Tessie D

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

It’s not that I don’t have friends—because I do. But, still, even though we moved here when I was 8 years old, I still don’t always feel like I fit in. It’s hard to explain unless you have ever moved to a small town. 

When we first got here, our neighbors were friendly—They stopped by the house to introduce themselves–the mothers wearing the same shade of Mary Kay lipstick, the men in their extra-starched blue Wranglers. They always invited us to church—but never to their houses. 

So, Momma would drop us off in our floral knee-length dresses and itchy, thick white tights to sit in poorly air-conditioned rooms on hard wooden pews while beads of sweat trickled down our backs. We mindlessly thumbed the hymnals and doodled on the collection envelops.

They were all pretty much 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 waterparks and others read aloud to us during Sunday School from the Left Behind books while assuring us that the rapture was a true story even if it had yet to happen. 

We learned that women must sit in silent submission, that all dancing is a sin, and to be vigilant against devil worshippers who were insidiously lurking in the community and kidnapping blonde haired, blue-eyed girls—like us—for rituals involving altars, disemboweled animals, bloody baptisms and poisoned Halloween candy. The satanic panic had set in, and they knew it had to be true because someone saw it on Geraldo Rivera. 

Daddy said that it was all bullshit and said we weren’t going to church anymore. And that was that—our spiritual and social damnation.