Mornings were for Bible study, afternoons were for exercise, then the sing-alongs and sharing sessions that comprised mandatory fun. Meals were for watching your back and learning your place. Twelve girls, and I didn’t need to learn their names or their stories because I didn’t intend to be one of them for long. It was enough to know that the Screamer jerked us all awake at three every morning; that the Sodomite had been caught in flagrante with her soccer team captain; that the Skank was a sex addict, or at least had a diary-reading mother who thought so; that the Virgin had remained so—if only by her own technical definition—by restricting herself to copious amounts of anal sex; that Saint Ann had shipped herself off to Horizons voluntarily, in need of some sinners to save.
The Bastard would have liked the regimented schedule, the drill-sergeant counselors whipping us into shape, a boot camp for the army of God; he would have loved the fact that any trespass was met with flamboyant, Old Testament–style consequences. This wasn’t hippie worship, the guitar-playing, turn-the-other-cheek kind of lovefest he detested, and it wasn’t the bingo-playing, potlucking, pamphleteering morality play that enraged him in Battle Creek. This was a camp created as if in his own image, complete with brimstone and fire and daily viewings of The 700 Club. All I had to do, they told me, was learn respect for authority and for the Lord, and they would send me home.
I tried.
I dedicated my life to Christ. I memorized Bible passages. I sang that my God was an awesome god and learned the hand motions to prove it. When we stood in a circle for Squeeze Prayer, I said my line, “I pray that the Lord helps me fight off the devil and his temptations,” then squeezed Skank’s hand and pretended to listen while she told her own lie. I dedicated myself to craft projects, because Jesus was a carpenter and handiwork was noble work; I sawed wood and carved soap, and when we practiced tying knots I did my best not to dream of a noose. I confessed to lascivious thoughts and agreed with Heather that I’d squandered my life. I racked up two weeks’ worth of privileges, and I didn’t let myself think of Battle Creek or of you until I was safe in bed, because that was my reward for making it through each day—that and Kurt, who sang me to sleep. Two weeks, and I scored enough privileges to write two letters. One to the Bastard, promising to be good if he’d let me come home. The other to you.
Dear Dex, I wrote, then stopped.
Dear Dex, I’ve given up. Dear Dex, Everything I told you about myself was a lie. Dear Dex, Everything I do is so I can come home to you, but I don’t deserve you if I come home like this.
No. I needed to be your Lacey. Strong. So the next morning, during the dawn service, I stood up in my pew and cursed Jesus Christ my Lord for this season in hell, and our whole bunk got rewarded with an afternoon scrubbing shit out of the toilet bowls. The next day I gave Shawn the finger, and Heather tasked us with mucking out the cow stalls, to remind us what it meant to be befouled by sin. I thought of you, Dex, and I thought of Kurt, and knew I would roll in my own shit before living their vision of salvation.
The next time I fucked up, they tried something new.
THERE’S A HIDDEN TRACK ON Nevermind. You’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. First “Something in the Way” fades out, with a final soft crash of cymbals and Kurt’s dying hum and then nothing.
Nothing for thirteen minutes and fifty-one seconds. What comes next is only for us, the ones who care enough to endure the silence. First the drumbeat, thrumming into the too-quiet like jungle cannibals. Then the lion roars: Kurt’s voice, pure and gleaming; Kurt’s voice like a knife scything the sky. It’s the raging of a man not going gentle into that good night. The silence is part of it, those thirteen minutes of agony, and Kurt’s in it with you, muzzled and frenzied as the seconds tick by and the pressure mounts and finally, when he can’t bear it any more than you can, he tears off the muzzle and goes fucking nuts. Thirteen minutes, fifty-one seconds. It doesn’t seem like it would be that long. But time stretches.
Remember what we read about black holes, Dex? How from the outside, from a safe distance away, when you watch someone fall into a black hole, they fall slower and slower, until they seem to freeze at the event horizon? How they’ll stay there forever, suspended over the dark, the future always just out of reach?
It’s a trick. If you’re the one falling, time keeps right on going. You sail past the event horizon; you get sucked into the black. And no one on the outside will ever know.
That’s how it was, in the dark place. No boundary between yourself and the dark, past and future, something and nothing. You could scream all you wanted, and the dark would swallow it whole. In the dark place, silence was the same as noise.