Authors: Julie Johnson
Erasing Faith
ERASING FAITH
a novel
Julie Johnson
Copyright © 2014 Julie Johnson
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, product names, or named features are only used for reference, and are assumed to be property of their respective owners.
Cover Design by
The Cover Lure
Other Works by Julie Johnson
LIKE GRAVITY
SAY THE WORD
ERASING FAITH
This one’s for
4
A.M.
For keeping all my secrets.
“
Just gonna stand there and watch me burn…
Well, that's all right because I like the way it hurts.
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry…
Well, that's all right because I love the way you lie.
”
Skylar Grey
Faith
“I have to get back to my life. People will be looking for me in New York.”
Shit
. I hadn’t meant to tell him where I was living.
Tension saturated the room, denser than morning fog. “Who?”
My back went ramrod straight as I listened to his footsteps crossing the room back toward me.
“Who’s waiting for you, Faith?” His tone was deceptively soft, but I could hear the strain beneath his words. “A boyfriend? A husband?”
I didn’t answer, but my hands curled into fists by my sides. He had no right to know the answer to those questions — not anymore.
“Is it the man who helped you disappear? The one who turned you into
Fae Montgomery
? Because whoever he is, he has connections. Even I couldn’t find you. And, believe me, I looked.”
My stomach clenched at that admission.
“Someone helped you vanish off the face of the fucking earth, without a single trace. No mere name-change could’ve erased you so thoroughly.”
I bit my lip to keep from answering as Conor’s face flashed in my mind.
“Someone taught you to shoot.” His words slithered around me like a snake, moving in for the kill strike. I tried to ignore him, but the closer he moved toward me, the harder it was to remain unaffected. “Someone helped you change into this… new person.”
I spun around so fast, I nearly knocked noses with him. He edged back until our faces were a few centimeters apart, and I glared into his eyes, suddenly furious.
“You want to know who changed me?” If looks could kill, he’d be down on the floor, bleeding out. “
You
. You changed me.”
His jaw clenched.
“You broke me, Wes-
whatever-your-real-fucking-name-is
-Adams. You ripped my life to shreds and walked away.” I shoved his shoulders with both hands and screamed a little when he barely even rocked back. “You don’t get to know about my life after you wrecked it. And you certainly don’t get to judge me for how I chose to put myself back together after you shattered me.”
I shoved him again, fighting the tears that were suddenly threatening to pour, and continued to berate him.
“If you don’t like the girl you see in front of you, you have only yourself to blame. You feel like I’m a new person?
Good
. I don’t want to be that fool who believed your lies ever again.” Despite my efforts, I felt a tear slip out from beneath my lashes. When I shouted at him again, my voice cracked with emotion. “You don’t recognize the woman I’ve become?
Perfect
. Now you know what it feels like to look at someone you thought you understood, and realize you never knew them at all.”
“What do you want from me?” he growled, his dark eyes narrowed in anger. The careful restraint he always used was stripped from his voice. “Do you want me to pinky fucking promise that I’m not going to hurt you again? Because I can’t. Grow up. This is the real world, Faith. I’m not accountable for your happiness — no one on this godforsaken planet is.”
“I don’t want anything from you!” I screamed, shoving him again.
My fists pounded against his arms, his shoulders, anywhere I could reach. I was crying full-out now — a sniffing, sniveling mess — and I couldn’t stop the tears streaming down my face any more than I could stop the words flowing from my mouth.
“You’re the devil.”
My vision was blurred, my voice clogged with grief as I struck him again and again with balled fists. He didn’t move, didn’t speak; he just stood there and let me hit him.
“You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
My voice broke on the last word and I felt something deep inside me break, too. Anger dissolved as quickly as it had materialized, replaced by sorrow so deep, shouldering it instantly fatigued me.
Strength sapped from my limbs, my blows subsided into feeble strikes against his chest. I thought I might collapse under the weight of my own broken heart.
“I hate you,” I whispered weakly, the heat of my anger gone. “I hate you so much.”
I’d never been a very good liar.
***
THREE YEARS EARLIER
***
PART ONE
BUDAPEST
IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
There’s a monster in the dark, darling. Hiding under your bed, lurking in your closet.
Are you scared yet, little girl? You should be.
Monsters aren’t all tentacles and teeth. Sometimes, they’re far less obvious — wrapped up in charm and charisma, cloaked behind secrets and seduction. They don’t blunder through blackness, or slither soundlessly through shadows. They
are
the dark — it’s what they’re made of, it’s in their very essence.
Still not frightened, little one?
Open your eyes, then. See the monster you’ve invited into your bed. You can hide under your covers all you like — I’ll hide under there with you. I’m your childhood nightmare, come out to play.
I won’t leave footprints to follow or fingerprints to trace. I’m no Sasquatch you can track through the wilderness, no monster you can spy swimming at the bottom of a deep loch. My calling cards are far more subtle.
A crooked smile. A smoldering look. A broken heart.
I don’t play fair — I don’t believe in it. Life isn’t fair. Why should I be?
What big eyes you have,
the little girl says to the wolf.
All the better to see you — your every soft spot, your every weakness. I’m going to exploit them all.
What big ears you have.
All the better to hear you — your closest-guarded secrets, your innermost thoughts.
What big teeth you have.
Yes, baby. And I’m about to eat your heart out.
LIKE A DREAM
Good things come to those who wait.
Everything happens for a reason.
It’s not about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.
Everyone knew these phrases.
They were everywhere you looked — doodled in the diaries of hopeful young girls. Emblazoned on taped-up college dorm posters. Framed on the walls of doctor’s office waiting rooms. Re-blogged infinite times on social media sites.
They weren’t called
clichés
for nothing.
In a society where “cool” and “cynical” seemed to go hand in hand, these platitudes often induced heavy eye-rolling from the majority of my jaded generation. To most, they were nothing more than pretty, empty words.
But that wasn’t me — never had been.
I wasn’t cool. Not unduly sophisticated, or plagued by a self-inflated sense of worth.
See, I was the loser who actually thought that happy endings existed for everyone in this life. The girl who believed in random acts of kindness and the power of love. The idiot who trusted that reaching for the moon was worth it because, even if you missed, you’d still land among the stars — or so I’d been assured by my Pinterest and Tumblr feeds.
Maybe I was naive. Maybe I was an innocent with wide eyes and a foolish heart. Maybe I really did live up to my name, putting blind faith in things I shouldn’t. But I loved those stupid, vacuous, absurd clichés. They were oddly comforting in this life of mine, where the only constant was change and the only thing consistent was utter inconsistency.
I grew up in a crazy family.
I loved them to pieces, don’t get me wrong. But the Morrissey clan was nuts. Totally, completely, certifiably insane.
First, there were my parents — two 1960s throwbacks who’d never quite stopped being hippies.
Products of their generation, they didn’t believe in corporal punishment, discipline, or any kind of rule-system. Rebellion was welcomed — encouraged, even. For my eighth birthday, I received a pair of platform white go-go boots; for my twelfth, they bought me a hookah; for my eighteenth, they supplied my party with three kegs. Despite their graying hair, they both had a penchant for stocking their wardrobes with far too much tie-dye, they listened almost exclusively to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Hendrix, and they were often caught making out in the kitchen like handsy teenagers — much to the mortification of their six children.
Yes, you heard that right.
Six
children.
And, as the baby of the family, you can bet your ass that I wasn’t the only one who wound up with a flower-power-generation name. From oldest to youngest, my three sisters were called Saffron, Meadow, and Rain. My two older brothers were partly spared this humiliation, given that male hippie names were a little harder to get away with if you wanted your son to survive grade school unscathed. My brother Dylan was the namesake of a particular favorite, famous folk hero my parents adored in their youth. And let’s just say, Lennon’s childhood bedroom was top-to-bottom Beatles lyrics for a reason.
I got lucky, I suppose. Maybe by the time they popped me out, my parents had given up on the truly Looney-Tunes names at the top of their list and decided to pick something a bit more reasonable. I felt justified in making that assumption, given the fact that my license didn’t read “Starshine Love Morrissey” but instead, “Faith Moon Morrissey.”
Still a hippie name, but at least passably normal.
On the contrary, there was nothing even
remotely
normal about being the youngest of six siblings in a house with very little parental guidance. My entire childhood was spent playing one everlasting game of catch-up.
My three sisters were eleven, nine, and seven years older than me, which meant that by the time I was formulating basic two-word sentences, even the youngest of them was filling out her training bra and gossiping about potential boyfriends. My interests — which mainly included teething and tinker toys — didn’t exactly leave us with a lot of common ground. I suffered through a decade of hand-me-down clothing and absent parenting, waiting for years to get older, to grow bigger. Praying for the day that things would finally change. And they did, eventually — just not in the way I’d been expecting.
I wasn’t welcomed into the Ya-Ya Sisterhood with open arms. My sisters didn’t become my friends; they became three more mother-figures whose “sage” advice I may’ve needed but rarely heeded.
Dylan and Lennon were closer to me in age — just five and three years older — but, as every little sister in history knows, there comes a point in every boy’s life when letting your baby sis tag along on your adventures is no longer acceptable. Plus, they were boys. I could play LEGOs and army tank with the best of them, but after ten years of scraped knees and tomboyish-tendencies, I was ready for a change.
My teen years were lonely.
All three of my sisters had moved out of the house, by that point — off at college or settling down with their own families halfway across the country, in places so far from our sprawling California farm house, years would pass between their oft-promised holiday visits.
They left and the house was suddenly quiet — or, if not quiet, then at least
quieter
— and I could hear myself think for a change. There was no more of Saffron’s screeching into her cellphone at all hours of the night, no girly pop music blasting from Meadow’s speakers, no rhythmic
thwack-thwack-thwack
of Rainey’s field hockey stick in the back yard. Dylan and Lennon, typical teenage boys, were out partying with their friends half the time and passed out in a dead sleep the other half.
There was silence at last in the Morrissey manor.
And in that unforeseen quietude, I — for the first time ever — could finally stop playing that game of catch-up. I stopped rushing full-speed toward my siblings. I let them fade out of sight, around a distant corner, and I was abruptly alone on the empty, dust-swept road of childhood. I glanced around for a while, apprehensive at my sudden solitary state, before I realized there was nothing left to do but ask, now that they’re all gone…
Who the hell are you, Faith Morrissey?
The saddest moment of my life was when I realized I didn’t have a fucking clue.
***
By the time I turned eighteen, I was overdue for an adventure.
I’d graduated from high school and broken up with Conor, my high-school sweetheart, who’d done the great service of divesting me of my virginity and walking me through all the typical teenage milestones: homecoming, prom, graduation. No one — not even me — fully understood why I’d ended things with him. He was the perfect, All-American guy — two years older, attending community college, and first in line to inherit his father’s car wash business, even if he secretly harbored greater ambitions. Being with Conor promised security: a safe little life with a big house and a bunch of kids, which never forced me to step foot outside the county I’d been raised in.
But I didn’t want safe. Not anymore.
So, I left a bewildered ex-boyfriend behind with no regrets, and found myself alone at California State University in Bakersfield — just another freshman with an “undecided” major and a case of severe skepticism about what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I’d figured that sensation of mystified self-consciousness would fade as I adjusted to life at school.
It didn’t.
CSUB was only a few hours from my parents’ house and, frankly, after putting five other kids through college and paying for two lavish weddings, it was the only option my parents could afford. I lived in a dorm with a part goth, part punk, full crazy girl named Cindy. She wouldn’t let me call her Cindy, though, insisting that I instead refer to her by her “paranormal” name —
Crimson
.
‘Cause, you know. Vampires. Blood. Red. Crimson.
Yeah.
She wasn’t exactly what I’d call an original thinker, let alone a friend.
So, when I heard about the study abroad opportunity my favorite history professor was coordinating, I didn’t give a damn about the destination. Timbuktu, Athens, Tijuana, Amsterdam… name the city, and I’d be there. As long as it was anywhere but
here
, cloistered in a 10x10 foot cinderblock room with a girl who spent every weekend watching reruns of
Buffy
alone in the dark.
Though my parents were fully supportive of my travel plans, they couldn’t contribute financially. I scrimped and saved for two years until, finally, I had enough money for the down-payment. And only when the check had cleared and I held the flight itinerary in my hands, did I allow myself to be excited.
Senior year in Budapest.
I still remember the giddy feeling I carried inside for weeks leading up to the trip, and the shit-eating grin I couldn’t quite keep off my face as I boarded my first ever plane, which would whisk me away from the only state I’d ever set foot in. I felt as though I was starring in a Hollywood movie version of my life — some glamorous jet-setter, heading off on a year-long European vacation with stars in my eyes.
And the best part? The trip was
mine
.
Just mine. It wasn’t a repurposed, out-of-fashion prom dress or a second-hand pair of shoes one of my older sisters was no longer interested in. It wasn’t the inherited, old bicycle Dylan had no use for anymore, or the beat-up, twenty-year-old SUV I finally got to drive after Lennon left for college.
Budapest belonged solely to Faith Moon Morrissey, and no one else.
I’d wonder later, after it all fell apart… if I’d known how it would turn out, would I have ripped that plane ticket into pieces? Would I have stayed in my quiet little life, married Conor, and chosen never to meet the man who’d splinter my world — and my heart — into fragments?
I still didn’t know the answer to those questions.
And, at the time, I had no idea that Budapest, that the fantasy I was living, wasn’t real.
It was nothing more than a dream — the kind so perfect, so detailed, it feels more authentic than any reality. The kind you never want to wake up from.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
Because while Wes Adams may’ve seemed like a dream come true…
He was actually my own worst nightmare.