We were born of dust, after all.

  Broken, filthy, and beautiful.

  Thirty-Three

  Present Day

  “Van, honey? Their plane just landed.”

  Cautiously, Candace pokes her head into the guest room. I left the door wide open so she’d stop doing that thing where she knocks, then barrels in anyway. God help her boys in their teenage years. “You feel like riding with us to get them?”

  “I’m kind of tired. Figured I’d rest a while.” It’s my ironclad excuse as of late. Nobody questions the energy levels of a dude who was just hospitalized.

  And it’s not a lie: I’m always tired, and always in need of rest. But I rarely sleep.

  I fainted yesterday, after Howard said a walk around the ranch might be good for me. Candace scolded him for pushing me to do it, but I was grateful. I needed a push. Anything to get me out of bed—five days in the hospital’s, then three straight in this one. It’s the very same one Juniper used when she stayed with us, but now sports a memory foam mattress.

  It also doesn’t reside in the same room, thank God. Candace and Howard’s sons took every room up here, so I’m in the tiny office they use for spare furniture. A storage room.

  They tell me it’s mine indefinitely. Howard’s trying to get me to stay a while. He’s even got an old Dodge I can have, in exchange for helping out with the horses until spring.

  I’m tempted. Missing the skate competition cost me important face time with some sponsors, but there’s another one near Fairview at summer’s end. And with plenty of trails around, I can keep updating my channel and social media in the meantime.

  My head swivels robotically to the stuff Juniper left me.

  When Candace naïvely told me she’d “set my things in my room,” I expected the boards and helmet. But the sight of her laptop and cameras got me good.

  “Now we’re even,” the Post-It inside the laptop read.

  Cruelest of all, she didn’t wipe the freaking thing clean. I mean, okay: she wanted a quick escape, so I get it. But would a factory reset have killed her? God knows I can’t bring myself to delete her blog posts, videos, or photos. I can’t even stop looking at them.

  Like now. I’m supposed to be writing the competition director back, who sent me a personalized “sorry you couldn’t make it” email when he heard I was sick.

  Instead, I’m reading Juniper’s post about navigating based on nothing but the stars, even when you’re traveling via highway.

  Hey, shouldn’t be too hard to draft a simple email, right? Surely I can take my mind off Juni for a few minutes.

  Dear Mr. Ingram,

  Thanks for the well wishes; I appreciate it, because breathing really hurts like a bitch these days.

  Yes, it is a shame I missed the competition, and perhaps an even greater shame I:

  1) Didn’t even notice, given my relocation to Death’s Door, and

  2) Couldn’t give one tiny rat’s ass, having just learned my girlfriend escaped from an actual fucking cult.

  Select All. Delete.

  I shut the laptop and slide it back onto the desk.

  “Hey, Lex,” I call to Howard’s oldest on my way downstairs, “still got those energy drinks? Saw you drinking one at breakfast.”

  “Mom told me not to give you one. She thinks you’ll faint again.”

  “I would never dream of telling a boy to disobey his mother,” I cluck, settling into the sectional beside him, “but let’s just say, if I were to leave five bucks on this coffee table, and in a few seconds an energy drink took its place? I wouldn’t complain.”

  Smirking, he starts for the fridge. Good kid.

  Unfortunately, our plan gets interrupted by our folks bustling through the front door. Megan’s squeaky laugh splatters across me.

  “Van!” She shows me her rings first, fanning her hand between us before hugging me. Since I was only halfway to standing, her enthusiasm shoves me back into the cushions.

  “No, don’t get up,” Dad laughs, bending down to hug me when Megan is out of the way. “You looked a little woozy, there.”

  I consider telling him I’m fine: it was his new bride who knocked me off-balance. But he’d miss my joke by a wide mile and assume I’m being a smartass. Bickering doesn’t make for good reunions.

  Besides that, I am still pretty weak. Just walking downstairs left me winded, and the process of parceling out hellos and “how was the flight”-type questions drains me even further. When Lex brings me a mug of tea that’s actually Red Bull, I want to throw a thousand bucks at him.

  I settle for dropping the five behind the couch as I fake-stretch. He scoops it up on his way outside.

  Megan tells us about their wedding ceremony and the names she’s already picked for the baby they conceived, like, point-three seconds ago. I watch Dad carefully while she talks. Yep. Guy’s terrified.

  But...happy.

  Knowing him—and any and all Durhams, really—that’s what scares him the most. We’re prone to screwing up good things.

  I’m dying to tell him about Juniper. Not just the cult shit, though I won’t lie: it will be nice to get his thoughts on that huge, crazy twist.

  Maybe it shouldn’t be, though. Huge, yes, and absolutely crazy as hell. But a twist...I’m not so sure.

  Once the shock wore off and I really thought about it, I saw plenty of things that should’ve clued me in sooner. I knew her well enough to figure it out.

  Of course, she knew me well enough to figure out I suck at reading between the lines. You’ve gotta tell me shit point-blank, preferably framed in such a way that I think it’s somehow about myself. I listen really well, when I’m the topic.

  Like now.

  “Doctors said it’ll be a few weeks before he’s back to one-hundred percent,” Howard tells Dad, staring at me for confirmation, “but I’d love to have him out here, if he wants to stay.”

  Dad looks at me, too. “Not a bad idea.”

  Well, damn. I was kind of hoping he’d ask me to live with him and Megan for a few weeks. Not because I want to; if I decide to go back to New York, that air mattress in Wes’s music room is definitely my preference. But it’d be nice to get the offer.

  New baby, new family, I remind myself. Their apartment in Manhattan is ritzy…but still an apartment in Manhattan. Space is limited. And knowing Megan, an interior decorator will turn the one spare bedroom into a nursery before they even land in JFK.

  “I’m considering it,” I assure them, mostly so they’ll stop looking at me. I almost miss Megan being in here to dominate the conversation. She’s talking Candace’s ear off about baby clothes in the kitchen, like the woman hasn’t been there, done that six times already.

  “You gonna tell him?” Howard asks suddenly. Pretty sure he purposely waited until I was drinking to do it, just so I’d choke on my tea that’s not tea.

  Dad looks between us. “Tell me what?”

  “Van found out something very interesting about our Miss Juniper.”

  Dad swigs his beer and nods for me to spit it out, with this look like nothing would surprise him by this point.

  Ha: been there, dude.

  “It was a cult.” I drag my teeth over my lip and watch the pieces click in his head, too. “That’s what she ran away from.”

  “Shit,” Dad exhales, rubbing his neck hard enough to polish off
his new tan. “I mean...wow. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, given how little we knew about her. Hell, given what we did know. But still.”

  Howard laughs bitterly. “Said the same thing myself, when Van told me. It’s so surreal to think anything like that exists, let alone so close.”

  “Not anymore,” I remind him, then explain to Dad, “The compound relocated after Juniper and a bunch of other people left. Their leader rounded up, like, twenty members and hauled ass God knows where, probably under a totally different church name. But it used to be up in the mountains, just twenty miles from here.”

  “Not far at all,” Dad nods slowly, still in shock.

  I nod, too. But I keep thinking about how twenty miles is a long fucking way on foot.

  Juniper’s journey from Crown Plains to us is still unknown. I can only assume it was similar to the one described ad nauseum, in dozens of interviews and articles, by her friend Rebecca.

  We take turns filling Dad in with what we know; I pass him my phone so he can watch the documentary clips I’ve memorized, by now.

  Rebecca describes how the girls were kissed and touched in their sleep during “retreats,” which sound like blatant brainwashing sessions to me. They were meant to test the men’s resolve or some shit, and the girls had to just let it happen. It was expected. Especially if the men helped them out somehow, or showed them kindness.

  Equally sickening is her description of the mass marriage ceremonies, where all that year’s fifteen- and sixteen-year-old females were matched with men and “blessed with the sacred duty to multiply.”

  In other words: Hope you enjoyed being a kid, because now your whole life is serving this creep and giving the cult more minds to warp.

  “Why wouldn’t she just tell us?” He pushes back his hair and swallows when the credits roll.

  “I think she wanted to forget it happened,” I say softly, feeling guilt strangle my organs. I’m surprised there’s anything left for it to work with.