Rashida claps her hands and sways in her chair, singing, “This bitch is going to heaven,” on a loop.
“Well, compared with Rashida and Taylor, mine is going to sound super-lame,” Tracy says. “There was this moment when I was really young. I was just reading the Bible one day at my family’s horse ranch. I picked it up just like now.” She opens the Bible next to her and bends the cover back to the first page. “And I read the first line. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And God said “Let there be light.”’” Tracy pauses, casting her eyes around the circle emphatically. “‘And there was light.’”
She darts an expectant look at me. Beside her, Rashida is still singing “This bitch is going to heaven.”
“Yeah?” I ask.
“You don’t see?” she asks, and when I don’t reply she shakes her head, her bangs whisking across her forehead in frustration. “I just realized, for the first time, how . . . beautiful it is. That everything in the universe was created in that one moment. Everything we are, everything that’s ever been and ever will be. Isn’t that amazing?”
She’s looking at me a little uneasily, as though she knows I can’t picture it the exact way she does, can’t accept the eye blink of God creating the heavens and the earth and the creatures of the land and sky. And I’m about to tell her so when, in the next moment, I’m thinking of Taylor’s story, and Wendy’s, and Rashida’s.
Maybe the amazing thing is the fact that they can believe, even in here, even when there’s no reason they should be able to.
“Yeah, Tracy,” I say finally. “I think it is.”
Chapter 37
I talked with Jude about everything, but some things didn’t really translate. It was the first time I realized that two people could speak the same words and each get very different images coming into their minds. I stopped telling Jude about the Community at a point. He didn’t speak that language, and I didn’t speak his. We had to invent a new language together, one that didn’t have words for everything. When we talked, we navigated around those big ideas that didn’t feel right on our tongues. At least for a time.
Once, the summer we turned sixteen, on a night bright with constellations, Jude and I stared at the sky from the tree house, not speaking, thinking our separate thoughts that terrified us. When I glanced at him, an unconscious folded bit of skin had settled between his eyes. He had begun to wear that face more and more. The stars did that to him, but he couldn’t look away.
“What are you thinking about when you look up at the sky like that?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Come on, tell me,” I said. “I know you’re looking at something up there. Is it the stars? The moon?”
“It don’t matter,” he said.
Something had changed between us, the language of our childhood no longer fitting our mouths the way it used to. Our bodies had grown. The tree house no longer accommodated us at our full heights, and with every season the walls seemed closer together. We were sixteen and we didn’t know how to navigate each other anymore. We no longer ran through the woods together, unconscious and loose-limbed. We were awkward, never touching, always making sure to sit inches apart.
“Jude, what do you suppose the stars are?”
He tilted his head toward me. “What?”
“The stars,” I repeated restlessly. “What are they, really? Sometimes the Prophet says they’re God’s eyes in a giant dark canvas, but other times he says that outer space goes on farther than our minds can picture, and the stars are each a fern-filled heaven waiting for us the moment we die, but he never answers which is which, and you get in trouble when you ask.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I never learned things like that.”
“Neither did I, and that’s what drives me crazy. I wanna know things. I wanna know everything. But it’s like asking questions to a tree stump. There’s never anyone answering back.”
“I can answer anything you need answered.”
“But what if you can’t?”
“Then it ain’t worth knowing.”
I crossed my arms and looked away.
“Look,” he said, a small huff in the back of his throat, “I can tell you about what kinds of rabbits make that chittering noise you hear sometimes at night, and how many fire ants’ blood is enough poison to bring down a squirrel. I can tell you how old this tree is, and how many strokes it’d take to chop it down. So,” he asked, “what do you wanna know about?”
“Who put them here?” I ask. “Was it God? Did He do it the same time He placed all those lights up there in the heavens?”
“The stars again?” He shook his head. “Why do you care? What difference does it make to your life?”