My Life with the Liars

by Caela Carter

  Should I care about that? Them?

  My knees are shaking by the time I step down the stairs. I tiptoe past the coffee table. The photo books are gone, disappeared like all of the people in them. All of them except for me.

  My flip-flops slap against the linoleum in the kitchen. It’s empty. Is the food gone? I walk past the other kitchen door with the steps that lead to the family room, and approach the fridge. I hold the handle in my fingers, but I don’t open it.

  I shouldn’t.

  Curiosity has done all of this to me. I’ve failed to kill her. Curiosity is the opposite of Mother God. She is the end. She’s the ultimate trickster. She is pure evil.

  I should go back to my room and stand under my light and pray and pray and pray and pray to remember every individual hair on Father Prophet’s head. I should sit at my window and make him walk down the street again. How long has it been since I did that? Two days? Three? How did I let myself get so tricked?

  I need to find Louis and Charita. I need to make them take me home.

  I release the handle of the fridge door.

  I am alone.

  I’m shaking so hard I can’t move.

  “Zylynn?”

  I turn. Charita is standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs that lead to the family room. She’s smiling.

  My heart burrows comfortably into my chest. My hands stop shaking and lay at my sides. I tell my feet to stay. I’m close to rushing at her, hugging her.

  “Hungry?” she asks. “How about some breakfast?”

  That’s not what I want her to ask. I want her to say what she’s said before: “What do you want to do today?” I will tell her it’s time for me to go home.

  “Where is everyone?” I try.

  She laughs. How does she do that?

  “It’s almost noon already! You had quite a sleep. I suppose it’s good: teenagers are supposed to sleep into the afternoon. And you’re almost a teenager, aren’t you? The day after tomorrow, you turn thirteen!”

  Oh yeah. She knows.

  Ask me what I want to do today. Ask me.

  “Elsie and Junior are at camp already. Jakey’s downstairs playing on the tablet.”

  Ask me what I want to do.

  “How about some breakfast?” she says again.

  Just then, my stomach growls.

  Guilty, I nod.

  Later, I sit on the couch in the family room with the sun washing over my hair and I watch as Jakey drives a blue truck in circles on the carpet with his left hand. Charita sits at the desk with her computer.

  Somehow she knows it’s almost my birthday. Somehow she knows I’m almost thirteen. Somehow they always knew, even before I got here. Somehow they always knew me. This fact scratches the back of my brain.

  Every once in a while Charita asks me a question. “Would you like to read a book, Zylynn?”

  “No thanks.” We don’t read books. They’re the breeding ground for Curiosity.

  She goes back to clicking the keyboard that’s connected to the tablet like two of Junior’s LEGOs.

  “Would you like to go outside?”

  “No thanks,” I say.

  Charita turns to look at me and sighs. “I know,” she says. “It’s so hot.”

  Jakey’s hand drives the truck up my leg. It tickles.

  I make a list of the questions I have. I keep them tucked into the folds of my brain.

  Who is Tessie?

  Why don’t I remember Louis from when he was at the compound?

  Why is Thesmerelda in Charita’s book?

  Is any of this real?

  Once the questions are there, clear and black-and-white, I try to squeeze them into nothing and knock them one by one out my ears. I will not ask them. I will not be curious. I will not become a dirty, evil girl. I will not be like Jaycia. I will not become a Liar.

  “I better start dinner,” Charita says. “What’s your favorite food, Zylynn? Do you have one yet?”

  The sun is crawling down the sky already and she still hasn’t asked the right question. Not once.

  She wants to know my favorite food. She wants to give me computer games and books. She knows my birthday is coming. The facts slosh around my stomach making me sick. I can’t figure out how these are lies.

  I shake my head.

  “Something new then?” she says.

  I nod.

  She hops up the stairs and Jakey follows her.

  “You don’t have to sit there, you know,” Charita calls down from the kitchen. “You can read, go outside, play on the tablet. Whatever you want.”

  I want to go home. But she doesn’t ask me.

  Can I tell her anyway? Can I ask for something all on my own? Is a question like “will you take me home?” a bad one, a curious one?

  I open my mouth to speak, but then she’s gone.

  I stand and wander over to the tablet. When I read the top of the screen, my jaw drops. It says:

  Google Search: The Children Inside the Light

  Charita has been reading about us. Us. I glance at the first few lines of blue text:

  Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: The Children Inside the Light

  Official Website: The Children Inside the Light

  The Tragic History of the Children Inside the Light

  The Children Inside the Light—I Was Brainwashed

  The Children Inside the Light: Be a Part of Our Movement

  I race the little arrow of the mouse up and down the screen watching each set of blue letters go from thick blue to regular blue to thick blue. I want to click on every one. I want to read every article. I want to suck up all of the information, swallow it, and try to make everything make sense.

  I recognize Curiosity. She’s sitting on my shoulders again, her icy hands wrapped around my neck. I try to shrug her off.

  But this is different from the book last night. This time Charita was here reading these articles herself. She was trying to learn about us—me. For herself.

  So she can’t be using these to trick me. To lie.

  I click on one of the articles.

  The Tragic History of the Children Inside the Light

  All of the ex-members of this group swear it started out innocently. They were hooked by the promise of a place without greed, a community to raise their children, childhoods with no pressure to be the best, with no unhealthy competition.

  When Pastor Jim Levens left his home church and started the Children Inside the Light Movement back in 1995, he promised his followers a safe place. In the famous video he said, “I’ve found God. I’ve talked to her. God is a woman. God is our Mother.” He claimed that God wants us to live in harmony and community and softness. He promised to provide his followers with everything God wants them to have if they were willing to come and live on his compound in the middle of the Arizona desert.

  The video was passed from neighbor to neighbor across the southwest and people came from far and wide to meet the Prophet in the desert. Did he believe what he was preaching? Did he truly think he was the direct connection between all of humanity and its creator? Or was he only hungry for power and money? These are questions anyone familiar with the Children Inside the Light is apt to ask. But ultimately, the answer does not matter. The motivations of Pastor Jim Levens are unimportant when we consider the damage his actions have caused to hundreds of adults and hundreds of children.

  I stop reading to think.

  There’s no one named Jim Levens on the compound. I’ve never heard a name like that before.

  And the Children Inside the Light are the opposite of damaged.

  I should stop reading. Part of me even wants to stop reading. But Curiosity has taken over. She forces my eyes back to the screen.

  For years, we Arizonians mostly ignored the white walls in the middle of the red sand. We described it as a “hippie commune.” We brushed off the women who tried to tell us about the Light in parks or grocery stores. We didn’t think about the Children Inside the Light when
we went home to our nuclear families after our days in our capitalist jobs.

  That is until a man, Dr. Eli Thomas, fled the compound in the middle of the night with stories that chilled us to our bones. He spoke of malnourished children, of hundreds of people being punished by starvation, of zombies with no sense of individuality. He called Pastor Levens a crook: the price for admission to the Children Inside the Light is one’s entire savings account and all worldly possessions including cars, houses, and land.

  Authorities are still perplexed as to how to handle this cult in the desert. The situation is similar to other cults that persist despite the rampant rumors of child abuse, violence, and brainwashing, such as the polygamists in Colorado City. State officials have visited the Children Inside the Light and found no indications of abuse clear enough to shut it down or even to remove children whose parents insist they stay. Pastor Levens, of course, claims that individuals choose to stay on the compound and are protected by their First Amendment rights.

  As usual, in Arizona, it’s easier to pretend we don’t see the fence in the desert than it is to admit children are being hurt right under our noses every day.

  The article is lying.

  Obviously. I’m Outside so everything is lying. I don’t even have to wonder if it’s true. I don’t know who Pastor Jim Levens is. Or Eli Thomas. No one Inside had names like that.

  But the Hungry Days part was true. It’s weird to see them written about like that. Like whoever wrote this is angry that we were punished by not having food. Like food is a right, is as essential as Light. Or more essential than Light.

  Is it? Does food matter more than Light?

  I hit the back arrow so that the screen shows the list of articles again. I run the mouse over them again. I want to read another one. But I shouldn’t. Curiosity is everywhere. And reading feeds her.

  I’m about to hit the X at the top of the screen when I see the little orange box in the corner. It’s a drawing with lines running in every direction and a blue circle right in the middle with a little arrow pointing to it. The words next to the arrow are black and bold and sure: The Children Inside the Light Compound.

  I know what this is.

  Map (n.): a representation, usually on a flat surface, as of the features of an area of the earth, showing them in their respective forms, sizes, and relationship according to some convention of representation

  I click on the orange square and it spreads to the whole screen and morphs into a photograph. There it is. Safety. My home.

  This is not a lie.

  The entire thing is pictured on the screen from a bird’s-eye view. The whitewashed buildings long and flat or tall and curvy or short and squat. The red-clay paths spiderwebbing between them. The three circles, each one more important than the one before. The exercise fields at the west end. Father Prophet’s building at the north boundary. The stone Chapel rising up right in the center. I use the arrows on the side of the screen to zoom in on different parts, to move my compound right and left and up and down. The compound. Our compound. Her compound. Whatever. There are people on the paths, frozen into the computer screen, but I can’t zoom in close enough to see who they are. I study the silver roofs of the Girls’ Dorm and the Boys’ Dorm and the Dining Hall and the classroom and the Teen Dorms and the Men’s Dorm. I stare at it until it becomes a red-and-tan-and-silver-and-white blob that won’t make any sense through the wetness in my eyes.

  Tears (n.): fluid appearing in or flowing from the eye as the result of an emotion, especially grief

  “Zylynn,” Charita calls after I’ve been crying at the tablet for hours and hours. Or minutes and minutes. Some amount of time. “Elsie and Junior are home. Come eat some dinner.”

  I blink and blink and blink at the bright screen, trying to make my eyes dry, to make them look normal. I blink so hard I almost miss the little box on the side of the map. It’s tiny but I’m sure I’m seeing the words right.

  Get Directions.

  I click on it and there it is. The map now has a bold line. There are two little circles, one labeled Current Location and the other labeled The Children Inside the Light Compound. Below there’s a list of step-by-step directions to get me from Louis and Charita and Elsie and Jakey and Junior’s house all the way home. And, at the very bottom of the screen, there’s a little box that says Print.

  Thank you, thank you. I’m coming home.

  We eat dinner. The chatter of the Outsiders fills the kitchen but I stop listening to it.

  They feed me and smile at me and give me colors and toys. They know when my birthday is. But this is Darkness. There’s a link missing in the chain in my brain. Why is the Darkness so pleasant and soft and full of food?

  After dinner, Elsie asks for ice cream. Junior and Jakey ask for cookies.

  I take gulp after gulp of water trying to erase the spicy, delicious flavor of dinner from every crevice of my tongue. I have to forget it. I’m going to have to forget everything once I’m home: I should start now. Charita said we were eating something called tofu fajitas and when there was only one left, Louis let me have it. But that doesn’t matter. I will forget about both of them soon.

  “Zylynn?” Charita says. “Is there anything you’d like?”

  She’s standing at the freezer, the ice cream carton in one hand. Her head is turned so she can probably only sort of see me. Her hair is curly down her back.

  When they stop cutting my hair will it be curly and black like hers? When I’m a woman will I look like her, smiley and curvy and soft? The women at the compound always had such hard lines. Why is that? Is Light harsh and Darkness soft? It feels like it should be the opposite.

  I pry Curiosity’s nails out of my arm again.

  I open my mouth to say I’d like to go home when she restates the question: “Did you hear me? Any dessert for you, Zylynn? What would you like?”

  Dessert. I wasn’t even thinking about food. My stomach is comfortable, not protruding outward and making my skin stretch across my ribs, not collapsing inward and folding me in half. It’s unnoticeable. It’s so unnoticeable it’s impossible not to notice.

  “What would you like?” Charita says a third time.

  I can’t ask the question. Not now that it’s night. I don’t want to be in the black outdoors in the car. I don’t want to have to walk Inside in the dark. I hate the night. Plus, Elsie and Junior and Jakey are watching me. The map makes it so I don’t have to speak yet. The map is my gift from Mother God. The map is my last resort.

  “A flashlight,” I say.

  Elsie giggles. “For dessert?”

  I look at her. “No. Just to have it.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want it for dessert?” Elsie sings.

  She smiles through a mouthful of ice cream. The freckles on her cheeks punch out at me. Her green eyes are just like mine except extra shiny. I have the strangest urge to pinch her cheek right where her dimple is.

  I shake my head. I smile. I don’t think that it’s good to smile out here, but when I look at goofy Elsie with the freckles and the sugary white cream on her little lips I can’t help what the muscles in my cheeks do.

  I’m going to take her with me. That’ll make everything OK. For me. And for her.

  “You’re not going to eat the flashlight? Good,” she says. “For a second I was afraid my new sister was a robot.”

  Junior and Jakey and Louis and Charita all laugh.

  “Bee bop boo bop.” Junior makes funny noises. “Feed me batteries.”

  “Beep-beep, boop-boop,” Elsie says. She pokes me right in the belly. “I must eat your flashlight.” She makes her voice flat. “I am Zylynn, the Flashlight-Eating Robot.”

  She pokes me again right above the belly button. And the strangest thing happens. It starts at that point. A little bubble, a movement of my muscles. Not indigestion or cramps. Not painful. It bounces from my belly through my windpipe and it’s already out my mouth before I know what it is.

  I laugh.

&n
bsp; Seventeen

  I TEST THE FLASHLIGHT IN MY room before I sneak downstairs. I turn it on and off forty or one hundred times. The light in it bounces off my gold carpet, weak but there under the burning lightbulb above me. I put on the pink whisper-clothes and I stand under the lightbulb but I don’t say my prayer and I don’t get into bed. I test the flashlight until the sink in the kitchen is no longer running and the footsteps are gone from the stairs and the hallway and the doors to the other rooms have stopped opening and closing.

  On-Off-On-Off.

  I keep it up while Louis’s and Charita’s voices sneak through the stripes in murmurs and muffled words.

  On-Off-On-Off.

  They really did give me a flashlight. All I did was ask, and here it is. And it works. Will it be that easy when I ask to go home tomorrow?

  When the house around me has been still and dark and sleeping for minutes or hours, I tiptoe to the door and creak it open. I don’t hear any sounds. I wonder if this will be as easy as last night.

  It’ll be easier; I have the flashlight.

  I switch it on and shine it into the dark hallway, watching the way Mother God battles the dark, the way it runs from every spot where the flashlight touches. The day after tomorrow, I will have the power of Light. I will light up the Chapel and I will be a part of Mother God forever.

  I hold the flashlight in both hands, raise my arms, and point it straight down over my head. The dark can’t get near me while I’m in this pool of light. I won’t let it touch my skin. Not again.

  The stairs are difficult but I manage to pad down them without even a toe brushing the dark.

  The living room is dark tonight too and I slip right past it. But I do see that the ZYLYNN book is back on the coffee table. They left it for me. In the kitchen, the tile is cold on my bare feet. More stairs then, finally, I reach the family room. I flip the light switch and watch the whole room breathe a sigh of relief at the presence of Mother God.

  Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be home.

  In an instant I’m at the tablet and when I touch the mouse, my map still lights the screen.