What The Hell, Jesus?

This guy got me hangin on by a thread

Everyone around me has a bible in their lap. The girl to my left, her long blonde hair in a high pony, shifts so her knee grazes mine. I look down at her bible. It looks worn. I can tell she’s flipped through often, leaving some of the pages dog-eared. I can tell that she loves it, the same way that I love Goosebumps or my Dear America Books.

“I like your Bible,” I offer to High Pony.

‘Thanks!” she chirps, perking up. “It was my sisters when she came here!”

My body glows with the possibility of a new friendship. I take the immediate in. “My sister went to camp here too!” I say back to her. She eyes my Bible, and I’m suddenly aware that the price sticker is still on it. It feels stiff and cold in my hands, like I’m holding a brick. The feeling of being out of place begins to tickle the edges of whatever new persona I’m trying to bring into my first day of camp.

“Was that your sister’s?” High Pony asks, extending a kindness towards me. We both know my mom picked this bad boy up from Barnes and Noble yesterday.

“Oh no, this is new,” I say, sticky paper piling under my fingernail as I subtly try to pick the orange sticker away. “My sister took hers to college.” This is a bold faced lie. My sister, who was three years out of college and living in New York, did not take a Bible to the University of Georgia. She took Adderall and hand-rolled cigarettes.

High Pony smiles politely at me. I take her brief moment of silence as a panicked opportunity to pivot.

“Cool braces!” I yell, a little too excited.

The light leaves her eyes. “Oh. Thank you,” she says, smiling with her mouth closed so I can no longer see her teeth and the green brackets that cover them. Seems I’ve struck a nerve, which is crazy considering outside of a large white flying dog who talks, braces are the only thing I’ve ever truly wanted. She turns away from me and to the girl to her right. My mind races through different topics I could bring up to redeem myself: Animorphs, Mia Hamm, the one time we lost a pet snake in our house and never found it.

Before I have a chance to launch into a story that I’m sure will lure this new camp alliance back to me, the lights go off. A match is struck, and our camp counselor’s face is suddenly illuminated by a small tea candle she’s holding in her hand.

“Happy first day of camp, campers!” We all cheer and giggle. “I’m your counselor, Caroline, and I’m so happy you’re here”.

This is when it starts, I think to myself, This is when I get to be a Capital C Camper.

I had had friends who went to sleep away camp years before I did. I was so jealous of the air of independence that followed them once they got home. They were sent away, alone, but they came back with a new shade of themselves. They were endowed with friends, an affinity for water trampolines, a hunger for sloppy joes, and a few more steps towards the coveted feeling of being older and wiser.

And now it was my turn.

My mom had asked me on our drive from Georgia to North Carolina if I was nervous.

“No!” I lied. Her eyes lingered on mine through the rear-view mirror, and I avoided them because I knew if I met them, I’d have to explain the evolution of this new feeling vibrating in my stomach. That as this New Exciting Thing drew near, so did my anxiety and fear. So close it almost made me want to turn back. Instead, I pivoted to the required reading of the summer.

“This is hard to read,” I yelled over the music as I flipped through my new bible. The writing was so small, the paper so thin and soft, like my grandmother’s skin.

“Sure is,” she responded, an edge of disdain in her voice.

Camp Hollymont was the number one choice simply because my sister had attended 15 years prior. It seems that my parents had forgotten that Camp Hollymont was a Capital C Christian Camp, but no matter. I was jazzed and they jazzed that they’d have one less kid in the house for two weeks.

I sucked on my fruit roll up thumb cast I had made and focused on the emotions that had become familiar when the idea of camp was just an idea. Hope, curiosity, excitement. I knew one thing. I was going to change this summer. I closed my eyes against Alanis Morrisette and told myself that I was ready to. Change is what brave people did.

“Why don’t we go around and say our names and favorite bible verse?” Caroline’s voice cuts through the room as she lights a few more tea lights.

I panic. Favorite Bible Verse? What the fresh fuck hell? You’re telling me I had to be familiar with this big, unreadable book BEFORE camp? That I was essentially going to be quizzed? Publicly ridiculed? Made into a JUDAS day one?

I sit on my hands and pray to god BEGGING to not to have Caroline start with me. I needed time to come up with something. I continue to play it cool, clasping my hands together and emphatically nodding as we go down the line, murmuring “same” and “exactly” each time Caroline applauds and says she loves a verse. In between each girl, I thumb through, scouring for a verse that 1- is short and 2- will wow the room. I don’t want to just read a bible verse like some bland, untalented child. I wanted to knock the socks off these Jesus freaks.

Earlier that summer, my mom had taken me to a callback for Disney radio. I spent 15 full minutes eating candy and saying the same line over and over again to a room of middle-aged men and one 22-year-old woman.

“Wow, chocolate AND Peanut Butter? More, please!” And while I didn’t get the part, partially because I wasn’t very good and partially because my mom said, “actors are weird, I don’t want this path for you”, I was bitten by the feeling of commanding a room and being paid attention to.

The verse I chose mattered. It was their first impression of me, a godly woman who would undoubtedly also be pretty good at archery.

When it’s my turn, I take a deep, labored breath and begin:

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

I finish reading and close my bible. I look around at a room full of blank faces. The weighted silence continues, and I take that as an invitation to continue.

“Well, and, I chose that one because it means a lot to me.” I look around. “It’s really special, to uh, my family too. Who also love this book”. I close my bible and hold it to my chest to further the impression that I am Christ’s #1 fan.

Caroline smiles politely at me.

“Who here has accepted Jesus Christ into their soul?” she asks. If I had Big League Chew in my mouth, I would have spit it out. Here am I thinking I’ve dodged a bullet only to be shot at again. Everyone’s hand raises except for mine.

“Layne?” She asks, scooting her body around so she is sitting directly across from me, interrogation style.

“Have you not accepted Jesus?”

“Jesus Christ?” I ask, sparking the kind of laughter that a Disney villain reserves for a helpless baby left alone in a cradle.

“Yes, Layne. Jesus Christ. HIS son,” She pointed up towards the stained ceiling. My face goes hot.

“Do I need to?” I ask. Someone in the room, probably High Pony, gasps.

“If you want to go to heaven, yes, Layne, you need to accept Jesus Christ into your soul”.

Hell fuckin yeah I want to go to heaven, dude. That’s where all my hamsters and a singular guinea pig now reside. That’s where my mom, dad, siblings, and friends will also go when we all die at the exact same time MUCH later in life. But I just…assumed I had a free pass, that it was the natural way of things. The way I saw it, we’re born, we play soccer, we hug our moms a lot, kick our little brother once or twice in the balls, all is forgiven, we get old, we die, we go to heaven. And that’s it, that’s the game. Why put us into the world otherwise? Why set us up to fail? Isn’t God supposed to be nice?

“It’s easy.” She coos. At this point, I assume that Caroline is on my side. She has the answers I seek. I do not yet realize I am being made an example.

“All you have to do is ask him, Layne.”

All eyes are on me. I feel dizzy. I wish my mom were here. I wish she were still meeting my eyes in the rear-view mirror, and I wish I were telling her to turn back. But brave people change. And I’m supposed to be brave. So I close my eyes and inhale.

Buff, blonde, white Jesus’s silhouette appears against my eyelids.

….Come into my soul, I think into the ether. Nothing. I open one eye and meet Caroline, essentially inches from my face.

I close my eyes and try again.

Come into my soul

Again, nothing. No spark, no revelation, no booming voice ringing out I AM HERE, CHRISTIAN GIRL, YOU ARE SAVED.

I can sense the room becoming impatient. I open my eyes.

“How do you feel?” Caroline asks, almost drooling. This virgin needs to get a grip.

I swallow hard, as if the right answer will become dislodged from my throat, and we can all continue with the night with the focus on something else besides me and my eternal damnation.

“Ummm. I feel the same? Is that ok?”

The hush that falls over the room is rivaled only by the time I had called JL a “shit bastard” on the bus on the way to school in 5th grade. I was testing out cursing, and he, a bully and also my crush, was the perfect target. I could both put him in his place and let him know I was different than other girls. I said things like “shit, bastard, ass, and piss”.

Caroline looks displeased. “No, you’d feel it. You’d feel different.” One camper begins tapping her foot, another bites her nails. The room feels smaller.

“Try again,” Caroline demands. Tears sting at my eyes as I close them shut. I try again. And again and again. Still nothing. I am no different.

I choke out one more possibility. “Maybe he was already there?” I say, my throat constricting around the hope, my finger tapping the spot on my chest where my heart is. Was that so crazy? That this jacked caucasian Jesus was already familiar with my soul and its credentials? That we didn’t need to do this whole song and dance because I was good…I was good enough to go to heaven. And until then, I was good enough to be at camp, and good enough to make friends, and good enough to come home with the same head held high as my friends did when they returned from camp. I was good enough to be here, right now, the only here that I knew.

“Try again,” Caroline murmurs, but its already too late. The tears I was holding back splatter onto my bible like rain on a windshield. A few drops and then all at once, it was hard to see. The tears keep building, snatching my breath away from me. Everyone’s worry about my soul suddenly pivots to a worry on wether or not I’d be able to breathe. Not only were they witnesses to me being bound to hell, but they were also apparently witnesses to how I’d get there.

Caroline leads me to my top bunk and I stay there, whimpering snippets of “Hell” and “Want” and “Mom” through chokes and sobs that seem to never stop.

After what feels like hours but is probably less than five minutes, I feel a soft tap on my back. I roll over to see Caroline, no longer so scary and in control, but a kid just like me. She has a phone in her hand, and she extends it so she’s holding it against the side of my face.

“Laynerds?” my mom’s soft voice reaches through the phone and I no longer want to change. I want to be small. Small enough to be on her lap. Small enough to be taken care of.

“Im going to HELL!!!” I scream. She pauses and then laughs.

“Oh, Layne. You’re not going to hell.”

“YES I AM. I’m gonna die at camp and go to HE-” She interrupts me.

“Hell isn’t real, Layne. It’s just a place a bunch of weirdos made up to keep you scared.” Her words fall over me and my sobs slow to a whimper. I sit up and take the phone from Caroline, holding it to my face with both hands.

“What about heaven?” I whisper between hiccups. There is a long pause on the other end.

“Uh. Sure. Yes. Yah. Sure.” I exhale, releasing all the worry and fear that had taken root. I trust my mom. She knows everything. And most of all, she knows me.

“Go have fun,” she reassures, “That’s why you’re there”.

And I do, have fun. My worries are wiped clean and I can see all the different ways to move on from this moment. Because she’s right. I am here to have fun, to make friends, to change, grow, be brave, be scared, laugh, fall down, get up, get dirty, be kind, apologize when I need to and sometimes when I don’t, to make memories, to learn about myself and inevitably, to get really good at archery.

Everything else is none of my business. No spaces left to fill with some pale blue-eyed ghost. Just my little life to live.

Hell fuckin yeah, dude. Hellllllllll fuckin yeah.

****This story was written for our most recent Tiny Apartment Show series that sierra carter and I have been putting on this past year. The series in a month long worksop with a small group of writers ending in a show in a Chicago Tiny Apartment (thus far- my home). I can’t believe it’s a thing we get to do. It’s so special and so good and I feel so so so dumb dumb lucky. The above image is from this Friday show. I’ll link story tellers in the comments- read their work!! They are so talented and wonderful. They could talk about anything and I would be on the edge of my seat******