Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  “Why do you hate him?” he asks softly. He pulls me sideways into his warmth, and I put my head on his shoulder, inhaling his brothy musk.

  “He . . . he does things to me.”

  The words fall easily from my mouth, and I’m glad to have them gone. There. It’s no longer a dirty little secret; someone else knows. Maybe Scott will know what to do.

  “What kind of things?” he asks, still caressing my back.

  “He picks the lock on my door at night and he . . . he . . .” I stop because these are things I cannot pronounce, and bury my face in his neck.

  “Well, he’s not your real brother.”

  True. But then neither is David. I start to sob.

  Scott drapes his arms around me, rocks me back and forth like a monstrous baby.

  “Shhh, it’s okay,” he says. His voice has thickened, deepened. “It doesn’t matter. Everything’s fine. I’m right here.”

  Hearing these words, a peace descends on me and I relax in his grip. Scott will protect me from Jerome and Brad and everything else. I wipe my nose and smile. Everything’s fine.

  Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You” floats down the hall. It’s the song I practice kissing the mirror to, the most romantic song ever, and I’m listening to it with Scott.

  Scott scoots back on the bed, lifts my head from his shoulder and guides it toward his lap. I close my eyes. Yes, I would like to lay my head down for a spell and rest. But my cheek doesn’t fall against red satin, it falls against something warm and hard and flesh. I open my eyes, and in a boozy blur, see his penis jutting from his shorts. He grabs it by the root.

  “Lick it,” he says in his thick voice, pressing my head toward it.

  I’ve heard girls giggle about blow jobs at school; it’s something a boyfriend requires of you.

  I stare at Scott’s penis. There’s a pearl balanced on the tan tip. It smells like liverwurst.

  “Like a lollipop,” he’s begging now, breathing hard. He wags the penis with his hand to get my attention.

  I close my eyes and stick out my tongue and it touches the side of it.

  “Open your mouth,” Scott says, and I do. He puts it between my lips and grabs my hair and pulls my head up and down on it. A moment later he groans and something slimy spurts into my mouth that tastes like pool water. Scott collapses onto his back on the mattress and I spit the slime onto my parents’ white bedspread and roll onto my back beside him. We lay together in silence, not touching, and my head swirls with booze and what I’ve done. It was sinful, yes, but necessary. I need Scott to be my boyfriend.

  Hours later, I wake alone and drag myself to my room. My stomach is in turmoil, but I’m elated. Now that I have a boyfriend, everything will change.

  Mother got angry, and David got in trouble.

  Seems he was always doing something to set her off: not paying attention, not eating all his food, not coming when she called.

  I’d do the same things, but it was David she’d punish, digging her nails into his arm or whacking his butt with the handle of a toilet plunger.

  One time we played hospital, washing our stuffed animals in the bathtub and wrapping them in gauze bandages. We were playing doctor and nurse, like our parents. Mother was not flattered. She tossed our patients into the trash, sent me to my room, and spanked David. It was a typical scenario.

  In a photograph from the time, David is posed stiffly against a wall in a blue suit jacket, a white turtleneck, and plaid pants—Sunday clothes. There is no date on the back of the picture, but he looks about six or seven. He winces up at the camera, his eyes swollen with tears, his small hand clutching tissue, patently miserable. He wore that expression a lot in those days.

  After Mother punished him, he’d stick his fingers in his mouth to stifle the sobs and gaze at me with those soulful brown eyes. At me, his twin sister. Wanting an explanation for life’s cruel vagaries. I looked away, having convinced myself that Mother knew something about him I didn’t, that he needed discipline to keep him from growing into a bad person.

  It was years before I knew better.

  CHAPTER 6

  VIRGINITY

  My heart’s chugging like a runaway train when I walk into the cafeteria on Monday. There’s Scott, sitting at the jock table, contorting in his chair as he says something that has everyone spasmatic with laughter. I stop walking and stare. Is he telling them what I did? I don’t want to be one of those girls that guys make up nicknames for.

  Mary and Elaine yell to me from the snack bar. I phoned them both on Saturday, impatient to share the news. I told them Scott kissed me, and it was beautiful and romantic and amazing. But it’s a lie; he never did kiss me, not even after he dirtied my mouth.

  “So, did he call you?” Elaine asks when I slip into line beside them. On the phone she called Scott a phony who flirts with all the girls, and said that no one takes him seriously because he’s a half-breed.

  “He’s like one of those miniature horses you country folk keep chained in your yards,” she’d said. “Amusing, but nothing you’d want to ride.”

  I almost hung up on her.

  “Did he or didn’t he?” she now insists, flipping her long red hair over her shoulders.

  “I was gone most of the day,” I lie. “He probably tried but . . .”

  “Here he comes,” Mary says, looking over my shoulder. I turn and see Scott strutting over in his varsity football jacket, a wide smile parting his face.

  “Damn Sam! Got me all Charlie’s Angels here at once,” he yells, spreading his arms.

  “What a dork,” I hear Elaine mutter behind me.

  He stops a few inches from my face. “So what’s up?”

  The corners of his almond-shaped eyes tilt upward when he grins, and his breath smells like the soy burger he ate for lunch.

  “Not much,” I shrug.

  “Wanna go somewhere and talk?”

  He cocks his head toward the dim hallway to the left of the snack bar, which ends in a glass doorway. Outside, gray sky hangs over dead fields.

  I shrug again and follow him down the hall, wishing I had a piece of gum to freshen my breath. Halfway to the glass door, he stops and faces me.

  “Didn’t think I’d talk to you today, did you?” he asks.

  I look at him, puzzled.

  “Of course I did,” I say. “I’m your girlfriend.”

  “My what?” He spits out the question, incredulous.

  “I mean . . . after . . . the . . . bedroom,” I stutter, as I sometimes do when I’m nervous. A boy sprints past us out the door, and a blast of arctic wind rips over us. I shiver and Scott starts to laugh, slapping his knees with his hands.

  “You think that just because you . . . we’re going out?”

  I can feel my pulse throb in my temples, and stare at him in disbelief. I did that to him for nothing? Tears sting my eyes, and I start to walk away from him.

  “Hold on!” he says, grabbing my arm and spinning me around.

  “I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t want you, dummy,” he says, pressing me against the cold metal of a locker. I stare at the collar of his pink Izod, which is starched straight up, preppy style. He leans into me, one hand resting on the locker behind me, the other lifting my chin. His lips are full and soft on mine, and his tongue swishes into my mouth, thick and wet and salty. I pull my head away; I don’t know what to do with a tongue and don’t much like it.

  Scott frowns.

  “You sure could use some practice kissing,” he says, before smashing his mouth onto mine.

  Mother’s waiting for us after school. Swim practice was canceled today, so I rode the bus home with the boys.

  “What in God’s good name happened here?” she demands when we walk through the back door.

  They got home late last night, after we’d gone to bed. I heard them tiptoe down the hallway and prayed they wouldn’t notice their bedspread. I scrubbed it with soap and a nailbrush Saturday morning, but the faint yellow stain w
ould not come out.

  “What in God’s name happened in this house?” she repeats, as we stand there in our winter coats and snow-crusted shoes, our backpacks still curved against us.

  Mother ticks off a list of things she’s discovered: spit tobacco on her rubber plant, beer cans under the sofa, her Aztec calendar in the trash!

  On Saturday, Jerome vacuumed the great room and put the spoiled food back into the refrigerator before returning to bed, complaining of a headache. On Sunday, he slept right through church TV.

  David and I now turn to glare at him, and he turns his bloodshot eyes to the ground.

  “Someone’s going to pay for this, or you all are,” Mother says before pounding up the stairs and slamming the basement door.

  “Well, what are you going to do?” David asks Jerome after she’s gone. “Get us all in trouble?”

  Jerome walks to the boys’ room and slams the door, and David and I take off our coats and sit on the green cot next to the ping-pong table and listen to Mother bang pots and pans upstairs and Jerome bang drawers downstairs.

  A few minutes later, Jerome emerges from the bedroom, still wearing his coat and carrying a duffel bag. He throws open the back door without a word and marches across the field as snow swirls around him. When he disappears behind the tree line, David stands and shuts the door.

  “Guess that takes care of that,” I say, turning to walk upstairs.

  I pause at the bottom of the staircase and look back at David, who’s still peering out the window into the frozen afternoon.

  “He brought this on himself, you know,” I say.

  He doesn’t respond. Mother’s in the kitchen, busy at the stove.

  “Keep that door closed,” she says. “You’re letting a draft in.”

  At supper, I blame everything on Jerome.

  “David and I stayed in our rooms the whole time,” I say. “We didn’t want any part of it.”

  Dad listens grimly, his steel-blue eyes jostling from me to David, who looks at his tuna and potato chip casserole and says nothing.

  “Jerome is officially persona non grata in this household,” he says after I finish. “I’m changing the alarm code tonight, and I don’t want either of you to let him inside. He’s no longer welcome here. Understood?”

  “Understood,” I say, picking up my milk glass. Finally, I can sleep in peace.

  David is silent.

  “David?” Father says.

  He nods, but doesn’t look up.

  “Heavenly Father,” Dad prays after he’s done reading the Bible, “protect this household from Jerome. Chastise him, dear God, and show him the error of his ways.”

  But Jerome doesn’t stay away. On Thanksgiving Eve, I’m in my bedroom racking my brain over an algebra problem when there’s a knock on my window. I look up to see a man crouched in a ski mask and am about to scream when I recognize Jerome’s filthy orange anorak.

  He motions for me to open the window, and I glance toward my closed door. David and Mother are in the great room watching television and Dad’s at the hospital. I forgot to close the venetian blinds at dusk, something I started doing last summer after I caught Jerome peering through the glass one night while I changed into my pajamas. He climbed the rose trellis to the broad window ledge, same as tonight.

  Snow sparkles in the floodlights attached to the roof and powders his dirty jacket. He hugs his arms to his chest and shivers; he’s not wearing gloves.

  We didn’t see him at school this past week, but David found out where he was staying and called to tell him he wasn’t allowed home. So why did he come back? Why doesn’t he leave me alone?

  No way I’m going to invite him into my bedroom after he forced his way in so many times before. I look back down at the squiggled rows of quadratic equations in my algebra book. I’m failing the class and the final’s next week.

  Jerome raps his knuckles on the window again, and I stand without looking at him and walk into the great room. They’re watching Little House on the Prairie, the only show Mother lets us watch besides The Waltons and National Geographic. Wholesome TV, she calls it. Good family values. I pull up a chair beside David, but don’t tell him what happened. He’d want to let Jerome in.

  “Jerome’s in the pole barn,” David tells me the next morning, on our way to Thanksgiving service.

  We’re sitting in the back of the van as Mother drives herky-jerky past empty fields and gusts of wind shove us toward the rims of dirty snow lining the road. Hymns blare over the van speakers and David leans forward so I can hear him.

  “He came to the window last night, but I told him I didn’t want trouble with Dad,” he says. “I gave him a blanket but couldn’t get him food because the motion detectors were on.”

  The internal alarm’s red lights zigzag the great room and rec room; normally we use it only when there’s a breakout at the county jail. Now we use it to guard against a break-in by Jerome, a little late.

  Mother stomps on the brakes at a yellow light, and the van’s rear end skitters sideways into the next lane before she straightens it.

  “Why didn’t you tell him to leave?” I ask David. In the front of Hippensteel Funeral Home, a large mechanical Santa waves to passing cars, its arm yanking right for a beat, then left.

  “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” David says. “Besides, he’s our brother, our responsibility.”

  “Not mine,” I say.

  They put the same stupid Santa on that corner every year.

  “Not your what?” David asks.

  “Not my responsibility,” I say. “He’s a problem, and I wish he’d just stay away.”

  “I don’t know why you hate him so much,” David says loudly, falling back against his seat. “What’d he ever do to you?”

  His outburst causes Mother to turn down the hymns.

  “You kids bring your study Bibles?” she asks, looking into the rearview mirror.

  We both hold up our Bibles.

  “Good,” she says, cranking up the hymns.

  We have Young Calvinists before church, and Mother has Adult Bible Study.

  Five of us Young Calvinists gather in a low-ceilinged room on the second floor of the church building, David, me, Rick Hoolsema, and a couple of kids from Lafayette Christian. As we walk in, I nod at Rick, who broke things off with me after our closet kiss, saying “it just didn’t feel right.”

  We meet here twice a month, shoving the warped ping-pong table against a wall and pushing the sagging, donated couches into a circle.

  Reverend Dkystra bustles in, looking reduced without his billowing black robe, and writes the meeting’s topic on a whiteboard as we take turns with a carafe, pouring hot water into Styrofoam cups, then stirring in packets of powdered chocolate.

  THE IMPURITY OF ALL MEN, he writes in block letters, underlining IMPURITY three times. David and I exchange a glance as we stir our chocolate: sex is Reverend Dykstra’s favorite topic. He thinks teenagers are obsessed with it, that our minds are filthy-full of it, and it’s all he talks about when he’s got us alone in this room.

  “Adolescence is a difficult age,” he says once we’re all seated. “Your body is changing, your hormones are raging, and you become curious about sexual things.”

  In the parking lot below, a car engine turns, wheezing and straining, before falling silent again. Reverend Dykstra, standing before us in a blue suit, scans the room dramatically.

  “But as Christian young people, you need to ask yourself the following question: Can you do the hanky-panky on Saturday night and shake it all around, and still call yourself a child of God come Sunday morning?”

  His question booms off the walls, which we painted pea green last summer to symbolize our budding Christian identity. Everyone stops sipping their chocolate and is seized by an abrupt fascination with the frayed purple carpet.

  As usual, Reverend Dyktsra is trying to be cool by using what he thinks of as teenage slang. I sneak a look across the circle at David, whose eyes a
re shining with mirth. Good. He’s not sore at me over Jerome.

  As Reverend Dykstra rails against the sins of the flesh, I think about the promise I made Scott last Friday during lunch. We were in a stall in the basement girls’ bathroom, practicing kissing, and he kept trying to put his hand down my jeans, and I kept shoving it away. He was getting peeved.

  “I won’t be your boyfriend unless we do it,” he said, his hard-on pressed against my leg. “I’ll find someone else. There are lots of fish in the sea.”

  We’d spent the final fifteen minutes of every lunch hour last week locked in that stall, hoping no one would walk in as we wrestled in silence, Scott trying to stick his hands different places and me slapping them away. I wanted to take it slow, so our first time would be special, so it would be making love, not just sex.

  Scott scoffed when I told him this.

  “Sex is sex,” he said. He narrowed his eyes. “Besides, I didn’t think this would be such a big deal for you, considering . . .”

  I grabbed his head and stuffed my tongue in his mouth to shut him up.

  “Fine, I’ll do it,” I said after coming up for air.

  Reverend Dkystra pauses to drink from his coffee mug and his sudden silence makes me lift my head. The other Young Calvinists are still staring at the ground with hot chocolate going cold in their hands, but David’s staring at me.

  “Stop spacing,” he mouths when Reverend Dykstra turns to set his coffee mug on the ping-pong table. He clears his throat before continuing in his preacher voice.

  “And you may think that playing with yourself is a fine substitute for carnal knowledge, but don’t be fooled,” he says, pounding the top of the bookcase beside him with the side of his fist. “You must have unholy thoughts to masturbate! You must sin!”

  He pauses weightily. “I’m here to tell you today that you can’t jack off with Jesus!” He pounds the bookcase to emphasize each word, unaware of the obscene gesture he’s making. You. Can’t. Jack. Off. With. Jesus.

  Around me, there’s weight-shifting and throat-clearing, and I slap a hand over my mouth and pretend to cough, my eyes burning with stifled laughter. David’s also got a hand over his mouth, but I look away before my eyes meet his, lest we both burst.