The Book of Essie

by Meghan MacLean Weir

  Remembering this, I frown as Essie goes on about the power of the written word to raise children up out of poverty and I can see that the lady on the television is eating this whole literacy thing up. I half expect her to start fawning over Essie’s qualifications. You took both AP and IB English Literature? The Chicago public schools are going to be so lucky to have you.

  Instead she’s saying, “So you might be leaving home before too long. What do you think will be the hardest thing about that?”

  Essie looks squarely at the camera and there is that expression again, the crinkling of her forehead that I noticed in the hall at school today.

  She says, “Probably the hardest thing is that I’m pretty sure I’m in love. It will be difficult to let that go.”

  Before I go back outside to take the hot dogs off the grill, I think how Esther Hicks in love is not something I would’ve seen coming. The next thing I think is that this dude had better run while he still can.

  Liberty

  When Esther Anne Hicks tells me that she thinks she’s in love, it’s all I can do not to laugh. Mama never approved of people who broadcast their business all around town, and even though broadcasting other people’s business is now literally how I pay my rent, this is one of those moments when I can imagine her eyes rolling all those hundreds of miles away. I’m not sure which is more pathetic, this lovestruck-teenager act or the bullshit literacy project Essie is peddling. It’s a toss-up. They both make me want to cut the feed and get up and walk away. The fact that what is expected of me right now is a sympathetic smile and not a lecture on white privilege or entitlement makes me hate myself even more.

  I hear myself saying, “This special someone. Is there any chance you want to tell me his name?”

  Or her name, I think, but I know that saying something like that would only get me fired. There is a seven-second delay on live television, which is enough time to bleep out expletives or black out the screen in case of wardrobe malfunctions but not enough to censor any worldview that stands in opposition to the megalomaniac who owns TIL and her sister stations. That’s what pink slips are for. Maybe someday I’ll be able to pull a stunt like that and get away with it, but as things stand now, I’m not holding any cards. Any outlet that makes a habit of real journalism won’t touch me. This job was the only one I could get.

  Essie blushes and shakes her head. “I don’t think I should say.”

  “Well, I can certainly appreciate your desire for privacy. Especially given how very public your life has always been.”

  Essie shrugs. It’s a practiced move. She says, “I’ve been very lucky. To share my life with so many people, to share the work that our family does both in the church and through our many charities, well, that’s a blessing that is sent to us straight from God. We owe everything we are and everything we do to those who watch and share this journey with us.”

  Amen, breathes Mama from just behind my ear. At least she knows enough to give credit where credit is due. She is referring, of course, to the Almighty. Whatever differences in opinion Mama and Essie Hicks might have when it comes to definitions of vanity or avarice or sloth, the God they worship is still the same. I actually stop listening while Essie is speaking. I don’t have to pay attention to know what she is saying. The line she is feeding me is one that I delivered many times myself. But that was a long time ago.

  When I see that Essie has finished talking, I shift forward in my seat and ask the only sort of hard-hitting question I am allowed: “But as a teenager, as a normal teenage girl, you must sometimes wish you could get away from the cameras even just once in a while and let loose, maybe go a little wild.”

  Essie’s upbeat expression fades and suddenly she looks pale and older than her seventeen years.

  “It doesn’t do any good to wish for things you’ll never have.”

  I blink, uncertain how to follow this departure from the cheerful persona the girl has always put forth in public interviews. I scramble for something to say, but Essie is already talking, laughing.

  “Besides, I’m not sure I’d know how to go wild. My idea of fun is curling up with a good book.”

  I realize that I have been holding my breath to keep from panicking and I let the air out of my lungs. Well, didn’t you just beat the Devil around the stump, I hear Mama say.

  After this, the interview dribbles on and then comes to a rather lackluster end. Essie promotes an upcoming episode of Six for Hicks that follows her brother Matty and his family on an African safari. She actually hasn’t been in any episodes since last fall while the overseas ministries of Matty and Daniel have been featured instead, but she promises that folks will be able to see plenty of her as she heads toward graduation and her literacy work next year.

  Then the lights dim and the camera is switched off. Candy, the woman who accompanied Essie to the local studio, excuses herself to use the restroom and I begin to pack up my things. As soon as Candy leaves the room, Essie is standing close beside me.

  “I need a cell phone,” she says urgently.

  “You can borrow mine.” I reach into my bag and begin to fish around.

  “No,” she says. “I need one to keep, at least for a while. I need to be able to reach you without using my own phone, in case they check it.”

  “In case who checks it?”

  “My parents. Production. Any of them. I have a story. If you want it, I need to be able to call you. Hurry. She’ll be back any second.”

  I motion for Margot, my camerawoman and assistant, and whisper, “Give me your phone.”

  She looks confused but hands it over. Essie checks it to make sure the ringer is silenced and drops it into the pocket of her coat. Margot starts to protest, but I raise a hand to quiet her.

  “Don’t call me. I’ll call you,” Essie says. It’s the sort of phrase that I imagine is used a lot in spy films, but mostly it makes me think of Nelson Mandela, someone Esther Anne Hicks probably knows nothing about. I don’t think Long Walk to Freedom is on the approved reading list for girls like her. It certainly wasn’t on mine. She continues, “I’ll give you a series of exclusives, but I’m going to need something from you in exchange.”

  “What do you need?”

  Essie shakes her head. “Not here. Not now. We’ll discuss it when I call.”

  “Exclusives covering what?”

  “Can’t you guess?” she asks. This time her smile contains none of the sugary sweetness she used when the cameras were rolling. “I’m getting married. You’ll get an exclusive on the big day.”

  * * *

  —————

  “Shit,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “Did that really just happen?”

  I am driving too fast, I know, but I need to get out of this piddly town and back to the city before I start to melt. I floor it and my hybrid rewards me with a wholly unsatisfying surge in speed. We are almost to the highway. On our left is the New Light megachurch, where Essie’s father tends to his mayonnaise-colored flock. It is both gaudy and industrial at the same time, a combination that makes the building particularly unattractive from the outside. Inside must be even worse, since then you would be surrounded by the congregation, a group of people for whom smiling while passing judgment has become a sport. Or so I assume. I’ve never been to a service there and I hope I never have to attend one. Steering clear of overpowering religious leaders is part of the spiritual cleanse I’ve been undergoing to make up for my first eighteen years.

  One more turn and we are on the highway, though it looks identical to the country road we just left behind. To both the right and the left of us are cornfields, and the road runs straight and flat for another hundred miles.

  “I can’t believe it either, but is that any reason to try to break the sound barrier in a Prius? Spoiler: it’s never gonna happen,” says Margot. She is holding on to the center console so tightly that her kn
uckles are starting to turn white. I ease off on the gas a little and Margot relaxes. She asks, “When did little Goody Two-shoes have time to fall in love?”

  The teenage-puppy-love thing I’m not particularly interested in, per se. Sure, it helps my case to break a story, even one as devoid of journalistic interest as this one. Sid is always saying what did he hire me for if I’m not the same firebrand that I used to be when I was fourteen. As if anyone really wants to hear that it’s all been downhill since eighth grade. What hooked me was the look in Essie’s eyes, the promise that there is more behind those blue irises than the mindless sheep she has always appeared to be.

  “An exclusive,” Margot is saying. “A whole series of interviews leading up to the wedding.”

  “The wedding hasn’t been confirmed,” I say, and now I’m starting to have doubts that any of this is real. “There’s no way her parents would let her get engaged at seventeen, let alone married.”

  “You don’t know that,” Margot says, and I can hear the hope in her voice. If I know anything about her at all, it is that she is already spending the money in her head. Margot has been known to burn through her paycheck with little regard for the need to pay bills or buy groceries, which is a large part of why her wife handles their finances these days. “What about that other TV family, the one with all the kids? They married them off pretty young.”

  “And then they got canceled,” I remind her. “If there’s one thing the Hicks family knows how to do, it’s go the distance. Conservative enough to appeal to the Bible Belt, but not so backward as to alienate the East Coast viewers. They’ve found the sweet spot, I’ll give them that. No, Essie will do whatever ‘Save the Children’ crap she was peddling and then she’ll get her ass into college. I guarantee it. Especially since they didn’t get to air the college episodes they had planned for Elizabeth when she dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Maybe they’ll let you do a series of interviews anyway,” Margot, ever the optimist, tells me. “The more airtime you get, the better.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” I sigh.

  This is the sort of rhetorical statement that Margot has a tendency to take seriously, so she says, “The state with the lowest highest point is Florida, where Britton Hill rises to only three hundred forty-five feet above sea level.”

  “Thank you,” I tell her, deadpanning, “I’m sure that information will be very useful at parties.”

  * * *

  —————

  We get back to the city just after eleven. I drop Margot off and then drive the seven blocks to my apartment. Mr. Danziger has left his Weber cooling in my spot again and I have to get out of my car and drag it back onto the patio before I can park. I shoot his door a withering look as I climb past his landing to the third floor. Mike is asleep on the couch, presumably overcome by the act of waiting up for me. I can’t really blame him. There’s a constitutional law book open on his chest. If I’d been reading that, I’d probably be asleep as well.

  I bypass the living room and head straight to the kitchen and open an IPA. I take a sip as I sink into a chair across from Mike and remember the summer we found this chair on the side of the road and he insisted that we carry it home even though home was fourteen blocks away. This was before we had a car. When it still felt strange that there was a we. Back then we weren’t living together, not really. I was technically still living in Barbara Lawrence’s spare room, as far as my parents were concerned, though even then Mike’s apartment was where I was spending most of my nights.

  Small-town girl in the big city; they almost didn’t let me come. None of the Bells had ever moved away. I practically had to bribe my parents to let me leave home for college and then, after graduation, I had to get a lawyer to gain access to the account where the money from my book had been deposited. It could have gotten uglier than it did, I suppose; at least my parents were still speaking to me after that. Now, not so much. It was the living in sin that finally broke them. Not when it happened, of course, but when it hit the papers.

  I was surprised, actually, by the vitriol, which I realize is entirely hypocritical. After all, hadn’t I been one of those mudslingers in the first place? Weren’t the profits from such bitterness and name-calling precisely what I would eventually use to pay my half of the rent for Mike’s, for our, apartment? So I shouldn’t really regret the book, or the blog, or even the flaming dumpster fire of a podcast that defined my life from age twelve until about eighteen. But I do. I regret it every day. I am lucky to have that money, little though it is. There is some part of me that does acknowledge that. But it doesn’t feel like luck. It feels like a pittance given in exchange for my near perpetual humiliation. I deserve it, though. I deserve everything I get.

  For Whom the Bell Tolls made a surprise appearance on a few best-seller lists. That it was written by a fourteen-year-old gun-toting, gay-bashing hick named Liberty Bell pretty much summed up the entirety of its appeal. The number of people who bought copies because they were legitimately interested in my thoughts was most likely outweighed by those who did not read it at all. Some probably bought the book in error, thinking they were ordering the famous novel, but others bought it to send me a message that the people I hated so much for being different were capable of kindness in the face of hatred, of turning the other cheek. Once it was publicized that the profits were being placed in a trust to which I would only gain access when I turned twenty-one, there was a movement among liberals to order copies online to be sent to an organization that would shred them.

  Volunteers used the strips of paper to make a giant papier-mâché replica of the actual Liberty Bell, the one in Philadelphia. Even at the time, I had to admit that it was pretty well done. Then the giant, painstakingly assembled paper bell was placed front and center at a ceremony welcoming a busload of Sudanese refugees. The headlines boasted something about literally creating love from hate. In the picture accompanying the story in the Gazette, the men and women making the thing wore T-shirts that said Free Libby or sometimes Liberty for the Bell. They had financed my escape long before I realized that an escape was something I needed.

  The book, the blog, all of it was why I was given the job I have, but it is also why it has been impossible for me to find another. No one wants to be associated with the sort of person I used to be. No one, that is, except for Sid, my boss, and the asshole that he works for. That kind of crap is what they’ve built their fortunes on. They churn it out day after day, year after year, and their faithful viewers don’t know any better than to lap it up, chunks and all.

  Mike was also sleeping the first time I saw him, I remember. His hair was longer then, but really his face looked no different than it does now, jaw slack and mouth slightly open, a small pool of spit forming at the corner of his lip. He looked like buzzard bait, dozing there like that. There was someone sitting across the table from him that day in the library, another freshman who had torn up little bits of paper and rolled them around between his fingertips until they were pressed into hard round balls. I recognized the kid from my European Literature class, his pimply face scrunched up in a look of concentration as he lobbed his miniature grenades at Mike, trying to land one of those balls right in the corner of Mike’s mouth.

  When one of them hit Mike square between the eyes, he lifted a hand as if waving away a gnat, but he didn’t wake up. The kid, who I remember talked incessantly all semester about how James Joyce was his personal hero, hesitated, waiting until he was sure Mike was still truly and deeply sleeping, and then started throwing the paper balls again. The floor was littered with them when I walked out of the library several hours later, but by that time Mike was gone.

  We didn’t formally meet until that spring. He stopped by my dorm room looking for my roommate, and when I told him she was in the shower, he said that he would wait. I stood, blocking the doorway, not sure what was expected, then stepped back to let h
im in. He flopped gracelessly onto Lara’s bed and leaned against the wall. I had never been alone with a boy before and I had the sudden urge to run. Looking longingly at the door, willing Lara to return, I moved back to my desk and tried to continue working on my blog.

  “Writing something?” he asked.

  My back was to him and then suddenly he was at my shoulder. I could feel his hand on the back of my chair. I sat up straighter and closed my laptop, but not before he saw. I felt him back away across the room.

  “You’re her,” he said in disbelief. “You’re Liberty Bell. Lara never told me.”

  “Why would she?” I challenged, ready for a fight. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  He was sitting on Lara’s bed again, but this time with his feet on the edge of the shaggy pink rug she’d put down on the floor beside it. He was still skinny then, all elbows and knees, a collection of sharp edges. He folded himself forward and leaned his arms on his legs as if pressed down from above.

  “I grew up hearing about that day,” he breathed.

  I said nothing, and in the time it took for his words to register, Lara burst into the room, wet hair streaming, wrapped in a yellow robe. Mike stood and Lara hugged him even though she was naked underneath the thin layer of cotton. He pulled a pair of tickets to some concert from his back pocket and handed them to her and she hugged him again and said thanks and then all at once he was gone.

  “You feeling okay, Libs?” she asked and dove into the closet in search of a perfect pair of shoes to match the dress she wanted to wear that night.

  “Fine,” I said. “I just need a break. I think I’ll go for a run.”

  I pulled on a pair of sneakers and burst out of the building and into the cold air, my heart still racing, because I knew exactly which day Mike was talking about. I ran toward the lake, but before I even got to the edge of campus, I had to hightail it to a trash bin to throw up. I stood there, retching, long after my stomach was finally empty, hands like a vise on the painted black metal rim of the can. I was shaking.