by Tosca Lee
“Weed?” she asked.
“What?”
“Got any?”
“It’s winter,” I said, confused.
She rolled her eyes and turned away. The side of her head was shaved into a grid of lines, and the rest of her chin-length hair flopped the other way. I thought she would have looked like a really pretty boy without her black eyeliner. Or the five studs in each ear. Which I didn’t think made her any prettier as a girl, either.
But I liked her. She was feral and dangerous, and I imagined she even smelled like the outside world—a thought that should have repulsed me. Instead, I craved her friendship. Especially now that Jaclyn had been reassigned from the warehouse to the clothing and counseling outreach in downtown Ames two days a week. Though we’d never spent much time together, it stung each time she left the Enclave.
“Um, hey. Come look at this,” I said, getting up and waving for her to follow me.
She sighed and, after a beat, trailed me into the kitchen where I pulled the ever-present fresh jar of jam from the cupboard. Strawberry this time.
“There’s a camera in there,” I whispered.
Her brows raised. I had her interest at last.
“This is homemade here on the grounds,” I said, loudly enough for anyone listening to hear. “Want some?”
I gestured for her to answer.
“Uh. Sure,” she said. “Looks . . . scrumptious.”
“What’s your name?” I asked softly.
“Shae. What kind of crazy-ass place is this?” she hissed. “Don’t tell me there’s a camera in the bathroom, too? I just peed in there before you got here. Sickos.”
“Where’re you from?” I asked, clattering a knife from the drawer and locating the loaf of bread.
“San Diego,” she murmured, leaning back against the edge of the counter, arms crossed.
I had never met anyone from California—at least as far as I knew. No one here ever talked about where they lived before.
“Have you seen the beach?” I asked.
“Every day. We live on the beach.”
My brain partially exploded. “What’s it like?”
“Frickin’ awesome.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and began to scroll through a bunch of photos. My heart thumped in my chest as I leaned close enough to see her with her friends, obviously partying. Making stupid faces. Playing Frisbee with a dog, lying out in skimpy bikinis. I was shocked by them in a way I never would have been as a child, envious and in awe all at once. At the laughter on their faces, the color of the water.
It’s what I’ve always thought Heaven should look like—not gold but blue.
“Here,” she said, handing me the phone and reaching for the piece of bread.
I knew not to touch it.
I took it anyway.
I swiped slowly through picture after picture of blue water and frothy white surf. Past surfers, palm trees, and pristine skies, purple and orange sunsets and kids my own age sitting around firepits. I took in their clothes, peace signs, and makeup. The plastic cups in their hands, the sucker in one woman’s cheek, the sunglasses and tans.
When the beach pictures ran out, I kept going. Past images of some cute guy with a pierced eyebrow cuddling Shae and the two of them kissing. I wondered what it was like to kiss a guy like that—so openly and unafraid that you take pictures of yourself doing it.
I blinked when I realized he—not she—was wearing the black nail polish.
“That’s my boyfriend. Part of the reason my dad brought me here.” She rolled her eyes as she took back the phone.
“Why’s he wearing nail polish?” I asked, wondering what she possibly saw in him.
“Why not?”
It wasn’t my place to school a guest. Besides, I desperately wanted to see more.
“Do you have any music on there?” I whispered.
“Sure. Lots.”
“Got headphones?”
We grabbed our coats and slipped out the back of the kitchen, hands in our pockets as we crossed first to the Banquet Table for the requisite ice cream.
“Gross,” Shae muttered, sliding her bowl away. “What’s in that?”
“Molasses,” I said, helping myself to hers. After so many years, I no longer knew the difference.
Afterward, I made a show of taking her through the greenhouse before leading her to the barn with the rope swing, where we hid on the stairs to the loft, listening to music for a full twenty minutes with one earbud each, my heart hammering the entire time.
I wasn’t to be touched by her influences. I was to make her feel embraced and loved unconditionally, while condemning with silent judgment every unholy thing about her. But that day as I served her jam and the promise of acceptance, I felt like she fed something starving inside me. I was elated, alive in a way I hadn’t been in five years, since Mom’s death.
Every day for three weeks we sneaked off between morning service and my chores to listen to music and look at the pictures and videos on her phone. I made Shae recount the storylines of her favorite movies and TV shows, tell me all about California and her friends, who called her “Coco.” (“For Chanel,” Shae said. “My fave perfume.”) She talked about high school (“sooo much drama”), parties, and the boys she dated before her nail-polished boyfriend as we laughed at her friends’ goofy expressions and stole minutes with Paramore, Radiohead, and The Killers.
I replayed the songs in my head as I worked, emoted their lyrics in the shower, fell asleep to them at night, toying with guilt but unable to find the Devil in this music, which felt more alive than the songs we sang in service. What was wrong with me that I swore I heard God in those electric guitars and pining voices?
Shae had been taken in by other new friends as well, including the ever-pious Ara, and it became harder to find time with Shae alone as she and Ara went off to play with the little kids together or climb to the top of Percepta Hall. I was jealous and glad. Jealous at the way she brightened at their fake overtures of friendship and because I desperately needed to know what happened to Elena in The Vampire Diaries. Glad because the more she felt loved, the more she might want to stay.
When Shae and her father committed to the Select, I was ec-static. Because in her, I’d found a way to live a life more vibrant than my own from the safety of the Enclave. In—but not of—the world. Even without her phone, which I knew she wouldn’t be allowed to keep, Shae had enough stories, songs, and memories to sustain me until the coming apocalypse.
I even imagined that a part of her fearlessness had transferred onto me.
I watched the bins of their things get carried off to the storehouse to be sold for the benefit of the Enclave or given away at the New Earth shelter in town. But I didn’t see Shae again for weeks. When I asked, I was told she’d gone into intense study and contemplation to purify herself from the life she had now forsaken.
The next time I saw her, the rows of her earrings—like the eyeliner I once watched her draw on with rapt fascination—were gone, the gridlines in her hair grown out and covered by a straight middle part.
And I could already tell that a part of her had gone with them.
Two days later, I ended up in Penitence for all the filth I had eagerly ingested during my time with Shae, who had reported me in her initial reckoning.
I emerged to new strictures put in place for my benefit—including only supervised access to guests. No more temptations from the tainted world . . . no more ice cream or last summer’s jam from our holy garden.
Shae and I rarely spoke after that.
• • •
THE DAY BEFORE my seventeenth birthday, I watched Shae cross the parking lot toward the van, a flat of seedlings for the farmers’ market in her arms. Jealousy spiked in my gut. Ever since I’d finished high school curriculum the year before, I’d done everything I could to prove myself worthy of working the market or clothing outreach with Jaclyn, who ran it now.
But I had been deemed “too vulnerable” for p
lacement in the outside world even as Shae—not even here two years—had been allowed to leave every Saturday now for a month.
That afternoon, Shae disappeared into the sweaty Ames crowd with a hundred dollars from the money box.
Now I understood why she had been so perfect since her conversion. She’d never meant to stay but had waited all these months for an opportunity to escape.
Which was also why she’d never been able to associate with me, the troublemaker she had implicated in the process.
I thought I hated her. At the very least, I was disappointed. But at night, as I lay in bed, I wondered if she was back in San Diego in the arms of her nail-polished boyfriend. Or, barring that, in her bikini.
CHAPTER FIVE
* * *
So this is “Hell”: an entire apartment over Julie’s second garage. A bigger bed than I’ve ever seen in my life with a thick white comforter and three fluffy pillows. A dresser with more drawers than I have clothes for and a bookcase filled with novels. A bathroom with a real toilet, a mirror that spans the entire wall over the sink, and a soft loopy rug in front of a bathtub shower. A TV the size of a window sits across the living room from the couch, and the little kitchen has its own set of plates, glasses, and silverware—as well as a small refrigerator that Julie’s busy stocking with plastic bottles of water.
“Lucky,” Lauren scowled when we arrived.
There was that word again. But this time, I agreed. I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the main house, which they showed me first. I thought Julie’s old house in Chicago was nice, but her house here is bigger than the barrow I shared with nineteen other girls. It also has two more garages attached to it in addition to the one beneath my apartment, where an RV and boat are parked.
“There’s soap and shampoo and a toothbrush and all that in the bathroom. I’ll pick up some juice and snacks for you tomorrow,” Julie says, straightening.
“Mom, why can’t I have the carriage house?” Lauren says. “Wynter can have my room.”
“Because she’s older than you and needs her privacy.”
“I need privacy,” Lauren mutters.
“Where are the boys?” I ask, not having seen a trace of them since we arrived.
Julie sighs. “Caden lives with his fiancée in New Mexico. Stefan’s at college in Columbus, and Brendan chose to stay with his dad,” she says with a sad smile.
I join them in the house for Chinese food Lauren’s dad picked up on the way home from work—my second restaurant meal of the day. There’s fried meat for everyone, vegetables for me. And fortune cookies.
Ken, Lauren, and Julie laugh as they scramble them on the table.
I like Ken. He kissed Julie first thing when he walked inside and there are laugh lines around his eyes. He doesn’t seem concerned about the fact that he married a divorced woman or that he’s a doctor tampering with divine will.
Most important, he wears his shirtsleeves all the way down, buttoned around his wrists.
“Wynter picks first,” Ken says.
I hesitate.
“Um,” Julie says, studying me. “Maybe we should save these for later.” She starts to gather them up, but I reach for the closest one.
“I want this one,” I say.
“All right! No whammies!” Ken snatches the farthest one from him as Lauren and Julie dive for the last two. They crack them down on the table, shattering the cookie, and then open the plastic, laughing.
“ ‘You are stronger than you know,’ ” Lauren reads. “Whatevs.”
“ ‘Laughter is the best medicine,’ ” Ken reads. “That is true.”
I peel open the plastic, break open the cookie, and search for the little piece of paper. But there isn’t one. I glance up, puzzled.
“Looks like you get to create your own destiny,” Ken says, getting up to clear the dishes. I’ve never seen a man do this. He waves us off.
“You girls go fire up a movie,” he says. “Unless Wynter’s tired.”
I beg off and thank them for dinner. For everything.
Back in the carriage house, I wander through the apartment. Study the mismatched soaps and little bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and other toiletries in the drawer. Read their tiny directions.
Out in the kitchenette, I touch the dishes on the open shelves. Eight plates. Six glasses. Four mugs. I straighten the side table so it’s even with the counter and then kneel down in front of the bookshelf to peruse the shelves.
Big Little Lies. Hex. The Ghost Mine. 16th Seduction. The Lost City of the Monkey God. They’re the kind of stories that would never have been permitted in the Enclave, where we were only allowed a handful of inspired classics and then only to satisfy the state requirement. I study the worn spines, settle on The Art of Racing in the Rain.
I climb into bed with the book and, seeing the remote on the nightstand, finally locate the button that turns on the TV.
I click past alien movies, crime dramas, and some show about arguing wives. I’m appalled, fascinated, transfixed. I’m trying to find more on the family that fell from the parking garage until a commercial with a girl Truly’s age hits me with a jolt and sends Magnus’s voice booming through my head. Blasting me for abandoning her, eating the unnatural food of the world, and practicing divination by opening a stale packaged cookie.
Shut up. I clench my fists over my eyes. Shut up. Shut up!
I click until I find the Disney Channel, which I used to love. Fall asleep to Finding Nemo.
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
The Sabbath after Shae disappeared, service began with a silent parade of headlines from around the world on the screen above the apse.
INFECTIOUS DISEASE ON THE RISE . . .
GUNMAN KILLS 13 . . . GUNMAN KILLS 27 . . . KILLS 56 . . . KILLS HUNDREDS . . .
AVALANCHES, HURRICANES, EARTHQUAKES, LANDSLIDES . . . THOUSANDS DEAD . . .
FLOODING KILLS HUNDREDS . . .
DROUGHT KILLS THOUSANDS . . .
ETHNIC CLEANSING, STARVING REFUGEES . . .
CHILD PORNOGRAPHY RINGS, HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN MISSING . . .
THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR . . .
The Select watched with escalating gasps and cries.
When Magnus took the pulpit, he stared out at us in silence.
“Have I not told you what is to come?” he said quietly at last.
Murmurs of agreement hummed around me.
“Did I not say: not in an age, but in this age? I tell you today: it is here. This”—he pointed to the screen—“is the beginning of the end. It is happening even now. Even as I speak, the Deceiver lays waste to a humanity drunk on its own cesspool of immorality! The police cannot stop it. World leaders cannot stop it. And God will not stop it!”
Shouts of “Amen!” issued from the pews behind me.
“And yet! And yet . . . some of you wonder. Why do we not aid the sick and dying? Why not comfort those about to perish as the Samaritan comforted the man beaten by thieves? Why?” He gestured to the screen behind him. “Because this world cannot be saved. Because God hates this world and therefore this world must perish. Do I say this? No. I do not say this. God says this! Anyone who asks, ‘What are we to do for the world?’ questions the Almighty One, who says, ‘I will lay waste on that coming day because I am righteous!’ So it was spoken to me.”
Shouts and clapping. Behind me, someone launched into a prayer so rapid it sounded like one long stutter.
He spread his hands and the chapel fell silent once more. “Brethren. Beloved. Even so, God is merciful. He has revealed He will call more to us. And we will welcome them. Their souls will be crowns on our heads. We do not know how many will arrive, but I tell you in that last day they will come as rats fleeing a flood! And I tell you something else.” He dropped his head, blew out a long breath. “Not everyone here will see that glorious day. Because the Lord has revealed deception among you.”
Somewhere behind me a woman cried out.
His shoulders sagged
. “It’s true. I’ve seen it. Now, you might be saying, ‘But I’ve been accepted! I’m part of the family!’ My friends, it’s one thing to be accepted by this body, which is human and can be deceived. It’s another to make yourself acceptable to the One who will broker no lies. What you have hidden in the darkness of your heart—you think no one knows? The Lord knows! And because He knows . . . I know. He has already spoken the names.”
A pall fell over the sanctuary as he stalked toward the pews and up the center aisle. I felt, more than saw, those around me shrink back as he passed . . .
Until his eyes fastened on me.
I dropped my gaze, heat springing to my face as a chill poured down my spine. Because even though I had been outwardly perfect, I also knew I had become two people: the penitent shunned for her failure with Shae and vindicated by her escape. Who clung to stories about TV vampires and sang rock songs in secret. A member of the Select longing for the world. A believer subsisting on her sin.
Kestral and a man with a guitar ascended the dais and started to sing. Only when those around me finally joined in did I dare look up, heart thudding in my chest so loud I was afraid the girl sitting next to me could hear it.
• • •
EVERY MORNING FOR the next week, I woke up wondering if I would be summoned before the Elders and told I was no longer worthy. Worse, I knew they would be right. I repented a hundred times in those seven days, terrified of being cast out to my own destruction, eternally separated from God and the only family I had left.
The following Sabbath, when the Select were summoned to the yard after morning service, I could barely breathe. I’d never seen a casting out. How would it happen? Would Magnus call out my name? Would the Guardians drag me from the assembly?
My knees turned to water at the sight of a figure being escorted from Percepta Hall: Thomas, one of the boys from the first family I had welcomed to the guesthouse, now in his twenties. The Elders—including Shae’s father, who had joined their ranks last winter—stood near the front as Magnus read the words accusing Thomas of disobedience and theft.