“I wouldn’t want to sit next to you if you were the last guy on earth,” she says to the cowlick at the back of his greasy head. “You smell like dog turds.” She is not disappointed by his lack of interest in being her church friend; she recognizes him as one of the losers who lurk lower than her on the social food chain. He is a mama’s boy with halitosis whose companionship could immediately doom her ability to meet anyone of interest here. Especially if he tells them about her reputation.
When Lizzie first visited River of Life, last Thursday, she had half-anticipated a disaster, despite Barbara Bint’s promises of abundant love. Zeke Bint, a class pariah for as long as Lizzie can remember, hadn’t exactly been a promising introduction to the world of Christianity. In the car, she tried to distract herself from her growing dread by counting the number of times Zeke scratched his dandruff-covered scalp (twelve) before they arrived. The “introductory” meeting at the church was only half full and almost entirely composed of middle-aged women like Barbara Bint, who, from her position between Zeke and Lizzie, perched on the edge of the pew and underlined key phrases (“all of God’s little creatures,” “redeemed in His eyes”) in the hymnbook with her index finger as she sang along. But there was free apple cider and cupcakes decorated with little crosses, and everyone seemed delighted to meet her.
The sermon was titled “Is God Forgiveness, or Is Forgiveness Godly?” “The forgiven who give their sinful lives over to God will be lifted up to heaven,” the priest explained. And Lizzie envisioned herself rising, on some kind of ethereal elevator, up to a puffy little cloud in the sky. In a little white dress, maybe, with wings. Though she’d probably have to die first, wouldn’t she? Would she still have to diet in heaven to be skinny? Probably not. It sounded pretty good.
But what clinched her return was when the priest mentioned the Friday night youth group, Smash! “I’d like to encourage the young members new to our congregation to attend,” he said. “It’s a real groovy time, lots of young people who love to make new friends, celebrating Christ’s love. There’s music, dancing, singing, movies.”
Lizzie had imagined walking into a room of smiling faces—
new
faces, faces that weren’t already familiar from Fillmore High. Faces of girls who would want to play makeover with her and go shopping and talk about boys, and faces of boys who would ask her out on real dates, dates where they picked her up in a car and took her to a restaurant and paid for her meal and didn’t expect a blow job in return. Cute, stylish faces who wouldn’t know that Lizzie had ever been fat, or unpopular, or the school slut.
Before Barbara Bint even suggested that Zeke take Lizzie to Smash!, Lizzie decided she would go.
But reality doesn’t quite match her vision. There is no heraldic music greeting her when the doors to Smash! open, no new friends rushing to shake her hand. In fact, no one seems to notice her at all as she worms her way through the crowd. The teens are fixated on the front of the room, clutching their Bibles, whispering under their breaths (“Dylan is so…” “He says that Jesus…” “…heard he once hung out with Bono…”) as they stare at the empty space below the neon sign. The air is crackling and bright with anticipation. Lizzie plunks down on a square of industrial carpet located inauspiciously in front of the drum set.
The buzz in the room stops abruptly when the music starts, a swell of hip-hop beats that thump the walls and vibrate the floor. “Yo, dawg, it’s the dogma, rising up to teach ya, God is gonna love ya, Jesus gonna greet ya.” The song rises to a bumping chorus that has a hundred heads moving in time—“Lift the Lord’s name on High, He’ll forgive ya ’fore you die!”—just as Pastor Dylan steps to the front of the room. He is wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt with jeans and flip-flops, topped off with a trucker hat that reads “Come to Jesus” on the front. He’s also wearing a hands-free microphone over his ear, and his hair, under the cap, is frosted blond. He holds up a hand, and the room bursts into cheers. The booming bass crescendos.
The pastor jumps up and down three times and pumps his hand in the air. “Are we feeling joy today?” he yells.
“Yes!” the room screams in unison, and Lizzie feels a bolt of excitement piston through the center of her body. The scream echoes throughout the room. Her own peers didn’t even seem this excited when Millard Fillmore High won the homecoming football game last year. She looks at the expressions of rapture on the kids seated beside her and sits up to pay closer attention.
All around her she sees beatific faces, other kids looking so
happy,
so
well adjusted
—like they’d ingested a quart of Wellbu whateveritscalled before walking into the room. They gaze with serene smiles at the pastor, close their eyes in ecstasy as they listen to him; some even lift their palms up to the sky, as if M&M’s are about to fall from the ceiling and right into their hot little hands.
I want that,
she thinks.
How do I get it?
“Do we have God in our hearts?” Pastor Dylan continues.
“Yes!” the room thunders.
“Are we going to
smash
the obstacles that keep us away from God?”
“Yes!” Lizzie shouts with the teens all around her, picking up on the momentum. She longs desperately to feel what they are feeling, and as she screams at the top of her lungs she thinks she might be experiencing some of the elation she sees around her. A kind of giddy sensation. Or maybe it’s just hyperventilation.
The pastor smiles and pumps his fist over his head. The teens in the room burst into whoops, which sounds like one of those African rain chants from the documentaries Lizzie sometimes watches on public television. They fall quickly silent when Pastor Dylan lifts a finger to his lips.
A pretty blond girl sitting next to Lizzie glances over at her and smiles. She wears tight jeans and a T-shirt that reads, in glitter letters, “Jesus Is My Sugar Daddy.” She points her finger up at the ceiling, then gives the thumbs-up to Lizzie. Lizzie, thrilled to have been noticed, jerks her own thumb aloft in response, although she’s not a hundred percent sure what she is approving. But she is feeling something, definitely, a warm fuzzy tingling in her nose. Maybe that’s God.
Pastor Dylan waits until the hushing stops to begin his sermon. “Today, my friends, we’re gonna talk about secrets,” he says. “We all have them. Look in your hearts. You have secrets. You have these awful, terrible things that burn away at you, day in and day out, and won’t let you sleep. And you think that if you just keep hiding them, they’ll go away. But that’s not going to happen. They’ll just keep on eating you up, from the inside out, until someday in the future you will be as unattractive on the outside as you feel on the inside.”
The pastor lifts his hand and points a remote at the back of the room. A screen comes down behind him, and the room goes black.
“Oooh!” the kids gasp, and begin to applaud.
Lizzie hears herself oohing along with them, letting herself dissolve into the unity of the crowd. She is one with them. Yes. God is smiling down upon all of them, her included. She claps her hands even louder.
The screen lights up with a projection from the back of the room. It’s a montage of faces—black, white, Asian, Latino, unified in the fact that they all look totally fucked up. There’s a photograph of a woman passed out in her own vomit; a young man missing his front teeth; a teenage girl with crossed eyes holding a crying baby; a young woman in a tawdry pink micromini with pustules all over her face; a teenage boy slumped in a wheelchair, drooling. The room gasps at each picture. The U2 song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” plays over the film.
Pastor Dylan’s disembodied voice calls out from the dark. “See these faces? These are the faces of the lost. Drug addicts. Criminals. Prostitutes. Gang members. They are people with terrible secrets that they keep bottled up inside. Sinners who haven’t come to God. People who never acknowledged that God‘s Son died for them in order to wipe their slates clean. And look what it did to them! See how ugly it makes them, how it rots not just the inside of their minds but their bodies too? Their secrets destroy them. They are lost.”
He lifts his voice: “But you don’t need to be like these people. It’s not too late. God forgives all sins. You just need to make him your best friend. Tell him all your secrets, even the horrible, humiliating ones that sting. The stuff you would never, ever tell your mother. And you know what? If you promise never to do it again and start to lead a clean, good, Christian life, God will forgive you. He will
live inside you.
He will teach you the
power of love.
He will help you
never sin again.
And you can live a life of beauty, inside and out. Because guess what? He knows all your secrets anyway. He just wants you to come clean with him.” Pastor Dylan pauses, and the room rustles quietly as the kids attentively absorb his words. Lizzie leans forward in anticipation. “Otherwise,” the pastor says, pointing a finger at the audience and giving a beatific smile that reveals rows of perfect white teeth, “he’s perfectly happy just sending you to hell. Up or down, guys. Heaven or hell. It’s your choice.”
The lights flicker back on and Lizzie blinks in the glow, puzzling through Pastor Dylan’s words. She can’t decide if they are ominous or promising. Does this mean she’ll be ugly if she doesn’t confess everything to God? Or that she’ll be prettier if she does? If she confesses all the terrible things she did, will she, like, lose ten pounds? That would be awesome.
The pastor smiles, exposing even white teeth. “Okay!” he says. “Time to do some reading. Let’s all open our Bibles to page 223, and we’ll read James 5:15. It says: ‘If you pretend that you’re, like, totally sin-free, you’re full of b.s. and God knows it. But if you go ahead and confess your sins, God will prove to be one righteous dude: He’ll forgive you for screwing up and scrub all that nasty shizzle out of you.’”
The pastor stops and looks up. “Time for free prayer. Five minutes. Go for it!”
Lizzie glances around and observes a sea of bowed heads and twitching lips. The sibilant hisses of whispered prayers make it sound like she’s sitting in a snake pit. She bows her head and stares at a small brown stain on the patch of industrial carpet in front of her and tries to focus. She wants to feel redeemed so badly, it almost hurts. It seems somehow too easy, just ask God for forgiveness, and she’ll be happy and pretty for the rest of her life, and all her mistakes will disappear and everyone will love her. But how does she know if she’s done it right? She concentrates very hard.
“Dear God,” Lizzie whispers under her breath. She pauses. This does not sound right. It sounds like she’s writing a letter. She tries again. “Hi, God,” she says. This, she decides, is far too chummy. Who is she to consider God a buddy? After all, they have been acquainted for only a few minutes.
Still, that’s what Pastor Dylan said she should do: “Think of Jesus as your best friend,” the pastor had said. She closes her eyes, tries to imagine Jesus as a teenager she’d hang out with, but instead comes up with a cute blond guy who looks kind of like Justin, which is a little distracting. And so far, Jesus hasn’t actually spoken to her, which makes it even harder to imagine him as a friend. Doesn’t a friend need to, you know, actually hold up his end of the conversation? she wonders.
But she’s willing to put these doubts aside if working really hard to be God’s friend means that you get forgiven for everything and stop being a social leper. It would, she thinks, be a relief to know that someone knows everything about her and doesn’t really mind how much she’s fucked up.
The truth is that she has never really thought much about God. If anything, he—or, rather, He—has always seemed like some distant historical figure—like Alexander the Great or Attila the Hun—who existed only in musty old stories. The Bible read much like her Western Civ textbook, a dry listing of irrelevant old battles and pointless vendettas. When her mother dragged her to church on Christmas or Easter, she never bothered listening to the sermon. Instead, she would spend the hour filling in all the
e
’s and
o
’s in her songbook with a ballpoint pen.
This, she now recognizes, is a sin. And God doesn’t really want to be best friends with a sinner. Or does He? It’s all so very confusing. She’ll have to go back to church on Sunday to get clearer on some of these details.
“God.” No. “Lord.” Yes, that’s better; conveys a certain sort of respect for His authority. But saying it out loud seems awkward. She feels like she is talking to the carpet. She hates the scratchy sound of her own voice. And what if the blond girl sitting next to her hears her secrets? She glances over to see the girl bowed over, her glossed lips moving frantically.
She decides she will speak to God in her head. She tries again.
Lord. Hi, Lord.
Yes. That’s better.
Your Lordness. I’ve done some really stupid things. I slept with a guy who I wasn’t married to. Actually, a lot of guys. And I guess that makes me a fornicator. And I called Susan Gossett a bitch behind her back. I guess I’m supposed to love her, because You say I should love my enemies, but the fact of the matter is she’s really hard to love. She’s really hard to even like. I don’t really understand why you—sorry, You—would love someone who is such a bitch, but whatever, if You say that I should like her, I guess I’ll try.
She pauses. Should she have used the word “bitch”? Maybe she should take it back. But wait, if God can read her thoughts, then won’t He know what she’s thinking right now? This is harder than she’d thought.
So, I guess what I want to say is that I’m afraid that no one is going to like me ever again. So can You make people love me, please? I mean, maybe not Zeke Bint or Susan Gossett, but, You know, just a few cool people. Like the girl sitting next to me, maybe?
She pauses, concentrates very hard. Yes, she thinks, the tingling sensation in her belly is
definitely
God, hanging out inside her, waiting to hear what she has to say before He decides to take up residence. Or wait, is that her stomach growling?