Run
In the beginning, God said “Watch out.”
If you had asked me at the time, I could not have told you where the thought had come from. It was all I could do to sit still. Follow the rules. Sit in my designated seat next to this sweaty girl who clearly gives no fucks—behind the Valley Girl wannabe with the cream leather jacket and poppy lipstick.
“Your laugh is so funny,” Poppy Lips tells me, batting her thick, fake eyelashes. I decide in that moment that everything about her is fake, but I can’t tell her that. That’s rude.
“What do you mean?” I squirm and wriggle my fingers. California heat ain’t got nothing on Georgia steam, but my hormones are going to murder me. I’m sweating through every pore. Thank god for extra strength deodorant.
“Your laugh! It makes me laugh.” Poppy Lips must sense my displeasure because she quickly tries to amend herself. “I mean- It’s a good thing. A good laugh should make other people laugh.”
I look back up to the man on stage. The director of Summit Ministries, Jeff Myers, is on-stage cracking jokes like rotting eggs. He makes Christianity fun. He makes fundamentalism fun.
He makes me sick. All of his jokes are recycled: perfectly manufactured, stale, and sold in cans to be opened whenever he’s in front of an audience of stinking existential teens.
God, I wish I could be somewhere else.
“I’m happy my laugh makes you happy.”
That makes Poppy Lips flash her fake smile. “Thanks!”
Mom always told me I was diplomatic.
My diplomatic self wants nothing less than for a well-placed drone strike to erase Biola University’s auditorium. God answers prayer. God sometimes answers prayer Editor reminds me.
“If you blow me up, I promise I’ll never be an atheist.”
No response.
The girl next to me thinks I’m losing my mind. She keeps her eyes fixed ahead, but I can hear her thoughts. Why did they sit me next to the homeschooled freak.
Technically, over half of the students in the auditorium were homeschooled freaks. Not this chick though. She was normal. Tragic.
It’s foolish to wish for God to send a drone. God doesn’t kill people—unless they deserve it.
I wonder what I have to do to deserve a drone strike.
I fix my gaze longingly to the doors behind me. I’m sitting at the very edge of the row. I’ve been stuck in this same seat for fourteen days, waiting for something exciting to happen. There’s a notebook that sits in my lap with the Summit Ministries logo in gray on the front. It’s hungry for my sins — my cruel honesty. Scribbled between its pages are my dark confessions.
Once in first grade, I told fibs that a kid punched me in the stomach and got him in serious trouble. He didn’t deserve it, and I have no insight as to what possessed me to do that.
That confession is there.
One time, in the elevator on the way home from CRCT testing, I threw my siblings under the proverbial bus because I didn’t want to get in trouble with a disgruntled city official.
Fourth grade. Classy.
I bullied my younger brother because I didn’t understand his Tourette’s. I was an awful big brother.
Yep. Also there.
Exulaitymohos.
We were asked to put our sins into code if we felt uncomfortable writing them down.
I love a good code. My introduction to cryptography was a little blue book at the local library at the end of the 2nd shelf facing the children’s fiction section. It was just hidden from the main desk and from where my mother would sit plotting the school year for me and my siblings.
The golden cypher is the one in the trashcan. No one throws away what they think is valuable. However, if an unintended target comes across the cypher, thinks nothing of it, and throws it away, then you know you have a winning code.
In hindsight, my code wasn’t superb. You wouldn’t need that contraption at Bletchley Park to crack it. But it certainly kept the airhead next to me from asking any questions. She was too focused on her own shortcomings to be worried about mine.
Poppy Lips wants to know what the poor soul next to her wrote down. She’s laughing as if sin is some grand game and she’s winning. She shows her cards — she’s just doodling. A poodle? A Tyrannosaurus Rex? The world may never know.
She turns to me. Smacking gum. “What about you?”
I slam the cover of my notebook shut. It’s already closed so all I end up doing is slamming my fist into its cover. My face turns Georgian red.
“Nothing. I’m perfect.”
Her eyes gloss me up and down in my stained tennis shoes, ill-fitting shorts, and empty gray tee. “That a fact?” She grows bored with me and turns back around. She only likes me when I laugh.
I look back at the doors. One of those cultish attendants in the blue staff shirt by the exit sees me watching. They’ve been trained to see the signs. First, there’s the nervous antics. The fidgeting. The sweats. The drinking excessive water. Next, there’s the boredom. A creative student seeking escape will glance around the room and pretend it’s anything else. Maybe it’s on fire; maybe a villain is charging through the door and uses magic to tear the speaker in three (my personal favorite); maybe everyone contracts syphilis. Finally, the dead giveaway, the student glances to the exit. If you do that, and They see you, the jig is up.
Sleep is too obvious an escape. That’ll get you in trouble too quickly. A well-meaning prison guard will come up to you and nudge you awake.
“You’ll get points for sleeping.”
I do not want to get points. That’s almost as bad as sinning. If I get points, I might have to go and talk to the man on stage. And if that godly intervention doesn’t work, then I’ll have to explain to Mom and Dad why we’re suddenly out a thousand-ish bucks.
No. Escape has to be creative. Clever. Like Bill Mason, the cat-burglar who paid a guy to describe how he hauled his ass up a drainpipe to steal some rich biddy’s pearls. I have to shimmy up drainpipes to get my freedom.
They monitor the bathrooms. They watch the exits. The guards know the tricks.
It’s too early in the timeline for bluetooth earbuds. I saw a student get reprimanded for wearing earbuds to the auditorium. They took his phone away. How twisted. He’d paid to be in the room. Let him be on his phone if he wants. The Christian authoritarians’ hatred of earbuds only makes sense if you realize it’s their weakness.
They can’t make you hate other people if you don’t listen to them.
I don’t want to hate other people.
Some might argue that there are better ways to spend a thousand-ish bucks, but despite appearances this moment is of vital importance. This moment shall either transform me into a promising recruit of truth and justice, or it will shatter me into a bajillion pieces that will make Humpty Dumpty look like a child’s puzzle.
The speaker is different now. I no longer remember his name, but I remember his subject. Islam.
Contradictions. “The Koran is riddled with them,” this man declares. And then, the kicker: “How could any rational person believe in this thing?”
Alarm bells.
“People say the same thing about us.” I uncover a new, fundamental truth about my existence: “Someone is lying to me.”
My breathing comes heavy. Something within me shakes and splits, and I have to avert my eyes. Thunder cracks and something falls into my hands. I can only look down for a few moments before I trigger the guards. But here I have a moment to examine the dull nugget of truth that landed there. It’s a small, frail thing. If I breathe too hard, it might crack.
He’s a gentle Truth.
I lean forward and listen for the thin vibrations that rattle with the weight of the universe. The room goes away. The guards don’t see me.
“What do you want to tell me?” I whisper to God.
“Run.”