The Children's Crusade (37 page)

“What?” Ryan said.

“Nothing.”

James’s fist had come in contact with the gold cross, a small spiky thing under the denim, and he pressed on it until the points of the cross dug through the lining of his pocket and into his leg.

“Listen, J?” Ryan said. “I’m not going to do the mushrooms. It’s good to have someone with you in case anything happens.”

“What could happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just watch you guys. Take care of you.”

James stared at Ryan. It was rare for them to stand so close, and he was more aware than usual of the difference in their sizes. Ryan was four inches shorter than he was and fifty pounds lighter. And he had a worried look on his face.

“The only thing?” he continued. “I’m not going to tell her I’m not doing it.”

“That’s fucked up.”

“It’s the least fucked-up thing I can think of. If I tell her, then she won’t do it, either, and she really wants to.”

“So
I’m
supposed to pretend you did it?”

“If you will.”

When they returned, Sierra had already set out the mushrooms on a white cloth—a cluster of long, slender stems with caps that
looked like flattened moths. There were five or six of them, dried and papery, though when James lifted one to his nose, he nearly gagged from the pungent smell. He asked how many they were each supposed to eat.

“We start with one,” she said. “Then we wait an hour, and if we want it to get more intense we eat another.”

“Is it going to be gross?”

“That’s what the ginger ale is for. Here goes,” she said, and she lifted a mushroom and bit off its cap. She chewed for a moment and cried, “Ewww! It’s disgusting!”

“Spit it out,” Ryan said, cupping his hand in front of her chin.

But she shook her head and chewed vigorously. Quickly, she folded the stem into her mouth and ate it, too. “The ginger ale, the ginger ale,” she said, waving her open hand at Ryan. He seized the bottle and tried to twist off the cap, but it wouldn’t budge. “No way!” she cried.

“Bottle opener,” Ryan said, thrusting the bottle at James and getting to his knees. He grabbed his backpack and said, “Please, please, please.”

“Ryan!” Sierra cried.

Ryan unzipped the main compartment, groped around in the emptiness, and then unzipped the front pocket and felt the paper towels he knew were the only things in there.

“Forget it, I’ll eat something,” she said, and she bit into an apple.

James put down the ginger ale bottle and brought the mushroom to his nose again. Again he nearly gagged. “Walk around a little,” he said to Sierra. “It’ll help, I swear.”

She stood up, retched, and ate more of the apple. Ryan held her.

“I’m not getting sick yet,” she said quickly. “It’s just the taste.”

James had forgotten—if he’d ever known—that mushrooms made you sick. He slipped the mushroom into his pocket while she
wasn’t looking. Then he put his hand to his mouth and made chewing motions. “It’s not that bad,” he said, swallowing air.

She shuddered and took a last bite of the apple. “I’m better,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would be so nasty.”

Ryan turned her gently and pointed to the edge of the meadow. “James is right,” he said. “Walk over and back. You’ll feel better.”

“I already do.”

“But even more,” he said. “You’ll feel good.”

She shrugged and took off, walking normally for a few paces and then beginning to skip. She knew this was silly, obviously not the drug, but she felt like doing it. When she reached the edge of the meadow, she turned around and couldn’t see Ryan and James.

“Hellooooo,” she called.

“Hellooooo,” she heard back, but she couldn’t tell which of them had spoken.

“Hellooooo,” she called again.

“Hellooooo,” she heard.

For the last six months, since Ryan had left for Santa Cruz, she had felt an agitation under the skin that sometimes woke her in the middle of the night and almost always found her in the sinkhole of four p.m. On the days she worked at Sand Hill Day, four was the hour when the teachers finished tidying the classrooms and sat together in the Big Room for tea and review. She had imagined she’d enjoy these sessions, but she found them excruciating in the way they forced her to imagine the incessant sensitivity the same teachers had felt in relation to her needs when she was a student there.

Sex helped with the agitation, and so did driving: when she got out of the car in Santa Cruz, she felt a welcome deadness in her legs and shoulders that was almost as good as the Valium she once tried. Being with her mother made the agitation worse.

She began skipping again, straight back to Ryan and James. She’d
heard the first hour or so could be kind of scary, and she thought that if she got her body into a playful state, perhaps her mind would follow.

“Baby,” Ryan said, opening his arms for her.

“Did you eat yours?”

“Pretty bad. But I had some apple.”

“How are we going to get that bottle open? We’ve got to have something to drink.”

“Baby, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. We’re just at the beginning.”

And so they were—or she was, the unwitting soloist in their psilocybin adventure. James knew she was the only one, whereas Ryan believed both she and James had partaken until about two hours in, by which point Sierra had vomited, complained that she was freezing, wept over the problem of the ginger ale, giggled madly about the idea of James going to the Priory (“the
Priory,
” “the
Priory,
” she kept saying between shrieks of laughter), and finally begged Ryan to massage her shoulders. At last, she took her blanket to the edge of the meadow and lay on her back looking at the trees.

“You didn’t do it, did you?” Ryan said to James.

“What do you mean?”

“I can tell.”

“Neither did you.”

“But I told you. You didn’t tell me.”

James shrugged. “I didn’t feel like it. Let’s walk around.”

They walked without talking, Ryan thinking the whole thing had been a mistake and James recalling a story a friend had told him about babysitting his older sister while she was on an acid trip. James’s friend had said the main thing was that it was incredibly boring, but James hadn’t understood this until now. He had imagined that the person tripping would be describing hallucinations so intense it would be almost as if the person hearing about it were trip
ping, too. But if Sierra had started hallucinating, she hadn’t said anything. At one point she had become incredibly drowsy and stopped talking, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover her asleep.

“Sorry she was laughing about the Priory,” Ryan said.

James pressed his fingertips to the outline of the cross in his pocket.

“But it’s not like you want to go there anyway.”

They’d strolled across the meadow and back, and James flopped onto the blanket and lay on his back. It was almost midnight and very cold. Ryan gathered a couple of apples and the Oriental snack mix and went to Sierra. She looked into his eyes and smiled, but she didn’t say anything. “Hey, baby,” he said. He sat down and felt in the bag for some of the wasabi peas she liked. “Hungry?”

She didn’t speak. After what felt like a long time, she lifted her hand and passed it over the length of her face, closing her eyes in the process as if she were both the mortician and the deceased. “Lie with me,” she said, her voice deep and faraway.

He lay down next to her.

“Did you ever realize,” she said wonderingly, “that the branches of trees are threads in a tapestry?”

“Huh,” he said. “Tell me more.”

She was silent for a long time, and he wondered if she’d fallen asleep or passed into a hallucination from which he wouldn’t be able to retrieve her. He twisted around and tried to make out James through the dark, but he couldn’t.

“It’s warp and woof,” she said. “Like yin and yang.”

“Opposites,” he said, relieved that he could follow some logic.

“Threads,” she said, “are the paint of a tapestry. Trees are the threads of the forest.”

“There’s also wax and wane,” he said. “Hey, where’d the moon go?”

“Lie down with me.”

“I am.”

“Lie on top of me.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “James—”

“Don’t you feel so beautiful?”

“You’re the beautiful one.”

“No, I’m not beautiful, I feel beautiful. My feelings are beautiful. Are yours? The trees are threads. The world is a loom. Lie on top of me. This could be the best sex we’ve ever had.”

“We don’t rank it, do we?”

“I’m not even sure I feel my skin anymore. Please?”

He slid his hand under her shirt and stroked her belly. “Baby, James is right over there.”

“He won’t mind.”

Ryan knew he had put James through some awkward times because of the thinness of the wall between Robert’s room and the room where James slept alone. “I can’t,” he said.

“Hooomp,” she whimpered.

“We didn’t think of this. I wish we’d talked about it.”

“Just touch me.”

He unbuttoned her jeans and slipped his hand down until his fingertips reached the silky band of her panties. He paused there and then continued until he got to her pubic hair.

“Please,” she said.

His middle finger found her spot. When they had to name it, they called it her spot, never her clit. “Clit” sounded rude.

“I’m going to come so fast,” she said. “Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I just think I will.”

“Don’t mind me,” James called. In the moonlight he’d been able to see Ryan’s progress, from sitting to lying to fondling. Or he thought he could, which amounted to the same thing.

Ryan kissed Sierra’s cheek and stood up. “Be right back,” he said, and he crossed to where James was now sitting cross-legged, holding an apple by its stem and banging the fruit lightly against his mouth.

“Is this going to take five more hours?” James said. “It’s after midnight. I’m starving.”

“I don’t know if we can move her.”

“She didn’t break her neck.”

Ryan went to get Sierra while James folded the blankets. He wished he’d stayed home; he would’ve found something to do eventually, or he could’ve watched TV with his dad, big-time fun for a Friday night. He thought of Mr. Calhoun, the man at the Priory, saying they were looking for the best in every young man who went there. If he went, if he wore the dorky shirt and tie, might he become a young man in whom the best could be found? He imagined seeing his family only on holidays: he’d show up and everyone would be incredibly impressed by how mature he was—so impressed, and he’d be so mature, there’d be no need to talk about it.

“Don’t you feel amazing?” Sierra said, surging toward James with her arms out. “Everything is so beautiful. You’re so beautiful.”

“I’m a guy.”

“You’re a beautiful guy. You have a beautiful animal inside you.”

James exchanged a glance with Ryan.

“ ‘Thank you,’ ” Ryan said. “Right, James? ‘Thank you, Sierra.’ ”

It was slow going down from the meadow. “Look at the trees,” Sierra kept saying, stopping and gazing around. “They’re actually threads. There’s a secret tapestry covering the world.”

When they got to the car it was almost two a.m. James and Ryan were both exhausted. Ryan urged Sierra into the backseat and got behind the wheel. As they drove past the Priory, James said, “I think I’ll go there.”

“Ha.”

“No, really. They find the best in every young man.”

“The best in you isn’t lost, J.”

They drove on, the Beetle’s headlights illuminating the empty road. Ryan glanced into the backseat; Sierra was staring vacantly out the window and didn’t notice him. On the driveway he tried to be extra gentle with the gears to keep the sound low. He parked next to the Accord and cut the engine. “Phew,” he said softly.

James slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out the cross. He tossed it onto the dashboard and said, “I stole that.”

Ryan looked surprised. “At the Priory?”

James considered correcting him but didn’t. They sat side by side, Ryan looking at the evidence of James’s bad character, James nearly holding his breath, he was so nervous about what Ryan would say. He was expecting to be yelled at, but Ryan never did that.

“James,” Ryan said softly. “It’s okay. You can take it back.”

“You don’t think I’ll burn in hell?”

“We don’t believe in hell. That’s the beauty.”

There was a gasp from the backseat. They both turned around, and Sierra was smiling rapturously. She clapped her hands together three times and then leaned forward and rested her forearms on their seat backs. “That’s why he stopped me,” she said. “That’s why.”

Ryan didn’t say anything, but James felt him tense up.

“Martin Degenhart.” She dug in her back pocket and withdrew a worn leather wallet from which she took a business card that had been fondled so much its edges were soft. She held out the card. “It’s the difference between beauty and beautiful. He stopped me because of beauty.”

Ryan looked at his lap.

“It’s not being a beautiful girl,” she said. “It’s being a girl who has beauty. The trees are threads. They have beauty.”

James couldn’t take any more, and he grabbed the cross and got out of the car. The night had gotten clearer, the moon brighter.
Father, guide me,
he thought. But he wasn’t sure if he meant his dad or God, and he felt like an idiot and kicked at the gravel.

Ryan and Sierra were out of the car, too. They all started toward the laundry room, but after a few paces Sierra stopped and said, “There’s the oak tree.”

Each of them looked at the thick twisting branches, heavy ink brushstrokes on charcoal canvas. “I love that tree,” she said. “And if you think about it, Martin Degenhart is a funny name. He’s famous. I told you that, right, baby? That he’s famous?”

“Aren’t you coming down a little?” Ryan said. “I am. James, are you?”

Sierra held up her arms and began to goose-step, like a child doing Frankenstein. “Degen Martinhart. That’s what his name should be. His hair is so straight. He takes pictures for
Vogue
.”

“Let’s not talk about him right now,” Ryan said. “I think we should go inside.”