KINGSLEY WAITED WHILE SAM SETTLED HERSELF INTO the covers. She rolled on to her side to face him, and as Kingsley gazed at her, he made the troubling discovery that he loved seeing her in his bed. She looked so small and defenseless in his grand red bed, almost like a little girl with her pixie cut mussed and her hands under her chin like a child.
“My family failed miserably at turning me into a girly girl. So my church talked to my parents, and they decided to send me to summer camp. It wasn’t the usual sort of summer camp. It was this place upstate where gay kids got sent to get their brains f ixed.”
“Sam…” Kingsley wanted to reach for her, but he held back. If he touched her, she might stop speaking, and he realized now he’d been starving to know the truth of her.
“I met a girl named Faith on the bus to this camp—this nasty awful camp where God wouldn’t go if you paid Him. Faith had gotten caught in bed with someone at her church, someone important, and they shut Faith up by sending her to that camp.”
“Where was this place they sent you?” “Pleasant Valley Camp and Nature Center. Can you believe that’s what they called it? What bullshit. There was no canoeing, no archery, no nature walks. Instead of that, there were ‘prayer sessions’ where they made us kneel for hours and pray out loud for God to take our sin away and heal us so we would desire men the way God intended. And there were fun ‘therapy sessions’ where we had to watch slide shows and were given electric shocks whenever the picture of a pretty girl appeared on the screen. Not electric shocks on the arms or the legs. No—electric shocks on our nipples and clits. But the best part was the drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“They’d give us campers vomit-inducing drugs and make us watch lesbian porn. Cunts on the screen. Puke on the f loor. We campers called it ‘movie night at Caligula’s.’”
Kingsley tried to take Sam’s hand in his, but she’d curled up her fingers so tightly he could do nothing but place his hand on top of hers.
“Even though we were so busy with all these delightful and wholesome camping activities,” Sam continued, her voice dripping with sarcasm and barely restrained fury, “me and Faith did what we could to keep each other strong and sane. Whenever we’d see each other we’d whisper our code words— More weight.”
“More weight? What did that mean?”
“Some fundies consider lesbianism a kind of witchcraft. I’m not kidding. Just ask Pat Robertson. So when I heard that, I decided to learn about witchcraft like your typical disaffected queer teenager.”
“I was a disaffected queer teenager.”
“What did you do?”
“Slept with another disaffected queer teenager.”
“Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, wait, I did.” Sam laughed and it was good to hear it. Then she spoke again, and neither of them laughed anymore. “I read this book about the witch hunts in colonial times. The law said a person couldn’t be put on trial until they’d entered a guilty or not-guilty plea. This man, Giles Corey, was accused of witchcraft, but he refused to put in a plea. The court had a method for getting people to enter pleas. They’d lay them on a board, put a board on top of them, and they’d pile on weight, slowly crushing the person. They did this to Giles Corey. On went the weight, they’d stop, ask for his plea—guilty or not guilty. And his response was ‘More weight.’ He said it again and again and then finally ‘More weight’ were his last words. They killed him, but they never got him to say ‘Guilty.’ When me and Faith said ‘more weight’ that meant ‘Bring it on. The pain. The tortures. We don’t care. They’ll never make us plead guilty. We didn’t do anything wrong. They were the guilty ones.’”