Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  My competition for attention was fierce, and sometimes painful.

  Once he rode his tricycle down the stairs at our house and crashed into a wall; everyone rushed over to console him. I took one look at all the commotion and rode my trike down the stairs right after him.

  Another time we sang “King David: Kindhearted King” in Sunday school and I raised my hand to demand a song about “Queen Julia.”

  I was convinced that David got special treatment because he was black.

  CHAPTER 5

  BODY PARTS

  The pool spreads out before me, purple-blue in the deep end and turquoise in the shallows. I stand on the high-dive platform, knees bent, toes curled over the sandpaper edge. Mary waits at the far end of the water.

  “Ready?” I shout. She gives me two thumbs up.

  I bounce twice and push off the board, soaring for a long moment before knifing through the cool surface, hands in prayer position over my head, elbows tight to my face. When I feel the counter-tug, I pull down my arms and frog kick, breaststroking underwater. I open my eyes in the scratchy chlorine and the world is pale blue. I glide past Mary’s brown legs, reach the wall, and crouch down to kick off the hard tile, lungs burning, and manage several strokes back toward the deep end before rising to gulp in air. I turn to look at the marker at the edge of the pool.

  “Five feet!” I yell, raising my arms in triumph. Mary made it to four. She freestyles over.

  “Not by much,” she says. “Do it again?”

  “Sure.” I shrug. “Just let me know when you get tired of losing, okay?”

  She splashes me and as we swim to the side of the pool, a car horn blares one, two, three times.

  “Gotta go,” Mary says, hoisting herself from the water. She winds a towel around her thick body, grabs her gym bag from the bleachers, and bolts out the side door as the car horn sounds again.

  “See you tomorrow,” I call at the closing door.

  Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. I pull off my rubber cap and lean back, letting the water cushion my head as my feet rise to the surface. As always, I’m the last girl in the pool after practice. This is my favorite part of the day, when I can float alone in the deep end and think.

  My hair caresses my shoulders, and I close my eyes, pretending the white glare of the overhead lights is sunshine. David and I will have a pool at our Florida apartment. Not one of those dorky birdbaths that take three strokes to cross, either, but a decent plunger, ringed by palm trees and hot pink hibiscus, a stone’s throw from the ocean. We’ll float just like this under the brilliant blue Florida sky, listening to the waves and the seagulls as the gentle sun warms us.

  Life will only get better when we’re eighteen, and it’s not unbearable now. I’ve got two friends and have won a few ribbons at swim meets. And now that I ride my bike to Harrison for the swim practice, I no longer have to endure the shame of the reserved bus seat or rush ahead of David on the sidewalk. Jerome rides the bus with him now, and nobody messes with Jerome.

  David seems to be okay, too, consumed by Dungeons and Dragons. David calls Kenny Mudd the Grim Illusionist and Kenny calls him the Dark Cleric. Whatever. He seems to be happy. And no one’s called me “nigger lover” since I stopped hanging out with him. Things will be different for us in Florida, but for now, it’s best we keep to ourselves.

  “Hey, little sister!”

  Jerome. I drop my feet and scissor my arms and legs, backing farther into the deep end. He squats at the edge of the pool, twirling his hand in the water.

  “What do you want?” I glance around; we’re alone.

  “Mom says to get home on the double.”

  I glance at the clock on the wall behind him.

  “How come?” I ask him. “It’s only 5:15.”

  He takes his hand out of the water and wipes it on his jeans.

  “Fuck if I know. Maybe you’re in trouble or something.”

  Maybe Mother found out that I borrowed her earrings without asking. When I returned them to her jewelry chest, I didn’t remember which drawer I’d taken them from and dropped them in the top one.

  “You coming?” Jerome asks.

  “Yeah, I’m going,” I say, glaring at him. “You don’t need to wait for me.”

  I don’t want him to see me climb dripping from the pool with my swimsuit plastered to my body. I don’t want him to see me, period.

  Jerome walks backward toward the side exit grinning smugly, turning at the last minute to slip through the door.

  After he’s gone, I rush to the locker room and throw my blue terrycloth sweat suit on over my Speedo, imagining Mother festering angrily at home. If she sent Jerome all the way down here to get me, she must be pissed. I’ll say I thought I’d asked to borrow her earrings, then apologize for forgetting.

  The hallway is unlit. At the far end, Jerome stands on the other side of the glass doors, straddling his bike and cupping his hands to the glass. I halt and cross my arms, and he pedals out of sight, the long shadow he threw over the floor refilled with orange sunlight.

  As I’m pulling my wet hair into a ponytail, the boys’ locker room door opens and three figures emerge. They stand facing me, but the hallway is too dim to see their faces; the fading light is behind them.

  “Hey there, Julia,” one says; I recognize Scott’s velvety voice.

  They walk toward me in a row, arms curved slightly at their sides, apelike. Squinting, I make out the two other boys, football players I’ve never talked to before: Brad MacIntyre and Todd Klondike.

  “What’s up?” I ask in a stiff voice, sensing something sinister in their crouched walk.

  One of them grunts something and there’s a flurry of motion and suddenly I’m on my back, swaying between them as if we were on the beach and they were about to toss me into the ocean. Scott’s at my shoulders, Brad and Ted have me by the ankles.

  “Easy, girl,” Scott murmurs, as if he were calming a skittish colt. “Everything’s okay. We’re just gonna have ourselves some fun s’all.”

  I know what’s happening. I’ve heard talk of this on Mondays after a big party. A bunch of guys will single out a girl, drag her away, and pull off her clothes. They’ll do things to her, and if she hollers, everyone ignores her.

  It’s called a gang bang, and it never happens to the popular girls. The boys always pick a loner or a wannabe, a girl who wants to be part of the in-crowd, but doesn’t quite have the right attitude or clothes. She’s flattered to be invited to the party, but on Monday she walks through school cringing, as the popular girls talk trash about her—Who the hell did she think she was, anyway?— while the jocks slap each other on the back.

  It’s happening to me. No, it won’t.

  “No!” I scream, and Scott stuffs a salty hand in my mouth.

  “Come on, angel, relax,” says Todd. He’s wearing his varsity team letter jacket, orange sleeves and blue torso. He’s got a zit on the side of his nose with a white tip, begging to be popped. His girlfriend is a varsity cheerleader named Brandi with big tits. He jerks on the bottom of my sweatpants and I kick my legs, seesawing back and forth between them. He drops my ankle, then snatches it back up, laughing.

  Brad’s curly brown hair falls over his face and he swings his head sideways to get it out of his eyes. I stare at his Big Boy T-shirt. Big Boy Makes You Say Ohhh Boy!

  “I thought he said she was easy,” Brad says, tugging on the cord at my waist.

  A streak of hatred burns through me: Jerome set me up. He knew I’d be here alone. He lied about Mother wanting me home. She doesn’t.

  Brad keeps tugging at the cord; in my rush, I tied it in a knot and it won’t budge. Thank you, Lord. Scott unclamps my mouth and snakes a hand down my top, groping my breasts through my bathing suit.

  “Not quite ripe, but tasty all the same,” he says. Scott, who stood in my driveway and shook my hand.

  “Fuck you!” I scream up at him, craning my neck to look into his eyes. I’ve never said those words aloud befo
re and am surprised at how easily they slip from my mouth.

  Brad and Todd are now both yanking on the waistband of my sweatpants, trying to force it over my hips, and Scott is reaching under my swimsuit. I flail my arms and legs like a possessed rag doll, trying to twist from their grasp. Todd grabs my crotch and I spit at him, but the saliva falls on my chest. They whoop with laughter.

  Brad steps forward, loosening his grip on my ankle, and feeling this, I yank back my leg and slam my tennis shoe into his balls. He crumples, shrieking, to the ground, his hands clamped between his legs. Half a second later, I’m sprinting down the hallway toward the exit.

  “You wounded, MacIntyre?” I hear Scott yell as I crash through the glass doors.

  I chained my ten-speed behind the school because the rack across from the gym entrance was full, and run to it and crouch by the front tire, fumbling with the combination lock, cursing the stupid tiny numbers on the dial and the setting sun. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I hear the boys tumble outside into the cool October air.

  “Where’d she go?”

  “This way!”

  The nightmare monster is chasing me, but I can’t break out of slow motion. Any second now, a hand will grab my ponytail and jerk my head back, and it will all be over.

  Miraculously, the footsteps run away from me, toward the front of the school. The lock finally clicks open and I fling the chain into the bushes and hop on, my muscles superhuman with fear as I pedal toward County Road 50. A single car is parked in the back lot, a navy Mustang sitting under a lamp pole. Light glances off its immaculate surface.

  I’m about to reach the intersection with County Road 600 when I hear the Mustang vroom to life, tires squealing over the pavement. They’re coming to get me. Fuck, fuck, fuck. There are bushes beside the road and I aim my bike for them, veering down a shallow ravine. My front wheel hits something and the bike pitches over, sending me skidding over sharp ground. I turn to see the Mustang’s high beams swerving onto County Road 50 from the school driveway, and crawl toward the bushes, dragging my bike behind me. Help me, God.

  As the Mustang bears down the road, AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” thuds from the speakers. The car skids to a halt at the intersection and I hear voices arguing under the music. The song clicks off and I hear someone say “Indian Meadow Lane”—my address—and then the music starts again. The car lurches forward and I lie under the bushes and watch the red eyes of the tail lights until they wink out and I’m alone in the dying light with the crickets and my heart pounding like a brick in my chest.

  It’s well after suppertime when I coast into the driveway. My bike chain derailed in the collision with the tree stump and I struggled with the greasy metal for an eternity before hooking it back over its ring.

  When I open the front door, Mother rushes over, her bifocals flashing in the entranceway light. The boys peer over at me from the table, where they’re eating bowls of pink ice cream.

  “And just where have you been, Missy?”

  Her voice is tight, as if someone were giving her a bear hug and crushing the air from her lungs. She hasn’t smiled at me again since that Sunday two weeks ago, despite my renewed efforts at prayer.

  She doesn’t notice my dirt-streaked clothes or the scrapes on my arms from where I slid over sticks and stones. She keeps her eyes locked on mine. Sandi Patti’s “Jesus, You’re Everything” plays over the intercom.

  “My bike . . . the road,” I stammer.

  “Your food’s cold,” she says, interrupting me. “I don’t see why there should be a separate eating schedule for every person in this household. When I say supper at six, I mean it.”

  I nod, and her expression softens a hint.

  “Make sure you get enough broccoli. We’re entering cold season and I don’t want you sick with your crazy swim hours.”

  She turns to walk back to her chair. In the kitchen sink, I scrub my hands with steel wool and dish soap, but the grease won’t come off. I sit down at my plate of fish sticks, Tater Tots and broccoli with black fingertips. David notices my shaking hands and gives me a concerned look. Next to him, Jerome scoops pink ice cream into his mouth, a smirk itching the corner of his lips. I pick up my knife and fork and glare at him. You are not my brother.

  Everything I know about being female I learned from a Kotex box.

  At Lafayette Christian, there was no sex ed class. In Home Ec at Harrison, we learned how to care for babies, but not how to make them. Mrs. Lawton had each of us girls carry a raw egg around school for two weeks to teach us that babies are fragile and demanding and we shouldn’t rush out and have one. Some of the girls drew faces on the shells and named them after their boyfriends: Jimmy Joe or Zeke or Bubba Johnson the Fifth. Most of the babies were dead by the end of the third day, their gutyolks smeared across hallway and bathroom floors. Mine lasted until the fourth, when it rolled off my desk in Algebra and cracked between my shoes.

  So I’ve had to self-educate regarding my female parts.

  I don’t have anyone to consult about these things. Even though my parents are both in the medical field, our family doesn’t discuss bodily functions beyond Mother scolding us for wasting toilet paper. (Two squares is plenty for a BM!) After Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge, they were ashamed of their nakedness, and so are we.

  In sixth grade, when the other girls started getting breast buds and staining their pants, I’d lock myself in the bathroom with my sisters’ Kotex box to read the pamphlet tucked between the stiff white tubes. From that piece of paper I learned my anatomy—urethra, vagina, rectum—in preparation for what the pamphlet called “my triumphant day of womanhood.” I practiced sticking tampons in, but felt like I was ripping up my insides when I tugged them out.

  Years passed, and I resigned myself to being a shapeless beanpole. So when I wake one morning with bloody underwear before swim practice, I actually do feel triumphant. I am normal after all.

  But my triumph fades a moment later.

  Now that I have my period, I can get pregnant. The unthinkable could happen. I get out of bed and open the bottom drawer of my desk. There, between the photographs of Lecka, polished seashells and my collection of plastic horses, I find the letter opener I got at a Christmas party gift swap a few years ago. The handle is engraved with Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” It’s metal with a pointed, knifelike tip, and it’s the closest thing I have to a weapon.

  I slide it into my pillowcase, put on my robe and go to the bathroom to clean myself off.

  There’s another episode with David in early November.

  I hear about it one afternoon while eavesdropping on him and Jerome. Our parents are at work, and I sit down at Mother’s vanity and press the “rec room” button on the intercom panel, then slide the black button to “listen.” They’re playing ping-pong; I hear the hollow ball slap against the table and their paddles.

  Things have gotten tense between David and me, and I’ve resorted to Mother’s tactic of spying over the intercom. I know it’s not right, but it’s the only way I have to know what’s happening in his life.

  Things started going downhill a couple of weeks ago when he came to one of my swim meets with our brother Dan, who’s studying business at Purdue. Afterward, in the crowded vestibule of McCutcheon High School, they walked over to congratulate me on winning third place in the fifty-yard breast event. Dan gave me a bear hug as David stood a few feet behind him.

  “Ooh, Julia, introduce us to your brother!” said Tammy Withers, a varsity swimmer and cheerleader who’d never before acknowledged my existence. She hooked her arm in mine and stared at Dan. Women often find my big brother hot. Other girls crowded around, giggling, and as Dan shook their hands and flashed his dimpled smile, I felt proud.

  “So, why didn’t you introduce me to your friends?” David asked after Dan drove us home; we were walking across the driveway toward the front door.

  His question panicked me.

 
; “You could have been like Dan and come over,” I shot back in an accusing voice. “It’s not my fault you’re such a loner. What were you waiting for, a special invitation?”

  He didn’t answer, and kept walking. I tried again. “Besides, everybody already knows you from school.”

  He turned to look me in the eye. “They don’t know the first thing about me,” he said, before slamming himself into the basement.

  “Shit!” I hear Jerome yell over the intercom. “Stop spinning the ball!”

  I pick up an amber necklace from Mother’s jewelry cabinet and examine the bugs trapped in the hardened sap.

  Did I ignore David on purpose? I was basking in the light of my handsome big brother and winning a race, and for a moment I wanted to be something other than the “black boys’ sister.” He could have interjected himself like Dan did; it’s not my fault he’s such a wallflower.

  We haven’t spoken much since that evening beyond “it’s your turn to fetch in the trash bins” or “Lecka needs food.” And now that Jerome’s back, I avoid going into the basement, and the boys avoid coming upstairs. Allegiances have once again shifted into white/black, upstairs/downstairs.

  “Sneed started it,” I hear David say over the bouncing ball.

  I put down the necklace and turn up the speaker volume.

  “How so?” Jerome asks.

  “He’s the one who started chanting K.K.K. when I walked in the room,” David says. “Then the whole class joined in, and Jones came at me with the welding iron.”

  I stare at the speaker, unbelieving.

  “How’s your arm?” Jerome asks.

  “There’s some pus . . . I think it might leave a scar.”

  “Those white fuckers touch you again, you let me know,” Jerome says. “Next time, they’ll get more than threats. I’ll break some bones!”

  The ping-pong ball slams hard against the table and they stop talking, as if they were concentrating all their anger on the game. I hear the garage door creak open—Mother—and rush to turn off the intercom and drop the necklace back into the cabinet before closing myself in my room.