Boy Erased (10 page)

Step Application
: “I think this experience, and the memory of it, applies most directly to Step Three. I've made a decision to turn my life over to the care of Jesus Christ.”

Scripture
: “I took my scripture from John, Galatians, and Psalms. We can never trust ourselves. Every bit of our trust has to be turned over to God.”

Three, four, five more people had gone, their stories fusing together into one long string of repentance. The room was freezing now. I rolled down my sleeves again, buttoned the cuffs.

“One of our new members is going to share for the first time,” Smid said, walking toward me. I could feel J's eyes on me. I could tell he was trying to encourage me, but it only made me feel worse. I pulled out my MI from under my thighs, my hands shaking.

“Would you mind going?” Smid asked me. His voice was soft, polite, encouraging.

I stood up and made my way to the center of the group. I coughed. I wanted to tell everyone how cold I was, how I wasn't shaking from fear but only shivering.

“Take your time,” Smid said.

I could make a run for it
, I thought. I could push open the sliding glass door and run down the streets until I made my way to some public park where I could hide.

A clanging of metal on metal from the kitchen. I coughed again, and added my voice to the chorus.

I
stood in the dorm entrance with a cardboard box hugged to my chest, the white concrete blocks of the stairwell covered with a skein of cobweb and dust, breathing in the air of not-home: not flower-scented linen, not peroxided kitchen counters, not the pages of the family Bible crackling open to emit their decades-old scent of soft handling. Instead I got a whiff of partial decay, of apathy, and what I would soon recognize as the smell of other boys.

“Shit,” I said, the box almost slipping from my hands. It felt good to say the curse aloud. It felt good to cut the quieting
shhhh
with a sharp consonant. Here in this small liberal-arts mecca with a sly Presbyterian bent that refused to take itself too seriously, there was no one to stop me from cursing. There was Thursday afternoon chapel to attend, if I wanted; if I didn't, no worries. I would belong to the majority of students if
I ignored the noncommittal bell chiming softly over the campus. I imagined hearing it as I walked back from class, smiling at the memory of so many mandatory church services receding behind the carpe diem mentality of certain humanities courses.

“Shit,” I said again. My voice became an echo. A bathroom door opened in the adjacent hallway, and a slack-jawed, black-haired boy stuck his head out, gave me a bored once-over, and let the door slam shut. Here, no one seemed to care what I said or did.

•   •   •

I
HAD
WATCHED
my parents drive away on the winding asphalt road down the slope of a pine-forested hill just thirty minutes earlier. I stood with my white sneakers on the edge of the curb, a first-day freshman, holding one last box full of empty picture frames that I would refuse to fill with photos of my family.
A F
AMILY IS WORTH A THO
USAND WORDS
, the topmost frame read. A flash of sunlight from the rear window, and my parents were gone.

On the ride here, catching sight of the campus bell tower looming at the top of the hill, my father had whistled loudly from the driver's seat. I knew at once what he meant: He was impressed by any building that demanded ascendancy, anything that reached for an impossible elevation. Our home church had just installed a new white steeple, one with a narrow porthole window that captured the sun at sunrise and sunset before releasing it again to the sky. My father was making plans to
build a similar church steeple, or perhaps a slightly bigger one, in anticipation of the day he would become an ordained pastor of his own successful church. Earlier that month, after years of private deliberation with God, he had decided to publicly surrender to the Lord's call to become a pastor. Now he was constantly talking about the kind of church he wanted to build, about the group of like-minded, God-fearing people he would one day call his flock.

•   •   •

“S
HIT
,” I
REPEATED
. The picture frames clacked together, threatening to spill. Only a few minutes earlier I had carried boxes two and three times this size just to prove that I was stronger than my father, had watched the moth-shaped sweat spread across the back of his cotton T-shirt as I followed him up these stairs, feeling sweat free and superior, my mother directing our ascent, begging us to watch our steps
for God's sake
.

Now that he was gone, my fingers relaxed their grip. One of the frames fell and clattered down the steps, a hairline crack forming a Z in the glass.

“Need help?” a voice asked. It came from somewhere below and leaped up to me. This was how I would later remember it: leaping. No,
pouncing
, I would think.
Tackling
.

I shifted the box to my right hip. Through the black metal railings below I could see two arms hugging a dense sphere of laundry, all whites, already wrinkled. The arms grew more
defined as they drew closer: two thin bands remarkably similar to my own.

I had lost something like fifty pounds over the summer. It had come about gradually at first, just before cutting off all contact with Chloe, then so suddenly that several of my friends hadn't been able to recognize me whenever they saw me running along our town's potholed streets. I had refused to eat more than five hundred calories a day, punished myself further by running for at least two hours every afternoon. Partly a penance for my failure with Chloe, partly a defiance of what I felt people expected of my future in the church, my weight loss took an angry, masochistic turn that verged on anorexic and scared my parents into asking me what was wrong every other day, though they seemed to connect this behavior to my decision to become more active and renounce the sedentary gamer life I'd been living. I barely came out on the other side intact, but I was proud of what was left: this
other
, excavated me; the anonymity of the handsome and lean. I had what a Psychology 101 class would later inform me was the secret to human beauty: truly average proportions.

“Here, let me,” the voice said, hand reaching for the box, a pair of white boxer briefs falling from his arms onto the mottled tile, our eyes meeting, and recognizing that we were both members of the Club of Truly Average Proportions.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“The Lord will provide,” he said. One more shared membership, then. I wondered what others we had in common.

He had the empty zippered-up smile of a youth pastor. I will call him David. He was a freshman here, too.

“I saw you earlier,” David said. He said he'd seen me on his way back from the laundry room and had waited until my parents left, that they looked nice but typically boring. As we talked, we found we had a lot in common. We spoke in the usual banalities: We both preferred waking up early in the morning, were both interested in running, both considered ourselves to be heavy studiers.

He took my box in one hand and piled his laundry on top with the other, taking the steps to the second floor—left, together, right, together; the careful baby steps of a formal procession—the backs of his brown loafers luminous in the dusty light, the heels of his unsocked feet peeking out with each step to lick the air in pale flashes.

The clashing of a big brass band echoed up the stairwell from the dorm entrance. Our college's marching band was making its rounds across the quad, marching in formation in full-dress uniform, instruments glinting in the sunlight.

“Do you like it here?” he said.

“It seems loud,” I said. “But nice.”

“Admin said they're always practicing.”

“How can people concentrate on homework here?” I looked back at his boxers lying on the steps, wondering if he wanted me to pick them up for him.

“What? You don't like music?”

“Maybe I'm in the wrong place,” I joked.

I looked away from the boxers. I don't know if he ever returned for them or if they were simply a dispensable prop. They would wait like a banana peel for the next unsuspecting freshman, part of a slapstick number for a very different play, a very different actor.

“One more question,” David said, turning toward my half-open dorm room, one half of his smile still aimed in my direction. “To get to know each other better . . .”

I wanted to turn back and pick up the boxers, try them on, feel what it might be like to be near this other truly average body.

“Which superpower would you rather have?” he asked. “Flight or invisibility?”

The band marched off down the quad. A heavy gust of wind pulled open the door and slammed it shut.

Invisibility
, I thought immediately. Free to do whatever I wanted, go wherever I wanted, undetected. I had felt anything but invisible in the weeks before coming here. After I'd cut things off with Chloe, I'd tried to continue ignoring her in church, but it seemed as though everyone there knew that I was the villain in the story, that I must have done something terrible to lose such a great girl. Chloe sliding her eyes at me from across the church sanctuary, clutching some other boy's thick football-throwing arm, drawing other congregants' glares in my direction, so that even my spoken, automatic prayers had induced a stutter.
Dear Lord
, I had begun, the hushed breathing around me growing louder, more expectant,
give me the strength to endure
.
Whatever comes
—the men at the dealership Bible study waiting for
me to recover from my Job failure, their eyes searching mine for the answer to human suffering. No one watching or listening: It sounded like a dream to me.

“Invisibility,” I said.

“That says a lot about you,” he said. “That says you're an introvert.” He kicked open the unlatched door to my room. “You're going to have some great times in here.”

Later, after everything had happened, I would want so badly to change my answer. I would repeat this changed answer to myself again and again, wanting to forget everything that came after the moment I entered the dorm room with him.

Flight
, I would think.
God, flight.

•   •   •

“S
INCE
YOUR
ROOM
MATE
isn't here yet, you get to choose. Which bunk do you want?” David said.

The room was small, cramped, and we stood in the entrance, facing our reflections in a black-splotched, wall-mounted mirror. I was the introvert to his extrovert. He smiled; I scowled. Where his hair seemed to reflect the gold light from the window, my dark brown hair seemed to absorb it, to steal it from every corner of the room.

“So?” he said. “Which one?”

“I don't know,” I said.

The alder trees just outside the window shook their dried catkins. One of the flowers bounced with a thud against the glass and fell below the sill.

“Well,” he said. “My arms are tired.” He slid his hands around the front of the box for a better grip.

I walked to the front of the wooden bunks. The rest of my boxes lay in stacks behind me. I'd never thought about which bunk to take. At home, I'd always taken the bottom, left the top one open for my mother.

“Come on,” David said. “I'm getting tired.”

“I'll take the top,” I said, thinking it would be easier to stay out of my roommate's way.

He set the box of picture frames on the empty mattress. The box bounced back, propelled by a loose spring that intended to cause me a great deal of pain.

“Where's your family now?” he said. “Already gone?”

“They left,” I said. “They're gone.” At the time, it felt good to say it.

•   •   •

I
SPENT
more than thirty minutes in the dorm bathroom that first night, afraid to change into my boxers, afraid the stretch marks where I'd lost all the weight would show as I climbed to the top bunk. I examined myself in the mirror, turning to view my legs from each angle. I remembered how Chloe would sometimes squeeze the sides of my thighs and lean in for a kiss, with me afraid that her hand would move farther up as our lips locked. I wondered if all of my running had finally managed to burn away that patch of contaminated skin.

The slack-jawed boy who'd eyed me that morning came in
through the bathroom door and entered a nearby stall. He released a heavy stream of piss that obliterated the memory of Chloe. Once I finally decided the marks wouldn't show, I made my way back to the room and climbed each wooden rung as quickly as possible, feeling my new roommate Sam's eyes move over my calves.

“Nice legs,” he said. “You run every day, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”

Sam and I hadn't talked much when he'd first arrived earlier that evening. A few pleasantries, but nothing more. Like David, Sam was an early riser, a runner. He was studious. But, I realized, he wasn't nearly as charming.

I lay on the mattress with its freshly laundered sheets and hugged a pillow to my chest. I was clean, pure, in these cotton sheets with this new body. I thought of my father working in our family's old cotton gin, directing the cotton through its cleaning process, pressing this whiteness into bales that would then be used to make these sheets. To be the end product of all this labor felt comforting.

Sam stood and slapped off the light switch. For a few seconds I could still see the flash of his pale shirtless back hovering in the dark.

•   •   •

W
E
SETTLED
INTO
SILENCE
. Each rustle of his bed sheets, each deeply drawn breath, each cough or loud swallow had the power to jolt me awake. I turned on my side. I still found it hard
to sleep without television, without the steady sound of prerecorded lives talking me out of my fear of Hell.

After we lay in silence for half an hour, Sam switched on the television. The room retraced its edges in blue, rediscovered its pockets of shadow.

“Does this bother you?” he said.

“Not at all,” I said. “But there's nothing on right now.”

“How do you know?”

“I'm kind of an insomniac. But I'm so hyped up right now that even TV won't help. I think I'll go for a walk.”

I left the room and walked around the quad a few times. I was counting the number of cracks in the sidewalk when I ran into David, who also seemed to be an insomniac.

He walked toward me. “I can't sleep,” he said.

“You're in a new place,” I said. “Your body needs time to adjust.”

I'd recently read an article that linked evolutionary traits to sleeping patterns. It was exhilarating to read something so overtly in favor of the science of evolution, so casually anti-Creationist, so different from what my church and school had taught me. “What kind of idiot do you have to be to think you came from a monkey?” our pastor would often say, a statement that earned him loud amens from the congregation. In my public high school, our biology teacher had skipped over the chapter about evolution, telling us we could read it at home if we liked. On the day we were supposed to be studying Darwin, she invited the cheerleaders in our class to perform their pep-rally routine.
For their finishing move, the girls were supposed to unfurl a Confederate flag and march in a circle so that all sides of the auditorium might see it. This was the part where our mascot, Rebel, a large-headed man dressed up like a plantation owner, was supposed to run out onto the football field and dance around the girls. At the time, my teacher's omission seemed relatively normal, though as I began to read more about biology on the Internet, I realized that my teacher had been ignoring what 97 percent of the scientific community now believed. Feeling both damned and excited, I had read several more articles on the subject. Though I still believed in God, I was uncomfortable with the idea of a God who would choose to ignore science.