Leaving Fishers (24 page)

Dorry blinked again. “I never thought of that,” she said. “Not once.” It changed something. She wasn’t sure how.

Zachary sat back and drummed his fingers on the table, one hand reaching over the other to make an imaginary cymbal crash at the end.

“That’s okay,” he said. “You haven’t been out as long as me. And in Fishers—whoa. They do everything to keep you from thinking.”

Dorry looked closely at Zachary. The wimpy, tortured kid she remembered from the E-Team meeting was gone, replaced by a peppy guy in constant motion, tapping his feet, bobbing his head, grinning. Dorry’s brain, well trained, cranked out, “The old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” Second Corinthians 5:17. But this had happened in reverse. The old Zachary had been the holy one. The new one was—evil?

“I’ve got to say,” Zachary continued, “I didn’t peg you as someone who would leave. I thought you were fully convicted.”

“I was,” Dorry said quietly. But had she been? She remembered the doubts she’d swallowed, the rebellious words she’d held back at practically every discipling session.

“So what happened?”

Briefly, Dorry told him about her botched attempt at converting the Garringer kids.

“Now, see, you’ve got drama,” Zachary congratulated her when she was done. “I just had all these doubts building in me until one day I looked at my discipler and said, ‘You’re full of it.’”

“And that was the end?” Dorry asked.

“Haven’t looked back since,” he announced proudly

“Even when they called and called and—”

“The harassment, you mean? I just started arguing with them. Even talked one other guy into quitting with me. Believe me, they gave up real quick after that.”

“Oh,” Dorry said.

“Some kids, though—did you hear about the girl who ended up in the mental hospital? Lara somebody?”

Dorry searched for the last name she knew. “French?”

Zachary nodded. “Yeah. Know her? Sad case. She was so fervent, she wanted to convert everybody on the planet, but she wouldn’t play by the
Fishers’ rules, following the exact procedure, letting the top level Fishers get the credit for every convert—”

Poor Lara, Dorry thought. She remembered Lara and Angela fighting. Of course there’d been no stolen necklace, no kleptomania. They had been fighting over her, she realized now, without a single ounce of surprise. But, oh, how she’d wanted to believe everything Angela told her. “Everybody likes you. You know that, don’t you?”

“So when this Lara finally gave up, the top Fishers were merciless,” Zachary explained. “Her mother told me she had a nervous breakdown. That’s one of the things I reported.”

“Reported?” Dorry asked.

Zachary looked around. “Yeah . . . I can tell you lots more. But I don’t want to waste this. Let’s sit somewhere else. Come on.”

He stood up, picked up his tray and walked to another chair several tables away. Dorry mustered the energy to follow him.

“What was that for?” she asked when she caught up with him. He shoved out a chair for her on the other side of the table.

“I’ll explain later,” he said. “Now I’m going to tell you everything about Fishers you should have known going in.”

Dorry waited.

“First of all, it’s a cult. I wrote to the Cult Research Service right after I left, and I described Fishers, and they were very interested. They’d never heard of the group before, but it meets every one of their defining criteria.” Zachary spoke loudly, as if he wanted the whole cafeteria to hear.

He waited for response from Dorry. When she said nothing, he added, “Don’t you understand? You were in a cult.”

It was just a word to Dorry. “So I was really stupid and fell for something crazy,” she said. “My parents have been telling me that all along. And I keep thinking, sure, but lots of people believe in God. Lots of people believe in Jesus. They just don’t practice their faith the right way.”

“According to Fishers,” Zachary said. “See? You were brainwashed. It’s not so much what Fishers believe that’s wrong, as how they make you believe it. They manipulate and harass and require complete obedience. They claim to be perfect and without sin, but they’ll lie and cheat and do anything to keep their members in line.”

Dorry remembered Angela’s lies. “They say they only lie when it suits God’s purposes. When it’s God’s will,” Dorry protested.

“But only they know God’s will, right?”

Reluctantly Dorry nodded. “But if they sincerely
believe they’re doing the right thing—” Dorry didn’t know why she felt compelled to defend the Fishers.

Zachary cocked his head. “I’ll grant you that some of the people are sincere. They do think they’re serving God. But there’s so much that’s fake, that no one who’s in the group very long could continue to be fooled. You remember that girl who saw God that first night at our retreat?”

“Moira,” Dorry said. She closed her eyes momentarily, remembering how awed she felt witnessing Moira’s dramatic conversion. Why hadn’t Dorry’s own faith been so simple?

“Made an impression, didn’t it?” Zachary said. “Only problem was, it was all a sham. I mean, Moira’d been a Fisher for three years. She was just acting. They have someone perform like that at every retreat.”

Dorry gasped. “How do you know?”

“I ask questions.” Zachary sat back with a self-satisfied smirk.

“But—”

Zachary wasn’t about to be interrupted. “And didn’t you notice the pattern of it all? In the beginning, everything was so happy and joyous. Everybody loved everybody else and God was like Santa Claus and weren’t you just dying to
be around these people who thought of nothing but you?”

Dorry looked down. “Yes,” she whispered.

“That’s called love bombing, incidentally, in cult terminology,” Zachary said. “But then there’s a whole cycle of membership after that. They can’t be loving to everybody all the time because they need to save their energy for recruiting new members. Once they’re sure they’ve gotten you, they have this big ceremony and tell you what a great person you are, you’re now a Level Two, and then everything gets intense. They give you orders they know you’ll fail at, nearly impossible things, so that you’ll feel guilty, and try even harder to please them.”

Eyes downcast, Dorry admitted, “Angela made it seem like I did something wrong because I couldn’t convert my parents. She was always expecting me to convert people. And she told me to fast on Thanksgiving, even though we were having a huge family dinner.”

That seemed to surprise even Zachary. “Really?” he said. “That’s truly cruel. Did you?”

“Sort of,” Dorry said. Familiar shame flooded over her. But now, she wasn’t sure if she was ashamed of failing to fast or ashamed of trying to. Either way, remembering Thanksgiving made her want to cry. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine,” Zachary said. “But you have to see the pattern, how things intensified. They were trying to shake out the iffy believers, the ones who weren’t fully committed, so they’d have a core group of devout, brainwashed people willing to do anything for the cause.”

Dorry thought of nearly being arrested at the mall. “But why?” she asked, truly bewildered. “Why create this—this whole kingdom—if it’s not for God?”

Zachary snorted. “You really were an easy mark for Fishers, weren’t you, Miss Gullible?” He shook his head. “Sorry. I thought you were smarter than that. Ever notice the offering plate at Fishers services?”

“Sure, but—”

“Pastor Jim’s got a lot of money, thanks to Fishers. He’s got practically a mansion up in Carmel—”

Dorry wasn’t ready to believe that. “No, he’s got an apartment in a bad part of the city. He talks about it all the time.”

“That’s just for show. Or reverse show. You didn’t give a lot of money to Fishers, did you?”

Dorry looked away. “My college savings,” she said.

Zachary didn’t say anything for a minute. Dorry saw that a group of boys sitting nearby were stirring about, looking disturbed.

“At least you didn’t sleep with him. Did you?” Zachary asked.

“What?” Dorry stopped watching the other boys and jerked her attention back to Zachary. “Of course not. Everyone in Fishers says premarital sex is wrong.”

Zachary laughed in a way that made Dorry feel like crying. “Sure, that’s what they
say
,” he said. “But Pastor Jim probably had half the girls in Fishers. That Angela who was your discipler—I think she was one of his favorites.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Dorry said. But she remembered the spark Angela had had with Pastor Jim at that first party, the looks that had traveled between them.

“He tells girls it’s their sacrifice for God,” Zachary said.

Dorry could imagine Pastor Jim saying that, could picture his mouth forming those words. And then did everyone comply? Why had he never asked her? Too ugly, a voice said in her head. Someone who could have any girl in Fishers wouldn’t have wanted you. She felt rejected all over again. Shouldn’t she feel relieved instead? She struggled to keep her expression neutral, to act like Zachary’s words didn’t bother her. Zachary wasn’t even watching.

“Meanwhile, all the new male Fishers are told
abstinence is sacred, that they mustn’t even think of girls or they will burn in hell,” he said. “Aren’t you, guys?”

Zachary spoke over Dorry’s shoulder, directing his voice to the group of boys behind her. They whispered among themselves, then each of them shoved out his chair and stood up, almost in synchronicity. They all but marched past Zachary and Dorry, their heads held high, eyes straight ahead. Only one scrawny, nervous-looking boy darted his eyes toward Zachary and Dorry. Then he quickly looked away.

Zachary laughed and laughed. “Can’t bear hearing the truth, huh?” he shouted after them.

One of the boys—a tall, imposing guy, more muscular than many football players Dorry had seen—turned around and walked back. He leaned both hands on the table beside Dorry and looked down at Zachary. The table groaned. “Zachary Haines, you are filled with evil,” he said in a booming voice. “You have ensured your place in hell by trying to tempt new believers. But you will not triumph.”

It scared Dorry, and she wasn’t even the one being condemned. Zachary only laughed harder. “You guys really have to come up with some new threats,” he shot back. “That hell thing is getting old.”

The muscular guy didn’t respond. He glanced once at Dorry—dismissively, like she was an insect or some other creature without a soul to go to heaven or hell. Then he turned with military precision and walked away.

Zachary kept chuckling. “In case you didn’t figure it out,” he said. “That was a new Bible Study group. Guess we shook them up, huh?”

Dorry wanted to slap him. “Give me some credit,” she snapped. “I’m not that stupid. You were baiting them. You just told me all that to get to them. You made it all up. You’re worse than the Fishers. At least some of them believe in what they do.”

Then she pushed away from the table. With much less dignity than the Fishers had shown, she walked away from Zachary.

“Wait!” he yelled. “Dorry, wait!”

Dorry turned around. What did she have to lose? Zachary rushed up behind her. “I’m sorry. Nobody else I did that to thought it was wrong, to bait the Fishers. They were all happy to find out the truth.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dorry said. “Maybe they’re just used to being manipulated.” But her anger was already fizzling. She leaned against the wall. “Was that the truth?” she asked.

Zachary nodded. “I think so. I can’t verify everything, but I did look up Pastor Jim’s
property records—I’m not making up the mansion. The sex stuff I heard about from some of the other girls who left.”

“How do you know they’re not lying?”

“I don’t,” he admitted. He looked down. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m too biased. I’ve got too much to prove. I’m trying to get the Cult Research Service to put Fishers on their official list. I’m trying to get the school to ban them from recruiting on campus. I’m trying to get the police to check into Pastor Jim’s finances, because I’m sure he’s embezzling. I think something’s about to happen, because Fishers seems to be getting more extreme by the day. I’m—”

Zachary stopped only because Dorry laughed.

“Didn’t you just tell me that you left Fishers and never looked back?” she asked. A group of kids walked past and looked at her and Zachary curiously. Dorry ignored them. She’d gotten used to being looked at strangely in Fishers.

Zachary smiled wryly. “Okay, okay, you’ve got me. I’m obsessed. But don’t you want to see Fishers destroyed? For what they did to you and to me and to that Lara girl and everyone else?”

Dorry hesitated. She looked out at the cafeteria, at the vast ocean of kids she’d felt lost and anonymous in, before Fishers. “No,” she said at last. “I want them to be as good and nice and
pure as they pretended to be in the beginning. I want to have the love and the sense of belonging Fishers promised me. And the holiness.” She held her breath, scared Zachary would laugh. He didn’t.

“But you can’t,” Zachary said. “That’s just—idealism.”

“Uh-huh,” Dorry said. “Isn’t that what religion’s for?”

Zachary squinted. “But religion’s evil.”

“No,” Dorry said. “Fishers was. Religion isn’t.”

And for the first time since leaving Angela’s car, Dorry felt a glimmer of the peace—and the lightness, the righteousness—she’d experienced when she first joined Fishers.

“You know what?” she told Zachary. “I just realized—when I left Fishers, I didn’t leave God. I left because of God. He wanted me to. I kept praying and praying and praying, trying to stop rebelling against Angela. But it was God telling me to rebel. Not the Devil.”

Zachary stared at her as though she had just announced she was a new messiah, come to battle Pastor Jim and his Fishers for the souls of Crestwood. “You’re crazy, too,” he said.

The bell marking the end of lunch period suddenly rang, sending kids scurrying around them. Dorry stood still.

“No,” she told Zachary. “I’m finally sane.”

Chapter

Twenty-eight