The first time I went to youth group was after the new kid stabbed himself in study hall.

Our teacher was Mr. Bream. He was something like ninety years old. Mr. Bream’s wife always packed him a cupcake in his lunch and he ate it in this slow, licking way, starting with the frosting and working his way down. 

I loved watching Mr. Bream lick his cupcake. I would spend most of study hall transfixed, watching Mr. Bream go to town. You couldn’t take your eyes off it.

At some point I noticed the new kid sitting two seats over from me. We didn’t get a lot of new kids, not in my school where everybody knew everybody and everybody’s parents and grandparents knew everybody else’s parents and grandparents. That’s just how Mississippi works. But I didn’t know a thing about this new kid. Nobody did. And he didn’t know a thing about me, which meant he didn’t hate me yet. I watched as he pulled a pocket knife out his bookbag. The new kid opened the blade up and jabbed it quick-like into his forearm. Blood bubbled up, rising to the surface, like his arm had sprung a leak. 

“Holy shit,” I said. 

The new kid glared at me.

“Mr. Bream?” he said. “Can I go to the bathroom? I hurt myself.”

Mr. Bream blinked three times at the new kid while blood spurted up between his fingers, like you got to be fucking kidding me. Then he slow-nodded and went back to his cupcake.  

I stood up and said that I was going too and followed the new kid into the hallway. I don’t even think Mr. Bream noticed. It was that kind of school. 

“Holy shit,” I said again, outside, watching the blood run bright red down his arm. “That looks like it hurts.”

“It does,” he said. “But I couldn’t take watching that man fellate his cupcake anymore. It was wretched.” 

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s nasty. It belongs on the Discovery Channel, like with those videos of rhinos giving birth or something.”

“Nature is disgusting.”

“Filthy,” I agreed. 

“I’m Varney,” he said. 

“I’m Charles.” 

We shook hands. I only got a little of his blood on me. 

◆

Me and Varney started hanging out a lot after school, mostly at his house. My mom never cared what I did, but Varney’s mom liked to know where he was at all times. He also went to church a lot, since that was one of the few activities she actually approved of. 

We were hanging out playing video games when Varney’s mom—a smiling little blonde woman with laugh-wrinkles around her eyes—poked her head into the room and invited me to youth group.

“It’s fun,” she said. “You’ll love it.”

“It’s not that fun,” said Varney. “I actually hate it.”

“No, you don’t,” said his Mom, smiling in this fierce kind of way, like it wasn’t up for debate. 

“Mom’s afraid you’re doctrinally unsound,” said Varney, “and she wants to give you a shot at something better.”

Doctrinally unsound? I didn’t even know what that meant. I was Baptist, same as everybody else I knew. My family went to church every Sunday and it was fine. We had Wednesday night lunch buffet, and that was delicious. So what if I didn’t know really what Baptists believed? Did anyone even care?

And yet. 

“Okay,” I said. “Sure. Let’s go to youth group.”

◆

Can I tell you a secret? Youth group is fucking awesome. 

First off, the hottest girls in the world go to youth group. I mean, girls who would never have spoken to me in a million years at school were suddenly happy to see me, all because they thought I loved Jesus. It’s like God required them to not be assholes to me because we were in church. I had no idea. Even better, the youth pastor was pretty great. He was this roundbellied forty-year-old guy named Greg who wore Hawaiian shirts and liked 80s rap a lot. He had a goatee. 

“Charles,” he said. “Strong name. It’s my daddy’s name. We’re so glad you’re here.”

That surprised me a little bit. I couldn’t remember the last time anybody was glad I was anywhere.

We all sang some hymns together. They were the same hymns we sang in the Baptist church, just sped up a little bit, and on acoustic guitar instead of organ. Greg played guitar while this gorgeous girl named Shannah Hawthorne sang lead. Shannah wore round librarian glasses and had long black hair and was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen in my life. Her voice sounded like little birds chirping around the room. I was scared I was going to be sick. 

Greg read a passage of scripture and gave a sermon. It wasn’t much, just some platitudes about how God loved us and how we should love each other and keep our friends and family from going to Hell. That was alright with me. I didn’t want anyone to go to Hell, not even my stepdad Norman, who sucked. Then Greg said a prayer, and there was a moment of silence for anybody who wanted to chime in with a prayer of their own. Nobody did. 

After that, we played dodgeball.

Greg took us into this big empty room with tiled floors and let us murder each other with inflatable balls. 

I didn’t win, mind you. Shannah did. Behind those glasses and her chirping bird voice, she was a fucking lion. But I didn’t come in last either. Some nerdy missionary’s kid did. I actually got him out. I beamed him in the head with a red bouncy ball and he dropped yowling to the beige-tiled floor. I was ecstatic. Then Shannah pegged me in the face so hard I had a welt on my cheek.

It hurt. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t last. The dumb missionary’s kid was.  

Varney didn’t play dodgeball. He sat in the corner and did a Rubik’s cube, his hair flopped over his eyes. He seemed to be trying to have the worst time possible. I wondered why. Because everybody was laughing, telling each other good job, making everyone feel like a million bucks just for tossing a ball around. Shannah even touched my face welt with her pale cold palm. 

“I got you good, didn’t I?” she said, smiling.

I kind of think it was one of the happiest days of my life. 

◆

In his mom’s minivan on the way home, Varney was eyeing me all weirdly.

“You weren’t supposed to like youth group so much,” he said. 

“I wasn’t?”

“No,” he said. “You were supposed to hate it, like I do. We were supposed to hate it together. And instead you fucking let me down, same as everybody.” 

◆

But I kept going to youth group, every Sunday night. Me and Varney kept hanging out too. We watched horror movies—the grossest, goriest ones we could find—and we would laugh at them, me and him together. It was really fun. Varney liked all this music I’d never heard of before, stuff like Slayer and the Deftones and Marilyn Manson, the kind of shit that would freak my mom out if she knew. 

“Why do you keep going to church if everything you like is kind of satanic?” I asked him once.

We were sitting in his bedroom playing Goldeneye, a game I was never very good at. I just died over and over again. Varney was a genius at it. I’d watch him hone in and focus playing video games in a way he never did at church or anywhere else. 

“Because my mom makes me,” he said. “She said I can listen to whatever I want so long as I never miss church. And none of this stuff is satanic, not really. I mean, Satan isn’t even real. He’s just a stupid idea somebody made up a long time ago to blame their own shitty behavior on.” 

“But Greg said…”

“Fuck Greg.”

So I let it drop. In the video game, Varney shot me in the head the moment I respawned. Every time I came back to life he was there, shooting me. It had stopped being fun a long time ago, but I still didn’t want to go home. My house was always silent except for the TV blaring war movies. My stepdad used to be in the army, and he never let me forget it. So Varney’s house was better than anywhere else, except for maybe church.  

It was hot in Varney’s room and he was sitting in gym shorts, and for the first time I noticed all these little scars crisscrossing his thighs. I guess he’d done it to himself, same as he had at school the first day I met him. I wondered if his Mom knew about them, or what she’d do if she found out. 

I never asked him about it. I’m still pretty ashamed of that. 

◆

After a month or so, I finally convinced Varney to let me spend the night one Saturday so he’d be forced to take me to church the next day. I know that sounds manipulative and it was I guess. But I wanted more of how I’d felt in youth group. That sense of belonging, of being liked. Loved, even, like you were part of the family. I figured Sunday morning church was the next big step towards something like that. 

We filed in ten minutes early, me and Varney and his mom, and sat in the third row. The youth pastor was there, Greg, except this time he wore a suit and tie instead of a Hawaiian shirt, and his hair was a little less spikey. The kids from youth group sat around in the pews, all dressed up, the boys in khakis and Polo shirts and the girls in long ankle-length dresses. Yeah, Shannah was there too, and she looked incredible. No makeup, her hair long down her back, almost to her butt. Somehow she managed to wear blue Converses under her dress, and nobody even gave her shit about it. I was pretty much in love with Shannah by this point, even though we had barely spoken.   

Varney’s dad didn’t come to church with us. Honestly, I think I only ever saw his dad a few times. Every time I asked where his dad was, Varney just said he was at work. If I had been a better friend, I would have maybe picked up on how weird that was, or felt sorry for Varney at least. But at that point, I didn’t really notice. So what if his dad wasn’t around? I hadn’t seen my dad in years. Nobody seemed too upset about it so I wasn’t going to be upset about it either. Teenagers are real assholes. Even the good ones suck without realizing it. 

Instead of a choir, Varney’s church had a rock band, with a drummer and two guitar players and a bass player. The music was really good too, straight-up gospel music, played fast and loud. The worship leader liked to hop up and down and holler the next line of the song right before it was time for us to sing it. Everybody was raising their arms and dancing to the music, singing the quiet songs with their eyes shut tight. I couldn’t believe it. I kept looking at Varney, who was working his Rubik’s cube, even though he could do the thing with his closed, while all the happy people danced around him. An old lady in a purple dress dropped her cane and took off running down the aisle, shouting “Hallelujah!” I’d never seen anything like it in my whole life. 

I realized I wanted to be one of those dancing happy people. I wanted to lift my hands and go running down the aisles screaming “Hallelujah!”

I didn’t, of course. I just stood there next to Varney, gaping at everybody. 

Pretty soon the music quieted down into an ambient, drum-less shimmery kind of thing, and the preacher walked out. His name was Pastor Rob. He was a tall guy with a bald spot and a big smile. The music was still playing softly, just billowing guitar licks that sounded kind of like the ocean. Pastor Rob raised his hands up in the air and shut his eyes.

“Hallelujah!” he shouted.

“Hallelujah!” shouted everybody else, except for me and Varney.

And then Pastor Rob did something incredible. He started praying in a foreign language. It sounded like German. 

  “Why is Pastor Rob speaking in German?” I whisper-asked Varney.

Varney rolled his eyes at me. “He’s not speaking in German, idiot. He’s speaking in tongues.”

“Tongues?” I said.

“You know. The Holy Ghost. Tongues of angels. Like in the Bible.”

I hadn’t actually read the Bible so I didn’t know. But I nodded anyway.

Tongues of angels, I thought. The Holy Ghost.

“They don’t do it in youth group because it’s not usually kid stuff,” said Varney. “It’s one of the so-called ‘higher gifts.’” And he laughed a little bit. 

Right then Pastor Rob’s voice rose up high, still speaking in tongues, and it was right in key with the guitar ocean noises, and the drummer picked up again, and the whole band came crashing back into the song they were just playing, this time with Pastor Rob singing lead.

I got chills all over me. 

The music became slower, more intense and repetitive. We sang one line like “You are the King oh God” over and over again for like twenty minutes, until it felt like I started to fall into a kind of trance. I felt so close to everyone in that room. And the more I sang, the more a part of it I became, like I was turning into the music, like I was the song we were all singing, and I was about to change forever. 

It’s hard to talk about what happened next. I don’t know how to explain it to you. Honestly, I’m kind of afraid to, because I’m scared you’ll laugh at me, or make fun of me. You’ll tell me it’s all psychosomatic, like mass hypnosis or something, and I’m just a sucker for falling for it. I know that’s what you’ll say because that’s what everybody says. 

I would probably say that too, if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t experienced it myself. 

Pastor Rob, his eyes shut, his hand out-stretched toward the crowd, said, “Who here would like to be baptized in the Spirit?”

I’d been baptized before, when I was six. Everybody back home did. It was like playing flag football or going through puberty. It’s just what happened. But I realized Pastor Rob wasn’t talking about that kind of baptism. He said, “The Bible says you must be baptized in water and in fire, and the Holy Ghost will come upon you, and you will speak in the tongues of men and angels.”

Oh, I thought. That’s what he means. That’s how you get to talk in that German-sounding language. You get baptized again, in fire. 

I watched as people walked down the aisle, dozens of them, black and white, young and old, rich-looking dudes and janitor-looking dudes, all kinds of folks lined up front. Pastor Rob laid his hands on them, and they shook and flopped over on the floor, like electrocuted trout or something. 

And before I knew it, I ran up on stage.

I don’t know why I did it. It was just this thing moving inside of me, like Pastor Rob had some kind of supernatural magnet and he just sucked me toward the altar, like I had no control at all. I knew beyond any doubt that I had to be up there.

It felt like destiny, like I’d finally found the place I belonged. 

I stood there, staring at the crowd, while Varney stared back at me, his mouth wide open in shock.

Two deacons in suits walked up on either side of me, and one just behind me. To catch me, I realized. If I got slain in the Spirit that man would catch me. I felt insane and ridiculous. 

And yet.

When the deacons held out their hands towards me and began whispering in tongues, it didn’t sound guttural and German to me anymore, it sounded thick and sweet, like hot chocolate at Christmas. The language of angels. I could feel my heart beating along with their words, sweat pouring down my face, down my stomach, the music and the hallelujahs all mixing together in my brain, a kind of whirlpool swirl. And then—and I fucking swear this to you, right now, I’m not making this up—I heard a sound like a tornado blowing, a great and powerful wind whipping around my ears. It was deafening, unlike anything I’d ever heard in my life. 

I looked out in the crowd, and for one moment I made eye contact with Varney. He mouthed No, you can’t, at me. But it was too late.

Pastor Rob stepped in front of me, his hands on either side of me, praying in tongues.

Then he touched me. He laid both his hands on the top of my head and gripped me tight. 

It’s hard to describe what happened next.

I sort of blacked out, I guess, but I didn’t lose consciousness. It’s like how people describe dying or doing DMT. It was like I fell into a river of white light rushing past, and I was drowning in it, like the inside of a star, like I was slathered in starlight. I felt clean, I felt destroyed, I felt brand new.

When I came to, I was lying on the ground, my entire body shaking, the tongues of angels spilling out from my lips. 

◆

I tried to call Varney later that night. I figured he was pretty mad at me since he had more or less refused to talk to me on the ride home. It was just me and his mom, gabbing about the Holy Spirit. It took four tries for Varney to answer his phone. 

“That was really fucked up in there,” he said. 

“But I felt the Holy Spirit!” I said. “I spoke in the tongues of angels, just like the Bible says!”

“You don’t know what the Bible says,” said Varney. “You’ve never even read the fucking thing.” 

It was true. There wasn’t a word I could say back to that. 

“This is bullshit,” said Varney. “I’m so stupid.” 

“Why are you stupid? You gave me a gift. This is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I was crying then, I really was. My feelings were hurt. Varney had ruined this perfect day for me. 

“I’m stupid because they got you,” he said. “And I let them. It’s my fault.”

And he hung up on me. 

◆

Me and Varney weren’t friends after that. He stopped going to youth group and then he stopped going to school. His Mom caught him cutting himself and she sent him off to some boarding school where they had cameras in the rooms and they watched your every move. She didn’t want him to hurt himself anymore, which makes sense. But I felt a little bit guilty every time she saw me at church, sitting there, singing along to the hymns.

It was like she thought I’d stolen something from her son, his faith maybe. At the very least, I’d stolen his rightful place in the pews.

◆

I kept going to church, and I even managed to bring my family along, from our quiet little Baptist church. You should have seen the fear on my stepdad’s face the first time somebody took off running, and Mom said the music hurt her ears. It was all too much for them, the tongues, the promise of miracles, the laying on of hands. They never came back.

But I was all-in. Church was the best thing that had ever happened to me. All of a sudden I had friends who seemed to really like me. I didn’t have to walk through the hallways alone at school anymore or sit by myself at lunch. There was always someone from youth group nearby. Even better, God loved me. Me! God! And God was everywhere so I was surrounded by this huge whirlwind of love all the time. It was like the cure for loneliness, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I started skipping Wednesday Baptist buffet with my family for my new church, and showing up for Thursday afternoon Bible study too. 

Youth group was the absolute happiest time of the week. We sang songs (turns out I could sing okay but that didn’t matter—I was singing for God, for my people gathered all around me, at the top of my lungs every time) and played dodgeball or street hockey, we took field trips to the mall and the fair, handing out tracts, telling The Story of the Wordless Book to little kids. We passed out cheeseburgers to the homeless in the park, blankets at Christmas when it was cold. We raised money for orphanages in Central Africa, for mosquito nets too. We built houses at Habitat for Humanity. We prayed for miracles, we laid hands on the sick and anointed them with oil, and sometimes the sick actually got better. They really did. Everybody screamed about how it was a miracle, praising God for His healing and all that. And yes, I believed it too. I believed everything. 

But miracles or not, the point is we did our best to do good things. In our hearts, we more or less always meant well. 

We also did some other things, stuff I’m pretty ashamed to talk about. We argued down science teachers who tried to speak to us about evolution and carbon dating, how the earth was older than six thousand years, and usually (due to a preponderance of arcane pseudo-science “facts” we memorized at church) we won. We protested the only abortion clinic in the state, holding up little signs with slaughtered babies on them that Pastor Rob and Greg made for us, yelling mean stuff at crying women who came to get help. We told people of other faiths their traditions were evil, and they would all suffer too, for eternity, burning with all the other shitheads. 

Eventually me and Shannah started “courting,” which meant dating with a chaperone—usually Shannah’s paralytic grandmother. I remember one night in her parents’ backyard, on a blanket, watching the stars. You can still see stars in Mississippi, it’s incredible, there are millions of them, and you feel ancient and loved and watched-over, like the whole universe was built just for you. That’s one of the things about Christianity that I still love, that all of creation was a big machine God built to show you He loves you. I mean, how can you not be moved by something like that?

And Shannah wasn’t just all about God either. Shannah was way, way smarter than me. She loved poetry, the kind of thing I’d ignored in English class. Keats was her favorite, and she knew a bunch of his poems by heart. They weren’t exactly Christian, but older things seem to get a pass from her. Maybe just because they were so beautiful, I don’t know. She had a whole poetry group she met with, quiet kids who seemed nice, her secret world she only let me catch glimpses of. But there was this one Keats poem she always recited to me, “Ode to a Nightingale,” with that line about being half in love with easeful death. It always frightened me a little. There was something else to Shannah, a kind of darkness lingering around the fringes. I never got to the root of that—I never even really had the courage to ask her about it, to my shame. 

I remember one of those days, when she was being quiet and strange, out in the land behind her parents’ house, the only place we were allowed without a chaperone. It was dark, and the stars were out but no moon, a hot and bullfrog-loud night. Shannah took my hand and placed it on her chest. Not her boobs or anything, but her heart. And I remember feeling it beat, and knowing that meant she loved me. We had our first real kiss that night. Our teeth bumped and her breath kind of tasted bad but I didn’t care. Our tongues touched, just a little, and I thought I might keel over. To me, it was holy, just like in Pentecost when tongues of fire fell and alighted over the Apostle’s heads. (Yeah, I was reading the Bible now, for at least an hour a day. What a wild book that turned out to be, not at all like I’d imagined it.) In my mind, Shannah and me might as well have been engaged. In hers too, maybe. She was graduating early, going to missionary school in Ohio, and then off to Cambodia to work in an orphanage and save people’s souls. 

It was only a short time apart, and then we’d be together, joined in marriage, forever, until we both died and whatever happened in Heaven happened.

◆

One morning I got a call from Shannah on the way to school. 

“You have to come to the church, right now,” she said. Her voice was all frantic, terrified. I wondered if there had been a shooter, or maybe one of the pro-abortion people had come by again. Those guys always freaked Shannah out.

“I’m on the way to school,” I said. “I can’t miss again. I’ll get grounded.”

“This is more important than school,” she said. “This is about our spiritual family.” I could tell she was crying, and Shannah almost never cried. So I swung my car around, pulled a U-turn on Lakeland Road, and headed my ass to church.

I pulled up in the parking lot. There were a lot more cars than there should have been on a Tuesday morning. I parked up front next to the youth building and walked over to the worship center, which was usually the only unlocked door on weekdays. Shannah met me inside. Her face was red and puffy, and she flung her arms around me, wailing.

“What happened?” I said.

“Come and see,” she said. 

She led me to the sanctuary. Pastor Rob was lying on the floor of the church, his mouth open, his tongue lolling out, his eyes staring straight up at Heaven. His wife and a few of the deacons were on their knees around him, hands clasped together, weeping, praying to God. Pastor Rob had this terrified look on his face, like God had ripped the ceiling off the world and showed him everything and Pastor Rob hadn’t much liked what he’d seen.

“I found him like this an hour ago,” said Shannah.

“We have to call an ambulance,” I said. 

“No,” she said. “It’s too late for that. We don’t need an ambulance. We need a miracle.”

“What?” I said. 

It didn’t make any sense. That was clearly a dead guy on the floor. Pastor Rob was dead. There was nothing anybody could do about dead, I knew that for a fact. 

“You don’t understand,” said Shannah. “Doctors can’t save him now. Only God can.”

“But Shannah,” I said. “He’s dead.”

Shannah slapped me in the face. It stung. I couldn’t believe it. Nobody had ever popped me like that except my stepdad, the one time he caught me smoking cigarettes when I was fourteen. 

“That’s just the way it looks,” she said. “And we live by faith, not by sight. Pastor Rob’s not dead, he’s only sleeping. And God can wake him up. He did it in the Bible many times. God can still save Pastor Rob, if we only pray hard enough.”

So I did it. I hit my knees, right there on the church sanctuary carpet, and I prayed along with Shannah and Pastor Rob’s wife and the deacons. We prayed and we prayed and we prayed. For hours. I prayed until my knees hurt and my back ached and the street lights flickered on. I prayed through my mom’s worried calls, through my stepdad threatening to ground me if I didn’t answer my phone. I prayed until I had to pee so bad I thought my bladder would explode, my voice long gone, just grunts coming out. 

But Pastor Rob stayed dead. 

His wife Rhonda ran up to where he lay and started pounding his body, smashing her fists into him.

“Get up,” she screamed. “Get up, damn you.”

Nothing doing. 

Rhonda wiped her bloodshot eyes and spoke to us in barely a rasp.

“Come on,” she said. “Come, gather round. Lay your hands on him. It’s like the Bible says, ‘They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’”

There’s a difference between sick and dead, I thought, but then I remembered Jairus’ daughter, and then those other guys who came back from the dead in the Bible. Maybe a miracle would happen now.

We gathered around him, at least twelve of us. One by one I watched them all lay hands on Pastor Rob’s lifeless body, Shannah included. Her hair hung over her face like a holy veil and hear her voice the loudest, pleading to God for mercy. 

But I didn’t want to touch him, or any other dead body for that matter. I just didn’t.

Everyone was praying, moaning, crying out to God, hollering out in tongues. I looked around the sanctuary. It had gone somber in the dusklight, looking like what it actually was, a cheap ‘70s daycare with some pews thrown up and a red carpet to fancy the place up a bit. It was such a shabby room, and yet in it I had found the most joy I’d ever experienced. I looked around at their faces now, exhausted from sorrow, from weeping and praying, and I felt in my heart how much I loved them all. How much I loved their faith. Because they were my family now, right? My spiritual family, closer than blood. But when I reached down into myself to find that same faith, it just wasn’t there, like whatever vastness their hearts contained was too much for the dinky little organ I carried in my chest. I wanted to leave, I wanted to turn and sprint and run from this place, and never come back. 

“Charles,” Shannah whispered at me, furious. She was glaring at me, one green eye clear through all that hair. “Lay your hands on him.” 

I reached out and touched the man’s dead flesh.

It was cold. 

Pastor Rob was dead, and there was no coming back from that.

Not now, maybe not ever. 

◆

Rhonda took over as preacher and she did a good job. She was an even better preacher than her husband was. Greg helped her. They sort of co-preached. The congregation grew more that summer than it had in the whole three years I’d been going. Everybody seemed pretty happy about things, even though Pastor Rob hadn’t come back from the dead. 

But everything had changed for me. I’d stared in the eyes of a dead man and asked God to bring him back to life and God hadn’t listened. We were a church of miracles, as Pastor Rob had always told us. But where was the miracle in this? 

I guess you could say it shook me to the core. More than anything, I couldn’t understand why I’d fallen to my knees and prayed for nine hours straight. What a useless, stupid thing to do. I thought about Varney and his Rubik’s cube. I wondered how he was doing, if he was still in boarding school, if his mom would ever let me see him again.

That night I called Varney’s cellphone and it rang and rang. I called him again. The third time it went straight to voicemail, like he’d turned it off. 

I kept going to youth group but it was like I’d fallen out of favor somehow. I kind of receded off into the background, the first out at dodgeball, standing on the sidelines, watching everyone have their fun. Everybody thought it was because I missed Pastor Rob so much. That was part of it, I guess.

Me and Shannah stuck together, even though she didn’t seem to like me quite as much anymore. Come fall, Shannah was headed to Ohio to become a missionary. I was supposed to join her once I got the money together. Until then, I was off to the University of Mississippi. 

◆

It was that year apart that really killed us, I think. It killed what was left of my faith too, if you want me to be honest about it. 

Away from the youth groupers, I kind of had to start thinking about things. Freshman biology fucked me all the way up. My little factoids didn’t do much against someone with an actual PhD. And geology, Christ. What was I supposed to do with billions of years? I remember sitting outside class, sweating, with my head in my hands. I read up about abortion (it happened in Jesus’ time and he never mentioned it?) and equal rights and met people from everywhere who believed everything and went to parties and by the end of my first semester, I knew I could never go back again. It just wasn’t possible.

Me and Shannah talked on the phone pretty regularly, but I wasn’t much good as a liar. 

“Have you found a church yet?” she would ask me every time we talked. “We have to stay strong in our faith. We need the accountability of others.”

And I would mumble about how I was still looking, how there weren’t many churches like ours back home.

“Charles, this is America. There are churches everywhere. Good ones, with sound doctrine. I’m beginning to think you aren’t even trying.” 

Pastor Greg called me every couple of weeks too, just checking in. 

“Come by and see us when you come home,” he’d say. “Stay strong with your faith because I know what happens in the classrooms up there.” 

“I’m staying strong,” I lied. 

Just before Christmas break, Shannah broke up with me over the phone. Apparently she met a doctor in Ohio and God told them to get married. They live in Tulsa now. They have like six kids. I saw it on Facebook. 

◆

I spent most of college drunk—not fun drunk, sad drunk, I don’t know how I’m supposed to behave drunk, Is God watching me? drunk. After college, I moved home and kept drinking. I worked at the secretary of state’s office, filing papers. For a long time I was angry and humiliated. I raged against my parents. How could they have let me join an insane nightmare church like that? How could they have let me believe all that garbage? 

My mom, crying, just said, “Well, you seemed happy. You were always such a sullen little boy. I’d never seen you so happy.”

The thing is, she’s right. I was happy. Honestly, truly happy, happier than I’d ever been before. 

Happier than I’ve been since. 

◆

You know, I saw Varney again, not too long ago. I was at a bar in Hattiesburg on a work trip. It was one of those hip places, the kind where everyone is either an artist or somehow professionally in college. I usually hate places like that but I didn’t want to be around any of my colleagues from work and I figured it was the least likely bar they would ever set foot in. A horrible noise band was playing, an emaciated woman running a musical saw through about ten distortion pedals. It was the worst sound I’d ever heard in my life. 

But then, right there up front, dancing around like a maniac, was Varney.

He was old as me at the time, around thirty-two. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, except for a peach-sized bald spot right in the middle of his head, like monks used to have. He wore a pink feather boa and a kilt, and he was doing some weird hopping thing, clapping and screaming along to whatever beat he imagined into the music.

He seemed like the only one having any fun. 

After the music stopped, I walked over to him and said hello.

Varney seemed shocked to see me. His eyes opened real wide, same as they had when I was up on stage, receiving the Holy Spirit. 

I bought him a drink. We went out on the bar patio and talked awhile. It was pleasant enough. 

After a few rounds, I told him how sorry I was for bailing on him, ditching him for youth group. I had tears in my eyes as I said this. 

Varney was quiet a moment. He took in a sharp breath and let it out slow, like he wasn’t sure quite what to say back. After a silence so long I was afraid he was about to get up and leave, Varney finally spoke.  

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “They brainwashed you. Same as they brainwashed me. Don’t get me wrong, I hated you, all you guys, for years. But I’ve let all that go. I’m happy now. I’m at peace.”

We talked a little bit more, and I asked him if he wanted to exchange numbers, maybe get a coffee next time I was in town. 

Varney looked at me and laughed. 

“To be honest,” he said, “I really don’t ever want to talk to you or see you again. Ever. In my life. If that’s okay with you.”

“But why?” I said. “I thought this was going well.”

I was drunk and a little bit desperate. 

“Because what you want from me is not something I can do,” he said. “It’s not something anybody can do. You’re on your own with that, buddy. Everybody is.”

What did I want from him? It wasn’t forgiveness, because he’d already given me that. Was it absolution, like what priests do? Did I want him to declare me not guilty, to take my whole horrible youth group past and my guilt and wipe it away, clean and clear, like my Great Aunt Charlotte’s house after Hurricane Camille blew through, nothing but a blank slab of concrete, clean and empty, a foundation for something new to be built? 

Varney wasn’t giving me answers. He downed his drink and walked off, his kilt swishing in the puny Mississippi breeze. 

◆

I’ll say one last thing, and then I’m done here, and you can go back to doing whatever it was you were doing before. Thanks for listening, I really do appreciate it. Lord knows I’ve been trying to say all this for years. It’s a relief just to get it out. 

I was feeling pretty down this past April so I took a trip out to the country to try and calm the fuck down. Nothing special, just a cabin on a small lake where my uncle has some property. It was me and the woods, gravel roads for miles in any direction. I figured it would be relaxing, sitting around phoneless, chain smoking. I didn’t even bring any beer, just a fifth of Heaven Hill, in case. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of these beavers who were maybe building a damn nearby. There were rumors of alligators in the pond but it seemed unlikely. All I wanted was some peace. 

But that first night, a great storm blew in. I mean, you’ve never seen anything like it. The wind whipped so hard the rain was nearly horizontal, the lake roiling and churning. I sat on the screen porch alone, drinking shitty bourbon. Lightning wrote God’s name all across the sky. The cabin started making this creaky noise, like it was going to blow away, like in The Wizard of Oz.  

And then it got quiet all of a sudden. The sky had taken on this eerie green color, and you didn’t have to tell me what that meant. 

I ran to the bathroom and got in the tub, since it was the closest thing to a central room in the house. The wind began to pick up again, the rain battering the tin roof. Then came the hail, a sound like a whole army riding their chariots across the ceiling. The lights sputtered and went out, and I was dropped into a darkness so complete it was like I had died already, all alone in the nothingness, the sort of oblivion that wasn’t Hell but might as well be. The cabin shook, the floor shivering under my feet. 

I was so drunk and scared I started crying. I didn’t want to die in that bathtub alone, in my uncle’s shitty woodlands cabin, with nothing but beavers around to find whatever was left of my corpse in the morning. 

I lay in that bathtub and I thought about my life, about broken-hearted righteous Varney and Mr. Bream and his cupcakes and Shannah in the starlight and all her children too, all her children that could have been my children if only I’d stayed faithful, if I hadn’t wandered, I thought about Pastor Greg and I thought about Varney’s mom and I thought about everyone I’d hurt by believing and everyone I hurt by not believing enough, and I missed believing the God of the Universe loved me, I missed being important like that, being known so thoroughly and loved anyway, no matter what I’d done. 

Do you know anywhere else you can get loved like that? Because people don’t love you like that. Trust me, I know. Time and time again, I’ve learned. 

The house shook so hard it was making me sick, and I could hear the roof beginning to yank itself free, the shrieking wind and the splitting trees, like all Hell had come for me. 

I hadn’t done it in years, not since before college. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, not until I heard the sound, the strangeness of some foreign language, words I never knew before spilling out easy as a song, as my lips moved, as the words flowed out like a spring from the earth, from somewhere deep and dark that I didn’t know was even there, from the very depths of me. Maybe they were nonsense sounds, maybe they were just me reverting back to childhood in the face of death, I don’t know. But I spoke them, and even if I couldn’t understand what I was saying, I knew I meant it. 

And as the tornado ripped trees from the ground and flicked them like spent matchsticks, as lightning lit the woods bright and burning, as the animals hid and quaked and shuddered in their dens, as my own fucking car was hurled into the lake, half-sunk like some prehistoric mechanical beast, I spoke in tongues, in the language of angels. And for the first time in years, I felt peace. Real peace, the kind I hadn’t known since youth group, in the good days before Pastor Rob died, when I still believed in things like coming back from the dead, when I was in love with Shannah, when I saw my whole glorious future stretched out before me, a path laid out by a God older than billions of years, a God stranger and more mysterious than anything I’d ever imagined. Real peace. 

I survived. Of course I did. 

Can someone please tell me what I’m supposed to do with that?