“There is a spot for you in Heaven, but only if you’re willing to open your heart like a door to Him,” Pastor Samuel had said that morning in his East Texas drawl, leaning on his podium. “Open your heart and let Him in.”
Susannah was trying. She wanted to be close to Him.
She saw the joy in her friends’ eyes when they spoke of their journeys. “I was afraid to let Him in,” Isabella told her, “but when I did, it was like I turned into this whole new person. A whole new me.”
Sarah, Susannah’s best friend and the pastor’s daughter, told her testimony like she was writing scripture: “One day, I was laying outside in the hammock reading one of those pagan fantasy books I know I’m not supposed to have. And His voice came to me, as clear as day, and told me to put the book down. He told me I don’t need to resort to those sorts of false idols to feel the wonder of the world He has made. He told me to ask for forgiveness, and I fell out of the hammock crying and crouched on my knees and begged him to forgive me. And he did, and he asked me to let Him into my heart where He can guide me and be with me always. So I did, and nothing has been the same since. I don’t need those books anymore–I mean, I never did, but now I really understand that, you know?”
“Please,” Susannah was begging God. “Please, please, please. You are all I want, and I am begging you, please, come into my heart like you did for the others.” She waited. She was crouching on the cold tile floor next to the bathtub, arms propped up on the tub’s ledge. The sound of rushing water from the faucet covered her tear-mingled prayers. “Please,” she said again, and wept. She felt nothing. She placed her Bible gently on the bathmat by the sink, out of harm’s way, and cast one arm violently across the tub’s edge, sweeping the assorted toiletries—the apple cider vinegar shampoo, the unscented body wash, the farmer’s market goat’s milk soap, and the mason jar of homemade coffee scrub—into the scalding water.
“Why don’t you want me?” she whispered.
–––
When they were little, Pastor Samuel told the children that those who died too young to accept Jesus into their hearts would be saved, still, because the Lord took pity on those who could not save themselves. The Lord was generous, and he was kind. He would not sacrifice those who were too young to understand what had been asked of them.
At seven, age twelve sounded like the grandest, most mature age a person could be, and so, she thought, that must be the cutoff. She wasn’t pressed for time. Twelve was a long way away. She was good at math (in fact, she loved the homework, and her teacher, Ms. Page), and she thought five years would be enough to make Jesus want her. Five years would be enough to make herself so lovable he couldn’t bear to reject her.
She was wrong.
Susannah focused all her energy on being a good girl, and she knew her parents were telling the truth when they told her they were proud of her. She always apologized when she made a mistake. She always asked for permission, and she didn’t keep secrets. When she was alone, she pleaded with God, begging Him to save her before she was too old to be saved, but when He didn’t answer, she pushed the fear aside. There was still time.
–––
Eight years old. Four more years.
–––
Nine years old. Three more years.
–––
Ten years old. Two more years.
–––
Eleven years old. One more year. Susannah went to a Christian camp that summer, her first week-long stay away from home. It was a hard sell to her parents, but if Pastor Samuel was letting his precious Sarah go, surely it must be acceptable for their pure-hearted daughter.
They drove two hours to the camp in the woods and dropped her off at the main hall with a final warning to be good.
“This place will do wonderful things for your relationship with Jesus. Just give it a chance,” her mother told her.
The camp was fine, kind of boring, but they let the kids kayak and swim in the lake nearly unsupervised. Susannah was too busy to ruminate on the absence of God’s love in her heart. She let her mind be empty, and for the first time, she felt the way she imagined the other kids did. She read the letters from her mother in the dimly lit cabin with the other campers, and she felt, if not quite loved, at the very least cared for.
–––
Her twelfth birthday came exactly two months after the last day of camp. The days leading up to it were excruciating. She wept every night after curfew, pressing the pillow to her face to muffle the sound. She begged, she pleaded, she argued with God. He never answered.
She snuck into her parents’ bathroom, held the small orange bottle filled with the pills her mother took for migraines. Two years previously, Miss Evelyn down the street had killed herself with a bottle of pills. The kids weren’t supposed to know that, obviously, but all it took was one decent eavesdropper for the whole youth group to know. Before they knew it was pills that did it, the rumors surrounding her suicide became so widespread that Pastor Samuel had to sit them down after church one week to ask if they knew the gravest sin a person could commit.
“Murder?” Isabella asked.
“Not obeying your parents?” said one of the younger kids.
“No,” Pastor Samuel chuckled, shaking his head. “Not either of those, not even murder.”
He grew solemn, any trace of laughter gone. “The worst sin a person can commit is murdering himself.”
“Or herself,” Sarah muttered.
“Well, sure, murdering herself,” he said.
“Like Miss Evelyn?” someone asked.
“Yes, exactly. Exactly like Miss Evelyn. You must never let yourself be tempted by Satan the way she was. If you are, you’ll send your soul straight…” he pointed towards the ground.
Susannah put the pills back in the cabinet.
–––
On the day of her twelfth birthday, she couldn’t get out of bed. An invisible weight pulled her back down every time she tried. Her parents thought she was sick. Only when Mother took her temperature and Father threatened to drag her out of bed himself did she finally find the strength to rise and get herself dressed. It was a Saturday, and they were all going to the zoo. Susannah cried at the gorillas in their PVC-walled prisons, and she cried on the way to the restaurant, and again during dinner as she blew out the candles. She smiled through it, and her father remarked what a wise girl they had raised to have such a mature fear of the passage of time so young. She laughed bitterly when he said it, but she wondered, too, if it might be true.
Susannah went back to camp with Sarah and Isabella in the summer, and the girls found it changed from what they remembered. The camp director had been replaced, and the new one, a stout middle-aged man with oil-money inheritance, a beer belly, and a ruddy face, brought with him an utter transformation. They had renovated the worship hall from a simple, comfortable gathering room to a grandiose auditorium with a raised stage in the center and a sloped floor. The outdoor activities were no longer independent activities to complement the Bible studies and worship gatherings, but instead, themed activities designed to emulate aspects of God’s will. The rock wall was demonstrative of how He would always catch them when they fell, the zipline into the lake revealed how human invention would always end in His creation, and even the swimming pool had received a hasty mural imitation of Noah’s Ark, reminding them of the danger that could come with forsaking His will. She could not escape the threat of her imminent future for even a moment.
The evening prayer sessions, previously independent casual studies and conversations with their cabin, were campwide affairs. The camp had hired a band, which sang a repetitive style of alternative rock that made the older kids want to raise their arms and sway.
On the last night of camp, Sarah and Isabella braided her hair into two French braids. They tried to do it Katniss-style first, wrapped in a single Dutch braid around her head, but her hair was too coarse, and by the time they got to the end, the braid was too thick to sit properly. They braided one side each, comparing after every few strands to make sure there was some aura of symmetry.
“We’re your best friends, aren’t we, Susannah?” Sarah asked. Susannah agreed. The girls giggled. They weren’t Susannah’s only friends, but they were the only ones she thought might be good enough to get her into Heaven, so she exerted most of her energy on them. She guessed that was what God would want if he ever answered her.
“You’re my best friend too,” Sarah said, and hugged her tight.
With fresh braids, a spoken confirmation of friendship, and a brand new center to show them off to, Susannah felt the closest to the feeling of safety she’d experienced the previous summer. She raised her arms and swayed to the music with Sarah and Isabella and, for the first time in seven days, didn’t feel like a fool doing it.
After the music ended, the camp director ascended the stage.
“Now, everyone, let us bow our heads and pray, and when we’re done praying, I want you to keep your heads down and your eyes closed,” he said.
“Dear God, thank you for bringing us together in this space away from the daily sins of the world, this place where we can praise your name and come together to worship you. We have all learned so much from each other and from You this week, and we’re committing to being the best servants we can be as we go forward from this place…” He went on for some time. Susannah tried to listen, but Sarah was poking Susannah’s foot with her toes and distracting her.
“Amen.”
“Amen.” Susannah echoed.
“Now, keep your eyes closed. I know some of you have already opened your hearts and your minds to Him, and I commend you for that. Some of you might not have had the opportunity to do that yet, and that’s okay. There’s no judgment. This is a safe space. But, I urge you, while you’re in this safe space with your peers and your counselors around you, think about all the good that God has done for your life. He loves you, and He wants to be with you always.
“I want to give you all the opportunity to accept that love, which is why we’re doing things a little bit differently tonight. While we’re all sitting here with our eyes closed, I want to invite those of you who are ready to accept Jesus into your hearts to open your eyes and look up. That’s all you have to do. Just look up. We’ll take it from there. Our counselors are ready to come get you and take you somewhere private where you can talk together about this next stage of your faith.”
Susannah held her breath. A single tear trickled down her cheek and fell onto her lap. She felt Sarah and Isabella on either side of her, unmoving. She knew they would not need to lift their heads.
She was cornered. She could lift her eyes and go with the counselor, beg them to save her, to help her understand what she needed to do to make God love her, but the girls would know. And they would inevitably tell their parents, who would tell her parents, who would be so ashamed to have a child who had not committed herself to God’s love by the ripe old age of twelve. She wanted Heaven more than she had ever wanted anything, but she could not bring herself to raise her head. She let her last chance go.
–––
Everyone at church said that she came back from that second summer camp renewed. She was quieter, calmer, more willing to raise her hand to answer in Sunday school. Her teachers described her as eager to please. She did her homework without being asked, she helped her parents with the laundry and the dishes, and she accepted her younger brother’s tantrums without complaint. She was an angel, they said.
Susannah alone understood the bargain she had made. She had exchanged the possibility of temporary shame for an eternity in hell. She would spend the rest of her life repenting, and it would not be enough.
–––
In tenth grade, Sarah started dating her first boyfriend, Jake. Pastor Samuel was not pleased, but he agreed to meet the boy and his parents on a tense triple-date at a smoothie shop. The boy’s parents attended the Baptist church across town, with whom Pastor Samuel had a falling out a decade earlier. To everyone’s surprise, the families got along splendidly. Pastor Samuel decided Sarah could keep seeing Jake on carefully selected daytime dates in heavily crowded areas where he and his wife may or may not be keeping an eye out for any uncouth behavior. Sarah was thrilled.
Isabella wrote her a long letter expressing her joy at this new phase of Sarah’s journey, but Susannah? Susannah resented the whole mess. Sarah barely had time for their weekly Wednesday Bible studies–how dare she think she had time to date?
It had recently become a struggle to remind herself that the other girls did not find themselves in her predicament. When you were certain about your glorious eternal fate in God’s heavenly house, obviously, you would have more wiggle room for impure behavior.
On June 4th, a Tuesday, when Sarah had been seeing Jake for nearly two months, Susannah and Isabella waited outside the local Cinemark in the sweltering heat for their monthly movie night. The movie, an ambiguous and unremarkable superhero movie featuring the current mid-20-year-old heartthrob scheduled for 7:00, was inching closer by the second.
Sarah was not answering her phone.
“Do we go inside without her?” Isabella asked.
Susannah sighed.
“I’m going,” Isabella said. “It’s too hot out here. She can figure it out when she gets here.”
They went inside. Susannah kept her phone on her lap the entire movie, her fingers tapping on the phone case until Isabella reached over and smacked her hand away. It never buzzed.
The girls always asked their parents to pick them up thirty minutes after the movie ended so they could have time “to chat about the film,” or, in other words, to gossip. Fifteen minutes before pickup, Sarah called Isabella. Her voice, on speakerphone, sounded frantic.
“I’m so sorry, y’all, I was with Jake. We were talking and we just lost track of time and my phone was dead so I didn’t hear you calling.” Sarah was rambling. “I didn’t mean to miss the movie, I swear. Please don’t tell your mom, please, please, please. Is she there yet?” she asked.
“Don’t even worry about it! I’m glad you and Jake are having fun,” Isabella said, emphasizing the “having fun” suggestively. She poked Susannah while she spoke. Susannah rolled her eyes.
“We’re on our way right now. I’m about 15 minutes away—do you think I’ll get there before her?” Sarah asked.
“Why does it even matter at this point?” Susannah asked.
“Ignore her,” Isabella said. “Yeah, you’ll get here before her. Just tell Jake to drive fast.”
Sarah and Jake made it—barely. Susannah gave them both the cold shoulder, literally turning her back to Jake’s pickup truck. She could hear them kiss, slowly, loudly, even with her back turned. Isabella giggled. Susannah tried not to gag.
–––
They jumped on the trampoline in silence, in the dark. Sarah’s face was backlit by the glow of the porch lights, and Susannah couldn’t bring herself to look at her. Soon they would all have boyfriends and separate lives, and they would leave her, and Susannah would have no choice but to let it happen and pretend to be happy. When Sarah went inside for a second popsicle, Isabella smacked her hard on the arm and hissed, “You’re being a bad friend.” Susannah did not care.
Susannah ignored Sarah’s texts for days. Finally, begging, Sarah called her and left a voicemail asking for a sleepover. “If something’s wrong, let’s just talk about it,” she said. Susannah didn’t want to talk about it, not really, but she did miss Sarah. At least, she missed how Sarah used to be, before Jake.
–––
“When do you have to go home?” Sarah asked the next morning. Susannah thought it would be awkward, being alone with Sarah after the past few days, but it felt like old times. They didn’t talk about the movie.
“Not too early, my mom said I can stay as late as I want as long as I get the chores done before dinner,” Susannah said.
“Good.” Sarah cleared her throat. “I have something I wanted to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“Can we go back up to my room first?” Sarah asked. “Just in case anyone comes home?
They sat together on Sarah’s turquoise shag rug, speckled with bits of glitter from years of craft projects. Sarah gave Susannah a neon green fleece pillow to sit on. Susannah hugged it tight to her chest instead and tried to stop herself from curling into a ball.
“You know the other day, when I didn’t show up to the movie?”
Susannah nodded.
“It wasn’t because my phone died.” She twirled her hair between her fingers.
“Yeah, I figured,” Susannah said, trying not to look at her.
“I was with Jake, but we weren’t just talking.”
Susannah chewed on her thumb nail.
“His parents weren’t home.” She wasn’t looking at Susannah now, either. “We were making out, and…” She trailed off, seemingly wanting Susannah to get some kind of message she wasn’t getting.
“And?” Susannah asked.
“We had sex,” Sarah whispered. “It just turned into something else. I didn’t mean to when I went over, but I didn’t stop it either.”
Susannah buried her face in the pillow.
“It was sweet, pretty awkward, honestly, but it didn’t hurt or anything like I thought it would.”
Susannah did not want to hear anymore. She felt sick to her stomach. She felt disgusting. She wanted to shower, to try and wash off what she was hearing, but to move would be to acknowledge what Sarah was saying.
Sarah lowered her voice to a whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, but he actually cried after. I’ve never heard of a guy doing that before.”
Susannah was silent. It took every once of willpower in her body not to cover her ears with her hands.
“Hello?” Sarah said.
Susannah turned her head so that one eye was uncovered and started at her.
“Your reaction is scaring me,” Sarah said. Susannah barely heard her through the roaring in her ears. The tightness in her chest was all-consuming. Her heart felt like it was trying to beat out of her chest.
“Hmm,” Susannah finally let out.
“Are you not going to say anything?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“I’m telling you this because you’re my smartest friend and the least judgmental.”
Susannah knew neither of these things were true, but she didn’t expect Sarah to know that. Susannah was an incredible actress.
“Right,” Susannah said.
“I mean, you’re not judging me, are you?” Sarah said.
“No, of course not,” Susannah said. She didn’t know if it was true or not. “I just don’t know what to say.”
Sarah seemed to be satisfied with this response, or at least pretended to be, and Susannah kept her horror stifled.
———
In the dark hours of the morning when she was usually either fast asleep or praying for mercy, Susannah lay on her back in her bed and grappled with the complexity of the situation she found herself in.
Lying to Sarah: sin
Hiding a secret from her parents: sin
Hiding a secret from Sarah’s parents, too: maybe a sin? Probably a sin.
Breaking her promise to Sarah: not technically a sin, she didn’t think, but it still didn’t seem right.
But, being complicit in Sarah’s violation of the body, the temple, that God had given her: that had to be a sin, right?
She prayed for an answer, but for the first time, she had no remaining shred of hope that God would hear her. She was alone.
When she slept, it was not restful. In her dream, she was dead. She was in a line, waiting to speak to a guardian in white robes, when a long line of prisoners in drab gray jumpsuits were guided past. In the lineup of ambiguous faces, Susannah saw Sarah. Her hands and ankles were chained. She shuffled along slowly, eyes downtrodden. No one spoke, no one acknowledged Susannah at all, but she knew it was her fault. Sarah was there because of her.
Susannah never told Sarah she wouldn’t tell anyone her secret, not explicitly. It was one of the unspoken rules of the trio’s friendship: don’t gossip about each other, except with each other, and don’t repeat anything said to anyone else. Especially not to parents.
Do the unspoken promises still count? Is it still a betrayal of Sarah’s trust if she tells, even if she never said she wouldn’t?
When Susannah finally gave in, when she finally told her parents, who told Sarah’s parents, she did it half-heartedly. The words had halfway left her mouth before she understood the choice she was making. Sarah would never forgive her, and neither would Isabella. She would be as alone in life as she would in eternity, although for the latter she was, at least, still holding out the tiniest hope for. A friend may be a friend for now, but a sin is a sin is a sin. She couldn’t lose another chance at God’s love.
The hand of justice was swift and exacting. Sarah’s parents pulled her out of her guitar and singing lessons, and she was barred from all future sleepovers indefinitely. Her cell phone was confiscated, her bedroom door removed, and Jake was established as an unspeakable name in the Miller household.
Sarah glared at Susannah when she passed her in the school hallway on the first day of the semester, and Isabella didn’t look at her at all, which was almost worse. When Susannah tried to sit with them in the cafeteria, Isabella held up her palm to her face and simply said, “No.”
Susannah started eating her lunch in the band hall, where she wasn’t technically alone—five or six other students ate there, too—but she felt like the only person alive.
In October, Susannah caught up to Sarah walking home (rides from Jake no longer being permitted) and tried to grab her arm. Sarah pulled away before she could reach her.
“What do you want?” Sarah asked.
“Sarah, I’m so sorry,” Susannah started.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Susannah said.
“Excuse me?”
“I didn’t want to sin,” Susannah said.
Sarah laughed.
“Oh, so you just betrayed me instead? Without even talking to me first?”
Sarah waited for a response. Susannah was silent.
“How did that not feel like a sin to you?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know,” Susannah whispered.
Sarah crossed her arms. “I’ll wait for you to think about it.”
“I just wanted him to want me,” Susannah said.
Sarah scoffed. “Jake? You have a crush on Jake?”
Susannah almost could have laughed. “No, no, no,” she said. “God”
“What the hell does God have to do with this?” Sarah asked. Susannah flinched when she cursed.
“I wanted God to love me,” Susannah said.
“You betrayed me and told everyone my secret because you wanted God to love you?”
Susannah nodded.
“You’re even more fucked up than I thought you were,” Sarah said.
–––
Crouched on the cold bathroom floor, Susannah pleaded with God, but for the first time, she didn’t know what she was asking him for. She did not want to go on. She wanted a redo, to start over as someone that Jesus loves. She wanted to start from scratch.
She waited until her parents left for work in the morning, then rifled through her father’s tool kit in the garage and took out a single razor blade. She held it up in the fluorescent light. She thought about trying to cut her arms, staring hard at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“Your body is a temple for Him,” she heard her mother’s voice whispering in her ear. She screamed, a raw, guttural scream, and dropped the razor in the sink. She slapped herself across the face. And again. And again.
She hit herself until her skin was raw and red, and she worried it might leave a mark, but it didn’t.
“Why don’t you want me?” she screamed, and burst into tears.
Emily Vance Brown 