And these signs shall follow them that believe: In My name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.
–Mark 16:17-18
Jeb Hook and Adam Hensley didn’t have any trouble at all talking Adam’s little brother Christian into meeting them at the old McCormick barn to hunt for snakes that they could sell to the church for $10 apiece. The dilapidated barn was the future site of the New Rock Solid Church of Jesus With Signs Following. Jeb and his family weren’t Sign-Followers, but Jeb had been catching snakes all his life, including the venomous snakes the church used in their services; the money he earned was a good portion of his family’s summer income.
The Hensley Boys’ great-grandfather Emery had brought the serpent-handling religious sect from Southeast Tennessee to Northwest Georgia at the turn of the century, so it had always been a fundamental part of their lives. Christian was nine years old, had accepted Jesus as his personal savior, had been baptized when he was six, and started regularly speaking in tongues on his seventh birthday. At the time, he believed that he had been called to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who were important men in the church, and his great-grandfather before them. Christian had not yet received the Sign from the Holy Ghost to take up serpents, but he had faith that the day was soon to come. His brother Adam had been handling serpents and speaking in tongues from the age of thirteen.
Christian climbed through the barbed wire fence at the dirt road on that late spring Saturday afternoon carrying one of the balsa wood boxes they kept around their trailer for keeping snakes in. He thought he was the first to arrive so he poked around looking for snake dens; they had told him they would give him a dollar for every snake he located.
The fifteen-year-olds giggled inside the barn and called Christian to join them. He found the broken door they had entered through and crawled through the same hole, leaving the box behind. The sun was bright that day and so, as he stood upright inside the barn, he was temporarily blinded by the darkness
A voice Christian recognized as Jeb’s said, “Now!” His arms were wrenched behind him, and a rough palm that smelled of manure and rotting fruit clapped over his mouth and nose. Shadowy figures moved around him; his pants were loosened and pushed to his ankles with his underwear; he was forced to his knees by a simple lift of his arms behind him. His face hit the ground and he thought to yell for help but his mouth and throat became coated with dirt turned to powder from so many years of being tamped down by livestock.
Christian struggled to lift his face up and spit out the debris when he suddenly saw a bright white light, like the presence of God; he would have thought that was the case except that the light seemed to emanate from an excruciating pain in his lower back, like he was being impaled by his mother’s boning knife. He lost consciousness.
When he came to he was supporting a suffocating weight on his back, and hot blackberry breath pumped steadily against one of his ears. He drifted in and out as the pain varied. In the end, a voice much like Jeb Hook’s, but sounding deeper, hoarse and itself possessed with some sort of venom, whispered into Christian’s ear, “Say anything and you’ll die.” There was no reason not to believe it.
Sometime later, Christian awoke from a dream of snakes covering him, weighing him down in the bottom of a pit. He sat up, confused; he was alone in an unknown place. A column of sunlight coming through the roof in a corner revealed the space to him: half-standing stalls, piles of rotting, nail-snagged boards, a mound of organic matter that had at one time been a stack of hay bales.
Christian pressed his palms against the ground to stand, but a pain across his middle stopped him. He looked up and cried out, “Jesus! Help me!” He waited in the silence for the clear, soft voice of the Lord, but heard nothing. “Jesus, what do I do?” Again he waited; again, no reply.
He bit his lips and got to his feet. Dirt fell off of him, trickled down the insides of his pants legs. He was shaky and unsure about anything as he limped out of the barn and across the overgrown pasture to where McCormick land met Hensley land. On his family’s property, Christian found the trail that took him to the cow pond. He undressed to take a dip and, noticing a spot of blood on his underpants, dug a hole in the soft ground at the water’s edge and buried them, for what reason he couldn’t say.
When he got home, his mother was putting supper on the table. She told him to wash up. He excused himself and went to bed with a stomachache.
The next morning, his stomach still hurting, Christian requested prayer at church. His brother Adam was one of the first ones laying hands on him, praying over him, speaking in tongues, calling for the healing of his little brother.
The Holy Ghost was quite present in the church that day. As the electric guitar, accordion and tambourines were playing and people were singing “There’s A Higher Power,” Christian watched his brother in the middle of the room, stretching a copperhead between his arms, tears streaming unselfconsciously down his face. Right then and there, Christian forgave Adam. As the Bible commanded, he forgave and forgot anything bad that might have happened between them.
As the years rolled by, the changes were almost unnoticeable except in spurts. Jeb Hook married a girl from Alabama and moved away and nobody missed him; he and Adam had stopped spending much time together as Adam’s faith and service to the Lord deepened. Adam spent many long days helping to build the New Rock Solid Church of Jesus With Signs Following on the site of the McCormick barn. It was twice as big as the old church and started filling up with new members as soon as its doors were opened.
Adam was blessed to meet Starr there; they were the first couple to be married and anointed in the new church. The newlyweds moved into a trailer home on the old McCormick land halfway between the church and the trailer home he and Christian had grown up in. Soon, Starr was pregnant and gave birth to a boy, whom they named Emery. The older members called him New Emery and believed he would bring great things to their community as the old Emery had done.
Christian felt his place in the order of things slipping. He did not think that his faith had faltered; he continued to pray as he always had, but he didn’t seem to hear the voice of his savior as clearly anymore, if at all. When he spoke in tongues, it didn’t feel quite real, as if he were making up the sounds that came out of his mouth, forcing them instead of letting the Holy Ghost work through him.
One evening when Christian was sixteen, his father joked over dinner that if he waited until he was seventeen he could go to prison for serpent-handling. It was a felony in Georgia, though they had never heard of anyone getting convicted. Christian responded defensively, saying that he had been praying hard for so many years and believed now that the Holy Ghost had abandoned him. Angered by this blasphemous statement, Christian’s father threw his dinner plate across the kitchen and disappeared into the night.
That night Christian woke up drenched in sweat. When he tried to roll over, a stripe of blisters across his upper back prevented it. The pain exhausted him; he fell back asleep and dreamed that his room filled with serpents, eventually covering him and suffocating him under their weight.
The next time he awoke, his mother was applying a salve she had made from beeswax and plantain and violet leaves. It felt like she was slicing the blisters open with a straightedge razor. Christian’s father had to restrain him so his mother could finish applying the salve. As he lay there held down, his face pressed into his pillow to muffle his screams, an old memory surfaced. It was a seven-year-old event that he had in fact not thought about since the day it had happened, that spring Saturday afternoon in the barn with his brother and Jeb Hook.
Adam was called to the house, and he and his father carried Christian on an old door to the church so that he could be prayed for and healed. Their father left them to go get their mother and gather up whatever church members they could. Christian lay on the makeshift pallet of quilts in the middle of the church floor crying, Adam tenderly stroked his brother’s face, wiping away the tears as they fell. But it wasn’t just the pain of the blisters that made Christian cry.
He asked Adam if he remembered the barn before it was the church, if he remembered Jeb Hook, if he remembered the day when they where younger and the three of them were in the barn together. Adam did not remember. He didn’t even confess to remembering how close he and Jeb had been when they were boys. He told Christian he believed the Devil was in him trying to put a wedge between the two of them.
Church members arrived; the men kissed Christian on the lips – a Holy Kiss, as was their tradition. They prayed for more than two hours, laid hands on Christian, asked the Lord to cast the Devil out of his body. When they felt done, Christian’s condition had not changed. His father and brother carried him back home and put him in bed.
In the next day or so, when he was alone with his mother, Christian tried to tell her what Jeb and Adam had done to him when he was nine, but he didn’t get far into the story before his mother ran out of the room with her hands over her ears. She went for his father, who came immediately to Christian’s side and was told the story.
A church meeting was called and over prayer it was determined that they had a bona fide Devil possession on their hands. Christian was not present at the church meeting and found out after the fact that they had decided he had been blinded to Signs from the Holy Ghost by the Devil, and the course of action they had come to was that Christian should take up serpents right away to show the Devil he was not afraid.
Christian begged his father not to go through with it then turned to his mother as his father and brother strapped him to the door and carried him screaming to the church. His mother believed it was the right thing to do and could only stand by, praying and crying.
Christian screamed Jesus’ name all the way to the church, and by the time they got there, his voice was almost gone, but not before someone heard the screaming and called the sheriff, who arrived at the church shortly after the Hensleys. Being told that serpent-handling was a felony charge by a man in uniform caused the people standing around in the church to lose their excitement. The crowd dispersed and Christian was carried back home.
For a week, no one entered his room except his mother, who fed him and applied salve. When Christian’s father showed up, Adam was at his side. It had been arranged for Christian to go live in Central Florida with former members of the old Rock Solid Church of Jesus. He was told it would be temporary, until things had settled down in Everett Springs, but Christian was put on a bus, his shirt sticking to the blisters, and he never saw his family again.
The couple who took him in were Sara and Doug Wall. They had left the church, Christian found out much later, because she had lost every baby they had in childbirth, and he had lost two fingers after a snake bit him during a service. They remembered Christian well – even though he didn’t know them – and had many fond memories of his childhood to share with him.
Christian enrolled in high school and missed his family and Georgia less each day. At their prompting, he started calling the Walls mom and dad, and used Wall as his own last name on his college admission applications. He only applied to schools near Shannon Wood so that he could visit his parents on weekends and holidays. By the time school started, the adoption papers had gone through and he was legally Christian Wall.
*
Christian stopped me in front of Broward Hall, my dormitory.
he: Hey! Aren’t you in my P&P class?
me: Your what?
he: P&P. Production and Performance.
me: Oh. Yeah, I’m in there.
he: And you live here?
me: Room 212.
he: No kidding? I’m in 312.
me: Right above me.
he: That’s right! What a coincidence.
There was an awkward pause.
Are you coming or going?
me: I’m going, to class.
he: Oh, that’s too bad. Well, you should drop by sometime.
me: Why?
he: You don’t have to. If you want. Just to hang out or whatever.
me: Yeah, okay.
he: What’s your name?
me: Randy Reardon.
he stuck out his hand: Nice to meet you! I’m Christian, Christian Wall.
I shook his hand.
me: You, too.
He was the most cheerful student I’d met at the University of Florida in the two months I’d been there. I wasn’t sure if the third floor of Broward Hall was anything like the second floor – or if this guy found himself in a similar predicament to the one I had found myself in – but the second floor was like a private club and I always felt like an intruder.
My roommate Zeke was an ex-jock who didn’t play college ball because he said he had more important things to do. Like smoke pot and masturbate, I decided. He was thick-bodied and thickheaded, always in his boxers and nothing else when he was in our dorm room, and he seemed to always be watching me suspiciously out of the corner of his eye.
I had started a journal in a spiral notebook when I got to UF, and left it open on my desk one day to an entry about his stash of weed and the stack of Penthouses he kept under his bed. When I returned from wherever I had gone to, he looked up from the book he was reading in bed and said, “Don’t fuck with my shit, Red, and I won’t fuck with yours.”
The next day at P&P class, Christian showed up in the row of theatre seats where I always sat, still as cheerful, and asked if he could sit with me. During the lecture, he was quick to laugh at the silly retorts I made under my breath about the professor’s presentation, and after class, he asked if I wanted to go have a burger. He seemed anxious to befriend me, which caused suspicion on my part, even though I did like the idea of having a friend.
That evening, I walked in on Zeke sitting on the toilet with a Penthouse in one hand and his dick in the other. It took me a moment to take in the whole scene, by which time he was starting to go limp. He shooed me away saying, “You need to learn to knock, Red!”
I spat back, “You need to learn to lock the door, Zeke!”
I had to pee and hesitated a moment before I headed up the stairs and knocked on Christian’s door.
he: It’s open!
I went in. He was lying on his stomach on the two beds in his room, which had been pushed together.
me: Hi, Christian.
he jumped up: Randy! Come in!
me: Can I use your toilet?
he: You know where it is!
I did. And when I returned, he was sitting at his desk, which was both of them end to end along the wall where my bed was downstairs.
me: You don’t have a roommate?
he: No way!
me: That’s great. I’m jealous.
he: Consider this your home away from home!
me: Be careful what you offer.
he: I’m 100% serious, Randy.
me: You don’t even know me.
he: I feel like I do. Sit down.
I sat across from him at the double-wide desk and told him why I had ended up at his door. I told him that Zeke was always parading around half-naked; Christian had seen Zeke and said, “That must be distracting.” I didn’t tell Christian that I sometimes heard Zeke masturbating in the dark at night and masturbated along with him, like we were doing it together, or that I fantasized about Zeke (when my mind wasn’t full of Rich White), but I did hear myself confessing to Christian that if he weren’t such a disagreeable pothead he might not be so bad, to which Christian said, “No doubt.”
I wasn’t the least bit attracted to Christian – he was slightly bucktoothed and otherwise unremarkable – but I liked something about him. Maybe it was because he seemed to like me, or maybe he was attracted to Zeke; maybe we had that secret in common.
Christian and I started hanging out regularly; we walked to the one class we shared together on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings; we ate lunch together most days; studied together in his room; went to plays and ate dinner together. I wrote about our adventures and deepening relationship in my journal.
Lying on his big bed one night as we worked on a theatre project together, he turned and asked if I was gay. I had never considered the word. I didn’t know if my answer would draw us closer or drive us apart. Before I got around to answering he told me the story of being raped when he was nine years old by two boys (he didn’t tell me at first that his brother was one of them). After a long silence that followed the story, he told me he felt a certain attraction to me, but didn’t know what that meant.
I assumed it meant he was gay. Soon enough, I had told him about my relationship with Rich White, how it was almost like rape but that I had wanted it. And then I told him about having sex with the Diana Ross impersonator in Las Vegas the summer before school started. He was fascinated by my stories, but didn’t ask for more information than I volunteered.
On the other hand, I couldn’t get enough of the story of his upbringing, not just the rape but also the whole life he lived when he was in Georgia, the peculiarities of the “Sign-Following” religion. I grilled him regularly until he forced me to stop, usually because we had homework to finish. He had nothing but contempt for those “weird Jesus people,” as he called them.
The Holy Kiss came up in a conversation we had one night, the tradition of men kissing one another on the lips as a greeting before church services. According to Christian, it’s mentioned numerous times in the Bible. I was titillated and couldn’t move beyond this point, even though Christian said again and again that it wasn’t a sexual thing.
me: You kissed boys?
he: Some. Men mostly. All the time.
me: How did it feel?
he: What?
me: Kissing.
he: It feels like kissing.
I shifted uncomfortably.
me: Except that it’s a man?
he: It feels the same as kissing a girl.
me: Okay…
he: Haven’t you ever kissed a girl?
me: No.
he: Not even your mama?
me: No! I told you how she is.
he: What about that woman in Las Vegas?
me: She wasn’t a woman, and we didn’t kiss.
he was baffled: Wow. You’ve had sex but you’ve never kissed anybody.
me: Do you think I’m weird?
he: No! I think you’re brave.
I had never thought of anything I’d done in my life as brave, except perhaps going to college.
Christian leaned close to me. I looked over at him and he kissed me gently on the lips. We stuck together longer, I believed, than any Holy Kiss was supposed to last. When he pulled away, I stared wide-eyed at him, unable to speak. He chuckled and looked back down at his homework.
I cleared my throat.
me: What?
he looked back: Huh?
me: What was that?
he shrugged: Now you know what it feels like.
That night my fantasies were briefly pulled away from the jock in my dorm room, away from the jock of my youth; my mind landed squarely on the bucktoothed boy one flight up. The next day, I wrote all about it and everything that had led up to it in my journal. By the middle of November I had filled up one whole spiral notebook – fronts and backs of pages – and was halfway into a second.
I lied to Christian that I was going back to Black Lake for Thanksgiving, but I missed him so terribly that I confessed my lie as soon as I saw him again. I lamented the fact that I would have to go home over Christmas because the semester would be over and the school would be closed.
Christian went home to Shannon Wood every weekend, and came back the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend extending an invitation to me to go home with him over the break. I sent Mona a postcard letting her know that I wouldn’t be home because I was going on a school-sponsored camping trip.
I didn’t realize that camping would actually be a part of my holidays, but on the drive to his parents’ house he suggested we pitch a tent in his back yard, explaining that he only had a twin bed, but that their back yard was big and had lots of pine trees and a pond. “It’s in the middle of a suburb, but with the frogs croaking all night, it’s almost like being in the country, and we’ll have more privacy out there.”
As he said this, his right hand slowly but surely slid across the front seat of his Pontiac toward my left hand. I followed suit, as casual as possible, moving my hand his direction. But he chickened out just as our pinkies were about to touch – I could feel the heat; he turned on the radio then returned both hands to the steering wheel.
The whole Christmas vacation was like that, the two of us inching close to something (me driven by the memory of our Holy Kiss), and then stopping just short. I was too shy to make the first move and too unsure to say anything.
Christian’s parents were wonderful. They introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Wall, so that was what I called them. I wanted them to adopt me, too, so I could call them Mom and Dad. Mrs. Wall was a wonderful cook, serving up steaming bowls of fresh vegetables and platters of meat, a different kind every night, it seemed. The only thing she seemed to enjoy more than stacking a variety of her many fancy Christmas cookies on a holiday plate was seeing us “growing boys” finishing them off.
Mr. Wall was more reserved; I decided that was because of his missing fingers. He had to wear his wedding ring on his right hand, which probably made his past come up more often than he cared to talk about it. He was as sweet a man as I could imagine one being. He worked as the regional manager for a chain of auto part stores, and when he wasn’t at one or another of them, he was working on his model trains; the garage was a tangle of working miniature tracks intersecting and dividing, tunnels, bridges, and crossings with flashing lights, bells and red-and-white striped arms that lowered when the trains approached and raised when they had passed.
On Christmas morning, I was surprised to see Mr. Wall in his red stocking hat take a present out from under the tree and place it in front of me. The tag read: to randy from santy! Inside were four pair of white tube socks with different colored stripes around the tops. I said, “Oh, Santy! How did you know?” and everybody laughed harder than I thought was necessary.
Most nights as we lay in the tent with a small plate of cookies, a thermos of homemade apple cider and a Coleman lamp between us, Christian and I talked about the near future. He had concocted a dream for us of going to New York City our sophomore year – or definitely by the time we were juniors - to study theater at NYU. We had both been told we had promise, him as an actor, me as a playwright.
The only flaw in the plan as he saw it was breaking the news to his parents, whom he adored. As far as I was concerned there was no flaw in the plan because I wanted to be near him and I could stand being as far away from Florida as possible. Christian told me that his parents obviously liked me, and because of that they would probably be more supportive of the idea of him going so far away since he would be with his best friend.
When he called me his best friend, I almost cried from the excitement of hearing it, but giggled instead and attacked him in a tickle-fight, which he won.
When we returned to school in 1982, Christian and I were both buzzing with the anticipation of New York. I filled up a second and third spiral notebook with my thoughts in January, and started a fourth at the beginning of February. Christian and I spent even more time together, plotting, planning, sending off for paperwork to fill out and brochures to fill us up with ideas.
Our affection for one another grew stronger. We always hugged whenever we saw each other, whether other people were around or not, and when we were alone in his room we were unconstrained with our affection, always touching one another, a hand on a leg, a head in a lap. There was nothing overtly sexual about any of it, but I figured that we would eventually have sex. We talked about getting an apartment together in New York, something small, whatever we could afford – Christian said, “Even if we have to share a bed,” which made me decide that that was what he was waiting for. I meticulously recorded every detail, every update in my journal, sometimes lying in bed with a flashlight as Zeke snored across the room from me in order to get it all down before another day started.
March came and neither of us had heard from NYU; we were busy studying for finals and preparing for our big theater production, a lavish and risqué production of Cabaret in which Christian played the sexy (bucktoothed) emcee. I spent more time in my own room studying as the school year drew to a close, but I was too busy to pay close attention to my journals, which I kept on a wall shelf over my desk; I didn’t notice if all six notebooks were there, or if sometimes there were only five. But apparently that was the case.
The phone in my room rang nine times on a Saturday morning in mid-April. I didn’t open my eyes but lay there half-awake waiting for Zeke to answer it. Most of the calls to Room 212 were from other guys on the second floor, too lazy to walk down the hall and knock on the door. No one had ever called me, and if anyone called from off-campus – or even beyond Broward Hall – I didn’t know about it.
The phone rang nine times, paused, then started ringing again. I opened my eyes. Zeke was not in his bed; his top sheet and cover were twisted like a long snake along the wall side of his bed. The phone had found a permanent home on his side of the room, under his bed with his drugs, porn and random socks. It was 8:35; Zeke was never up and out of bed on a Saturday before noon. I stumbled across the floor and answered during the third ring.
me: Hello?
he: Randy, it’s Christian.
me: Christian, good god! What are doing up so early in the morning?!
he: New York is off.
me: What?
he: New York is off.
me: What are you talking about?
he: We can’t go to New York. We’re not going to New York.
me: What’s going on, Christian?
he: We read your diary, Randy.
me: What?
he: We read your diary.
me: My what? What are you talking about? Who?
he: Me and the guys.
me: What guys? What’s going on, Christian? Are you upstairs?
he: No, I’m at home.
me: At your parents’ house?
he: Yes.
me: What are you doing there? I thought you were staying in town this weekend. What about the show tonight?
he: Don’t worry about it, Randy. Listen to me.
me: What’s going on, Christian? I don’t understand.
he: Listen and I’ll tell you.
me, after a painfully pregnant pause: I’m listening.
he: We read your diary.
me: What diary?
he: –I can’t believe some of the things you wrote in there, about me. About us.
me: You read my journal?
It was semantics, but in this moment I had nothing but semantics, nothing to contribute. I sat on Zeke’s bed, which was forbidden.
he: Randy, I don’t know what you were thinking – about us – but I’m not like that. Being gay is wrong, Randy. You know that.
me: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
he: Yes, you do, but I’m not going to argue about it. I just called to tell you that we’re not going to New York, not now or ever, and after this semester is over, we can’t be friends anymore.
me: Christian…
he: That’s all I have to say.
me: Christian, wait.
he: Goodbye, Randy.
me: What’s going on?
I don’t know if he heard my last line, but I wasn’t really saying it to him, I was saying it to myself, to the world: What was going on? I felt a combination of panic and rage. I wanted to cry, I wanted to wail, I wanted to tear something up.
Any minute, Zeke could walk into our room, he would he pissed off that I was on his bed. Maybe he would be pissed off enough to hit me. I hoped he would. I wanted him to walk in and beat the shit out of me, leave me in a bloody pulp in the middle of our floor. Or better yet, smash my head against the linoleum tiles until I was dead. I wanted to die.
My journals were in his line of vision across the room from his pillow, six silver spirals catching the light, calling curious attention to themselves, slightly mangled from nervous hands – mine or theirs, I wasn’t sure. One notebook was askew in the stack. I was neater than that; I always pushed them flush against the wall.
It was Zeke! Of course it was. He was one of the “guys” Christian was referring to. He wasn’t just one of the guys, he was the number one guy, the ringleader to his Broward Hall minions. But Christian wasn’t one of them. Christian was friendly to everyone, but he didn’t hang out with the second floor guys; they weren’t his friends.
So when did it happen? And where?
I threw the phone to the floor when it started making its frantic off-the-hook signal then kicked the receiver under the bed, it bumped into Zeke’s stack of Penthouses, which slid out and splayed on the floor between our beds. I kicked at the magazines; a cover came loose from its staple and this somehow unhinged me. I grabbed the magazine, tore the cover off and hurled both parts across the room; then another; then several. I tore at the pages, tore at the nipples, the ruby red lips, the fuzzy patches between the smooth legs. I picked them up again and again, turned them into pornographic confetti, which littered the room.
Next, I took Zeke’s pot tray out from under his bed and dispersed its contents, threw the lighter one direction, the book of papers another, his prized glass pipe at the wall over his bed. It shattered and left a mess of sparkling glass and black soot on his sheets. I tore open the baggie of marijuana and sprinkled it across the expanse of the room like a cheap spice.
I was pleased with myself, and out of my head. I opened Zeke’s closet, yanked his hanging clothes to the floor, kicked the dirty clothes and shoes in the bottom of the closet toward the middle of the room, then I grabbed his toothpaste from the bathroom and squeezed it onto the pile. It was all over my hands, in my mouth, gritty spearmint. I opened Zeke’s bottle of Chaps cologne and added that, gagging at the overwhelming mix of smells.
For a moment, I panicked, not so sure I was willing to take Zeke’s powerful punch in my face, I had never had a broken bone and this wasn’t a good day for it. I washed my hands, dressed and considered the mess. There was no way to cover it up, no way to explain it away. I spotted the orange lighter by the door, picked it up and for a moment thought I would catch the room on fire. I was going to burn down Broward Hall!
But something stopped me. I stuck the lighter in my pocket, pulled Zeke’s big canvas duffel bag from the middle of the mess and coolly filled it with my belongings, my clothes, my toiletries, my school supplies (though not the schoolbooks), and lastly the spiral notebooks, my “diaries,” as Christian Wall had incorrectly labeled them.
I crouched to hang the duffel bag strap on my shoulder then hoisted myself to a standing position and walked into the hall knowing that at any second I might come face to face with Zeke, whatever that might mean. I didn’t care. I was willing, anxious even, to take whatever punishment he or anybody else felt I deserved.
The hallway was deserted; there wasn’t even the sound of a stereo playing or the usual noise coming from the tv room at the far end of the hall. I walked downstairs. The game room was empty, and if anyone was at the lobby desk, I didn’t see them. Outside, the sun danced with the clouds; blue shadows ran ahead of me across the grass and sidewalks, which were uninhabited. I cut across Newell Road to the stadium parking lot, the duffel bag strap cutting into my shoulder. The only people I saw were far away, as if word had got out and people knew to make themselves scarce.
At a bright blue garbage barrel in the middle of the barren stadium parking lot, I shrugged the duffle bag to the ground, unzipped the top, gathered the six full spiral notebooks and the seventh I had just started; I balanced them on the rim of the half-full barrel, pulled Zeke’s lighter from my pocket, opened one of the notebooks and lit a corner on fire. When it caught good, I dropped it into the barrel on top of the garbage then fed the others in, ignoring the content as much as possible but seeing the word christian again and again and again.
The flames licked the air above the barrel, black smoke pumped into the sky like a beacon: He’s over here! I didn’t care. I strapped the duffel bag back on – it felt a hundred pounds lighter – and started walking toward University Boulevard as sirens wound up in the distance.