Sinless

by Sarah Tarkoff

  “Good. I just saw her. There’s something going on for sure.”

  “You think she knows something?”

  “Something, yeah. What, I don’t know.”

  “Find out. Who knows what happened on that date before you got there.”

  “I just wish we knew what he was looking for in the woods, if it wasn’t her.” Zack paused. “Okay, it’s sent.”

  “I’ll forward it to the team for approval.”

  “Thanks, man. See you soon.”

  Zack turned off the phone and paused for a moment, maybe checking his email? My heart raced. Please let him leave.

  Zack moved to his suitcase . . . would he notice that I’d moved the things inside, in my search? While crouching down to look at it, would he spot me hiding beneath the bed? I tried to breathe as quietly as possible—harder and harder with my constricting throat. Hiding here, trying to steal this clearly criminal medicine, must have caught Great Spirit’s attention in a big way.

  But as he unzipped the deepest compartment, he pulled out an electric razor—a perfectly normal-looking one I’d seen and tossed aside in my search—and removed the bottom. Out poured a handful of pills. What I’d seen in the woods wasn’t a pill bottle at all; it was this contraption. He took one pill, then put the rest back in the razor. Which went back in the suitcase. I’d found them. As quickly as he’d entered, Zack zipped up the suitcase and left the room.

  I got up, unzipped the suitcase, and opened up the razor, pouring some of the small, yellow, unmarked pills into my hand. The razor was full of them, hundreds at least. How many people was he killing that he needed all these pills?

  His phone call had confirmed it: Zack was a part of some organization. But an organization that killed teenagers? It seemed impossible. Then a thought occurred to me . . . maybe Ciaran had been taking the pills, too—that would explain a lot. Maybe Zack and Ciaran were in rival gangs? Or . . . something? There were too many possibilities. Zack had the ability to track my cell phone signal, which scared me. And if they were tracking me . . . I had to get out of there.

  I shoved the handful of pills in my pocket and quickly zipped up Zack’s suitcase. I peeked out into the hall—empty, thank Great Spirit.

  As I reopened the bathroom door, I checked myself in the mirror—I was starting to look disgusting. I wanted to take the pill then, but that would be too obvious, the sudden change. I had to make it through the day.

  I walked slowly, evenly, trying to keep the pills in my pocket from rattling.

  I could hear Zack talking to Macy as I entered the living room. “Where did Grace go?”

  “Bathroom,” Macy answered. “Why are you so obsessed with Grace?”

  I paused, hoping Zack would answer before they noticed me, but he saw me first. “Macy thinks I’m obsessed with you.”

  Macy slapped Zack on the arm. “Don’t tease her. She’s had a bad day.”

  “I didn’t say it, you said it.”

  “It’s okay,” I cut in. It came out wheezy, labored. For a moment I was sure that Zack could see right through me, that he knew I’d stolen the pills.

  But then with an “Okay, you kids have fun,” he was off. No concern for me anymore. Maybe whomever he’d talked to on that phone call had assuaged his worries. His interest in me was no longer pressing enough to stay and torture me. That was a relief. He’d pump Macy for information later, I was sure.

  As we started the drive to school, Macy was ready for story time. “You slept with him, didn’t you?” I shook my head. She was annoyed. “I told you my story. You have to tell me yours.”

  I did the best I could. “He tried to . . . you know. I stopped him. We got in a fight, and he left. I don’t know where he went. Later when my dad asked me what happened, I was too embarrassed to tell him, and that’s when I lied.” That sounded like good information for her to pass on to Zack, and every word was true enough that I’d pass Macy’s visual lie detector.

  Macy was stunned. “What happened to Ciaran?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him today.”

  She asked carefully, “Do you want to?”

  Did I want to hear from a ghost? “Definitely not. I was lucky things ended the way they did.”

  In the side-view mirror, out of the corner of my eye, I could see my face getting worse and worse. I could tell Macy wanted to ask me about the Punishment, but she was being considerate, worried about my safety . . . if thinking about her troubles affected her, she wouldn’t want to prod me to do the same.

  “Maybe you should skip school today. I’ll cover for you.”

  “You can’t do that.” I wasn’t letting anyone else get Punished for lying. This was my mess, and I had to take care of it.

  “It’s worth it. Whatever it costs me, it’s worth it. If you go to a worship center, I know you, you’ll pray this thing away in like an hour.”

  I hesitated, trying to find some way to keep her safe. “I’m sure I can find a junior cleric to write me a note.”

  “Perfect,” she said. And then she gave me a hug. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  Even though she didn’t know the truth, she didn’t know how bad it was, I teared up. “You think so?”

  “You’re Grace Luther. I know so.”

  “What do you mean, I’m Grace Luther?”

  “You’re the strongest one of all of us.” She meant my group of friends at school, the pious ones who sat at the big lunch table right in the middle of the cafeteria. I wondered how many of them, at one point in time, had gotten her secret makeup treatment. For the first time since my terrible date, I didn’t feel so alone.

  “Thank you.”

  She dropped me off outside the nearest worship center—not my father’s, of course. My instinct was to step inside . . . but then I remembered, I had a better solution. I waited for Macy to drive out of sight, and then I walked home. Slipped into my room and pulled out the pills. I was afraid. At that moment, I imagined how this might have gone if my mother was still alive. I could have trusted her, I thought. She would have understood, she would have given me advice and held my hand and made everything better. But the mirror reflected only one person—me. I wondered what side effects the pills might have. But I’d gone to all the trouble to steal them—I didn’t have time for doubts.

  I braced myself and slipped a pill into my mouth. For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then suddenly, viscerally, I felt my whole body transform. My face became perfectly symmetrical, and my brown skin grew more radiant than I’d ever seen it, shining like a polished copper penny. I felt healthier and stronger than ever in my life. I felt relaxed, I felt powerful. I hadn’t felt this good since I was nine years old, at the Moment of the Revelation, the very first time I was Forgiven.

  With a whole pocketful to burn, I tried an experiment. I wanted to know if these pills protected me against future sins as well as previous ones. I tried the simplest sin I could think of and whispered, “Hell!” I waited. Usually, for me, this word was accompanied by an immediate response from Great Spirit—but not this time. I tried again. “Crap.” Still nothing. I tried more vile expletives, anything I could ever think of having heard somewhere. It seemed I was now, like Ciaran, under Great Spirit’s protection, no matter what I did.

  In that moment, with the fear of death gone, the weight of everything I’d seen and experienced suddenly crashed down on me. The loneliness, having these secrets I couldn’t confide in anyone—not my father, not my best friend. The confusion of a world I no longer understood. The only thing I had to hold on to, in that moment, was the knowledge that I’d somehow gamed the system, that I’d somehow found a way to beat Great Spirit.

  All the guilt I’d ever felt melted away. I was angry. Angry about my mother’s death, and Jude’s. Angry that even though I lived in this newly just world, life still felt so unfair. But I had this new power, an unbridled ability—like Ciaran, like Zack—to take whatever I wanted, everything this life had always denied me.


  And I was going to take advantage of that.

  Chapter 5

  I didn’t start right away. I waited to hear from Macy that Zack had stopped asking questions, but after she passed on my story about lying to my dad, it seemed that Zack lost interest completely.

  My revived appearance seemed to soothe my father’s concerns. I told him I’d been praying all day—a statement he didn’t doubt, and a lie the pills kept me from revealing.

  It seemed the pills had a time limit. My beauty would start to fade after a day or so, and I’d have to take a new one. I hadn’t figured out exactly what to do when my supply ran out. But I was getting antsy . . . I knew I had a small window to take advantage of my newly opened world, perhaps the only one I’d ever have, and I wasn’t willing to miss out on that.

  The story of my disfigurement hadn’t spread to anyone at school—Macy was inherently trustworthy. It was a good thing, obviously, to have my reputation intact. But at the same time, trying to act normal, when no one knows what you’ve experienced . . . it can get lonely. I think if I’d had Macy to talk to, who at least had seen the effects of my ordeal, I might not have needed to do what I did next. But by the time I was back in class later that week, she was out with the flu, and the isolation started to make me crazy. So that Saturday, I decided to take advantage of my newfound abilities.

  It started with stealing my dad’s car. I could have asked him to borrow it, and with my fancy new face he would have said yes to anything. But I enjoyed the rush of doing something unheard of, something no one had been able to do for a decade. I drove to the store, but there wasn’t much to do there. It was hard to fly in the face of Prohibitions at 7-Eleven, where the raciest thing you could buy was Vogue magazine.

  So I headed somewhere I knew I’d need these pills, somewhere I knew I’d see no one familiar, somewhere I had to navigate to based solely on my fuzzy memories. The black market.

  Despite the immunity the drug conferred on me, I was wary of getting caught. As I drove to the Outcast side of town, I kept an eye on the cars around me. Cutting through side streets, I noticed someone following me—a motorcyclist with a blue full-face helmet. My heart raced as I took turn after turn, and the motorcycle remained on my tail. It must be Zack. He’d caught up with my lies and was coming to finish me off. But as I paused on the side of the road, the motorcyclist whizzed by me. A false alarm.

  I recognized the site immediately when I finally found it. It looked less menacing in daylight, but I’d know that street corner anywhere. I walked toward those big dilapidated doors, the most beautiful person for miles. With those pills rattling in my pocket, I felt a sense of superiority. I could dabble in these Outcast vices and return to the real world, with no one the wiser. This must have been how Ciaran felt. Omnipotent. I could see why someone might want to stop people like him—people like me, now.

  This time, I browsed the aisles with more purpose. I paused to examine the liquor bottles, as though I knew enough to tell them apart. My experience with alcoholics like Clint made me wary of purchasing any, even with my newfound invulnerability. Who knew what might happen if I got addicted and couldn’t find more of these pills?

  And then, like I’d conjured him just by thinking about him—there he was. Clint. Ciaran’s dad. On the other side of this liquor shop, examining bottles with the eye of someone who could tell the difference. I paused to consider the astronomical odds, then realized: no wonder Ciaran had known about this place—his father would have been the one to take him here to begin with. It seemed Clint had abandoned his reformed self already. My lady volunteer friends would be so disappointed. His face showed he hadn’t been back on the bottle long, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the drink would kill him, before Great Spirit would Punish him to death.

  I quickly stepped away, but it was too late. He glanced my way, and I’m sure he saw me. I slipped between the aisles of raunchy movies, hoping to disappear. As I wound through the decades-old thrillers and pornos, I wondered . . . did Clint know what had happened to his son? Surely Ciaran’s parents must have realized he was missing . . . did they know I was the last person he saw? If so, why hadn’t they tracked me down? It had been almost a week now. Had they called the police, and if so, might my 911 call be unearthed?

  I felt a responsibility to tell them, to give them some kind of explanation. But I knew it was too risky. Risky like being here. I was suddenly reminded of the stupidity of my behavior. I had barely escaped notice by Zack, and here I was somewhere so suspicious, it was like advertising my crime.

  I leaned against a rack of comedies, the boxes covered with pictures of scantily clad women. My desire to buy something was gone. I just wanted to go home. I peeked out—the coast was clear. Clint hadn’t come looking for me. I put my head down and worked my way through the crowd, toward the exit.

  As I opened the doors, I saw a sight more horrifying than all these Outcasts put together—my own father sitting on the steps. Waiting for me. Too afraid to cross that threshold into sin himself.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He was livid. Terrified. “What are you doing here?”

  My voice shook no matter how much I tried to force it to be casual. “Just walking around. A friend told me about this place, I thought it would be cool to see it. I didn’t buy anything.” I displayed my hands to show they were empty. “How did you know I was here?”

  “My car’s GPS.” Of course it had a GPS locator.

  “Why did you come looking for me? I’m fine.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  I guess that was true. He held out his hand, and I gave him the keys. “I want to know what’s going on.”

  Chapter 6

  I had never gotten a lecture before. Turns out I don’t like them. For the whole car ride home and a good ten minutes parked in the garage, my father went on about how lucky I was that Great Spirit had spared me, and how worried he’d been, and the suspicious look he’d gotten from his Uber driver when he asked to be driven to the black market.

  If I’d been smart, I would have apologized, but I was too angry. All my frustrations came barreling out at my father. “If Great Spirit doesn’t care, why do you?”

  My father was shocked. “Are you talking back to me?”

  I looked up at the ceiling. “Hey, Great Spirit, do you care if I have opinions?”

  “Grace!”

  “See, He doesn’t.”

  “This isn’t the daughter who’s lived in my house for seventeen years.”

  “People change,” was all I could think to say. I desperately wanted to escape to my room, but my father was staring at me with accusing eyes.

  “Has the devil gotten to you?”

  “Dad . . .”

  “I can’t think of any other explanation for what I’m seeing.”

  “You want the explanation?”

  As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Because I knew the only thing he could say would be “Yes, I do.”

  Deep down I hoped maybe he could help, maybe he’d know what to do when the pills ran out, maybe if he had all the details he could make sense of everything I’d seen. So I began, “You know that date I went on last week?”

  My father immediately misunderstood. “Oh no . . .”

  “No, not that.” My father seemed reassured that my virginity was intact, at least. I braced myself to say the words that were so much worse than that. “He tried to force himself on me.”

  “Did Great Spirit protect you?”

  “No! I protected me. I ran away.”

  “Good. I’m glad you’re okay.” In that moment, I was reminded that he was my dad after all. I felt safe; I was sure that I could tell him anything. “Is your date alive?”

  My heart stopped for a moment. How could my father be so far ahead of my story? Did he know something he wasn’t telling me? “What do you mean?”

  “His Punishment. How bad was it?”

  Oh. Of course. “He wasn’t Punished,” I said.

  �
��That you saw.”

  “No matter what he did, nothing happened to him. He said it was because he was blessed. That he could do anything he wanted, and Great Spirit couldn’t touch him.”

  My father was unmoved. “He was lying, of course.”

  “But his face didn’t change. If he was lying, why didn’t his face change?”

  “Great Spirit works in mysterious—”

  “No, He doesn’t!” I couldn’t stand hearing that stupid phrase again. “Whatever Great Spirit’s doing is just random.”

  “Grace . . .” my father warned.

  “It’s been happening to me, too.” As soon as it slipped out, I regretted it—I saw the change on my father’s face, his horror.

  “Since when?”

  “Since my date with Ciaran.”

  “How? Why is this happening?”

  I imagined my dad pulling up to Macy’s house, asking her parents a lot of questions, and then getting cornered by one of Zack’s associates, the ones he’d talked to on the phone. No, telling my dad about the pills, and where I got them, was not an option. “I don’t know how. But I do bad things, things I would have been Punished for a week ago, and I’m still beautiful. Just like Ciaran. He tried to rape me, he stole things, he drove without a seat belt—nothing happened to him.”

  “Maybe you just got confused after a bad date . . .”

  “I’m not confused! I know what I saw.”

  “Great Spirit Punishes liars,” he warned me gently.

  “I’m not lying!”

  My father was pacing the room. Not sure whether to believe my pious face. “I know it sounds crazy,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t think you’d believe me. Or you’d think I was mistaken, or that I’d done something wrong. But I know what I saw.”

  I’m not sure if my father heard any of this, because the next thing he said was, “Maybe we should find someone else for you to talk to.”

  “Who else would I talk to?” I asked.