Jasper stuck out his tongue at her. “Not going to work anymore, is it, Rose? She’s not Mother Sally, and she doesn’t believe every word out of your lying mouth.”
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t speak that way to your sister.”
Jasper just grinned.
I took Leon by the shoulder. “Come on, now. You’re going to time out.”
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said. “You shouldn’t have hit your brother.”
“But I didn’t.”
I gave him a little nudge. “Leon, let’s go.”
He wouldn’t budge.
I took him by the arm and tugged.
He planted his feet on the floor and refused to move, screwing up his face.
I tugged harder.
And it was this scene that the other wives walked in on. Me struggling with a nine-year-old boy in the middle of the kitchen while the other children stood around, laughing at me.
Sally rushed forward and snatched Leon away from me. “What do you think you’re doing?”
May ran around me to the stove. “Abigail, I think this might be burning.”
I turned to see that Holly was standing away from the stove, holding the wooden spoon, not stirring at all.
I shut my eyes and stood up, feeling like I was going to boil over.
Sally’s voice, shrill. “What gives you the right to put your hands on my child?”
I took several deep breaths, and then opened my eyes. In a barely controlled voice, I said, “Leon hit Finn while they were outside playing. I was taking Leon to a time out. While I was doing that, Holly was supposed to be watching the stir fry.”
“It wasn’t Leon, Mother,” said Rose. “It was Jasper. Jasper hit Finn.”
May turned away from the stove. She’d taken the skillet off the heat and was shaking it to see the damage to the food. “Jasper? Is that true?”
Jasper tossed his head. “Mother, you know how Sally’s kids like to make up stories.”
Sally gasped. “That is not true, Jasper. You’re the one who’s making up stories. Just because your mother lets you run wild all over—”
“Excuse me,” said May, her voice strained.
Sally glared at May.
Fern cleared her throat. “Finn looks fine to me now.”
The little brat did at that. He was smiling up at the commotion in the kitchen, just like the other kids. They seemed to enjoy the commotion caused by pitting the mothers against each other.
“Someone hit him,” said Sally. She turned to me. “Did you see it?”
I shook my head. “Well, no, I didn’t actually see it—”
“What were you doing?” said Sally. “Weren’t you watching them? We asked you to watch them.”
“I was trying to make dinner,” I said, and my voice came out sharp.
Fern stifled a small smile. “Sally, perhaps you’d better take your children someplace safe. Then you can have your eye on them every single second.” Her voice was mild, but there was just a hint of sarcasm.
It wasn’t lost on Sally. She drew herself up. “You’re so self-righteous, aren’t you, Fern? First you didn’t even want me to come to the prayer meeting at all, even when you always leave me behind to watch all the children—”
“Jasper and Marissa can amuse themselves,” said May. “Your children are young, and so it only makes sense for you to stay home with them. When Fern and I had young children, we stayed home. It seems to me, Sally, that you can’t let a second go by without finding something to complain about. Your certain that someone’s attacking you or attacking your children and—”
“May.” Fern shook her head.
May looked down at her shoes.
Sally’s lower lip trembled. “Everyone hates me. You all hate me. No matter what I do in this family, you’re all against me.” She looked at me, and a fat tear trickled down her cheek. “I hoped you would help balance things, but you’re on their side, aren’t you?”
My mouth dropped open. Sally was the one who wasn’t on my side.
“There aren’t any sides,” Fern said, but she was starting to sound exasperated.
Sally let out a sob. “Come on, children. I can see we aren’t wanted here. Let’s go to our wing now.”
All of the children except Jasper and Marissa trooped after their mother like a string of ducklings. She led them out of the kitchen.
It was quiet for several minutes, until they were all gone.
Then Fern let out a long sigh. “I wonder if she’ll be back for dinner tonight, or if she’ll insist on feeding them herself again?”
May shrugged. “You never know. We’d better have enough food just in case. If she goes and whines to Bob again—”
“Now, May,” said Fern, “we shouldn’t say whines.” She went over to the stove to look at what remained of the stir fry. Then she turned to me. “Looks like you’ll have to start again, Abigail. At least the rice seems to be okay. Hard to mess up rice after all.”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t apologize, just fix it,” said Fern. “That’s the best we can do around here.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jesse
“So, on the one hand, you’ve got your shaving gel and a razor,” said Anthony, holding it up. “On the other hand, you’ve got your electric shaver.” He pointed. “Since you’re just starting out, I suggest the shaver. It’s a lot harder to cut yourself. But you definitely get a closer shave with the razor.” He set it down on the sink. “Still, you’ve got a pretty light beard, so it might not matter that much if it isn’t too close, because your hair’s not going to be as easy to see.”
I looked back and forth at both of them. Men in the community didn’t shave, because we tried to stay as close to our natural state as possible. The saying went that God wouldn’t have given us hair if he wanted us to cut it off. I was feeling a little apprehensive. “You sure I need to do this? Don’t men out in the world have beards?”
“You need to do it,” said Anthony. “You want a demonstration?”
“Uh… would that make you think I was a total idiot?”
“Oh, I already think you’re a total idiot,” he grinned.
I shoved him, laughing. “Shut up.”
He picked up the electric shaver. “Watch and learn, buddy. Watch and learn.” He turned it on.
The whir of it made me jump.
He snickered.
“Hey, isn’t that thing going to get caught on your lip ring?”
“You gotta be careful, man.” He smirked at me.
* * *
It felt strange without a beard, but kind of nice. I liked the way I looked when I saw myself in the mirror too. In my worldly clothes, without my beard, my appearance didn’t scream that I was from the community anymore. Of course, my hair was still long. Anthony had offered to cut it all off with clippers, because he said that out here in the world, people thought guys with long hair were lazy, good-for-nothing tramps.
I asked him what they thought of all the metal in his face or the fact that his hair was orange, and he just laughed and said I had a good point.
Anyway, I had my hair pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of my neck, and I told myself I would cut it. Just… well, maybe it was easier to take baby steps.
Armed with a list of places that might give me a job if I mentioned Ephraim’s name, I went out in my truck to fill out applications. The first two places I went said they were sorry, but they just weren’t hiring at the time. But the third place, a grocery store, hired me on the spot.
The manager, a compact woman in her thirties with very short hair, looked me up and down, and said, “If Ephraim vouches for you, I’ll take a chance. But you’ve got to understand that there aren’t going to be any second chances. If you show up drunk or high one time, you’re out.”
I assured her that I understood.
She actually put me to work that afternoon.
It was strange to me to have a female manager. In the community, women never had positions of authority over men. I’d never really questioned why that was. It seemed to me that it was the natural order of things. Men were supposed to make the decisions and women to follow along. But now I wondered if the only reason we’d been taught to believe that was because Robert Morris liked to take advantage of women.
I had spent some time on the Internet the night before. I didn’t have any experience with computers, but Anthony had showed me what to do, and he’d let me look at the website that Ephraim was talking about.
Near as I could tell, it was all true. The guy had a picture of Robert Morris’s mug shot, from when he’d been arrested for fraud before he’d fled out to California. There were interviews with people who’d gotten out of the community back in the 1970s, people who knew Robert Morris and claimed that he’d been the furthest thing from godly they could imagine. The people on the website kept calling the Life a cult.
It was the same thing the waitress had said to me and Abby when we were in Applebees.
Cult.
I’d been in a cult.
It was weird to think that. My family was in a cult? Everyone I’d ever cared about was in a cult?
I didn’t know how to process it.
On the website, there was a message board, and people from all the different communities talked about how they’d broken free from the Life. They all seemed really glad to be away from there. Even Anthony, while acknowledging that being cast out sucked, said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He said he was glad he wasn’t still living there, under all those rules.
Anyway, I tried to keep an open mind about having a woman as a boss. It was definitely true that she knew more about living out here than I did. I was a complete idiot about everything.
I was put to work stocking food on the shelves, and there were certain kinds of food that I’d never heard of. We didn’t have things like cheese puffs in the community, and when people would ask me to bring over the pallet of them, I would stare at them blankly, until they explained it to me.
Most of them were pretty nice about it, but they all had a zillion questions.
“So, they don’t let you cut your hair?”
“No.”
“You allowed to comb it though?”
“Of course.”
“Not like Rastafarians or something.”
“Rasta-what?”
“You know, like Bob Marley.”
“Who’s that?”
Laughter. “Man, you don’t know anything, do you?”
That was how I felt. My ignorance of the world was staggering.
Someone mentioned something about how, since I was part time, I wouldn’t have health insurance.
“You can sign up for that Obamacare stuff, though,” he said.
“What stuff is that?” I said.
“Uh… it’s just insurance you buy yourself, but if you don’t make enough money, you can get some help from the government.”
“Why would you call it that?”
“What?”
“O… Obana… whatever you said.”
“Oh, it’s after the president, man.”
“The president?”
More laughter. “You don’t know about the President of the United States?”
We knew nothing about wordly government, because we governed ourselves. Whenever the government was spoken about, it was only mentioned as something evil, something we should guard ourselves against.
The more that I interacted with others, the more that I realized it wasn’t just the technology and the clothes that I didn’t understand. Sure, I had lots of trouble trying to figure out my first cell phone, and I was endlessly fascinated with electric lights and plugs in the wall. But more than that, I’d been denied basic knowledge that even little children in the outside world had.
My education had huge holes in it. I’d been taught to read, and I’d been taught math. I could memorize scripture and do very basic algebra—just enough to help with construction and keeping track of money (and the girls in the community knew even less than that), but I’d been taught no history except stuff from the bible.
I’d never heard of dinosaurs.
I didn’t know who Hitler was.
I didn’t know that energy equaled mass times the square of the speed of light.
The Life had stripped my ability to think from me, keeping me stupid, and telling me that accepting everything that they told me was a virtue from God. Telling me that doubting and questioning were sins.
The more that I knew, the angrier I got.
I had so much to catch up on. That first week in the world, I didn’t go one day without feeling like an absolute idiot at least a dozen times.
The good thing was that I was a fast learner. The Life might have kept me from learning, but now that I could, I wanted to learn everything.
I spent my days scouring the Internet, reading about everything that I possibly could, devouring knowledge like a man starving for food. At night, I went to the grocery store and stocked and cleaned. When I got home, I drank beer and talked religion with Ephraim, who kept trying to convince me to go to church.
But the more that I read and learned, the more that I was positive I didn’t want that.
Religion had stolen too much from me already. My eyes were open now, and I didn’t plan on shutting them anytime soon.
But…
I did get my hair cut.
* * *
One night, Anthony dragged me to a house party in town. He said I needed to live a little, and that I needed to meet girls. He said the girls out in the world were nothing like the girls back home, and that I was missing the best part of being free.
I agreed to go with him, but not because of girls. I had sworn off girls. Even though I was glad not to be in the community anymore, I couldn’t help but feel that my entanglement with Abby had caused me nothing but trouble. I’d lost my family, my home, everything. And whenever I thought about her, I remembered her telling me that she never wanted to see me again.
So, I didn’t think about her.
I found the party pretty awkward. There were a bunch of people crammed into the rooms of a small apartment. So many people that there was spillover onto the porch. They were all drinking beer out of red plastic cups. I still got a little weirded out by seeing so many disposable items. Back in the community, we’d never use something and throw it away. If we had plastic cups like that, they would have been washed and reused until they fell apart.
I didn’t know anyone there except Anthony, who had brought a bottle of tequila with him. He used this to get to know everyone, flitting around the party and trying to make people do shots of it straight from the bottle.
For a while, I tagged along behind him, but no one was paying any attention to me, least of all Anthony, so I ended up standing in a corner and nursing beer after beer while I watched him get drunker and drunker. I would have just left, but Anthony had driven us there, and I didn’t have a way home. Since I kept drinking, I started to get pretty wasted myself.
Someone bumped into me.
I looked up to see a girl who was hardly wearing any clothes by my way of thinking. Her shirt skimmed her belly button, leaving a swath of her skin bare. Her jeans were super tight. She had long curly red hair that cascaded down around her shoulders. “Sorry,” she said.
“No problem,” I mumbled. I tried to back up, but I was right up against the wall as it was, and there was nowhere to go.
She cocked her head to one side. “Do I know you? I don’t think I know you.”
I shrugged. “I guess not.”
“Oh my God, how is that possible? I know everyone.” She giggled, running a hand through her hair.
She was pretty, I guessed. When I was back in the community, and I was hanging out with the guys, we called all the worldly girls sluts, more because we were trying to make ourselves feel better about our own way of life. If w
e called them nasty names, it made us feel superior. Still, it was the only frame of reference I had for a girl like her.
I didn’t know how to act. The few times I’d been alone with Abby were really the only times I’d ever been alone with a girl I wasn’t related to. With Abby, there had been this desperation to cram as much as we could into our stolen moments together. I hadn’t bothered to wonder if I was doing things right. All I had to do was look into her eyes, and I knew she accepted me.
Until she didn’t, of course. Until she told me to leave and never come back. Until she said I was evil.
This was the reason I never thought about Abby.
The redhead was still staring at me expectantly.
“Uh, I guess I’m just new in town.”
“Oh yeah?” She smiled. “Where’d you come from before?”
I looked down at my shoes. I didn’t want to tell her that I’d come from the Life. I knew from experience that there would be a flood of questions.
“You’re kind of cute,” she said. Then she put her hands to her lips, giggling maniacally. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I just said that out loud. I must be drunk.”
I laughed too. It was easy to laugh, because I’d been pounding beers. “I came from Maranatha.”
“The weird Jesus commune?”
See. I knew it. “Bet you don’t think I’m cute anymore.”
“Are you kidding?” She tried to take a step towards me, but she stumbled a little bit.
I reached up to catch her, and then suddenly her body was pressed against my body, and my hand was on the bare skin of her arm. I could smell her perfume mingled with the sickly sweet scent of liquor.
The flood of sensations confused me. Aroused me.
I gave her a slow, easy grin, somehow emboldened by my sexual attraction to her. “Careful.”
“I think it’s cool you escaped from a cult,” she said.
I laughed.
“You did escape, right?” She hadn’t moved. Her body was still against mine. “You don’t still like live there?”
“No,” I said.
She craned her neck back, smiling up at me. “I never kissed anyone who used to be in a cult. Do you want to kiss me?”
I swallowed. Was this what worldly girls were like? So forward? I sagged against the wall, thrown by her question.
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