Jesus Land (30 page)

A group of boys find a tennis ball under a bush and chuck it against the school building and it echoes loudly
poing poing poing
. One of them is Tommy Atherton, a seventeen-year-old Californian whom Susan and I secretly call “The Clydesdale.”

We’d both like to have unfitting corporal contact with Tommy; he’s got a basketball player’s physique and talks like Sean Penn in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
. We suck the chocolate from our tongues and watch his tan biceps curl beneath the sleeve of his lavender polo shirt as he chucks the ball against the wall.

When a housefather roars at the boys to stop, they arrange themselves in a glum circle and toss the ball to each other underhanded. Tommy sees us staring at him and grins, and Susan perks up, sticking out her boobs and grinning back. When he sees this, Tommy smiles wider, and Susan sticks her boobs out further.

“You look real stupid doing that,” I tell her, sore because I have no boobs to stick out. She ignores me.

A whistle blows to signal the end of Social Time, and Susan and I reluctantly stand to join the other girls.

No one notices that Jolene’s gone until we’ve lined up to march back up the hill and there’s an empty space behind me.

Bruce and Becky run back through the courtyard shouting Jolene’s name. They’re joined by other staffers who poke flashlights into the classrooms and toilets calling “Jolene! Time to go, Jolene!” as if she’d simply misplaced herself. Susan and I exchange a wide-eyed look; we know better.

Ted struts around with his hands on his hips, barking orders. The Dominican guard trots up with his German shepherd and machete to consult with Ted and lopes off into the darkness, shouting in Spanish.

She’s gone. Vanished onto the Dominican side of the barbed wire.

Bruce and the other men pile into the school’s two vans, and the vehicles careen through the front gate, tires spitting gravel, and shoot down the narrow road toward Jarabacoa. We listen to them fade into the distance, and then Becky turns to us, her face as pale as a mushroom.

“Let’s go,” she says, her voice barely a whisper.

We walk up to Starr under the moon’s unblinking gaze in deep silence, no one daring give voice to the thought swirling through her head:

She’s free.

The vans growl back up the hill a few hours later. I’m awake and thinking about Jolene and listening to the girls in the bunks around me as they sigh and moan and cry out at the demons who pursue them even in their sleep. Tires crunch over Starr’s driveway, a metal door slams, then footsteps clack across the
tiles into the houseparents’ quarters. Bruce, returning without Jolene.

At the breakfast table, Bruce says Jolene made it all the way to the village by hiding in the shrubs alongside the road; the men passed her several times before one of them looked through the back van window and saw her metallic silver purse sparkling in the moonlight. I stare into my grape oatmeal as he speaks and imagine her tottering down the dirt road in her gray satin pumps, her white eyelet dress glowing in the moonlight.
Did she have a plan, or was she blinded by panic? Was she happy? For a small while at least
?

They hauled her back to the property and locked her in the room at the end of the courtyard where I spent my first night. Kids call it “The Hole.”

After lunch, Ted Schlund tells us to remain seated for a special function and I prepare myself for the worst. David and I exchange a grim look across the picnic tables before Bruce leads Jolene into the courtyard, where she is seated on a stool before us. She’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and she perches on the stool with her back curved in defeat, her platinum hair snarled with knots and draped over her face like a corn tassel.

Ted quotes some scripture and makes some pronouncements, but my attention’s fastened on the scissors in his hand. When he’s done talking, he grabs a fistful of Jolene’s hair at her neck and nips in with the long blades. A thick swath drifts to the ground, where it is dragged over the brick courtyard by a gust of wind.

By the time Ted has finished with her, Jolene’s pride and joy winds around the bushes, the table legs, and our shoes in a vast golden spider web. Jolene slouches on the stool with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her pale face naked to the sun, her eyes closed. Her hair has been reduced to a jagged butch cut
that’s blond at the tips and black underneath, her natural color. She looks like a punk rock star; all she needs is a safety pin in her ear.

Ted prays aloud for God to help her accept this punishment, and we echo his “Amen” in a mumbled chorus before he dismisses us for the class.

On Sunday afternoon, I stand before Bruce to recite Bible verses, then prostrate myself before him to do leg lifts and push-ups and suicides. The house votes to approve my promotion to First Level, and suddenly I can move without asking and use the bathroom without an audience. And these simple freedoms— which just two weeks ago were as natural to me as breathing air—fill me with awe, and I circle the house several times, marveling at the ease of it all.

Bruce pins a silver-colored medal on my T-shirt that says “Achievement” and tells me I’m now entitled to use one make -up item and one accessory. He returns my safari hat, and I thank him before walking into the kitchen to spit on it and stuff it deep into the garbage can.

Two more weeks of this playacting, and they’ll let me talk to David.

First Level also means I can read a letter Scott sent a week ago. I carry it around unopened for days, savoring the anticipation of opening it, prolonging the suspense.

The staff have already scrutinized the letter and taped it back into its envelope, but I don’t care. A letter is proof that I once lived in the real world beyond the barbed wire fence, and that the real world has not forgotten me.

Between classes, I take Scott’s letter out of my backpack and trace his cramped handwriting with a fingertip, imagining his
fingers gripping the blue pen that scrawled my name. His tongue licking the back flap. His callused palm smoothing it shut, the same callused palm that skimmed my back as we lay in bed after sex. At night, I sniff the letter for traces of his musk and sleep with it under my pillow.

On a Friday evening, I sit on the patio during Free Time to open it while everyone else plays Scrabble at the long wood table and Sandi Patti wails on the house cassette player. The small speakers make her voice all the more annoying. Thank God that batteries are hard to come by in the Third World, so we’re restricted to only one hour of Jesus music a night.

I peel the tape off the envelope and pull out the letter. Black marker blots out half the words.
Jerks
. I wonder how much of my letters to David were crossed out as well. Now I believe that he couldn’t warn me about this place—Bruce and Becky check our letters home for “negativity” and “lies” about The Program, and if they find a hint of nonconformity, they dock our points and make us rewrite them. I quickly learned not to refer to Escuela Caribe as a concentration camp after scoring a 1 in the School— Attitude box. Our parents must continue paying our tuition, and The Program must go on.

I read Scott’s letter in the gaslight as the evening breeze tugs at the corners of the page.

Dear Julia,

My love, it’s only been a few days since you’ve left but it feels like an eternity.

After you got on the plane, I had some “words” with the bitch and bastard. I told your dad he was a
and a
and that if he wanted to
, then
. ’Course your mom pulled him away, and that was that. Reckon they didn’t want a scandal to ruin the good doctor’s name.

Since you’ve gone, I’ve scarcely moved from my room. I don’t have energy to do anything. When the boys came round the other day to see if I was up for shooting squirrels I told them no, I’d rather
.

I can’t stop thinking about you, about how they seperated us like this. Even as I write this, my hands are shaking. I want to be with you and in you so bad it hurts. I miss your
and the way your
when we
. But it’s not just
, it’s you, the way you are good to me in ways no one understands.

I’ve never felt this way before, this pain is the first I’ve suffered purely from emotional problems. You are my first, last, and only love. When this is all over I want you to come back to me and be mine. And if you want, I will marry you.

Yours 4 Ever,
Scott