by Caela Carter
“This doesn’t happen all the time, these private feasts,” Father says. And Brother Crissakey starts laughing. I don’t get the joke, but that’s OK. I’ll understand everything soon. If not, I’ll forget it. Father keeps talking. “It must have been strange for you to walk in on this feast since you haven’t heard of it yet. But I’m sure that answers your questions, right, child? Now tell me, why are you here?”
But he didn’t answer all of my questions. Curiosity floods my brain again. If this is a feast, why do the women look like they’re dead? If it’s a private feast with all this food, why did all of the girls in the dorm have to have a Hungry Day today? Why is this house so nice with stone and carpet? Why . . .
I’ll choose one question. Father doesn’t like questions the way Charita does. So I’ll choose only one. I point to his table where the gun is. “Why—”
“Shh, child,” Father says. “Tell me why you’re here. How did you get here? Did Louis finally find enough sense in his heart to return you to where you can be safe forever?”
Thesmerelda’s head whips up and her eyes come to life for a second. And I remember. Louis was here. He was Inside. He belonged to Father once too. Like me. Like my new mother who is sitting in the corner.
But Louis had nothing to do with me being here today. I shake my head.
“Did you convince your new family that you had to get back to where you can find Mother God and ultimate salvation?”
My voice is so small. “I wanted my ceremony,” I whisper.
“Your ceremony?” Father’s eyebrows jump. “You convinced them to take you back here for your Thirteenth Ceremony?”
“I . . . I walked,” I say.
“What?” He pauses. “Are you saying they don’t know you’re here?” Father is speaking quickly now. More quickly than I’ve ever heard him speak. It’s like he starts saying a word before he’s finished saying the one before. I have to work to understand him.
“They don’t know anything, I promise. I ran away. I walked all day to get here.”
“What?” Father says again. He’s loud now. Almost like he’s scared. Or angry. Maybe angry.
“I wanted my ceremony,” I say again. “It’s my birthday,” I say.
“It’s her birthday,” Thesmerelda/Tessie says at the same time. I look across the room. Her hair is yellow, like mine. Like Uncle Alan’s beard. What would it be like if she hugged me?
I shake my head. No questions. Father said no questions. Not even in my brain. No questions anywhere.
Curiosity: I give you up. I renounce you.
“You think you deserve a ceremony?” Father Prophet is laughing but I don’t understand it. “After you spent ten days in Darkness, you think you can march back in here at the last minute and we’ll drop everything and throw you a ceremony?”
So we do have laughing here. But it doesn’t sound as nice. It doesn’t sound nice at all.
“I don’t need the whole thing,” I say quickly. “I only need to turn the lights on.”
He laughs again. It’s like each chuckle chops an inch off my legs. Mother God is making me shorter.
“Don’t tell me what you need, girl,” he says. He grabs both of my shoulders in his fleshy palms and holds too tight. “Don’t act like you know the Mother better than I do.”
“Father—” There’s a voice in the back but he keeps talking.
“You think you’re pleasing to the Mother?”
I nod. “I walked all day to get here,” I say. “Fourteen hours or more. It was supposed to take twelve but I passed out and then I kept walking and it took fourteen. I walked it all. Just to get here. Just to be a part of the Light forever and I—”
“Well, that was a waste of time.” His words bite me in the face. “Don’t pretend I don’t know every horrible thing you did out there. Don’t think I don’t know every evil, dirty thing you let them tell you, you let yourself think or do or say or smell or touch or . . . taste.”
I’m shaking now but I’m not doing it myself. It’s my body shaking between his hands. He’s shaking me.
“You were a bad, bad girl,” he growls. “You forgot all about your one true Father and Mother.”
“No,” I say.
Everyone in the room gasps. We aren’t allowed to say that word to him.
Still, my brain screams it. NO! “I thought of you every day. I prayed every night.”
“You believed every lie the Darkness told you.”
“No. No. I didn’t. I tried not to believe anything.”
Father keeps on yelling. “You decided life was all about money and greed and having things.”
“No! I didn’t think like that.” No one thought like that.
He’s wrong. Father can’t be wrong but he is wrong.
“Father,” Brother Wrinkesley says. “Don’t you think we should explain—”
He doesn’t listen. He keeps on yelling.
“You can’t go trying to turn on the lights in Mother’s Chapel now, Zylynn,” he says. He shoves me to the ground. I land on my hands and knees, looking up at him. “She knows you’re nothing but a dirty, evil girl. You don’t even deserve to be called Zylynn.”
Mother God? I ask. I don’t even care if I’m bothering her. Am I dirty? Mother?
“Stop!” Thesmerelda screams. I hear her feet on the wooden floor behind me and then her fingers are like feathers on my elbows, pulling me up. She spreads her arms but before she can get them all the way around me, Father shoots his hand back like he’s about to hit her in the face.
“NO!” I yell.
We all freeze.
Her arms are open. I want to step into them. I want her to hold me close. This is the body that grew me before I could grow myself. This is the woman who was supposed to take care of me when I was hungry and when I was sad and when I was confused. This is my Charita. This is my mother.
She didn’t do those things. But I want to hug her anyway.
I take a step toward her. Father’s arm is frozen in the air like if she hugs me, he’ll hit her.
I’ve never seen Father hit anyone. I’ve never seen an adult get hit. Usually it’s only the Caretakers or the other kids who hit someone. And usually it’s only if someone makes a Mistake.
Thesmerelda hasn’t made a Mistake.
She takes another step closer to me.
“Don’t hug that child,” Father says deeply, slowly. “Don’t hug that child unless you want to go right where she’s going.”
She takes a step back. Her feather-fingers are gone. Her eyes look dead again. Everyone’s eyes are dead except mine and Father’s and his look . . . awful.
He drops his hand.
“Wait downstairs,” he commands. “Brother Wrinkesley will come down in a minute and he’ll call Louis. He’ll have that Agent of Darkness come and get you and take you back where you belong now.”
The entire room stares at Father, mouths open, dead eyes slightly less dead.
“Really?” they start to say.
“That’s it?”
“Is that really best?”
“Shouldn’t you tell her?”
He flicks his eyes off me to yell at them—“Shut up!”—and I run. Out of the room, through the small hallway, down the scratchy stairs, onto the red path, I run and run and run.
I can’t turn to look, but somehow I feel Thesmerelda’s eyes in the window, watching my escape. I feel her smile.
My feet and legs burn. My lungs are ready to burst and give up. But I run. I run back through the third circle, through half of the second circle. I run until I am at the building, up the stairs and inside the tall, stone doors. There, I bend over and suck in breath.
Her Chapel spreads before me: exactly the same as it is every day when it’s stuffed full of all of the Children Inside the Light. But it also looks different. It looks happier, for some reason, all white stone and high windows and the tiny last wisps of sunlight sneaking through them like her fingers. It’s weird to be alone in the Chapel but
it’s also OK. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m me. I know I’m making her happy.
I’m calm.
Once my breath is back in my body, I stand and stretch until my spine is as straight as it will go.
I will not think about Father or Jaycia or Louis or Thesmerelda or any of the people who are not here and should be. I spent thirteen years learning about her, learning about how to become a full member of her Light. I spent fourteen hours or more walking here to do this today. I know exactly what to do.
I will throw my own ceremony.
I open my mouth.
“Oh Mother God . . .”
I almost stop, startled at my voice. It’s high and raspy and young and it doesn’t match how I feel inside: like I know more than everyone, like I’m even closer to Mother God than Father Prophet, like I’m made entirely of Light.
“Oh Light of all Lights . . .”
I take my first step down the aisle, singing as I go. My imagination fills the benches with all of the people who should be here. Every last drop of sunlight slides warm across my face as I step-sing, step-sing, step-sing down the aisle.
“I am yours.”
My bare feet climb the metal rafters at the front of the Chapel and then I’m on the stage where I’ve never been before. I stand with my back to Father’s chair, about five feet in front of it, and I study her Chapel as it is—made of nothing but stone and sunset. It’s so beautiful. I wonder how I never noticed that before. I wonder why at every other Thirteenth Ceremony the chapel has been full and I’ve been empty.
But it will be night soon. I can tell by looking through the high windows, it will be dark in minutes.
Here we go.
I’m not nervous. I have never been less nervous since I left the Inside ten days ago.
Once I turn the lights on, everything will make sense. Father Prophet will know, somehow. She’ll tell him. He’ll explain everything or I’ll just know, or somehow it will make sense why the Darkness has so many good things that we don’t have here and why there were women in that room when the women aren’t supposed to be back yet and why there was noise and guns and a party and a music-player and other things that belong to the Outside and why Father Prophet lives in the big house instead of a dorm and why his chairs are always bigger and covered in cushions while we crowd onto stone benches and why no one in the Girls’ Dorm woke up even when I made all of that noise and why Father let Louis take me to begin with.
I’m seconds away from it all making sense.
“Judge me worthy,” I say to Mother God, like I’m supposed to, like I’ve seen so many girls do before. And I know she will.
Then, slowly, I raise my arms, close my eyes, and wait for them to be accosted by electric lights.
Too many seconds go by before I realize I’m standing with my arms ahead of me and my eyes shut for nothing. It’s dark. The sun is barely touching the windows anymore. It’s empty and dark.
It didn’t work.
It has to work. I know it will work.
“Judge me worthy,” I say again, louder this time.
I close my eyes and my hands come up. I freeze like that. Turn them on! Turn them on! Turn them on! I beg her in my skull. Nothing.
Then the door behind me clicks open. Not the one at the back of the Chapel that we all enter through. The one at the front. The one only Father Prophet ever uses. I don’t open my eyes to look, but I know Father’s here. He’s changed his mind. He knows that I thought about him every day and I want nothing but to be full of Light.
Maybe that thing in his house was my final test.
I keep my eyes closed as I listen to his footsteps cross the stage and stop next to his chair. I expect to hear him sit, but when he doesn’t, I do it again anyway.
“Judge me worthy!” I practically shout it. Then my hands go up and BOOM. I don’t even need to open my eyes to know it. They’re on fire. There are lights everywhere, shining from the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the stage, the benches. The entire room is full of buzzing, electric light.
I did it.
Relief floods every inch of my veins. My breath rushes cool out my nose. My smile slices my face in half.
I open my eyes and at first I can’t see anything but a wall of light so bright it makes them ache.
I squint and turn, ready to see Father, ready to run straight into his arms and hug him.
But he’s not there.
He’s not in his chair or next to his chair or anywhere in the Chapel.
Instead, crouching there in Mother’s Chapel, next to Father’s chair, with a hand snaked between two of Father’s pillows, is Louis.
Tears come to my eyes. My body deflates. My spine can’t hold me up anymore. My lungs are burning. My legs are jelly.
“Zylynn,” Louis says. He moves one of the pillows so that I can see something. “It’s a light switch.”
It’s there, right in his fingers. Even though it can’t be. It’s there. It’s a light switch.
I didn’t turn the lights on. But no one has turned the lights on.
Ever.
Every Ceremony has been a lie.
My whole life every light has been nothing but electricity.
The lights are on but the world goes dark.
I collapse.
Twenty-Six
THE NEXT THING I FEEL IS the water as it slides through my mouth and slips into my stomach.
“We have to get her out of here.”
A voice floats over my head. A man’s voice. Not Louis’s.
I blink. Which means my eyes are open. I didn’t turn on the lights but I’m still alive. My eyes still open.
No one has ever turned on the lights. It’s a light switch.
I’m sitting on the edge of the stage, my feet hanging off it. I’m leaning against Louis, which is OK because if I wasn’t I would fall off onto the benches. He’s keeping me safe. I blink at his eyes. He kept me safe. Louis, the Outsider, the Liar. I don’t move from his arm.
“Zylynn? You OK, sweetheart?” the other voice says.
I turn. It’s Uncle Alan. He’s squatting next to me, holding a water bottle close to my mouth.
I’m not OK, I don’t think. I didn’t turn the lights on. There weren’t any lights to turn on. Every ceremony I’ve ever been to has been nothing, pointless. My whole life has been pointless. Father Prophet yelled at me like that and it wasn’t a test. He ate food and had a feast on a Hungry Day. He had a gun in his house.
Father Prophet was the only person I ever trusted. And he was a Liar.
I’m not OK.
But I’m here.
It’s dark in the Chapel, but I can still breathe. My skin is not burning.
Mother God has kept me alive for one more day or year or something.
“Zy-baby,” Louis says. He squeezes my shoulders and I smell his skin, then I remember: he’s been here before. With me. He’s held a tiny version of me here in this Chapel.
So once, a long time ago, he was someone else who I trusted. Once, a long time ago, I trusted him to hold me up through a whole Chapel service, and he did.
“I’d like to take you home now. Is that all right?” Louis says.
I know that he doesn’t mean my home; he doesn’t mean back to the Girls’ Dorm to drink pomegranate tea and sleep until waking up for a scratchy-soap shower and breakfast and school. He means his home. In Darkness.
But even in Darkness there’s electricity and light switches. There’s also birthday cake and little sisters and Turtles. Maybe the Darkness isn’t the Darkness after all.
I nod.
I’m so weak it takes both of the men, all of their muscles under my arms, to help me walk out of the Chapel. And once we’re in the second circle, Louis says, “Hey, Zylynn, those legs must be tired. How about a piggyback ride?” I’m too exhausted to wonder what that is. I let him hoist me on his back and I only watch the world, my world, go by.
Good-bye, classrooms and Exercise Fields and offices and buildings I don’t know
what you’re for. Good-bye, circles and clay paths and Dining Hall and Men’s Dorm and Teen Girls’ Dorm and Teen Boys’ Dorm and Boys’ Dorm and my dorm. Good-bye, Chapel. Good-bye, walls and hedges and dogs. Good-bye, home.
I know I’ll never see it again.
“Zylynn,” Uncle Alan whispers. “I’m so sorry we didn’t find you sooner. I’m sorry you had such a hard day in the heat with no food.”
“I had an orange and a chocolate bar and a tomato and some cheese,” I whisper.
Uncle Alan nods. I see the corners of his mouth turn up then down then up then down. “We should have found you sooner. We should have looked here right away. I’m sorry we didn’t protect you,” Louis says. I feel his voice moving through his back as he carries me through the compound.
“We went to your friend Jaycia’s house,” Uncle Alan says. “When you weren’t there, we asked her where you might be. She swore up and down that you’d never come back here. She said you’d talked last night.”
I’m too tired to feel guilty about lying to Jaycia, but somewhere in me, I know I should. I know I’ll feel guilty about it eventually.
“She had us searching Target and the mall and the park and the restaurant. We were so panicked. We couldn’t find you anywhere. We didn’t know what to do until Elsie told us you had tried to take her with you to your ceremony.”
“We’ve been searching for you all day,” Louis says. I can feel the vibrations of his voice through his back. “I’m so glad we found you.”
“We found you just before you got to the compound gate.”
I squint at Uncle Alan. The sun is gone now but there’s spotlights shining from each building so I can see his yellow beard. Like my hair. Like Thesmerelda’s.
“You didn’t find me until I got to the Chapel,” I say. I don’t want the lying to start now.
He smiles. “Did you see a green van pass you just before you found the gate?”
Van (n.): a boxlike vehicle that often has double doors both at the rear and along the sides; can be fitted with seats or used as a truck
“Yes,” I say.
“That’s my car,” he says.
“We realized we had seen you too late, so we turned back and started searching. Then we finally saw you walking toward the walls. We were about to catch up to you but the dogs stopped us a bit at the gate. How do we get past them on the way out?”