A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  Julia had been completely taken aback. Some said this was because her own SUV, though it had cost more than twice the price of this Land Rover, was the same year as Juniper’s, and shouldn’t she have a car newer than her daughter’s? Admittedly this assertion was unsubstantiated. Some of us were willing to give Julia more credit than that. She might have been taken aback simply because the vehicle went well beyond a teenager’s need for reliable transportation and she worried about Juniper’s being spoiled. Whatever the case, Juniper, who’d been annoyed when leaving the house today, was not concerned with any of that now—because, Zay.

  He was a word Juniper preferred over cute: winsome, a word she’d learned from a book. She knew it meant attractive or appealing in character, but she also liked how it was a (not literal) opposite to lose some. She’d watched him at work. He’d been stocking in aisles four through seven while she was in two and three, and she’d made every excuse to walk past his aisles to get a glimpse. He was no slacker, which came as no surprise to Juniper or to any of us—how does a teenaged boy earn enough money to buy himself a $6,000 guitar unless he’s willing to work hard with practically no days off?

  So yes, Juniper had been admiring Xavier while he worked. She’d also been thinking about how they’d started off really well, but then for these past couple of weeks, while they were both swamped with school stuff and, for Xavier, graduation, everything had stalled. Until right now, or so she hoped: as they’d been clocking out, he said, “Hey, do you have a minute? I was hoping we could talk.” And she’d said, “Yeah, me, too.” And they’d walked out here together.

  As they did, she could hear her heartbeat inside her eardrums the same way she had that night when he’d kissed her, and she felt suddenly warm all over. This fascinated her; it was as if some unconscious and primal part of her knew things her conscious self was far less certain about. She and Xavier had something real going on, that’s what these reactions were telling her. They told her that she was, finally, being given the guidance she’d prayed for.

  Xavier said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you how bad I feel about that night, you know, at your housewarming party.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I owe you an apology.” He was holding his phone, turning it end over end over end as he spoke.

  Juniper said, “No, you don’t. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I appreciate you saying that, but … For one thing, you said you aren’t supposed to date, or whatever, so what was I thinking, basically making you break the rules?”

  “You didn’t make me. I do have a mind of my own.”

  “Yeah, no, I didn’t mean that. Obviously you have a … I’m not saying this right. Man … I knew I was going to mess this up and now you think I’m an ass—”

  “I don’t,” she said. “At all.”

  “I wanted to do this sooner, but since I don’t have your phone number…”

  Juniper waited. He’d wanted to do what sooner? Apologize? Or was there more? Because he was acting like there was more.

  Xavier leaned against his car and stuffed his phone and hands in his pockets. He said, “Maybe it wasn’t wrong, but also maybe not the smartest thing—for me. I mean, I like you. A lot. It’d be cool if we could hang out and, you know, go out. Assuming you wanted to, and could. But we’d just be making things hard on ourselves since I’m gone in August. You get that, right?”

  Juniper had been watching him while he spoke. Now she looked down at her shoes and shrugged. “I guess, sure.”

  “It’d be hard for me, anyway. But we can be friends. I mean, since you aren’t supposed to date anyway—”

  “No, right, I’m not supposed to.” She glanced up at him. “But I figured if we—that is, if I decided that there was someone I wanted to go out with, well, I’d just talk to my parents about it. They actually seem like they’re loosening up. But it’s academic, I guess, since like you say, you don’t want to start anything when you’re leaving. Which is smart, I guess.”

  He was staring at her intently. “Yeah,” he said, “but … maybe stupid, too.”

  Her pulse jumped. “Stupid how?”

  “Well, I might be seeing it all wrong. I mean, I’m just thinking about it some more, and is it actually stupid to deny ourselves a chance to make it work?”

  “Stupid not to give ourselves any credit for being, like, intelligent and mature?”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  There was an awkward silence while they both smiled at their shoes, and then Xavier said, “So, this ride.” He pointed to her SUV. “It’s pretty sweet.”

  She said, “I don’t know. It is, but I’m kind of embarrassed by it.”

  “Nah. Count yourself lucky.”

  “I just … I was excited about getting to pick what I wanted.”

  “Of course. I would be, too.”

  “But now I think I should’ve gotten a Corolla or something.”

  “What? No, take what you can get.”

  Or as Brad had said, Find out how to get whatever it is you want, and then do whatever it takes to get it.

  Juniper looked straight at Xavier. “Do you want to go get a milk shake and test out our intelligence and maturity? No one expects me home for at least two hours.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  Oh, Xavier. He had just stepped onto a tightrope and didn’t even know it.

  * * *

  As the teens drove to the restaurant where they would get their milk shakes, Xavier tailing Juniper as they went, Juniper felt both bold and nervous. Bold and nervous were, in fact, the two emotions she’d been feeling most acutely of late.

  The boldness had everything to do with her feelings about Xavier. The nervousness arose from her taking the dispatch job, from working with Brad (only one week, so far; three shifts) and seeing his enthusiasm as he’d brought her around the Hub to speak to everyone who worked for him there, letting them all know that Whitman HVAC had become, if only in this small way, a family concern. Everything about Brad these days made her feel nervous—and for a very good reason, which we’re going to get to shortly.

  The teens met up inside JJ’s, where some of the best milk shakes in town were to be had. Juniper ordered mint chocolate chip. Xavier opted for chocolate peanut butter.

  “We’ll call this an un-date,” Juniper said as they took their selections to a table beside the window.

  “Un-date?”

  “Like a non-date, except non-date sounds like people trying not to date, whereas an un-date sounds like people hanging out and getting to know each other better to evaluate whether they should date.”

  Xavier laughed. “If you say so.”

  “I do. So, okay, tell me two things about yourself that I don’t know yet.”

  “Hmm.” He thought for a minute, and then he laughed again. “I don’t know. This shouldn’t be hard, right?”

  “I’ll go first, if you want.”

  Xavier said, “What if I ask you something I already know I want to know?”

  “That’ll work.”

  “Okay, so, I’m curious about the Purity Promise thing. I read up on it a little, and it seems, well, kind of bizarre. I was wondering, did you want to do it, or did you have to do it, or…?”

  Ah: the question so many of us would have asked in his place.

  “I wanted to,” Juniper said. “Surprising, right? But at the time, I really did.”

  What she hadn’t wanted, initially, was to attend church at all. This was earlier, when she was nine and Julia, newly employed by Whitman HVAC and trying to remake their lives, was turning over every new leaf she could think of.

  Thanks to having a regular Monday through Friday schedule, their weekends now were completely free and could be filled with any and all kinds of family enrichment activities that Julia might want to plunge them into. Juniper had long been accustomed to weekends of being sat in front of cartoons and videos while Julia was at work. She didn’t want to get dressed up on Sunday mornings t
o go to a new place and meet new people who might not be nice to her. But Julia had latched onto the idea that Jesus or God (Juniper wasn’t clear, then, on which one Julia credited, or maybe it was both, or maybe they were one and the same?) had entered their life as demonstrated by Brad’s hiring her. And what could be better than to show their gratitude by making worship a regular feature of their week? Juniper didn’t share Julia’s conviction. Too bad. TV was out, Jesus was in. Juniper had better learn to like it.

  And as it happened, she did. The church was huge and clean and full of light. There was music and singing. The people were calm and unhurried. They seemed to always be smiling. Welcome! they said every time. We’re so glad you’re here to join us in giving thanks for this glorious day, this gift from our Lord. Everyone was grateful. Everyone was cheerful. There were special classes for kids, with lots of treats and crafts and music. No one was crabby or stressed out. Kids didn’t fight with one another or yell at the teachers or call one another names or offer to sell her drugs. It was a place—really, the first place she’d ever spent time—where the atmosphere was one of harmony and peace.

  We’re so glad you’re here.

  At church, everyone loved her. And, she soon learned, the Lord loved her, too.

  New Hope’s mission was to see that all the girls felt themselves worthy—of God’s love, of Jesus’s admiration, of respect from each and every man they’d be encountering as they got a little older and began to receive the attentions of young (and less young) men. Love, admiration, respect: Who doesn’t want all of that?

  To have it, they said, a girl needed to understand and embody the behaviors and traits that would engender it: Modesty. Obedience. Chastity.

  They said (and we agree) that there are so many pressures on young women to be and to do things that will lose them the love, admiration, and respect they deserve. They also said (and here we are less persuaded) that every girl should rely on her father as her best guide during the most dangerous years, those years when she’s physically mature and therefore attractive to men, but not ready yet to be released from her father’s care.

  Xavier was not the only one who thought that purity vows were bizarre. Others used terms like gross, perverse, damaging, wrong, and reprehensible. But few of those people have participated in the program or the ritual. Few have been the girl involved. We want to give Juniper the benefit of context.

  Juniper told Xavier, “My mom and me, we had some really hard times before she met Brad—and then everything changed so much, it was basically a miracle, that’s what she says. Which is why she had us join a church. Also, she wanted me and then Lily, too, to be better grounded than she was as a kid. She and Brad figured church and the Purity Promise thing would counteract the unhealthy pressures I’d get everywhere else. Which I think worked, to be honest.”

  “You seem fine to me,” he said. “I mean, it still seems extreme, but…”

  “I don’t necessarily believe all of it anymore.”

  “Either way, everything is good now. Obviously.”

  “Yeah, it’s great,” Juniper said, and in that moment it felt almost true.

  “So are you planning to stick to it? Virginity until marriage?”

  He said this casually, as if out of curiosity rather than personal interest. Even so, Juniper felt the color rise in her cheeks. “Well, I’m not planning to, like, rush into marriage or anything, so … I guess it’ll be something I decide when it comes up.”

  Xavier nodded. “Everybody should decide what’s good for themselves.”

  “It’s not a one-size-fits-all world.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I mean, I wanted mint chocolate chip today,” she said.

  “And I wanted chocolate peanut butter.”

  “Tomorrow I might want … a hot Krispy Kreme doughnut.”

  “I might want poutine.”

  “Poutine? For dessert?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “Yeah,” Juniper echoed, grinning at him. “Why not?”

  They finished their milk shakes in this happy mode, impressed with their combined intelligence and maturity. Maybe this dating thing was worth a try, they agreed. Maybe it could work.

  When they were on their way out to their cars, Juniper said, “We need to keep this between us for the time being, okay? Just until I figure out how to handle my parents.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Radio silence until I tell you.”

  “Got it.”

  They’d reached their cars and stood between them once again, facing each other. Juniper glanced around to make sure no one who knew her was watching them, and then she reached for his hand. “I like the calluses,” she said, touching his left-hand fingertips. She’d noticed the calluses the night of the party. All the pads were hardened from pressing guitar strings. “Makes you seem tough.”

  “If a tough guy is what you want, you’re going to have to keep looking.”

  “No, you’re tough. Just like I’m tough. Because we’ve been through things that most kids haven’t had to deal with and probably never will.”

  A brief but tender kiss. A reluctant but happy parting.

  * * *

  Juniper’s declaration about fortitude and experience had more behind it than has been revealed up to now. She’d been keeping a secret for five months, a secret that even the person involved in it didn’t know she knew. A troubling and unsavory secret, as we’re sure you’ll agree once you know the details.

  Her declaration was also an example of an occasion where the Fates, observing, laugh and shake their heads as if to say, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  20

  Among Oak Knoll’s longtime residents is a husband-wife pair of cultural anthropologists to whom we would later turn for help in putting some of the more upsetting things we witnessed or heard about into context. As with extenuating circumstances, context matters when it comes to understanding how and why our fellow human beings behave in the ways they do.

  Humans, as we all know, are complicated creatures. Even the simplest of us isn’t simple. We are, every one of us, shaped by who raises us and where we’re raised and how. Do we have two parents? One? None? Do we live in luxury’s lap, or perhaps abject poverty, or solidly in the middle class? The differences make differences. Changes in circumstance from better to worse or worse to better matter, too.

  Are we well tended? Are we loved? Are we the awkward kid, the mean kid, the violent kid, the shy kid, the popular, the celebrated, the disabled (either emotionally or intellectually or physically)? What traits do we have built into us in terms of talents and interests? Juniper had a connection to nature, a love of frogs and bugs and flowers. She was not so different from Valerie, in that way. Xavier loved music he could make with guitars, and had a preternatural ability not only to play that music but also to laser his attention and devotion on whatever captivated him. Everyone has something. And that something has a lot to do with what we want, who we are, what we do.

  And then there is the power of that odd and ineffable thing called attraction.

  Even more mysterious: love.

  * * *

  Juniper’s secret, part one:

  When it happened, Julia Whitman was away with Lily at Lottie’s place. This was in early January this past winter, and Juniper sensibly had refused to accompany her mother and sister to that miserable trailer with its sagging floors and cockroach-ridden cupboards. It wasn’t that Juniper didn’t have sympathy for Lottie, who’d been diagnosed with COPD generally and emphysema in particular, and was in the process of figuring out how to manage an oxygen canister without setting herself and the trailer on fire (that would come later). It was that Juniper couldn’t stand being there for more than a few minutes; when she was inside at Lottie’s, her early childhood was there with her—every too hot or too cold or too hungry lonely scary painful hour, or so it felt to her.

  Outside was a bit of a different story; outside were memories of wandering the loamy,
pine-studded land upon which the trailer was anchored, poking about through the wildflowers and weeds to discover the great wonders of what seemed to her the wilderness. Beetles and butterflies and toads and tree frogs, and sparkly slivers of pyrite that she collected and saved in a Pringles canister. Outdoor playtime, for little Juniper, had been a suspension of all the bad.

  Now she was seventeen, though, and it was wintertime, and when Julia asked if Juniper wanted to go with her and Lily out to Lottie’s place, where they’d be staying over for one, maybe two nights, Juniper said no. She said she had reading to do before school started up again on Monday. She’d stay home with Brad.

  Let us backtrack here—for context—to when Juniper was fourteen and the New Hope Purity Promise program was under way. This was the rehearsal for the ceremony and ball. In the church’s Great Hall, fifteen dads and daughters were standing in pairs facing each other, her right hand in his left, each person’s free hand clutching the page on which their respective vows had been printed.

  Juniper watched Brad’s face as he and the other men took their turn reading aloud: “I choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection, to be pure in my own life as a man, father, and husband, to be a man of integrity as I lead and guide my daughter to a future in which she will find a worthy husband to take my place.”

  She watched him and was filled with gratitude and warmth. But, too, in a cascade of thoughts that were at once flattering and shameful, she had an odd sense that the expression she was seeing was a different kind of love than she felt for him.