During the dark period Anna’s vanity had been repressed. But it has, oddly enough, awakened with her faith. She finds she is proud again of her long blonde hair. Of her figure, even. Tall, and willowy, a bit wide in the hips, but still slender enough to be acceptable even by the brutal standards of her peers at school. She is now beginning to be complimented again, not by boys her own age, but by older ones, or friends of her parents.
Anna is concerned. She knows it is a weakness, that it is wrong to lap up such words as evidence of her worth rather than as something unearned, something that He has bestowed upon her. She reminds herself that any beauty she has is by the grace of God.
Anna decides to take action. She rummages in drawers until she finds a pair of kitchen shears. She locks herself in the bathroom. The mirror. Now she can look into it without shame, without fear. Since she found Him there is nothing to fear, after all. Anna pulls her hair back from her face with her left hand. Her right hand holds the scissors. She begins cutting. The long blonde strands fall into the sink, onto the floor. She keeps going. With each slice of the scissors she feels heavier, more weighty, more serious. Her face emerges from the cloud of hair, tufts sticking up at her forehead, around her ears. She is almost completely shorn. She can see her skull. A new person. A bubble of joy in her heart, a smile on her lips. Truly, she is now ready.
Her mother shrieks when she emerges from the bathroom. “What have you done! My beautiful, beautiful girl!”
“Don’t cry, Mom,” Anna says, but the tears still pour down her mother’s cheeks. “It’s for Him,” putting her hand on her mother’s arm. “I need to be fully committed.”
“Oh, Anna!” her mother asks. “Don’t talk about commitment. We were happy that you weren’t depressed anymore, but we were hoping . . .”
“What were you hoping?” Anna asks. She takes her hand off her mother’s arm.
“That this was just a phase,” her mother says.
“Please, Mom. I deserve more respect than that,” Anna says.
Inwardly, though, Anna is pleased by the reaction. She goes back to look in the mirror. Her exposed face and neck, making her cheekbones more prominent, her eyes unnaturally large. “What big eyes you have, my dear,” she says into the mirror and laughs. She is happy with what she’s done.
But outside her home her act doesn’t have the effect Anna had hoped for. To Lars, none of this matters. She is disappointed, wanting her gesture to be appreciated. Anna doesn’t think he even notices her shorn head despite the amused and aghast reactions of others.
Students stare in the school halls, but in math class, John Martin reaches over and strokes her bare head. “Like Nefertiti,” he says, almost in awe. Despite herself, Anna is pleased. The flesh still so weak.
18
LARS AND ANNA ARE IN the science hallway at school, outside the boys’ bathroom, their usual place to touch base between classes. They clasp hands briefly, their secret handshake. Then enemies appear. They are younger, but larger. They don’t yet have mastery of their hands or feet. Like puppies, their limbs in a state of uncontrol.
“Look who’s here. The homo and the Jesus freak.”
“How weird can you get? Aren’t you supposed to hate each other?”
“Who converted who? Did he teach you to love Jesus? Did you teach him to love boys?”
Here they can say such things and get away with it. What a difference fifty miles makes. In San Francisco they’d be toast. But Sunnyvale—Sunnyvale is not San Francisco. Still, Lars warns Anna not to fool herself. Their kind—by which he means End-of-Dayers—would be shunned up there, too. Their kind.
Naturally, the boys are largely focused on Lars. People are still tentative about Anna. Her shorn head, black clothes, scrubbed face—is this social suicide? Or does it mask some new height of coolness? But Lars is an easy target. He is pinned to the lockers, his backpack torn from his thin shoulders and flung down the hall. Anna is left outside a wall of burly backs. She pushes her way through. A hand gropes her right breast, moves lower to her belly, tries to go farther, but she gives a sharp twist to her hips and loses it. Then she finds herself being forced, face-first, toward Lars. Her body pressed against his, but because Anna is so much taller, she can feel his eyelids fluttering against her lips.
“Give the homo a kiss,” says one of the boys. “You know he wants it.”
“Yeah, and then he can do something for you. Given that he only reaches your crotch anyway.”
They’re still laughing at their wit when Anna kicks backwards, hard, with her right foot. She makes contact and hears a surprised yelp. Then she manages to turn around. She’s facing four, no five, of them, all taller than Anna, their arms a tangle reaching out to grab, restrain, but it’s her left knee this time that shoots up and catches someone in the thigh. A nice, bruising blow. Another yelp. She swings her leg and tries again, hitting softer matter this time. A screech of real pain and an expletive. “Bitch,” and a hand is around her face, the fingers going too near her mouth so she bites down, hard. A crowd has gathered, but no one is helping. Lars is now free, everyone is concentrating on Anna, hands everywhere, grabbing her breasts, neck, buttocks. With enormous effort Anna wrenches herself away and breaks through the circle of onlookers, pulling Lars along with her.
Anna hurries him to the classroom she’d left five minutes earlier. The chemistry lab. Turns the handle. Pushes the door. Makes sure Lars makes it in behind her. Slams the door hard after him. If something fleshy got caught between the door and doorframe, if Anna hears, as she thinks she does, a cry of surprised pain, so much the better.
Lars and Anna lean their backs against the door. The door handle moves; they feel the strength of those on the other side. Both of them breathing hard, Lars even panting.
Then an emphatic “Well?” Anna looks up. At the front of the room sits Ms. Thadeous, the chemistry teacher, at her desk, her pen poised above a stack of papers.
Ms. Thadeous says nothing as she walks over to Lars and Anna. She gestures them aside, opens the door, and faces the boys there. One look at her face and they melt away. Ms. Thadeous closes the door. Then walks back to her desk and sits down once more, picks up her pen. But she keeps her eyes on Lars and Anna.
“Again?” she asks. Her voice is not sympathetic, but neither is it hostile.
Lars nods, his usual guarded self in public, revealing nothing.
“What do you mean again?” Anna asks. She still feels the hands on her breasts, buttocks. Violated.
“Don’t be an imbecile. It doesn’t suit you,” Ms. Thadeous says. She doesn’t sound like the boring and obviously bored teacher who just finished lecturing Anna’s class on absolute zero less than ten minutes ago. Her voice is sharp, her face alert.
“You two have had quite a month,” she says. “Not that you haven’t asked for it. You and your Children’s Crusade.” Ms. Thadeous is dressed simply, in a plain white blouse and black trousers. No jewelry, not even a wedding ring. Carefully applied makeup. Anna estimates her age to be early thirties. A little heavy around the waist but not unattractive. Petite frame. Perfect, ramrod posture.
Anna dismisses her and turns to Lars. A raised bruise is starting to appear on his right arm, below his short shirtsleeve.
Ms. Thadeous sees it, too. “Hold on,” she says, and goes to the large red-and-white first-aid kit hanging on the wall behind her desk. She brings over an ice pack, cracks it, and places it on Lars’s arm. She is not particularly gentle. Lars winces.
“You two up to your usual tricks?” she asks as she returns to her desk.
Anna has never heard Ms. Thadeous talk like this before. Everyone calls her Ms. Tedious. Today she seems different. Meaner. More interesting.
“You have no one but yourselves to blame,” she says. “People like you need to keep low profiles. Wait out the high school years. Don’t expose yourself until after graduation. Then move to Col
orado Springs. Grant’s Pass. Find yourself a nice, isolated tract of land, and haul in the double-wide trailers. Call it a religious community. Break bread with your own kind. Make sure to identify and kick out the sexual predators before the Feds move in.”
Lars takes the ice pack off his arm. He is clearly searching for the right thing to say. “We’re not weirdos,” is all he can come up with. Anna is surprised at how vulnerable he sounds. “And we have no intention of hiding the light of our faith in Grant’s Pass.”
“The light of your faith,” Ms. Thadeous repeats. She is almost jeering.
“Why didn’t you help?” Anna asks Ms. Thadeous. “You must have heard us being attacked.”
“I don’t believe in helping those who ask to be victimized,” Ms. Thadeous says. She picks up her pen, draws a hard line across an equation on the paper in front of her, then puts it down again. “If you and Lars would cooperate when the police come, that would be one thing. We can get the boys who are doing these things under the hate crime law. Penal Code 422.6. God, I’ve signed enough police reports with that number on it! You’ve got double cause: your religious beliefs, and Lars’s sexual orientation.” Lars looks up, startled, but Ms. Thadeous continues. “But no. You have to turn the other cheek. And you’ve muddied the moral waters considerably. By continuing to engage in inappropriate activities on school property, despite numerous warnings.”
She pauses for breath. “If you would just make a statement to the police . . .?”
Lars shakes his head vehemently. “No. Out of the question.” Anna is relieved to see that the bruise on his arm is the only sign of injury. They’ve had days she needed three, four ice packs, half a tube of antibiotic cream, and the largest adhesive bandages Anna could find.
Ms. Thadeous sighs. She randomly starts shuffling the papers on her desk. Anna recognizes her handwriting on one of them. Ms. Thadeous has already graded it. Even upside down Anna can see the big red D, and the scribbled question mark followed by an exclamation point. All her teachers are having the same reaction. Let them. His will be done.
“It’s probably safe now,” she says. “Go to your next class, both of you. I’ll write you late passes.”
“I have algebra,” says Lars. “And Anna has gym.” He stops, and looks at her. Anna knows that look. It’s his let’s-use-our-moral-high-ground-to-get-something-we-want look. It’s a more calculated version of what Lars’s parents do when they put on their professional clothes and enter the working world. It’s his us-against-them-and-all’s-fair attitude. Not his most admirable quality. But one of his more useful ones. “But,” he continues, seemingly addressing Anna. “It’s not a big deal if we’re a little late. Nor would it be a disaster if we missed the whole period.” He doesn’t look at Ms. Thadeous when he says this.
Neither does she look at him or speak, but just buries herself in the papers again. Yet some communication passes in the silence and Lars smiles for the first time since the fight. “Thank you,” he says, and he’s smart enough to say it with humility and gratitude that Anna knows he doesn’t feel. Lars is neither a particularly humble nor grateful person, Anna has learned. He is accepting Ms. Thadeous’s gift as something he’s owed. “We’ll sit over here in the corner,” he says. “We won’t bother you.”
Previously, in Anna’s now-vanished life, the chemistry lab was one of her favorite places in the world. Anna loved the long countertops, the shiny mysterious bottles filled with multicolored liquids, the careful measuring and pouring of substances from one container to another. The possibilities of creation.
“Anna,” Ms. Thadeous says, startling her.
“Yes?”
“What exactly do your parents think of all this?”
“All what?” Anna asks, cautiously.
Ms. Thadeous gives her a look.
“They let me be,” Anna says, with a touch of belligerence. Lars smiles at the floor.
“Fools,” Ms. Thadeous says. “I just don’t get it. An intelligent girl like you.”
Anna quotes Proverbs 14:10. “The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.” She smiles at Ms. Thadeous.
Surprisingly, Ms. Thadeous has a reply. “And the simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going,” she says. “Proverbs 14:15.”
“Idiots, both of you,” Ms. Thadeous says, and gets up and leaves the room.
19
ANNA’S FATHER IS FLIPPING PANCAKES at the stove. It’s one of the few times they’ve been alone together since what her mother refers to as Anna’s road-to-Damascus moment. Her mother tries, but can’t quite keep the scorn out of her voice when she says these things. This might have hurt Anna deeply once. Before.
“Religion is the one point on which your mother is not quite rational,” Anna’s father says now. He puts a plate in front of Anna, and she quickly devours it—she has gotten her appetite back and is starting to regain the weight she lost.
“Like you and your earthquakes?”
“Like me and my earthquakes,” Anna’s father agrees. She loves him like this, jovial and reasonable and able to joke with her. She knows however that his mood can change at any moment.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Little Man?” His pet name for Anna ever since she was seven, when she refused to mother her dolls, only to father them. To throw them up in the air, to roughhouse, discipline them. Her bewildered parents let this go, as they did most things. Laissez-faire parenting.
“What do you think about my . . . road-to-Damascus moment?”
Her father answers promptly. He has evidently been thinking about it. “As a stage you’re going through. Not as bad as drugs or sex or any of the other things teenagers can get into, thank goodness. But not particularly productive, either. Your mother and I will be glad when this, too, passes.”
“What if I said that about your earthquake fixation?” Anna asks. Her father makes frequent trips to Parkfield, one hundred and eighty miles away in the Central Valley. The Earthquake Capital of the World. Hundreds of quakes rattle the windows of the small town every year. Experts predict that the Big One, long anticipated, will have its epicenter near Parkfield. The city’s motto: Be here when it happens.
Anna’s dad chooses not to answer, pours himself another cup of coffee and opens the newspaper. They would live in Parkfield if Anna’s father had his way. His retirement dream is to live in a house made of redwood and steel, steel that would bend and flex with the seismic shocks, with bulletproof windows and enough land for him to place sensors in the earth for his own experiments. He wants to be the third little pig. Safe in the midst of danger that no one else has been wise enough to prepare for.
In one of Anna’s earliest memories, she is sitting on her father’s shoulders on a hill overlooking the dry fields of a California midsummer. She smells dead grass and hears the buzzing of cicadas. Then the trees begin to quiver and her father is trembling and holding out his arms straight to balance on the rolling earth as if on a surfboard. Anna clings tightly to him as they sway in the hot sun, and she can, if she tries, still feel her knees gripping his shoulders, his heart beating so hard and fast she swears she can feel it reverberate in her own body. Even as her father struggles for balance, he opens his mouth, lets out a wail that echoes against the rolling hills of the empty countryside. A primal call.
For as long as Anna can remember, her father went to Parkfield at least once a month, a three-hour drive that her mother refused to make, preferring to stay home and practice. Anna accompanied her father when she was young and on the way to Parkfield he would talk to her of fracture propagation and asperities and elastic rebound theory. His idea of good parenting, teaching Anna to fear the earth she stands on.
Anna tries again. “Dad?”
He doesn’t look up. “Yes?”
“I’m bringing this up again because it would be remiss of me no
t to.” Despite herself, Anna’s voice rises.
Her father puts down the paper and takes another gulp of coffee. “You really shouldn’t get yourself so agitated,” he says. His voice is kind. He can be a kind man, and generous, if you catch him at the right time. “We don’t want you to relapse.”
“A relapse is incidental compared to what I’m talking about,” Anna says. She had told herself that she would remain calm. But so much is at stake.
“Yes, I know,” her father sounds slightly irritated now. “Your mother and I will be damned to eternal hell for not believing. Well, so be it.” He picks up his newspaper.
“You don’t understand,” says Anna. “When the Tribulation comes, I will be forced to take arms. Against you and the other ungodly people.” She is close to tears.
“Ungodly, eh?” her father says.
“Dad, please,” Anna says, and her father must hear the urgency in her voice, so he looks at her over the paper, reaches out, and takes Anna’s hand.
“Little Man, you couldn’t convince me of this any more than I can convince you about the importance of being prepared for the Big One,” he begins.
Anna interrupts him. “I do believe in the Big One,” she says. “But statistically, it could be three hundred years from now. You’ve said that yourself, many times. But the End Days are nearly upon us.” She has finished her pancakes, and takes the sticky plate and silverware to the sink, rinses them off, and puts them in the dishwater. Her father’s plate sits on the table beside him with the remains of a pancake soaking in syrup. Anna knows that he will leave it there, and that no amount of threatening or cajoling of her mother will induce him to take dirty dishes to the sink. Her mother says it isn’t in his DNA to obey orders.
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