by Piper Lennox
“You aren’t mad?” I sniff, then cough the rest of the tears from my throat. I spit them over the railing and ignore the scolding look he flashes.
“I’m relieved, actually. I wish you hadn’t seen her like that at all—that I’d been the one to find her, instead. But knowing you at least missed it actually happening...maybe it shouldn’t bring me some weird kind of peace, but it does.”
“Not me. She was all alone. Her last thought was how pissed she was at me. How shitty I’d been to her.”
Dad’s quiet. He picks at some blistered paint on the railing. “Not sure if this will help you,” he says, “or make you feel worse.”
“I couldn’t possibly feel worse. Tell me.”
“She had her keys in her hand. And she was wearing her shoes, remember?”
I hesitate, then shake my head.
“At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. All the details blurred together, honestly. But now, knowing what you just told me….”
He stares at me, refusing to go on until I look back.
“She was heading out to look for you, Van. Her last thought wasn’t that she was mad at you. It was that she missed you.”
“You don’t know that.” I wonder if tear ducts can sprain from overuse following atrophy, because it feels like mine are on fire. “Maybe she was leaving to get groceries or something.”
“In her sweatpants?” Dad laughs.
That’s actually a really good point. Mom never left the house unless she was dressed.
Except when she went out looking for me.
Megan calls to him from an upstairs window; she can’t find their electric toothbrushes. He shouts back that he’ll be up soon, then swings his gaze from the porch roof to me.
“I’m glad you told me.”
“Yeah?” And here I thought I’d done it out of selfishness: wanting to make myself feel better, fearing it would make him feel worse. But this is the complete reverse.
Then again, as awful as I feel right now, my sinuses burning and ego shattered...I kind of feel better, too.
Dad squeezes my shoulder before he leaves. “Don’t stay up too late. You’ve got your follow-up with the doctor tomorrow.”
“I know,” I tell him, even though I forgot about the appointment entirely. Once he’s inside, I grab Juniper’s book from the swing and head down to the front walk.
It’s a small strip of sidewalk we never finished. Guess Howard put it on the backburner, too, because it still ends after a few concrete panels, transforming into a worn path through the grass.
Without really thinking, I follow it to the carriage house.
It’s been cleaned up and painted, but still feels like stepping back in time when I walk in and see all those fairy lights.
Howard told me he left them up. His boys used to come out here for mini-campouts and use them to read comic books or play Twister, but haven’t done that in a couple years.
I tuck the book under my arm and kneel in the dirt, feeling for the plug. When I bring it to the socket on the wall, I hold my breath. Push it in.
Nothing happens.
After two more tries, I give up. They’ve burned out, now useless tangles of wires and glass.
But when I crack the door to leave, I look back and see the moonlight reflected in every last bulb.
Thirty-Five
“Wow, what a gorgeous van!”
I look up with my heart beating twice as fast as it should. You’d think my brain would have some kind of filter to catch instances like these: the many times a day I hear, read, or say the word “van” meant as a vehicle, not a name.
“Thank you,” I manage, while the passersby circle my bumper. Being around people is the last thing I want right now, so I don’t invite them inside. When they ask if they can open up the back to see the rest—while already grabbing the handles; who does that?—I bite my tongue, but shake my head.
They walk away as though I screamed at them, which I expected. I’ve learned a lot the last few days, but especially that: some people are so sure you’ll say yes, so convinced that your business is also theirs, they take your display of a backbone and call it rudeness.
Oh, well. Not my problem.
I wonder if this was how Van felt—halfway between numb and furious at any given moment. I don’t like it. It’s a low current that buzzes through your body and leaves you feeling just off-center, all the time.
Despite the heat radiating off the electronics store lot, I shut up the Transit and lie in bed while the air conditioner struggles to earn its keep. My new camera and computer sit unopened on my shelf, taunting me.
I know I need to work. A photo, a blog post...anything. But I’ve got no idea what to write about, and there’s nothing I want to photograph or film out here. Even the sunrise this morning looked muted.
The laptop is cheap, a massive downgrade from my old one—the kind I used when I was just starting out. It feels appropriate. I feel like I’ve been downgraded, too. Something way too close to the person I was seven years ago.
I open it, but not to work. After skipping every setup prompt I can, I navigate to the browser.
Don’t, I tell myself, when I start typing “Unity Light cult” in the search bar, just as I’ve done on my phone every day since I left North Dakota.
Being back there finished opening up whatever wound Van first pulled the stitches on, with all that “show me yours, I’ll show you mine” talk. I can’t stop poking it to confirm it does, in fact, still hurt.
I’m not reading or watching anything I don’t already know, of course. Quite a few ex-members have given interviews. Cults are a Big Deal in the media, the kind of thing viewers and readers can’t get enough of. And the more details you give, the better.
Rebecca soon emerged as the favored source, because she was one of the few people born there who was willing to rehash the same stories, over and over. Most of the other ex-members are like me: no interest in reliving the past.
Maybe it would be easier if Unity Light didn’t exist anymore—if it weren’t still operating in some unknown location with a new name. If we were all out.
I click an article. I’ve already read this one several times over. My eyes know exactly what paragraph pattern to look for.
“Yes, we had to leave everything behind, but it wasn’t as though we had much to begin with. Unity Light didn’t allow most electronics,” Hostetter said of her harrowing escape with a group of other teens—one of whom was, like herself, engaged against her will and set to be married just a few days later.
“We didn’t have photographs, except ones the church took for recruitment pamphlets. And no books that weren’t approved by the council. They were in charge of everything we did.”
Hostetter did have one book she treasured, however: a worn copy of the middle-grade fantasy bestseller The Phoenix Seer, by D. Amelia Royce.
“My friend and I took it from a girl’s backpack in a park,” Hostetter explained. “Back when we were still allowed to leave Crown Plains for special trips.”
“It was a youth canvas…this thing where we had to go to parks and hand out pamphlets to kids.”
According to Hostetter, the group was told to target teens who were using drugs or drinking, or ones who appeared to be runaways.
“Lost souls,” she said. “That’s who we were supposed to find.”
I skip down past the part about Unity Light’s recruiting process. It sickens me too much—makes me imagine too vividly what my mother went through. Like us, the adult canvassers were told to look for lost souls. The younger, the better.
I still remember that trip. It was midsummer. Later, I’d realize this time was chosen on purpose: it was when most kids ran away from home.
Our chaperone fixed my braid as we filed off the bus and spread out. There were ten of us. We tended to stay in cliques, divided into the group that was born into Unity Light, or basically toddlers when their families joined, and the kids who still remembered their life before.
They huddled in clusters and complained about how much they missed television, or real school.
Secretly, I loved listening to their conversations. I’d hover nearby and drink up whatever they said, even when I didn’t understand it.
That day, Rebecca and I handed out our pamphlets together. She found it hilarious whenever I’d go off-script, especially to nosey people who asked a lot of questions. We were supposed to ignore them and move on; the chaperones said they were beyond saving already, too mired in doubt.
I enjoyed talking to them, though. I’d compliment their tattoos and piercings. They’d admire our long braids, or poke gentle fun at our old-fashioned clothes.
By the end of the trip, we’d chatted up everyone in our corner of the park and handed out all our pamphlets. Most would end up in the trash, but at least the chaperone couldn’t punish us for being slothful. We’d done our job.
“Jessie,” Rebecca whispered, elbowing me when I joined her on a bench to rest, “look.”
I wiped the sweat from my eyes and turned. There was a pink backpack on the ground, unzipped.
Inside was the book.
“It belongs to her, I think.” Rebecca nodded at the girl on the monkey bars, all the way across the soccer field.
“The Phoenix Seer,” I read. Our fingertips traced the embossment on the cover. It was gorgeous, but worn, which made me love it even more.
Coveting, I recited in my head. Wanting what your neighbor has on his plate, when you should be thankful for whatever’s on yours.
What was on our plates?
Chapbooks of Reverend Barton’s visions-turned-poetry, his face emblazoned on the cover, filled the only bookshelf in my house. Rebecca’s, too. A few varying translations of the Bible and boring books about sewing or cooking filled out the rest. Even the religious comic books we used to get in school as a weekly treat were now banned.
Our plates were empty. This girl, dangling from those monkey bars by her tanned, bare legs while her shoulder-length hair fluttered around her, had so much.
Her backpack was shiny and metallic pink. Figurines clattered from both zippers, and when I nudged the bag I could see all kinds of little treasures inside: bracelets and toys and candy that made my mouth water, just to look at it.
She had two other books in there, as well. Would she miss this one? A single bite from an overflowing plate?
“Quick,” I told Rebecca, and shoved it into the pamphlet bag when no one was looking. She covered it with our uneaten sandwiches and followed me to the bus.
We hid the book between the wall and the seat when the chaperone collected our bags, praising us for meeting our literature quota. Rebecca smiled and thanked her, but I wasn’t listening. All I cared about was that book.
I hid it under my dress during the bus ride back to Crown Plains, which took hours. When I was older, I’d realize the reason for this was two-fold.
First, they wanted to recruit people from as far away as possible, so police and family members wouldn’t be able to track them down.
And second—so we’d fall asleep before the trip was done. They didn’t want us knowing where Crown Plains was. How close it was to anything else.
I look back at the article.
Unfortunately, Hostetter hasn’t been able to find her friend since they left the cult.
Her heartfelt plea went viral on Facebook a year ago, asking anyone with information on Jescha Cole to contact Hostetter.
At the time of publication, the whereabouts of Cole are still unknown.
“I get emails every week,” Hostetter says. “People say they’ve seen her in one state, but then the next email says she’s across the country at the same time. None of the ones we’ve followed up with turned out to be her.”
Hostetter has abandoned her search, but says she refuses to fear the worst—that her friend didn’t survive her escape from the Unity Light compound.
“Jescha was—is—one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. If I made it out of there, so did she. So the only reason I can think of that she hasn’t been found yet...is because she doesn’t want to be.”
I close the laptop and lie back, shutting my eyes against the traces of Van’s deodorant I swear I keep smelling, no matter how many times I wash this bedding.
Rebecca was half-right.
At first, I wanted her to find me, or vice-versa. I spent every outdoor minute at the ranch watching the woods, hoping she’d appear.
A few months after I left, I was hopping around homeless shelters and doing odd jobs to save for the Transit, when the first car I’d bought kicked the bucket. One evening, when it was too early to reserve a bed but too dark to hunt for work, I went to the nearest library and sat at a computer.
Slowly, I typed Rebecca’s name into a search engine.
She was already giving interviews. I was shocked to find dozens of others, from ex-members who left years ago. I’d thought Crown Plains and Unity Light and Barton were a secret, exactly as he intended them to be, but most of the outside world already knew about them.
Then why did nobody save us?
Rebecca quickly made a comfortable career out of talking about the Plains, which is what stopped me from reaching out to her. In that sweltering attic when we first planned our escape, we said we couldn’t wait to leave it all behind and never talk about it again.
Clearly, she’d changed her mind.
And that was fine for her. If she wanted to parade the details in front of cameras and reporters all day long, who was I to judge? But that didn’t mean I wanted to be around it.
I did miss her. I still do.
But she knows me as Jescha, and Jescha doesn’t exist anymore.
Unity Light wasn’t looking for me, I knew that much. They only went after the ones who left when they seemed unsure. Climbing a fence and running through the wilderness in the dead of night? Didn’t get much more sure than that.
And if Rebecca and the other ex-members could tell their stories without Unity Light coming after them, I knew I was safe to post whatever I wanted about my new life.
By the time I started my blog—with my haircut, weight gain, new clothes, and some makeup—I looked nothing like I used to. The threat of being recognized was gone. Even if someone did find out who I used to be, I had my Transit. I’d be gone before they could do a double-take in my direction.
There was only one person I wanted to find me, anymore. And she’d be able to see past the changes, the years, and recognize me in a heartbeat.
If she ever came looking for me at all.
But right now, no one is looking for Juniper Summers. I guess I’m looking for myself, if I feel like getting dramatically poetic about it. All hippie-ish. Which I don’t.
My phone pings. Someone I don’t know is sending me a message on Instagram.
I open it. It’s usually spam, but every now and then it’s a new follower, or another van-lifer looking to meet up and hang out.
Hey. Your bio said to DM you with questions?
I type back a “Sure, how can I help?” and force just enough cheerfulness into my thumbs to add a smile emoji.
How far can you usually travel in a week?
Odd question, I think. Most people frame this differently: how many miles to the gallon does the Transit get, how long do I stay in each town, etc.
But I did say I’d help, so I write back that it depends on whether I’m traveling somewhere specific, or just wandering for a while.
Let’s say you’re driving to get as far from one person as possible. Where might you end up?
My creep sirens sound off...until I look at the username again, and actually take a second to read it.
Flew2Close.
The profile picture is, of course, a cropped oil painting of Icarus.
Thirty-Six
I drop my phone in the cupholder, buckle my seatbelt, and drive until it’s dark.
Should I answer him?
No. Definitely not. The only correct response is none, ev
en if it hurts. It’s better for both of us.
A clean, simple break.
When the roads are too deserted to keep my interest and I start feeling tired, I pull over in a parking lot and stare at the swaying reflection of the string lights in my windshield.
My heart pounds when I grab my phone again, lugging it to the bed like an anchor. I lie down and open the app.
He hasn’t written anything new, still waiting for my answer.
Juni: I blocked your real profile for a reason, you know.
Van: I know. Because I’ve been an asshole of unprecedented proportions. And I’m sorry.
Juni: That’s not why. The opposite, in fact—you were right. We can’t work. We never should have tried.
Juni: …
Juni: I’m not who you think I am.
Van: I know.
Van: You’re even more incredible than I thought.
I roll over and wipe my tears on the pillow.
Van: I’m sorry I pushed you to tell me when you weren’t ready.
Van: I’m sorry I couldn’t just trust you.
The tears triple. What I wouldn’t give to have that numbness back, the kind that fueled me over the North Dakota border.
I get ready to type back that I accept his apologies, even though I don’t know if I do or not. I’m starting to think he was right. They don’t mean much, when they can’t change anything.
Van: Come home.
