“When I get my hands on that boy,” Rosemary said through gritted teeth, “I’m gonna tan his hide.”
Jessica inspected her, taking in how delusional this woman really was. Did she think Jimmy Dean would suddenly waltz into her room and offer up his hide to tan? It would be a cold day in hell before Jimmy came to a place like this, and an even colder day in hell before Rosemary ever got to leave this place in hide-tanning condition.
“He’s really gone and done it,” Rosemary said.
“He sure has.”
“Next time I see him, I tell you, I’m going to let the wrath of God work through me. That’s a promise.”
“See who, Jimmy Dean?”
“Mm-hm.”
Jessica chuckled at the thought. “I hope I’m here for that. Truly.”
But as pleasing as the thought was of Rosemary Heathrow and Jimmy Dean destroying each other in mutual combat, the joy of the fantasy wore thin quickly, and all that was left of it by the time she signed out for the afternoon and stepped out into the parking lot was a thin specter of Jimmy. Jimmy and all of his schemes. Schemes she hadn’t heard about in months and months. But she knew he had them. He always did. The fact that she didn’t know what they were left her terribly uneasy. Because no matter what they were, they would involve her. Of that, she was certain. Unlike Rosemary, Jessica would see Jimmy eventually.
And when that day came, would she be ready?
Chapter Ten
Jessica raised her glass and clinked with Judith, Brian, Jesus, and Jeremy.
Jimmy’s scandal was fully back in the news, and she had enjoyed a wild week of guessing how each station would cover such despicable content without violating FCC regulations. The euphemisms varied at first, with “The White Light Church scandal” and “the pig molestation saga” among the most common. But within a few days, when it became clear the ratings for such a thing were only going to get better over time, virtually every outlet began referring to it as “Swinegate.”
Wendy had claimed this was a huge victory. Once something got a “gate” tacked on, it was a sure sign it would get coverage for at least a few more months.
It was as good a reason for celebration as anything, and that was how they all came to gather around a high-top table at Smashmouth, Jessica’s neighborhood sports bar.
“What exactly are we celebrating?” Jesus asked enthusiastically as he sipped his water.
Judith answered. “Pigfucking.”
Jesus let the sip of water dribble back into his glass. “I can’t drink to that.”
“None of us can,” Jessica said. “And that’s not what we’re celebrating.” She shot Judith a stern look. She couldn’t blame her for enjoying a jab here and there at Jesus’s expense—after all, they were exes, and that always made things complicated. But telling the poor guy they were celebrating pig rape, well, if that wasn’t crossing a line, it was flirting with it.
“What are we celebrating?” Jesus asked hopefully.
“We’re celebrating the powers of the mighty-and-all-that flashlight,” said Jessica, “who doth shine her light upon us. Sometimes directly in our eyes. We’re celebrating the truth about Jimmy and the festering cauldron of hate he calls a religion finally meeting its demise.”
“It’s not dead yet,” Brian warned.
Jessica still experienced strange flashes of unreality when she hung around with Brian Foster. It was like two parallel realities ran so closely together they almost touched but never did. In one, Brian was Judith’s live-in boyfriend whose cynicism and analytical mind made them a perfect match. And in the other, he was Mr. Foster, Jessica’s former science teacher and college counselor—not a living, breathing, complex person, exactly, because no adults are when you’re young. He had even been her favorite teacher for a while, her confidant, but seeing him in a casual setting, considering him her friend—those two realities had never truly combined for her; she merely spent most of her time in the second and would temporarily slip into the first like an electron jumping orbits.
Brian, however, did not seem to struggle with the dissonance. “You’d be surprised how resilient cults like his can be.”
Since she currently had both feet in the reality where Brian was a cynical realist, the notion that he would understand cults did not surprise her, and she took his word for it.
“It’s not looking good for him,” Jeremy Archer said. “And I have some guys on it. It’s only been a week since those last videos emerged, but we have at least four more weeks of coverage slated, and that’s if another video doesn’t surface. We’re not letting this thing go.”
The small part of Jessica that still suspected Jeremy Archer was a complete fraud inspected him closely. If a lie was there, she couldn’t find it. “Are you doing that for me?” she asked.
He sipped his IPA and cringed. He’d mentioned multiple times how much he hated the taste of IPAs but insisted on drinking them anyway, claiming they were good for fighting Big Ag’s mutant microbes in the gut. “No, though I’m glad to hear it might also help you. I did it because there hasn’t been a scandal this good in ages. The child molestation thing with all the priests is a bit played out, ratings wise. People just expect it now, and it’s pretty rampant. But bestiality is new territory.” He chuckled. “You should see the way the writers are scrambling around to give as much detail as possible without incurring fines.” He threw his head back and laughed.
“Hold on,” Brian said, “people are becoming immune to stories of pedophilia? That doesn’t seem good.”
“Of course it’s not,” Jeremy replied after collecting himself. “Nothing about pedophilia is good. And, if it makes you feel any better, people aren’t completely burned out on it yet, but its ratings have definitely peaked, and we’re only a few high-level coverups away from it being about on par with campus gang rapes. But, boy, is sex with animals on the up.” His eyes were wild with excitement. “It’s like viewers can’t get enough of it. The greater the percentage of the population that condemns an action, the richer the moral outrage and their need to retweet the content to publicly show their condemnation. Jimmy’s made this rich man an even richer man.”
Jessica and Judith exchanged a glance, and Brian said, “I guess we know who’s buying drinks tonight.”
While most of the mounted televisions around the bar were rotating through the week’s sports highlights, the one closest to their table had been changed to the news by request. It was on mute, but closed-captioning displayed the Texas senator’s now famous words: What if it was your pig? The question heard round the country. As it turned out, no one wanted it to be their pig that was victimized. Of course they didn’t. The only person who got to victimize their pigs was them when they ripped them away from their mothers too young, raised them in tiny cages, transported them carelessly, then brutally butchered them for consumption.
Nobody, as far as she was aware, had yet addressed the question of how people might feel if it were nobody’s pig, if it belonged to no one but itself.
“Hey, I got a question,” she said.
“Is it about pigs?” Judith asked.
“No. I already know too much about them. I did a lot of research on them as a kid for Jimmy. But what do you think it means to be a woman?”
Judith shrugged. “I guess it means you don’t have a right to your own body, and everyone pretends your right to vote means you should shut up and take whatever bullshit you’re dealt.”
That was a minefield if Jessica had ever seen one, so she decided against inquiring further and addressed the question to Brian.
“I don’t really think in those terms, ‘man’ and ‘woman,’” he said. “I mean, outside of it helping me guess what specific genitalia they might be working with to some degree of certainty—not complete certainty, mind you—I rarely even notice it.”
“You don’t notice any differences in behavior?”
“Of course I do. Boys and girls are conditioned differently by society. But in my yea
rs of teaching, I’ve seen so many young minds, and the only overarching patterns I noticed were that the girls tended to complete their work more often than the boys. And the boys were more likely to hurt themselves on the science equipment. But like I said, that’s very general. There were plenty of each group who didn’t follow that trend.”
She turned to Jesus. “And what about you? Have you thought anymore about it since I last asked?”
“Oh yes! I’ve had many long silent moments to think about it.”
“And?”
“And in my experience, women are far less likely to be meanies.”
She might have accepted that, except for one glaring problem. “What about the Devil?”
He shrugged. “I suppose that’s why she got away with so much. It wouldn’t have worked as well if she were the type of person more likely to be a meanie. You would have suspected her sooner.”
“That’s true,” Brian said. “Dolores did well to hide behind that maternal facade. Of course, I only ever saw the soft side of her in passing, but it was still enough to make me question whether I was judging her too harshly for all the other behavior. But eventually I just made up my mind, decided to trust that the cruelty showing through was the real version of her.”
“And you were right,” Jessica said. “I was wrong.”
Judith nudged her. “Don’t take it so hard. You got outsmarted by the Devil. Who cares?”
“Trust me,” Brian continued, “it would have been incredibly easy for me to go on doubting myself for years. The only thing that saved me was my obsessive relationship with data. After one particularly confounding encounter with her, I started keeping a journal. I was curious if she was a good person or not, and I figured she would be whatever the majority of her actions were. So, I wrote down each interaction I had with her or observed her having with others and sorted them as either generous-philanthropic or selfish-malicious. The results were quite astounding.”
“What were they?”
“For every generous or philanthropic action I observed, I counted six selfish or malicious actions. Six! I couldn’t believe it. I really thought it would be closer to fifty-fifty. I was quite astounded, really. I consider myself a skeptical person. Just goes to show how easily our feelings can steer us off course.”
“But,” Judith said, “it was a feeling that prompted you to start collecting the data in the first place.”
“True enough. My point is, Jessica, that she neither liked me nor needed me for anything in particular, and still, I was fooled. I suspect she made a concerted effort to ensure your ratio of good to bad interactions was heavily weighted in favor of the good so that one day she could blindside you with the bad when it really counted. Considering how forgiving our minds are of malicious behavior, you can hardly blame yourself when you saw almost none of it up until that point.”
“I did, though. Well, I didn’t see it, but people told me about it. You told me about it. Chris told me. He told me years ago. I saw the way she treated the Wursts, and I went along with it because I didn’t like them either. I thought they deserved it, and it only made me like her more. But they were kids. She was terrorizing kids!”
“She’s the Devil,” Judith said. “I don’t know how many more times we have to point that out.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then Jessica popped the big question. “How do I make people believe God is female if there’s no consensus on what it means to be a female?”
Jeremy shut his eyes and nodded serenely. “Mind control. You need to figure out how to control their minds.”
Jessica looked around the group. “And how do I do that?”
“A church would be a pretty good start,” Brian said. “You make an official group, give people an identity as part of that group, and they’ll do a lot of crazy shit for you. They’ll believe anything.”
Judith explained, “He’s been watching a lot of cult documentaries lately.”
“He’s not wrong, though,” Jeremy added.
But Jesus shook his head. “No, I don’t like that idea.”
Ah, well that made two of them. “I don’t either, bro.”
Judith glared across the table at Jesus. “How can you say that? You have a two-billion-person faith all about you! Jimmy may have a lot of locations, but you have a hundred different denominations and millions of meeting places spread across the globe.”
Jesus slunk down in his chair because nobody likes being scolded by an ex. “I didn’t start any of them. I thought I’d made it pretty clear that I didn’t like big organizations accepting money in return for privileges of the secular or spiritual variety. I mean, sheesh, I let them kill me just to prove that point!”
Judith narrowed her eyes at him. “I thought you died for our sins.”
He shrugged. “It was a twofer. And that ‘dying for your sins’ thing is used rather loosely. It was more like I died because of people’s sins. There were some real meanies back then.”
“So, hold up,” Judith said. “If you had your way, there wouldn’t be Christian churches?”
He considered it. “I don’t know. I like the idea of a bunch of people getting together to decide the best ways to be nice and love one another. I like holding each other accountable for not being meanies. And I like it when people get together to go help those in need. Oh! And I like communion.”
Jessica cringed. “You like people pretending to eat your body and drink your blood?”
“That part is a little weird, and I believe much got lost in translation, but the part where they provide nourishment to anyone who wants it is nice.”
“That’s almost never how it—”
But Jessica caught Judith’s eye and shook her head. Jesus didn’t need to know all the details about communion right now.
“Okay,” Judith said, pivoting. “What don’t you like?”
He sat up straighter, appearing glad to finally get his say. “I don’t like people getting rich off of it.”
“You don’t like rich people?” Jeremy asked, looking wounded.
Jesus tilted his head to the side, gazing lovingly at his roommate. “I can’t say that because I love you, and you’re rich!”
Jeremy relaxed. “I am.”
Jesus continued, “I worry about money and its effects on a human’s ability to find true inner peace, always have. During my time in the Far East—”
The cocktail waitress came around and they each ordered another round.
“You were saying?” Jessica reminded him.
“Right, right. Things I don’t like about church. I also don’t like people committing violence in my name.”
“And the pedophilia,” Jeremy supplied. “Remember when I told you about that?”
“Right!” Jesus wagged a finger at his roomie. “The pedophilia. I really don’t like that. That’s very sinful.”
“Is there a way to start a church that doesn’t do all those things?” Jessica asked. “That doesn’t make the leaders horrifyingly wealthy, that doesn’t inspire violence and hate, and that doesn’t prey on children?” She hurriedly added, “Or pigs.”
“I don’t see why not,” Jesus said.
Judith raised a hand. “I do. People are awful, and those who want power over others tend to get it because those who don’t want power over others don’t seek it.”
Jessica was careful with her next words; the last thing she wanted was for anyone to hold her to them. “But what if someone who didn’t want power over others, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone and live a normal life, what if that person decided it was their duty to step up? Could it work then?”
Judith wiped the foam off her lips with the back of her hand. “We all know you’re talking about yourself here. Maybe, though. But you need to be really careful, Jessica. Starting a church … you can’t go back.”
“I know. Of course I’ll be careful. Priority number one since I was a kid has always been not to get myself martyred.”
“It is �
�� not super fun,” said Jesus. “I will grant you that.”
Chapter Eleven
Jessica was a little tipsy by the time she said goodbye to Jeremy and Jesus and made it into her apartment that evening. The conversation about churches had swirled in her mind on the walk back from Smashmouth while Jesus and Jeremy played a game they’d made up called Fact or Fiction. It consisted of Jeremy running his historical conspiracies by his best friend, and Jesus, who had watched the events of the world unfold from his place in the Great Beyond over the last two thousand years, confirming or denying the rumors.
Could she do it? Could she start a church that didn’t become something unwieldy and horrifying that no one person could control? For some strange reason, she thought she could. She’d even begun to imagine it as they’d strolled the dark sidewalk. A whole network of churches that spanned the globe—or at least the US—where women were revered and treated as true equals, where love and respect were kept at the forefront of everyone’s mind …
By the time she set down her purse on the kitchen island, she was convinced it not only could happen, but would be inevitable if she truly invested herself in the endeavor.
And then the Heavenly Pest spoke up.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD POUR YOURSELF ANOTHER DRINK.
She froze. It was never a good sign when God suggested she get liquored up.
The End Is Her Page 6
