Auntie Crystal and Uncle Michael pick me up at the airport. Uncle Michael gives me his familiar warm smile and bear hug. It’s good to see him. As we drive from the airport, I dream of seeing my siblings and visiting the fabled Heavenly City School.
“I don’t know when it will be possible for you to see them,” Auntie Crystal snaps at my questions about seeing my family. “They live in another part of the country, hours away.” Wait. Didn’t she tell me I would be seeing them soon? We drive through wide-open tracts of green farmland. When we finally arrive at our destination, I’m in the countryside of Fukuoka, a city in the south of Japan, a ninety-minute flight from the HCS in Tateyama, looking at a traditional, Japanese building.
Uncle Michael takes me on a tour of the house. Around fifty people live in this two-story, refitted Japanese guesthouse, including the teen group. The teen girls sleep on futons on the floor in one room, the teen boys in another. The bathrooms have drop toilets—a no-flush-toilet system—that are emptied weekly by the “honey truck.”
I’m led into the teens’ living room. Uncle Michael and Auntie Crystal take their places at the head of the room with the teens fanned out around them. My new group.
Pretty much everyone knows who I am. They’ve been reading about me and my family and our life at the farm in the Family News for years. But I just shrug when people try to ask me about it. I would be “proud” if I discussed my relation to Grandpa. “You’re nothing special, you’re just like everyone else” has been drilled into my siblings and me by Shepherds for years. The truth is, I avoid the subject. It brings up feelings I’d rather ignore: feelings of resentment and embarrassment that Grandpa has never asked us, his own grandkids, to visit—especially now that I have some experience of what grandparents are after my time in the States.
Auntie Crystal’s hard and distant face is not the one she had when she was coaxing me to come to Japan. She and Uncle Michael, I remember, are the Shepherds who oversaw the Victors at the Stone House, the most terrible place you could be sent. A queasy feeling grows in my stomach.
“This is Faith,” she says to the group. “She has come from Macau for retraining. She is on probation until further notice.”
All the teens’ eyes pierce me like tiny darts. My cheeks flush with humiliation. I’ve been had. I’m not in Japan to rejoin my peers and family. I’m here for punishment.
Probation is a punishment for anything that could get you excommunicated if repeated, like sex with outsiders and, since the Family directive in 1989, adult sex with underage kids. But a Shepherd could impose it within their discretion for a consistently poor attitude, if you were too critical or doubting, or spoke back too much, snuck out of the house, or bought alcohol. Pretty much anything they didn’t like.
I can’t believe Auntie Crystal turned on me. During her visit, she’d been all honey and pie, going out of her way to dispel any concerns I might have had. She was the picture of sympathy, telling me it was totally understandable that I snuck out to see a Systemite, given my circumstances. She betrayed me.
Mom betrayed me.
And I betrayed myself.
The sizzle of anger running from my chest to my fingernails retreats. I have no right to blame anyone. This is my struggle. I did the deed; I pay for it.
Unable to meet the judgment of sixteen pairs of eyes, I look at my bare toes and take the stack of basic-training Mo Letters from Auntie Crystal’s hand. “For the next three months, you will read these by yourself in addition to the morning two hours of daily Devotions,” she tells me.
I’ve been kicked to the lowest rung on the totem pole.
After a sleepless night, I wake up feeling more alone than I have since Thailand. I shuffle out of bed and ready myself to rejoin the regimented schedule of the Home. I barely begin my breakfast before I’m assigned to the worst jobs and told I must do anything that anyone tells me to do—even the younger teens.
The days turn into weeks, and I am at times entertained by new experiences in a new country, but mostly I am miserable. I’m bored with reading the basic-training Letters I’ve read a hundred times. Where it was once habitual, I struggle with constant obedience, witnessing, selling Family CDs door to door, and cleaning bathrooms for fifty people. I miss my studies, my books, the horses. I call out to God to help me readjust to communal Family living.
Thankfully, He sends me an answer—a new friend.
Joy, a tall, gangly, half-Mexican, half-American girl with long dark hair and mocha skin, approaches me shyly. We start talking, and soon we’re sitting next to each other at meals. Together we find things to laugh about, like our witnessing uniforms, flowered purple fabric sewn at home into tiny miniskirts that we wear with little spandex shorts and tops that show our midriff.
Like me, Joy doesn’t really fit in; she’s too tall and serious in a land of smiling dolls. I tell her she’s beautiful, but she has very low self-esteem, and I don’t believe her when she returns the compliment. We both wish we were cool kids: the pretty girls, or the girls confident enough to think they’re pretty, the singers, and the dance troupe—the cheerleaders of the Family.
On the margins of the social fabric, Joy and I are allies, and I realize she’s my first real friend since I was ten years old, running around the Farm with Patrick. We talk late into the night about how difficult everything is. I confide in her about books, my studies, and dating Systemite guys.
We maneuver to be paired together when we go out witnessing. At each store, we hand our full-color posters with a message about the End Time and 666 or Jesus’s love on the back to the proprietor and talk to him or her about Jesus and ask for a donation.
Chill autumn winds are already blowing and changing the colors of the trees to red and gold. We don’t have colors like this in Macau. Joy and I step into a 7-Eleven to warm up while out witnessing one day. The smell of cooking meat on a stick hits my nostrils. I’m hungry, but I dare not use any of the money we collected and come back empty-handed. We will eat when we are done in a few more hours. I flip through some of the magazines on the rack to distract me from my growling stomach, and so I look like I have a purpose here rather than just sucking up heat.
“Gross,” I say to Joy, nearly dropping the violent comic I’ve grabbed in horror. A man is strangling a woman as he rapes her. Screams and tears spout from her face. “That’s terrible!”
I pick up another and slam it closed just as quickly. More violence and horror. “How can they have these degrading comics out on a shelf where any kid could pick them up?!”