Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“I would rather jab a hot knife in my eye.”

“Too bad for you, then, because your mom already said yes.”

IBLAME JESUS. AND BEFORE YOU get all uptight about sacrilege, remember that it would be just as easy to blame you.

I should have left without you. I could have: I had the car. Shame on me for giving you more time, for assuming the Bastard would calm himself down. For going home.

Call it a failure of the imagination.

HORIZONS. THAT’S WHAT THE SHITHOLE was called. As in Expand your . As in Learn to see Christ on the . As in Unless you want to be a brainwashed Jesus-freak head case, better run for the .

They dumped me off just inside the barbed wire gate, and I knew exactly what kind of place it was once I saw the pony-tailed blonde with the lobotomized smile flanked by two thugs just waiting for a chance to test out their Tasers. I let Thing One and Thing Two frog-march me in to see the man in charge — also blond; they were all fucking blond. He told me to call him Shawn. The people at Horizons said Shawn the way Shawn said Jesus . This puny, pasty gym-teacher wannabe with the cross-shaped whistle around his neck and the gigantic mahogany desk that said more than he intended about the size of his dick, this was the only guy with the power to send me back to you.

“Welcome to your safe haven,” he said, and I wondered how many of the girls he’d fucked, hoping it was a lot, because it’s the kind of guy who’s in it for other reasons that you really have to worry about.

He issued me a Horizons handbook and my very own teen Bible, complete with a couple neutered blonds frolicking on the cover, bone-white horse teeth testifying to their oneness with the Lord. “We’ve made a space for you in bunk six, Ecclesiastes. Chastity will take you over there. I’m sure you have many questions—”

“Starting with, are you fucking kidding me that her name is Chastity ?” I had more questions — did he really believe that a few coils of barbed wire could keep out the devil, how much had the Bastard paid for the privilege of dumping me in this shithole, how long would it be before I could go home — but Shawn’s game-show-host grin had gone full jack-o’-lantern.

“—but as you’ll learn from your handbook, you haven’t yet earned the privilege of asking questions.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“This is a hard transition process, I know. So I’ll give you a pass on the language. But my leniency ends now.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?” I said.

He jerked his head at She-Who-Would-Not-Be-Penetrated. “One demerit,” he said, shaking his head in what I eventually came to recognize as Shawn’s Special Recipe Sorrow, because it hurt him ever so much to hurt us.

One demerit meant one chore, of my counselor’s choosing, and my counselor, a mini-Mussolini named Heather, never met a toilet she didn’t think needed a good toothbrush-scrub. So that’s how I spent my first morning at Horizons: on my knees, bent over the bowl, swallowing bile because I was pretty sure that if I threw up I’d have to clean that, too. As I scrubbed, she walked me through my dos and don’ts: Do love Jesus, do follow the rules, don’t think for yourself, don’t imagine your life is your own, don’t fuck up or you’ll be sorry.

For each day of not fucking up, you earned a privilege, and privileges were everything. You needed them to speak to other campers, to leave your cabin without supervision, to send letters, to spend your free time outside rather than sitting at your desk reading the Bible, to go to the bathroom without supervision—“and I don’t want to waste any more time than I have to watching you pee,” Heather said, “so get it together.” No amount of privileges would get you five minutes of any music but Christian rock. You earned privileges by memorizing Bible passages, making your bed with hospital corners, sucking up to your counselor, publicly confessing your sins and taking Jesus into your heart, writing antiabortion letters to your local congressman, and tattling on your fellow campers when they momentarily forgot themselves and started acting like human beings rather than zombies. We lived in bunkhouses named for the books of the Bible, a dozen of us in Ecclesiastes: twelve little girls in two straight lines, call it Madeline and the Jesus Freaks .

Mornings were for Bible study, afternoons were for exercise, then the sing-alongs and sharing sessions that comprised mandatory fun. Meals were for watching your back and learning your place. Twelve girls, and I didn’t need to learn their names or their stories because I didn’t intend to be one of them for long. It was enough to know that the Screamer jerked us all awake at three every morning; that the Sodomite had been caught in flagrante with her soccer team captain; that the Skank was a sex addict, or at least had a diary-reading mother who thought so; that the Virgin had remained so — if only by her own technical definition — by restricting herself to copious amounts of anal sex; that Saint Ann had shipped herself off to Horizons voluntarily, in search of some sinners to save.

The Bastard would have liked the regimented schedule, the drill-sergeant counselors whipping us into shape, a boot camp for the army of God; he would have loved the fact that any trespass was met with flamboyant, Old Testament — style consequences. This wasn’t hippie worship, the guitar-playing, turn-the-other-cheek kind of lovefest he detested, and it wasn’t the bingo-playing, potlucking, pamphleteering morality play that enraged him in Battle Creek. This was a camp created as if in his own image, complete with brimstone and fire and daily viewings of The 70 °Club . All I had to do, they told me, was learn respect for authority and for the Lord, and they would send me home.

I tried.

I dedicated my life to Christ. I memorized Bible passages. I sang that my God was an awesome god and learned the hand motions to prove it. When we stood in a circle for Squeeze Prayer, I said my line, “I pray that the Lord helps me fight off the devil and his temptations,” then squeezed Skank’s hand and pretended to listen while she told her own lie. I dedicated myself to craft projects, because Jesus was a carpenter and handiwork was noble work; I sawed wood and carved soap, and when we practiced tying knots I did my best not to dream of a noose. I confessed to lascivious thoughts and agreed with Heather that I’d squandered my life. I racked up two weeks’ worth of privileges, and I didn’t let myself think of Battle Creek or of you until I was safe in bed, because that was my reward for making it through each day — that and Kurt, who sang me to sleep. Two weeks, and I scored enough privileges to write two letters. One to the Bastard, promising to be good if he’d let me come home. The other to you.

Dear Dex , I wrote, then stopped.

Dear Dex, I’ve given up. Dear Dex, Everything I told you about myself was a lie. Dear Dex, Everything I do is so I can come home to you, but I don’t deserve you if I come home like this.

No. I needed to be your Lacey. Strong. So the next morning, during the dawn service, I stood up in my pew and cursed Jesus Christ my Lord for this season in hell, and our whole bunk got rewarded with an afternoon scrubbing shit out of the toilet bowls. The next day I gave Shawn the finger, and Heather tasked us with mucking out the cow stalls, to remind us what it meant to be befouled by sin. I thought of you, Dex, and I thought of Kurt, and knew I would roll in my own shit before living their vision of salvation.

The next time I fucked up, they tried something new.