This Little Light

by Lori Lansens

  “Wow. Wow. Fee. Seriously? You think I’m making this up?”

  “I think you think you saw something you didn’t see.”

  “So I’m delusional?”

  “He’s abstinent. I mean, he made that pretty clear, right? That whole weird thing at orientation night, Rory. I’m sorry. I think your eyes were playing tricks.”

  “Fee, I filmed it. And you’ll see it on my camera. Jesus, it’s not like we’ve never heard Christians arguing that anal sex doesn’t affect the virgin status. You know what they say about fucking a loophole?”

  “Maybe you were at a weird angle.”

  “Jinny was at a weird angle.”

  “Okay. Well. You’re a psycho for filming her. And I think you’re wrong. And even if you’re right, it doesn’t prove anything about the bomb or that thing in your car.”

  “Jagger’s a freak.”

  “Whatever, Rory.”

  “Fee, she’s like, sixteen, and Jagger’s thirty at least, and it’s totally against the law, and if people found out, his whole franchise would die and his reputation would be ruined. If people saw what I filmed, he’d go to jail. It’d be over. So that makes me a threat. It happened, and they must know I know. You get it now?”

  Fee shook her head then stared at the dirt for a really long time. Finally she goes, “Okay. Well, I guess after we get some water, we gotta find a way to get to Oakwood Circle without anyone seeing us, get your camera from behind your dresser and get it to someone who will believe that you filmed sodomy between a famous preacher and a Christian school girl and that they set a bomb in the bathroom to kill us so no one would find out.”

  “Yes!”

  She stared me down. “Hello? I’m being sarcastic. Jagger’s messed and all, but he wouldn’t do that to me. To us. Kill us in a bomb blast? It’s crazy. He just wouldn’t. I don’t believe Jinny would either.”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t think it was supposed to be us in that bathroom. It was just supposed to be me. I think, when you ate those stupid ganache thingies—the poisoned chocolate balls—I think when you ate them, and got sick, you ended up being part of it by accident.”

  “Oh my freaking God, Rory. Your imagination…”

  I have to remember that Fee hasn’t spent the night hoovering news reports and connecting dots and writing her whole life story. It’s easier for her to choose denial.

  She goes, “Okay, let’s say everything you’re saying is true, Detective Miller. Shouldn’t we turn ourselves in before we get shot by some bounty hunter who thinks we deal dead babies on Craigslist?”

  “Javier—”

  “You think all Latinos are these, like, good-hearted people because they used to ass-kiss you over your parents. They aren’t saints, Ror. They’re just people. The bounty is a million dollars?

  Hello?”

  “Then why hasn’t he turned us in already? He could have collected the bounty last night.”

  “How do you know he hasn’t? How do you know somebody isn’t on the way here right now? I don’t just blindly trust him.”

  “But you blindly trust Jagger fucking Jonze?”

  “Holy shit, Ror. Stop! Will you just stop!”

  There was another noise outside. We both heard it. Something brushing up against the wall of the shed. The blue tarp?

  * * *

  —

  Out the window I see more tumbleweeds blowing around. Couple of squirrels chasing each other around the oak beside the shed. The blue tarp hasn’t moved. The drunk guy’s truck is still here.

  I can’t stop steaming that Fee would in any way excuse or protect Jinny Hutsall or Jagger Jonze. I wanna remind her about all the fucked-up things Jinny has done, like what happened the week after my birthday. But Fee’s not speaking to me right now, so once I’m through staring out the window, I go back to my blog. I have to get this stuff down.

  So this one day, we were all drinking lemonade around Jinny’s pool, talking about Brooky’s track event on the upcoming weekend. I’d been stoked to drive Bee’s fan club—us—in my new, old Prius, which was my birthday present from Shelley. Since Bee went on the team bus, I had enough seat belts, even one for Jinny.

  Jinny was, like, “I’m so sorry, but I hate the Prius. I know your parents are Canadian and whatever, and not to be offensive, but…”

  Okay, so if a person says “not to be offensive,” they’re about to offend. If they say “not to be racist,” whatever they say next will totally be racist.

  Jinny goes, “It’s just that Priuses are so weak, Rory. They’re just so libtard.”

  Offense taken.

  The Hive said nothing, of course, because they kinda felt the same way about the Prius. Automobiles are everything in Calabasas. Tom Sharpe says that in California you don’t own your car, your car owns you. Your success is in your whip, your tinted windows, and mag wheels, and fly rims. Some people spend more waking hours in their cars than their actual homes. A Prius? People say it’s the hemp sweatpants of cars. I don’t care.

  I looked around and I go, “Come on, chicas—I just got my license.”

  Zee goes, “We can just order a van service like always.”

  And Jinny says, “Plus, your mom won’t let you drive us because it’s illegal. Right? Underage passengers and all?”

  I’d already asked Shelley if I could drive the Hive. I’d done six months of driver’s ed so we could save money on insurance, and even though it’s not legal for a new driver to carry underage passengers, it’s done all the time and Shelley was chill about stuff like that. “Shelley’s cope with it.”

  “But the rest of the parents won’t be cope, right?” Jinny said.

  The girls all shrugged. Like, basically the parents around here can’t wait for the kids to get their driver’s license so they can stop carting them around and paying for expensive car services. So they’ll find a way to be copacetic about illegal shit that benefits them, no matter how Christian and rule-following they are. Everybody here gets a car for their sixteenth. It’s a thing. Already established that we’re spoiled brats.

  Dee goes, “Nah. Everybody’s chill with it. They know we don’t drink and drive and whatever. If we don’t speed, we won’t get caught, and anyway, Rory drives like a gramz for real.”

  “I do not!” I kinda do though.

  Then Jinny goes, “Well, if the folksies are good with it, then why don’t we take our Tahoe? We’ll be sooo much more comfy.”

  I didn’t even know she had a Tahoe. They had a four-car garage and with her brothers always coming and going I’d seen ‘Rarris and Mazzis and whatever parked in the drive. Never a Tahoe.

  I explained to Jinny that I had to drive because of my severe carsickness, and that if I didn’t drive, I’d have to take meds and would be sleepy and feel shitty. The girls did not support me, though, since obviously they’d be more comfortable in the Tahoe. And there were chargers in all the seat belts. Huge bonus. So it was decided that Jinny would drive us to the meet.

  She goes, “Where is it?”

  “Pasadena.”

  Jinny got way too excited about Pasadena. I should have suspected an agenda.

  Saturday morning, I took two honkin’ non-drowsy carsick meds, which never worked anyway, and told Shelley we’d be back late afternoon depending on traffic. She asked who was driving and was fine that it was Jinny, and she kissed my forehead and went straight back to her computer. I wish I could’ve told my mother what was going on in my life. But then again, she would have just told me to stand up for myself. Be true to myself. Express my beliefs. And none of that applied in this scenario. I also didn’t want to worry her. I was glad she was working again. I didn’t want to interrupt her flow.

  Even though I get way less sick riding in the front seat, and my friends are all aware of this fact, Zee shotgunned it, and I didn’t ask her to move because needy and demanding. Dee and Fee climbed in the back, and Jinny looked at me like she would have been so okay if I went home. I climbed in and buckled up
.

  Jinny played Jagger Jonze music the whole way there, and we sang along at the top of our lungs. It wasn’t awful. At first. It was actually kinda fun, doing harmonies, pretending we were a girl group. I kept checking myself about my own hypocrisy—I was being a hater, right? Judge-y. Jealous. So maybe Jinny is a little freaky with her ceiling fan God, but maybe I also just needed to lean into this new us. Plus, sometimes the screaming desire to be part of something is so loud you can’t hear your gut going, Nooooo.

  In the back of the Tahoe, even with my meds, I started feeling carsick a few miles out of Calabasas. The traffic was horrible. The traffic’s always horrible. And Jinny was so irritated and she was driving so fast—well, at least trying to. We were telling her it was no problem because the track events weren’t usually on time and we’d get there for Bee’s first challenge, but Jinny didn’t let up. She was bug-eyed, not cursing but muttering about the other drivers—procits, and illegals, geezers and gramz—weaving in and out of lanes that were not moving anyway, and I was getting sicker and sicker. I wondered if that was her plan.

  And then we pull up in front of the Pasadena Courthouse and we’re all like, wha…? And Jinny goes, “Surprise.”

  That’s when I realized why the road trip to Pasadena had gotten her so excited. The courthouse in Pasadena is where they take women who’ve been caught in illegal clinics, since the other courthouses in the area couldn’t handle the traffic from the protesters. Pasadena handles all of the abortion-related crimes and built permanent barricades to keep back the Crusaders and hired a squad of goons to make sure there was relative peace.

  The rest of us got quiet in the car, wondering exactly what we’d signed up for, but Jinny was on fire—flaming nervous energy and euphoria. After she parked, she got out and hefted this big green garbage bag out of the back of the Tahoe, going, “Come on. Come on. We don’t wanna miss them!”

  We got out and followed her over to join the other fifty or so people already there singing old-timey Christian hymns. “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” “Nearer My God to Thee.” Ugh. No wonder Christian rock got so popular. No wonder Jagger Jonze rose so high so fast. It was a crowd of mostly white people. Mostly women, but a few men and children too. They all had signs but hadn’t hoisted them yet. I read the stack against the wall: Baby killer. Murderer. No Mommy No!

  I said, “Um, Jinny…This is one hundred percent not okay. What are we doing here?”

  Jinny couldn’t hear me over the roar of the crowd as a police van pulled up to the curb. She reached for the green garbage bag.

  I’m like, “Jinny. I don’t want to be here. You should have asked us.”

  That she heard. She turned on me slowly, making sure the other girls were watching. “Don’t tell me you believe in abortion, Miller,” she said.

  “Get your religion off my body?” I replied.

  Jinny turned back to the idling police van and began to shout, “No, Mommy! No!” Around us, the crowd took up the chant, including Zara, which really tore me.

  I wasn’t down with any of it. Plus, No, Mommy! No! Seriously? That was a creepy fucking thing to yell at a woman who’d recently terminated her pregnancy, or who’d been caught in the waiting room of an underground clinic.

  The first woman out of the back of the van wore a pair of mud-caked faux BushBoots, pleather disasters that made my heart ache for her before I even laid eyes on her face. Her coat was what we oh so sensitive girls called Nino Kmarti, a term we applied to all clothes that poor people wear. She had blue hair twisted up into a knot at her crown. Dirty face. She looked homeless. And broken. The next woman was older, almost Shelley’s age, and wellish-dressed in Ann Taylor and good shoes. What’s her story? Did she already have fifty kids and a demanding job and couldn’t deal? The next person out of the van wasn’t a woman. She looked to be our age. A girl. She was wearing jeans and a crop top and she had frizzy hair and freckles and she was sobbing, and all I could think was, That could be me. It could be me.

  The woman in bad clothes didn’t look our way. None of them did, even when the protesters began to shout from behind the barricades, “Baby killer! Murderer!” An armed security guard took the elbow of the sobbing teenager after she stumbled on the long walkway toward the courthouse steps.

  Jinny’s face was red. Veins popping at her temple. Zara shouted along with her, taking the sign someone shoved into her hands, “No Mommy NO!”

  “Oh my God. You guys. This is not us.”

  “Not you, maybe,” Jinny said.

  “Can we please go now?”

  Dee and Fee were just sort of there, not joining in with the protesters but not supporting my objections either. I wished Brooky were with us.

  “YOU WILL PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID! NOT OKAY TO KILL YOUR KID!” Jinny sang when the rest took up the new chant.

  “Stop. Please stop this,” I said.

  Jinny fished in her pocket and tossed me the keys to the Tahoe. “You’re welcome to wait in the car.”

  I looked around at my hive. “What are we doing here? Since when is this us?”

  Jinny took a breath, eyes blazing. “We’re here because killing innocent babies is sin. And this is us.”

  Zee backed Jinny up. “You don’t have to believe the Bible to know killing is wrong.”

  “It’s about choice. A personal choice. You don’t get to decide for other people. You can’t see that, Zee?”

  Jinny goes, “So if I get annoyed with you and borrow my mom’s pistol to shoot you in the head, it’s a choice?”

  “Not the same thing.”

  “Murder is murder, Rory.” She squatted down and opened the green garbage bag. I nearly puked when I saw what was inside. A dozen or so foam rubber fetuses, fake blood–covered and real-looking. Like they could have been used on a movie set. Fucking disturbing.

  Jinny grabbed one by the teeny tiny hand and hurled it in the direction of the women being marched into the courthouse. The thing hit the young girl on the side of the head.

  Then Zee dipped her hand into the bag and threw the fetal abomination as hard as she could, missing all three women because Zee has no aim.

  I grabbed the heavy green garbage bag before Jinny could take another of those horrible things and started marching back to the Tahoe.

  Fee followed me. Rather than head for the car, we sat down in a grassy area near the parking lot, under the shade of a eucalyptus. “Fee,” I said. “This is messed.”

  “I know.”

  “At the very least, she should have told us she was bringing us here.”

  “True.”

  “Did you see Zee? What was that?”

  “I know. Gross. It’s just…”

  “Just…?”

  “Well, they have a right to their opinions, right?”

  Fee? I mean, I know she was rattled by what we’d just seen, but why was she not offended? “So it’s okay to scream at those poor women and throw shit at their heads?”

  “Not saying that. Just…I just want us all to get along.”

  When the protest ended, Jinny and Zara and Delaney came bounding up to find us under the tree, all chatty and friendsy like it was all no big thing. “We’re twenty minutes from the field,” Dee said. “We gotta fly.”

  In the car, Zee asked Jinny where she got the foam rubber fetuses because they looked so dead real, and Jinny said her dad imports them wholesale from China because they’re made of some substance that’s banned in America.

  I couldn’t help myself. “So on top of how formally shitty that was, now those toxic things will just sit in a landfill polluting the earth? Ugh, you guys.”

  “Oh my gosh. Here goes Planet Girl,” Zee said. Gosh. She stopped saying God—taking His name in vain—when she noticed it made Jinny Hutsall cringe.

  “I’m not Planet Girl.” I couldn’t let it go. “It’s just, come on. Little kids make those foam thingies in sweatshops in China? So basically you exploit children as you protest to save children?”

  “You worry
about the Chinese people and their job benefits and I’ll worry about American children who’re being murdered by their own mothers,” Jinny said.

  “Women are still going to have abortions. You get that, right? No matter the law. No matter you Crusaders. So they gotta go to Mexico? I mean, knitting needles in the basement like in our freaking grandmothers’ time? I’m glad there’s a Pink Market. I’m glad there’s an underground network with actual doctors and surgical instruments. Thank God.” I said that last part pretty emphatically.

  “So you obviously won’t be coming with us to the next protest, right, Rory?” Jinny said. “The week after AVB there’s a really big one in Palm Springs. We can all stay the weekend at our desert place. And I know I’m going to sound like a brat, but my dad said he’d get UberCopter for us so we don’t have to sit in traffic.”

  I closed my eyes because I felt sick from the driving, and the demonstration, and Fee’s attitude that this wasn’t worth rocking the boat over, and also because I couldn’t stand to see how excited my friends got about going to Jinny’s place in the desert. I definitely wouldn’t be joining them, but I also knew that if Fee went, I’d die.

  Brooky won all of her events at the track meet except for long jump, where she took second. We celebrated her victories and took tons of pics, and I faked a smile because I didn’t wanna be a bummer for her sake. I wished she could have driven home with us, but she had to take the team bus. If Jinny started up again about abortion and baby killers, at least Bee would’ve stood up to her in her own unconfrontational way.

  I really felt sick on the way home. Turns out that I was on the first day of a really bad flu.

  Jinny was slick, calling to me in the backseat, “I think I owe you an apology, Rory. I didn’t know you were an anti-Life person. Just never occurred to me. Guess I should have known.”

  Was that an apology? Fuck. “What would Jesus do? Right, guys?” I said. “Right, Zee?”

  Jinny smiled, but I could see in the rearview mirror all the microaggressions on her face. “Christ would weep, Rory. God wants us to save the babies.”

  I wanted to ask Jinny if she heard God talking to her through the white noise of her bedroom fan or if He was, like, riding the rotating blades, and didn’t that make them both super-dizzy. Instead, I said, “Those women just looked really scared. What if they were raped? What if it was incest? Anyway, it’s not for us to judge. Judge not lest ye be judged? Remember, Jesus said that.”