Have a Little Faith in Me

by Sonia Hartl

  God help me, indeed.

  Chapter 5

  Taking on the role of my summer best friend with more determination than actual appreciation for my company, Mandy insisted on covering my eyes before she would open the door to cabin eight. I had to assume a cabin was a cabin, though. I’d camped plenty of times as a kid, and we always stayed in cabins with electricity so my dad could hook up his sleep apnea machine.

  Mandy giggled her little bell-like giggle and took her hands off my eyes. “Ta-da. What do you think? Isn’t it the cutest?”

  The cabin had plain white walls, with exposed wooden beams crisscrossing the ceiling. It smelled like mothballs and floor cleaner, but it was homey enough. Four twin beds with white sheets took up most of the space, save for a giant braided rug at the center of the open room. Each bed had a wooden cross above it and a set of shelves built into the wall, with drawers for storage underneath. A door to the back opened up to a small bathroom with one shower, one toilet, and one sink. That would suck in the morning.

  “Since you’re new, we decided to let you have first pick of the beds,” Mandy said.

  “When did you decide that?” I asked.

  “When you ran off to make out with your boyfriend.”

  “Paul’s not—” I’d gotten so accustomed to telling everyone and their dog that Paul wasn’t my boyfriend, changing that particular trajectory would take some getting used to. “I mean, yes. Lots and lots of making out. You know. Before official camp begins.”

  “I’ll tell you a little secret.” Her blue eyes danced with mischief. “You can make out after official camp begins. Just don’t get caught.”

  Did Christian kids even make out? Obviously they did on some level. They could even have sex as much as they wanted, so long as they claimed to be born-again whenever it suited their needs. But I didn’t know if they talked about it out loud, or if it was one of those things everyone did but no one talked about. Since I was stuck sharing a cabin with Ethan’s new girlfriend, I hoped it was one of those things they didn’t talk about.

  “I guess I’ll take this one.” I pointed to the bed tucked behind the door. There wasn’t much of a difference between the beds, but I didn’t want to get stuck next to the bathroom.

  “Perfect.” Mandy tossed my suitcase onto the bed. “You can personalize it any way you like. They even let us paint the walls if we promise to paint them white again before we go.”

  “That seems like a lot of work for three weeks.”

  “No one ever goes full color. They just paint crosses and butterflies and things like that.” Mandy dumped her stuff on the bed across from mine. “How do you know Ethan? Do you two go to the same church?”

  “Um …”

  I hadn’t figured out how to explain that one yet. Luckily, Astrid and Sarina barreled in behind us, providing a nice distraction. They did rock-paper-scissors to decide the fate of the last good bed, with Sarina’s paper covering Astrid’s rock. Astrid gave a long-suffering sigh and put her stuff on the bed next to the bathroom.

  The girls caught up on their school year while I quietly unpacked my clothes and the few personal belongings I’d taken with me. They had the kind of easy rhythm with each other that came from spending every summer in the same cabin since they were sophomores. Even if they hadn’t figured out I wasn’t a Christian, there was more than one way to be an intruder.

  I put my collection of romance novels on the shelf next to a picture of my parents. Probably not Jesus-camp-appropriate reading, but I’d die if I could only read the Bible for the next three weeks. The Beanie Boo elephant my dad got me for my birthday, because for some reason he still thought I was five, sat next to the Bible I’d run over a few times with my mom’s car to make it look well read. I was sure I’d committed some kind of high-level blasphemy with that one, but in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “She hit a line drive straight to my stomach,” Mandy said, telling Sarina and Astrid about her homeschool community’s softball team. “I still caught it, though, and you should’ve seen the look on her face. They thought they had the game in the bag.”

  “Nice,” Astrid said. “I bet you had a welt the size of your head.”

  “Bigger.” Mandy beamed as if this were a point of pride. “Do you play sports, CeCe?”

  Other than my disastrous first day on the ski team, where I walked away with a black eye and zero chance of dating Austin? “No. Sports and I don’t get along.”

  “Same for me,” said Sarina. “Unless you count shopping as a sport. I’d be All-State in collecting Sephora Beauty Insider points.”

  “Speaking of which, how do you do that with your eyes?” I couldn’t stop looking at them. The mermaids on her lids appeared to swim every time she smiled.

  “My parents didn’t let me wear makeup until I turned sixteen. Once they let me, I went a little overboard.” She cast her eyes downward, like it shamed her for some reason.

  “I think it’s amazing,” I said. “I’d give anything to have that kind of talent. Do you draw, too, or just do cool stuff with eye pencils?”

  “Just the makeup.” She folded and refolded the same shirt from her bag three times. “I’m really not that good. I’m still learning.”

  “Oh right.” Astrid snorted. “That’s why you’ve gotten fifty thousand YouTube subscribers in what? Six months?”

  “Wait.” I held my hand out. “You have fifty thousand subscribers and you think you’re not that good? I’m all for a little modesty, but da—darn. You’ve earned the right to brag.”

  Her face paled. “Pride is a sin.”

  “It’s a stupid sin.” All three girls went suddenly still, and Paul’s advice about not talking echoed in my head. “Well, it is.” I huffed as I threw a stack of shirts in my drawer. “Girls get enough crap.” Did they consider crap a swear? “The least we can do is be proud of our own accomplishments. Lord knows the world won’t do it for us.”

  “I was proud when our softball team went to nationals,” Mandy said as she stared at her clasped hands in her lap. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

  “It’s not,” Astrid said. “I take pride in my youth group. And, Sarina, you should be proud of your YouTube channel. Your tutorials taught me how to apply liner without stabbing myself in the eye, and that alone is a pretty phenomenal feat.”

  “My parents don’t feel the same way.” Sarina looked out the window. “They might make me take down my YouTube channel when I get home from camp.”

  “Then tell them Galatians 6:4 states that ‘Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else.’” Astrid crossed the cabin to give Sarina a hug. “Pride is only a sin when you use it to put others down.”

  “Thanks.” Sarina’s cloudy expression cleared. “What about you, CeCe? Do you have any hobbies or extracurriculars you’re involved with?”

  “Not really.” Unless they counted causing a ruckus at school on a regular basis, telling stories with Paul in our hideout, or pelting his mom with water-filled condoms. Which I’m sure they didn’t. “I’m still trying to find my thing. Other than worshipping Jesus, of course.”

  “I checked out your Instagram,” Astrid said. “You have a lot of pictures of Paul making goofy faces. That looks like a hobby.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s kind of an ‘us’ thing.”

  Outside of the occasional shark-humping news article, Paul and I had pretty much dedicated each other’s Instagrams to maximum one-upping. It started with a shot I took of him watering his mom’s flowers. From the angle of my bedroom window, it looked like he was peeing. He fired back with an unflattering photo of me shoving half a Popsicle down my throat.

  It devolved from there.

  “I looked you guys up too. I thought you were a girl with a Precious Moments profile picture,” I said to Sarina.

  “That is me,” she said. “My family one. I do all my makeup pictures under EyesAlive. It’s not attached to my
real name in case weirdos on the Internet try to look me up.” Her face turned beet red. “I don’t mean you. I mean, like creepers and stuff.”

  “Weirdos on the Internet would be a great band name,” I said, before realizing that would only ever make sense to Paul. “I saw all your pics too,” I said to Astrid. “You’re always with a ton of people. Is that your youth group?”

  She nodded. “Some of them. I try to show us having a good time, so people resistant to attending church won’t feel like it’s all stuffy and boring.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t find anything on me.” Mandy picked at the split ends in her sunny hair. “My parents think the Internet rots your brain. And their parents said the same thing about television, so we don’t have one of those, either.”

  She didn’t have Internet or Netflix? My heart wept for her. “What do you do for entertainment?”

  “We have music, and phones with no data. I have seven brothers and sisters, so there’s always someone around to play board games with. I like to bake. Sometimes we invite friends over and play softball. We go sledding and ice-skating in the winter. Usual stuff.”

  It sounded pretty normal. Not for me, but I had friends who did all those things. No social media, though … I shuddered.

  After I folded my last T-shirt and stuck it in a drawer, I turned back to the girls. “I know Mandy and Ethan are a thing.” I somehow managed to get that out without a hint of bile rising up my throat. “Is anyone else here dating?”

  “The only man I have an interest in committing myself to at this point in my life is my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

  Okay. So Astrid was no fun.

  “What about you, Sarina?”

  She blushed. The Christian girls did that a lot. Like the girls back at school who could make themselves cry on demand. A skill I envied.

  “Last summer Jerome kissed me at the final bonfire,” Sarina said. “I’m not sure if anything is going to happen this summer. Let’s say I wouldn’t be opposed to it.”

  “Really?” I said. “No offense, but that guy seems like a total dick.”

  “Why? Because he didn’t come to the rescue of that little pervert, Peter?” Sarina’s disposition had gone chillier than the window unit working overtime to keep our cabin a steady seventy-two degrees. “You’re new, so you don’t know he almost got kicked out last year.”

  “For what?” Peter was on the skinny side, kind of nerdy, but overall seemed harmless.

  “He had a picture of a girl under his mattress,” Mandy said in a hushed tone.

  “A naked picture?” Gross, but not the worst thing teenage boys kept under their beds. I’d once found a week-old burrito growing fuzzy mold under Paul’s.

  “Not naked, but she might as well have been,” said Astrid with a look of revulsion on her face. “It came from one of those calendars. The kind where the girl wears dental floss while she rides a muscle bike that is an obvious euphemism for a man’s penis.”

  “And he almost got kicked out for that?” The people in charge were way more hard-core than Mandy had made them seem on the van ride over. “Seems a little extreme.”

  “It’s disgusting and objectifying to women. He’s lucky his parents made such a huge donation to the camp, or he would’ve been gone for sure,” Astrid said. As if that settled it.

  I sort of agreed with her about the objectification, but if a woman got paid to wear a short skirt and pose for photos on a motorcycle, that was her business. Hell, I’d probably do it too. It had to pay way more than babysitting, for a fraction of the work. Christian CeCe couldn’t voice that opinion though. Christian CeCe had to toe the line to keep her ruse intact.

  “It sounds like he could really use this place then,” I said, recalling when Peter had mentioned something about why his mom wanted him to return to camp.

  “We should get down to dinner.” Mandy hooked her arm through mine. “The food is actually pretty decent here. And, as leadership campers, we’ll have access to the kitchen keys for cleanup duty, so we can always snag some chips if we get hungry later.”

  “Isn’t that stealing?” I asked.

  “For all the work we’re going to be doing for free?” Astrid’s face puckered. “They owe us the chips, cookies, and whatever else we feel like eating, whenever we want.”

  And with that, Astrid had given me a pretty decent lesson in navigating Christianity. Outside all the Bible Scriptures I hadn’t bothered to read. Turned out, any sin could be justified with a certain level of entitlement.

  Chapter 6

  We met up with the guys by the lake before dinner. They had an annoyingly long trek to get to camp, but I supposed it built character. Or at least better calf muscles. A cool breeze kicked up off the lake and mixed with the scent of wildflowers growing along the trail. A month ago Ethan would’ve picked some of those for me. Now he made a huge show of picking up Mandy and spinning her around. Hint taken. The younger kids who walked by oohed over the golden couple as I tried not to vomit.

  Paul slung an arm over my shoulders. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  “He probably wants to ravish me before dinner,” I said to Ethan as Paul dragged me away from the rest of the group.

  “You told me you’d explain,” Paul said. “I got the gist of it from the way Ethan talked while we unpacked, but I want to hear it from you. Why did you tell him we’re dating?”

  “It just happened.” I rubbed my arms, wishing I’d grabbed a hoodie before we’d left for dinner. “He wouldn’t even look at me until Mandy made some offhand comment like she thought we were together. It made him jealous.”

  “I got that part.” Paul crossed his arms over his chest. “What I don’t get is why you’re still actively pursuing a guy who A, has a girlfriend, and B, only bothers to notice you when his possessive jackass instincts kick in.”

  “He said we could talk about us after camp.”

  Paul closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. “I’m trying to understand your point of view, and I’m not getting there. He’s obviously keeping you on the hook.”

  “But if he didn’t care, it wouldn’t matter to him.” Like Paul was one to lecture me. He hadn’t even noticed when Jessica Hapgood started dating his lab partner to get his attention after they broke up. “Ethan still loves me. He can’t stand the sight of me with another guy.”

  “No.” Paul’s lips thinned as he exhaled through his nose. “He’s jealous because he’s an asshole. He wants you to want him for his ego, not because he loves you. If he really cared, he’d either break up with Mandy now or let you go.”

  “It’s not like that. He isn’t aggressive or mean like the other guys I’ve hooked up with. He’s awkward and shy and gets picked on at school.”

  Ethan was the nice guy. That was the whole reason why I’d dated him in the first place. I was so tired of the guys who acted like they were doing me a favor by being seen with me, like Justin Counter, who only ate lunch with me so I’d pay for his Taco Bell. Or Tyler Volk, who wouldn’t even make eye contact with me after I gave him a hand job. Later I found out he told a bunch of people I sucked at it and he had to walk me through the whole thing, so I told everyone his penis had been so small, I had trouble locating it in the first place. I considered us even.

  On the other hand, Ethan wasn’t hot or athletic or cool. He was kind of a dork. But he held my hand in the halls and picked me flowers and bragged about me to his friends. He got scared after we had sex. His upbringing traumatized him into believing he’d put his immortal soul in jeopardy, and it was hard for me to blame him for that. Burning for all eternity was some serious shit.

  “Remember the summer before sixth grade?” Paul asked. “When we picked a bunch of blueberries on my grandfather’s farm and set up a roadside stand?”

  “Of course.” We tried to sell the berries individually, thinking we’d make a huge profit, because we were eleven and didn’t understand the concept of supply and demand. “It was really cool of your aunt to buy that
one berry from us.”

  “Our first and only sale.” He smiled. “But remember what happened after, when I tried to give you a celebratory kiss on the lips for our first dollar?”

  “I punched you in the face.”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his jaw as he looked off in the distance. “I miss that girl.”

  “You do? I mean, I didn’t know getting punched in the face was your thing, but if you want me to, I’m more than happy to oblige.”

  “I’m sure you would. Anyway, after that happened, my mom gave me a huge lecture about what it means to respect girls. She hasn’t stopped lecturing me since that day. But I doubt Ethan got the same talk from his parents. They’re probably the type who pretend sex before marriage doesn’t even exist.”

  “It’s a shame all your mom’s lectures didn’t sink in for you.” Paul’s mom was a cape-wearing Super Christian, but still a realist in a lot of ways. The number of girls he dated wouldn’t have gone by unnoticed.

  “Why do you think it didn’t sink in? Do you think I don’t respect girls?”

  The troubled look on his face gave me pause. I’d been giving Paul crap about his meaningless relationships since freshman year, when I overheard Alisha Roth crying in the locker room. He’d dumped her shortly after they’d made out behind the gym during the Halloween dance. It never seemed to bother him before, or maybe I’d never pushed the right buttons. I never did tell him that Alisha had cried. Girl Code kept me from revealing how much damage he’d really done over the years.

  “I think you appreciate girls.” I had to pick my words carefully, because Paul wasn’t heartless. Not on purpose. “But you think sex is just sex, like it’s not a big deal to you. Which makes you a little dense when it comes to the emotional stuff.”

  “You make everything a big deal, and I’m the dense one? Nice try, but look at what all that emotional investment did to you. Now you’re stuck faking it with me at Jesus camp.” He took my hand, threading his long fingers through mine.