There are whispers, whiffs of excitement about the Farm becoming a Teen Home. The only other Teen Home I know of is the huge Heavenly City School (HCS) in Tateyama, Japan, a mountain town about five hours’ drive from Tokyo. The school is named after the Heavenly City described in Revelation. Grandpa has visited the Heavenly City in spirit and described its buildings and delights in our full-color posters. He says the Heavenly City was traveling through space to Earth, like a spaceship, but we can’t see it in our earth telescopes because it’s currently hidden in the moon, waiting to be revealed at the Rapture.
Homes with special ministries, like Teen Homes, are larger Combos with a hundred or more people, but they are rare. The HCS is a training and reeducation center where Family teens are taught revolutionary discipleship and strongly encouraged to declare their personal commitment to God and the Family, separate from their parents; overcome their spiritual problems or Needs Work On (NWOs); learn practical life skills, like cooking, handyman work, and childcare; and find marriage partners.
We’ve been tracking with envy the stories, testimonies, and videos coming out of the HCS. And while every continent has a Music with Meaning recording studio to create Family music tapes in the native languages for sale, the HCS’s recording studio is turning out new Family teen stars who are writing and performing Family songs and making their own music videos like, Watch Out for 666 and Cathy Don’t Go to the Supermarket Today about the Antichrist, and Watch Out for the Green Door, based on a dream Grandpa had about Hell.
Macau is viewed as a relatively safe haven because of my family’s strong relationships with the local government officials—and our Farm has room to grow—so it is declared a good place for teens from the Philippines, which has been hard hit with persecution from allegations of child abuse.
Soon we receive fifteen teens between the ages of twelve and sixteen who have been living in Family Homes in the Philippines. They are mostly girls (my brothers are downright giddy) and just a couple of teen boys, so my options are limited. Jacob is six feet tall, reed-thin with a long face, and barely says a word to anyone. Eddie, his younger brother, is his exact opposite, fat and impossibly annoying, who tries to make up for his lack of good looks with teasing, cutting comments.
The teens are excited to get out from their old Homes, away from their parents and come to the Farm—a place they have long read about in the Kidz True Komics and Family News, where testimonies, photos, and stories about my siblings and I have been publicized. We are used to new people expecting that, as Grandpa’s grandkids, we will be little angels. I think my brothers enjoy squashing those assumptions.
I beg and plead to be allowed in the teen group with my siblings, even though the official age to be a “teen” in the Family is at least eleven or twelve and I’m still ten.
My mother goes to bat for me. “She is much more mature than most kids her age, because she has always had to keep up with her older brothers. We shouldn’t separate them now,” she tells my father, and after a little pushback, he agrees. I’ve earned my place.
Almost overnight, my tight sibling group balloons with testosterone and estrogen. The teen girls are moved into the large room at the Main House, where my whole family slept when we first arrived over six years ago. The teen boys add a couple of bunks to my brothers’ room. We pack ’em in dorm room style. There are no closets in these old Chinese houses, so everyone keeps all their belongings in a small suitcase under their bed.
As a welcome party, my father decides to take the whole group of teens camping at the beach for a week. These teens need to get a taste of survival skills and roughing it, he tells Esther, who is trying to dissuade him. Some of the other adults are concerned about the trouble twenty horny teens can get up to. My father believes in instant obedience to his commands, but he’s lax on supervision.
Esther’s concerns are valid. The teens spend the week sneaking into each other’s tents and hooking up. My brothers have been sexually active for years. Nehi even had an intense, two-year relationship with one of the adult women starting when he was fourteen. I overheard the adults whispering that she was heartbroken when the leaders broke them up, something about them being in love, which meant they were putting themselves first. What on earth did an adult woman see in my skinny, dorky brother anyway?
But this is my brothers’ first time having sex with girls their own age instead of adult women. Even though we don’t have condoms, the boys work extra hard to not get the teen girls pregnant. The adults have made it clear that a teen pregnancy means marriage, but even without a pregnancy, there are still lots of broken hearts to mend after the sex spree.
Of course, I don’t find out anything is going on until the end of the trip, when a tropical storm blows down all our tents in the middle of the night. I wake alone, batting away wet canvas sticking to my face and wondering where my tent mate, Joan, has gotten to.
I don’t find the new teen boys attractive, but I want in on the excitement and attention. I try to model myself after the older girls, swinging my hips and flipping my hair. I watch Joy with envy. I’ve never seen such a beautiful creature in real life, with her long dark hair past her fully formed breasts and small waist. My brothers are of the same opinion. I don’t understand how anyone can be so feminine and delicate. She moves gracefully and speaks softly, her eyebrows raised at our loud farmyard ways.
Everything Joy wears looks cute on her. Her miniskirts and button-down shirts tied at the waist to show a few inches of flat tummy. I copy her, but nothing looks the same without breasts. I am willing mine to grow with all my might, but they are barely little swollen nubs.
As we sit under the trees outside our drying tents, she tries to help me. “I did some modeling in Japan. When you take a photo, try sucking in your cheeks a little.”
“Like this?” I turn into a fish face.
“Hm, no, not quite.”
I try again and again and again. “How do I smile and suck my cheeks in at the same time?!”
“Perhaps just try pressing your tongue on the roof of your mouth.”
After an hour, we both give up. Whatever special beauty skill she has doesn’t seem to apply to me. Secretly, I keep practicing my fish face, hoping for the miracle that will make me pretty.