She gives me a watery grin and takes the book. This is my favorite part of the day. For both of us, I think. The stories of sheep dip and cow shots and loco farmers in the Scottish Highlands soon have us roaring with laughter. I miss the Farm and all our animals. Even more, I miss knowing where we will sleep the next night and not having the responsibility of feeding my family.
When we finish reading, I climb into my loft bed over the driver’s seat, and the fear I’ve pushed down all day wraps its scaley fist around my stomach. It’s hard to breathe in the two-foot-tall space. I close my eyes and reach for the only comfort I know. I begin silently quoting the Bible chapters I’ve memorized to myself: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee. In God I will praise His word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me” (Psalm 56:3–4).
Beginning with Psalm 1, I roll through Psalms 23, 24, 27, 32 . . . until I drift off to sleep. While Mom’s faith may falter, mine won’t. God will save us.
Within days, I have proof that He’s heard my prayers. Someone in the Atlanta Home puts us in contact with another family who has also been TRF’d, a mom and dad and their five teen daughters. Like us, they have a camper and want to live on the road, traveling around. Even together we still don’t have the numbers required to qualify as a full-time Family Home, so during the spring and summer we spend a few months driving around the East Coast with them, witnessing and provisioning for food and campsite parking fees.
I enjoy being with other teen girls again. Their mom has them studying the Christian Light Education (CLE) homeschool course, which was developed by the Mennonites. When they are not studying at the campsite picnic tables, we busk and can to raise money. At least I’m not alone out there.
But for Mom, the setup is fast becoming a nightmare. The girls’ father is controlling and abusive to her. He takes control of our busking earnings and our supply of Family posters and cassette tapes that we need to sell to raise money, making us dependent on him. And he insists that Mom shares with him regularly.
With no other support, Mom submits to the sex.
The situation is grim, but there’s a flicker of light.
Mom still has the IBM laptop that she brought from Macau. As a leader at the Farm in charge of communicating, she’d been using the latest technology and email for years with dial-up Internet. Early one morning, I find her hunched over the screen with tears streaming down her cheeks. She’s finally heard from Dad! She points to a long email. Between sobs of relief, she tells me that Dad made a trip out of Japan to renew his visa, and as soon as he could access the Internet unsupervised, he sent her an email. Apparently, they’d both been writing each other letters through the post but hadn’t realized the Shepherds never delivered them.
Hearing from my father revives Mom, and she gathers the courage to escape our current nightmare. The husband of the family we are traveling with gives us only enough money for one tank of gas at a time, so it takes a few days of travel before we are within a two-hour drive of Atlanta. As soon as we fill our gas tank, Mom peels off and heads for Grandma’s.
16
The New Kid in the Class
Back in Marietta, Georgia, Mom parks the camper in Grandma’s driveway, and we unload our little suitcases onto her front stoop. The sticky heat of summer has been trailing us from Florida.
I know that going to live with Grandma means that we have failed. As long as we were living in the camper and “postering” (surviving by witnessing and donations), we were still Family members of a sort—even if lowly TRF Supporters. I still had hope.
But this time it’s different. We have sold out and become Systemites—the worst of all things. This is why Mom fought so hard.
Grandma leads us to our designated bedrooms and gives me a hug. But late at night, when I go to the bathroom, I hear her telling Mom she’s not prepared to have us live with her; this is only temporary. She’s made her life the way she wants it to be. She is older; she works full-time; and she is not keen on having three children underfoot. I return to my room knowing that, once again, I’m unwanted.
The next day, I make a point of being as helpful or as invisible as possible, so she won’t ask us to leave. Because if she does, where will we go? I notice that Mom is also on her best behavior; she even goes out to look for a job. With only a GED, there are few options, but she manages to find work at a nearby call center doing telemarketer sales.
At Grandma’s insistence, Mom enrolls us in a traditional school for the first time in my life. Two-year-old Jondy will attend daycare, and Nina, at six, is going to preschool. She is far ahead of the other kids. We started teaching her to read at one year old, and she’s been reading fluently since she was three.
My only idea of school comes from Grandpa’s rants against it in the Mo Letters and scenes from the few American high school movies I’ve watched. I’m nervous. Mom tries to comfort me, telling me that even though I’m attending a System school, at least it’s a Christian school, one that does not teach things like evolution.
But that’s not why I’ve bitten my nails into stubs. For nearly all of the past year, the only schooling I’d been doing is teaching Jondy and Nina with flash cards. I’ve been too busy acting as a parent to my little siblings to care about my own studies. Will I be able to do the schoolwork and keep up? What will my classmates think of me? Will I slip up and reveal something I shouldn’t about the Family?
As summer draws to a close, I’m given a test to determine what class to put me in. I’m told the results say I’m quite far behind where the average twelve-year-old should be. I’ve never even studied some of the grade-school topics, like history, social studies, and sciences. But the school kindly allows me to enter eighth grade with my peers.
“She seems smart. Let’s see how she does and if she can catch up,” the administrator tells Mom.
I’m determined to do so.
Arriving at DeKalb Christian Academy on my first day feels like landing on another planet. There are hundreds of kids bustling through white-wall hallways lined with gray metal lockers and industrial-looking beige carpet. It’s so different from back at the Farm, where ten kids of all ages were stuffed into one room on the patio. Here, there are thirty kids to a classroom, all of them the same age.
I don’t know how to behave in this kind of setting, so I move quietly and watch everything. I enter my assigned classroom, and the teacher introduces me as Faith Jones, a missionary from China. They stare at me, and I stare at my hands. I’ve never been called by my surname before. It sounds like they are talking to someone else; I even forget to answer the first few times I hear it. I sit at the desk the teacher points me to, waiting, my shoulders stiff and straight.
I hear a rustle of papers and see all the students pull out their three-ring binders, with the class name printed on a sticker along the spine, and their history textbooks. All I have is one notebook and one pencil in my otherwise empty backpack. The teacher spots me staring straight ahead. She looks at my bare desk and then walks over.