Tessie D

I suppose you might be wondering why I’m choosing to sit in the library at lunch instead of sitting outside with friends.

It’s not that I don’t have friends — because I do. But even though we moved here when I was eight years old, I still don’t always feel like I fit in. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve ever moved to a small town.

When we first got here, our neighbors were friendly. They stopped by the house to introduce themselves. The moms all wore the same shade of Mary Kay lipstick, and the dads wore extra-starched blue Wranglers. They always invited us to church but — for some reason — never to their houses.

Momma dropped us off a few times at their churches. We wore floral, knee-length dresses and itchy, thick white tights. We sat in hot sanctuaries on hard wooden pews while beads of sweat trickled down our backs. I tried to listen and pay attention, but most of the time I just thumbed through the hymnals and doodled on the collection envelopes.

They were all pretty much the same: Baptist, Methodist, Seventh-Day Adventist, Church of Christ, Six Flags Over Jesus. Some dunked, others sprinkled. Some tried hard to be cool with rock bands and trips to water parks.

One time I went to Grandpa Bruce’s church, and all I remember is that the guy who taught Sunday School wore a camo jacket and dirty pants. He read to us from the Left Behind books and told us the rapture was a true story. It just hadn’t happened yet. He said we’d hear Jesus talking to us, and when we did, we needed to take Him into our hearts or we’d go to Hell forever. That we’d have the Mark of the Beast.

But I didn’t hear anyone.

It scared me so bad that I stayed up all night for weeks begging Jesus to talk to me. I imagined all sorts of terrible things about what Hell must be like.

The most popular boy in my class went to another church on the main street in town, so I went there a few times. But the youth minister said that girls had to sit in silent submission and that I couldn’t read the Bible passages out loud when they went around the room. That’s a stupid rule, so I never went back.

All the popular girls went to a church on Park Street that said dancing was a sin and that we had to be careful of devil worshippers who were everywhere. They kidnapped blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls—like us. They killed animals and poured the blood over their victims’ heads, like a bloody baptism. They poisoned our Halloween candy so we couldn’t trick-or-treat. It was a Satanic Panic that had to be true because someone saw it on Geraldo Rivera.

Daddy said it was all bullshit and said we weren’t going to anyone’s church anymore.

And that was that—our spiritual and social damnation.