Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (13 page)

“Pierce Masterson.” I look up at her. “They keep saying that name. ‘The Church's most brilliant scholar,' Peter said.”

Harp nods and finds her voice. “Look at the inside cover.”

I open the book. The author photo shows a man with a thin face, a high hairline, eyes so pale they're nearly translucent. He smirks at the camera, and I grin back. Because this is not the first time I've seen him. He sat to the left of Michelle Mulvey on the screen in Frick's compound.

“The third Angel.” I hand the book to Winnie. “Pierce Masterson is the third Angel.”

“Oh my God.” Winnie stands, staring at Masterson's photo. “We should have known—this dude's everywhere. I'll catch up with you later—I need to go tell Diego.”

She races from the room, book in hand, and Harp waits for the door to slam behind her before giving me an issue of our favorite Church magazine,
Godly Girl!
There's a grinning all-American boy on the cover, and my eyes skip over the headlines (
SECOND BOAT FASHION: 167 UNFORGETTABLE LOOKS FOR YOUR DAY OF ASCENSION
;
CAN GOD READ YOUR TEXT MESSAGES?
), but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing here.

“Thanks, Harp, but I've read enough of this shit to last me my possibly very short lifetime.”

Harp shakes her head, pokes her finger so hard at the cover that she knocks the magazine out of my hands. “The cover model, dummy! Look at the goddamn cover model!”

I pick
Godly Girl!
up again and force myself to look at him. He's older than we are, with gold ringlets and tan skin. He wears a T-shirt and blue jeans and smiles disarmingly, broad forearms crossed carelessly across his chest. He's very handsome, and just looking at him, at the confidence in his warm eyes, I can tell he knows it. It's this quality, this self-assuredness, that makes me finally recognize him. When I do, I let out a faint cry and search for his name in the text. It only takes me a moment to find it.

Dylan Marx: Our Godly Gorgeous New Fave Spills the Deets on His Apocalypse Plans—and Describes His Dream Wife!

Somehow, Raj Janda's old boyfriend has ended up a Church of America cover boy.

Harp and I sit side by side, the issue of
Godly Girl!
splayed across our knees. We consume the feature on our old friend Dylan Marx with the same level of rapt absorption as the hormonal tween Believers for whom the magazine is written.

Dylan appears on five pages of
Godly Girl!
Four are just photos, primly sexy shots of him in a variety of dumb poses: rowing a canoe in a checkered button-up; in a tux, holding a bouquet toward the camera, glancing shyly through his curls; kneeling before a portrait of Frick, palms together, solemn eyes focused on the prophet's face.
“What the fuck is this?!”
Harp says each time I turn the page. “What the fuck is this?” At the corner of each page is a list of prices on all the clothes he wears, available at the Church of America website. What this is is an ad. What remains unclear is how Dylan ended up in it.

On the fifth page there's an interview we snatch up hungrily, eager for any clues as to why Dylan is shilling menswear for the Church. Instead we find questions such as
Can you describe your dream girl?
and
What do you look for in a potential wife?

“She has a penis,” Harp remarks, deadpan, “and is, in fact, a man.”

I shush her to concentrate on Dylan's reply:

I love girls of all shapes and sizes, but when I settle down, it will be with a woman who loves the same three
F
s I do: food, football, and Our Heavenly Father!

“ARE WE IN HELL RIGHT NOW?” Harp shouts in my ear. “Vivian, I think we might be in my personal hell!”

The questions never stray far from the territory of
Do you like girls/Jesus?
and
How much do you like girls/Jesus?
All Dylan's answers read to me as desperately insistent that he likes both very, very much. (
“The perfect date? That's easy! Taking a girl to church is the surest way to find out if she's the one for me! Girls look prettiest when they're lit from within by God's holy light!!”
) The interview is surrounded by pastel hearts proclaiming Dylan's virtues:
Handsome! Devout! Your Boyfriend Would Look Great in These Clothes!
It's only in Dylan's last answer that we receive any insight into how and why he ended up in
Godly Girl!
's pages:

Not to be all frowny-town, but how did you feel about being left behind? And what are you doing to prepare for the arrival of the second boat!?

I was initially bummed! My parents embraced eternal splendor in March, but Frick had different plans for me and my little sis, Molly. I've spent this time between Raptures digging deep into my faith to figure out where I went wrong. Luckily, Frick sent me a sign! I was on a bus to New York with Molly in April when I met the Church scout who got me my first modeling job.
And then I realized Frick wanted me to stay behind and encourage Believer girls to stay holy and virtuous, no matter the temptation! Now I'm truly giving back to my community—and getting to wear all these cool, affordable clothes isn't so bad either! [Laughs.] As far as the second boat goes—I plan to look my best, in my new boot-cut Church-brand jeans. I can't wait to greet the Prophet Frick in style!

“Are
we
doing this, somehow?” Harp asks incredulously. “Is there something about us that makes all the boys of our acquaintance turn belatedly evangelical? Maybe we're, like, too
raw
in our intelligence and sensuality.”

“I don't think the rawness of our sensuality was ever an issue for Dylan.” I reread his final answer, trying to make sense of it. “This is too ridiculous. He has to be faking it. Don't you think? The scout spotted him on the bus and Dylan saw easy money, plus stability for him and Molly. So he let the Church believe he believed. I can see him doing that—can't you? It's not like he ever had any sympathy for the Church of America.”

“Neither did Peter,” Harp points out.

“But we knew Dylan longer, and a lot better. And Raj knew him better than either of us. I can't imagine Raj being wrong about him.”

Harp has a faraway look on her face. I wonder if she's thinking about the last time she saw Dylan: when she lashed out at him, blaming him for Raj's death. I watch as she grabs her laptop and searches Dylan's name. Together we marvel at the results. I'd searched for him before—two months ago now, in Keystone—but nothing came up. I hadn't searched since because I was afraid of what I'd find. I thought he was dead—as far as we knew, he'd been on the East Coast during the devastating Hurricane Ruth. But we soon figure out that this push to make him famous is recent and aggressive. The image search is a treasure trove along the same theme as the pics in
Godly Girl!
: Here, Dylan smiles sultrily in front of an American flag. Here, Dylan stands knee-deep in the ocean in a red, white, and blue swimsuit, beckoning to the viewer. Harp finds his Twitter (
PGH boy in the City of Angels! Prayin' for the second boat!
); he has two hundred thousand followers. He tweets in the same cheerful tone as his
Godly Girl!
interview:

Great shoot today over @StyleVirgin! Classy & modest just as @FatherFrick would want. Think you guys are gonna luv these pics! #GodblessUSA.

 

Wow! I love my new @ChurchofAmerica brand water carbonator. Gotta get my fizz on! Seriously tho they make a great product.

 

#LazySaturday working on my car! I am a car buff! Total dude thing. Keep holy the Sabbath tomorrow!

 

Asked to be the new face of @ChurchofAmerica cologne for men: Eden! Soooooo #blessed! Smells great.

 

I'll b @theGrove this afternoon doing a promo event with @GodlyGirl! Come say hi! #Frickblessyou!

It isn't the most egregious of the Church's crimes, but my skin crawls at the way they've turned my friend Dylan—whom I loved in Pittsburgh for being smart, sly, and sharply sarcastic—into this brainless walking advertisement. I'll never understand why Believers cling to this kind of language, this relentless empty optimism, plus all! those! exclamation! points! Maybe the corporation uses it to offset the doom preached on a daily basis—if the corporation's language matched Frick's, people would be too depressed to leave their homes to buy the Church-brand cologne and kitchen appliances. On her screen, Harp pulls up a map of the Grove, apparently a shopping center, which Dylan mentioned in a tweet from just a few hours ago. She traces its proximity to our current location.

“Five and a half miles,” she notes, standing and heading for the door. “Doable. It looks like there's a bus we can take . . . we'll have to get the fare somehow. I have no cash. You think Amanda leaves a stash around?”

“Wait—what are we talking about?”

Harp makes a disbelieving face at me. “You don't seriously expect me to sit here while Dylan Marx is alive in the same city we are—do you?”

“Harp, come on.” I trail her downstairs into the command center, empty now as everyone is scattered across the city on their various missions. “You think you can waltz into a Church-sponsored event and out again with no repercussions? They're looking for us. They have the whole country looking for us.”

“Exactly!” She throws open drawers, searching for secret petty cash. “It would be
so
stupid for us to try this that no one in their right minds will expect it. It's the perfect cover!”

I watch her move to the kitchen. Harp opens a cabinet above the stove, takes out a black tin, and removes the lid. “Ha!” She holds up a wad of small bills. Her grin fades when she sees the anxiety in my expression.

“You don't have to do it, Viv. Just because I'm doing it doesn't mean you have to. You don't magically turn back into the old Vivian Apple every time you make the choice to abide by the rules. But I have to go. Because Raj loved him, and you're right—that's not the real Dylan. They're making him do it or he's doing it to survive, but that isn't him. And maybe I can help him get away from them.”

It's true that I don't want to take chances. I feel like we're already pushing the line with Amanda's militia—Kimberly thinks we're liars and the others think we're reckless; Diego's impression of us as useless teens would probably not be turned around for the better if we were seized at a
Godly Girl!
event in the middle of a bright Los Angeles day. I don't want to betray Winnie's trust. But I look at Harp's face, at the determination set into every line, at that little glimmer of mischief, too—she wants to see Dylan. She's going to see Dylan. And if she's going to get caught, I won't let her get caught alone.

“Lead the way, old sport,” I tell her.

We'd be most incognito in our old Church of America–approved apparel: modest long-sleeved shirts and ankle-length skirts to hide our skin, the source of all temptation. But when Winnie brought us new things to wear, she somehow didn't anticipate our need to blend into a crowd of tween Believers. We try to make ourselves look as different as possible from the pictures of us on the feed. Harp raids the others' bags for bits of disguise; she finds a baseball cap for me and a pair of wire-framed glasses that blur my vision but make me look a few years younger. My sprained hand has mostly healed—Frankie took the splint off last week—but my fingers are still stiff, and I struggle to pull Harp's hair into two tight pigtails. “Hustle up, Apple!” she commands; we don't know how much time we have until the soldiers begin to trickle back home. When we assess ourselves in the bathroom mirror, I note that we don't really look different—we're recognizably ourselves, just more ridiculous. Harp's expression is sober, but she's not deterred.

“Let's move,” she says.

By the time we walk down to the bookstore, Julian's shift is over, which is a relief—he and Harp have this new flirtation, but still I think he'd have stopped us if we tried to get past him. Robbie sits behind the counter. When we walk in, he looks up from his book.

“Where are you going?”

Harp replies simply, “Out”—but one look into Robbie's eyes and I panic.

“Amanda asked us to go on a mission . . . for the blog!” I blurt. “It's secret, so you can't tell anyone.”

Untroubled or uninterested by this burden, Robbie shrugs and returns his eyes to the page. When we step outside into the brutal glare of the sun, the searing dry winds blowing down on us, shivering the leaves of the palms overhead, Harp gives me a look.

“What?”

“You are terrible at lying, Viv. Embarrassingly bad. Have I taught you nothing?”

At the stop down the block, I'm expecting a normal public city bus to pull up, so when the gleaming white shuttle that arrives turns out to be a Church-sponsored one—Sacrificial Rides—I feel a cold sweat break out over my skin. I stand back, ready to let it pass, but Harp pinches my arm and gestures me forward. “It's the only bus there is,” she whispers.

Onboard, I feed my fare into the machine, avoiding eye contact with the driver, hyperaware of the security camera above. There's a large cluster in the center of the bus: elderly women, boys with skateboards, wealthy tourists with sunburned faces. Harp slips into the crowd with ease. I move awkwardly, too aware of my body. One of the skaters glances up as I push my way behind him, and when our eyes meet I instinctively smile—then freeze. My face is visible, but it'd be weirder to duck my head, to hide. So I stand there, smiling politely at him, hoping my eyes don't reveal the terror I feel, until the boy, apparently taking me for a crazy person, makes a face and turns away. When I glance at Harp, I see she's watched the whole exchange with an incredulous look upon her face.