Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2016 by Garrard Conley

Artwork © 2018 Focus Features LLC

Garrard Conley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008276980

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008276997

Version: 2018-11-19

Dedication

For my parents

Epigraph

Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

—FLANNERY O’CONNOR, “REVELATION”

If I’m looking at that wall and suddenly I say, “It’s blue,” and someone else comes along and says, “No, no. It’s gold.” But I want to believe that that wall is blue. It’s blue, it’s blue, it’s blue. But then God comes along, and He says, “You’re right, John, it is blue.” That’s the help I need. God can help me make that wall blue.

—EX-GAY LEADER JOHN SMID, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH THE Memphis Flyer

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Timeline of the Ex-gay Movement

I

Monday, June 7, 2004

The Plain Dealers

Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Other Boys

Friday, June 11, 2004

Prisoner’s Cinema

II

The Smallest Details

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Diagnosis

Monday, June 14, 2004

Self-Portrait

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

During my time at Love in Action (LIA), no journaling, photographing, or any other method of recording was allowed inside the facility. To that effect, all events, physical descriptions, and dialogue have been reconstructed to the best of my ability. My mother’s and my memories, LIA’s ex-gay handbook, newspaper articles, blog posts, and personal interviews have supplemented the empty spaces where trauma has made dark what was once painfully clear. As in most memoirs, the chronology is accurate, altered only in places where the narrative requires it. I have excluded details that seemed irrelevant to the nature of the story. The names and certain identifying characteristics of some key figures in my life, including Chloe, Brandon, David, Brad, Brother Stevens, and Brother Neilson have been changed.

I wish none of this had ever happened. Sometimes I thank God that it did.

I

Monday, June 7, 2004

John Smid stood tall, square shouldered, beaming behind thin wire-rimmed glasses and wearing the khaki slacks and striped button-down that have become standard fatigues for evangelical men across the country. The raised outlines of his undershirt stretched taut beneath his shirt, his graying blond hair tamed by the size-five hair clippers common in Sport Clips throughout the South. The rest of us sat in a semicircle facing him, all dressed according to the program dress code outlined in our 274-page handbooks.

Men: Shirts worn at all times, including periods of sleep. T-shirts without sleeves not permitted, whether worn as outer- or undergarments, including “muscle shirts” or other tank tops. Facial hair removed seven days weekly. Sideburns never below top of ear.

Women: Bras worn at all times, exceptions during sleep. Skirts must fall at the knee or below. Tank tops allowed only if worn with a blouse. Legs and underarms shaved at least twice weekly.

“The first thing you have to do is recognize how you’ve become dependent on sex, on things that are not from God,” Smid said. We were learning Step One of Love in Action’s Twelve Step program, a set of principles equating the sins of infidelity, bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality to addictive behavior such as alcoholism or gambling: a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for what counselors referred to as our “sexual deviance.”

Sitting alone with him just hours before in his office, I had witnessed a different man: a kinder, goofier Smid, a middle-aged class clown willing to resort to any antic to make me smile. He had treated me like a child, and I had relaxed into the role, being nineteen at the time. He told me I had come to the right place, that Love in Action would cure me, lift me out of my sin into the light of God’s glory. His office seemed bright enough to substantiate his claim, the walls bare save for the occasional framed newspaper clipping or embroidered Bible verse. Outside his window was an empty plot of land, rare around this suburban subdivision, an untended grassy mess peppered with neon dandelions and their thousands of seed heads that would scatter across the highway by the end of the week.

“We try to blend several models of treatment,” Smid had assured me, swiveling in his office chair to face the window. An orange sun was climbing its way up the back of the hazy whitewashed buildings in the distance. I waited for the sunlight to spill over, but the longer I watched, the longer it seemed to take. I wondered if this was how time was going to work in this place: minutes as hours, hours as days, days as weeks.

“Once you enter the group, you’ll be well on your way to recovery,” Smid said. “The important thing to remember is to keep an open mind.”

I was here by my own choice, despite my growing skepticism, despite my secret wish to run away from the shame I’d felt since my parents found out I was gay. I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the increasingly blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler.

God, I prayed, leaving the office and making my way down the narrow hallway to the main room, the fluorescents ticking in their metal grids, I don’t know who You are anymore, but please give me the wisdom to survive this.

A FEW HOURS LATER, sitting in the middle of Smid’s circle, I was waiting for God to join me.

“You’re no better and no worse than any other sinner in this world,” Smid said. He kept his arms crossed behind his back, his whole body tense, as if he were tied to an invisible plank. “God sees all sin in the same light.”

I nodded along with the others. The ex-gay lingo had by now become familiar to me, though it had come as a shock when I’d first read it on the facility’s website, when I’d first learned that the homosexuality I’d been trying to ignore for most of my life was likely “out of control,” that I could end up messing around with someone’s dog if I didn’t cure myself. As absurd as the idea seems in hindsight, I had little else to go on. I was still young enough to have had only a few fleeting experiences with other men. Before college, I’d met only one openly gay man, my mother’s hairdresser, a bearish type who spent most of his time filling out what I saw as a stereotype: complimenting my looks; gossiping about coworkers; discussing plans for his next fabulous Christmas party, his pristine white beard already sculpted for the role of Dirty Santa. The rest of my bigotry I learned from pantomime: limp wrists and exaggerated sashays from mocking church members; phrases that lifted out of natural speech into show-tune lilt—“Oh, you shouldn’t have”; church petitions that had to be signed in order to keep our country safe from “perverts.” The flash of neon spandex, the rustle of a feather boa, the tight ass shaking for the camera: What I did manage to see on TV just seemed further proof that being gay was freakish, unnatural.

“You need to understand one very important fact,” Smid said, his voice so close I could feel it in my chest. “You’re using sexual sin to fill a God-shaped void in your life.”

I was here. No one could say I wasn’t trying.

THE MAIN ROOM was small and halogen lit, with one sliding door opening onto a sun-sick concrete porch. Our group sat in padded folding chairs near the front. On the walls behind us hung the laminated Twelve Steps that promised a slow but steady cure. Aside from these posters, the walls were mostly empty. Here, there were no crucifixes, no stations of the cross. Here, such iconography was considered idolatry, along with astrology, Dungeons & Dragons, Eastern religions, Ouija boards, Satanism, and yoga.

LIA had taken a more extreme stance against the secular world than any of the churches I’d grown up in, though the counselors’ way of thinking was not unfamiliar to me. Within the fundamentalist strain of Christianity that goes by the name Baptist, my family’s denomination, Missionary Baptist, forbade anything that had the power to distract the soul from direct communication with God and the Bible. Many of the other hundred or so denominations that comprised the Baptist spectrum often quibbled about what could or could not be permitted within the flock, with some churches taking these issues more seriously than others, subjects like the ethics of dancing and the pitfalls of non-Biblical reading still up for discussion. “Harry Potter is nothing more than a seducer of children’s souls,” a visiting Baptist preacher once told our family’s church. I had no doubt that my LIA counselors would also shun any mention of Harry Potter, that my time spent in Hogwarts would have to remain a private pleasure, and that I had entered into an even more serious pact with God by coming here, one that required me to abolish most of what had come before LIA. Before entering this room, I had been told to cast aside everything but my Bible and my handbook.

Since most of LIA’s customers had grown up within this literal-minded Protestantism and were desperate for a cure, the counselors’ strict rules were met with mild applause. The unadorned white walls of the facility seemed appropriate decor for a waiting room in which we would wait to receive God’s forgiveness. Even classical music was forbidden—“Beethoven, Bach, etc. are not considered Christian”—a heavy silence blanketing the room during our morning Quiet Time, drifting into our daily activities and inspiring an atmosphere that seemed if not holy, then at least not secular.

The study area at the back of the room, home to a bookshelf filled with inspirational literature and a hefty stack of Bibles, contained dozens of testimonies from successful ex-gays.

“Slowly yet surely I began to recover,” I’d read that morning, squeaking my finger down the glossy page. “I began to recover from not having a male friend unless it involved sex. I started learning who I really was, instead of the false personality I created to make myself acceptable.”

I HAD SPENT the last several months trying to erase my “false personality.” I’d walked out of my college dorm one winter day and jumped into the campus’s half-frozen lake. Shivering, I walked back to the dorm in water-suctioned shoes, feeling rebaptized. In the hot shower that followed, I watched, dazed by the shock of icy heat on my numb skin, as a drop of water traced the edge of the showerhead. I prayed, Lord, make me as pure as that.

During my stay at Love in Action, I would repeat the prayer until it became a kind of mantra. Lord, make me as pure as that.

I REMEMBER little about the ride to the facility with my mother. I had tried to look away, to prevent my mind from recording what passed by outside the passenger’s-side window, though a few details remained: the muddy caramel-colored Mississippi passing behind the steel girders of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, the scale of our American Nile feeling like the perfect stimulant for my uncaffeinated mind; the glass pyramid glittering at the edge of the city, spreading its hot light across our windshield. It was early June, and by midmorning almost every surface in the city would be too hot to touch for more than a few seconds, everything sweltering by noon. The only relief came in the morning, the sun resting at the edge of the horizon, still only a suggestion of light.

“Surely they could afford something better than this,” my mother said, steering us into a parking space at the front of a rectangular strip mall. The location was more upscale than much of rest of the city, part of a wealthier suburb, though this strip mall was arguably the least attractive landmark for miles around, a place for lower-end retail stores and small clinics to find a temporary home. Whitewashed red brick and glass. Double doors that opened onto a white foyer with fake plants. A logo above the entrance: inverted red triangle with a heart-shaped hole cut out of the middle of it, a series of thin white lines spreading across the gap. We stepped out of the car and headed toward the doors, my mother always a few steps ahead.

Once we entered the foyer, a smiling receptionist asked me to sign my name in a ledger. The man looked to be in his midtwenties. He wore a polo shirt that fell loosely from his chest, and his eyes were a bright honest cobalt. I’d been expecting some wan-faced wraith who’d already erased everything interesting about himself. Instead, here was someone who looked like he’d be willing to play a few rounds of Halo with me, then use video-game analogies to tell me a little about what God had done for him. You have to fight against the enemies, the aliens trying to invade your soul. I’d met plenty of hip youth pastors with a similar look and attitude.

I can no longer remember his name. I can no longer remember if there were any signs in that foyer of what was to come, any paintings on the wall, any rules posted. The foyer exists for me now as a blindingly white waiting room, the kind you see in Hollywood depictions of heaven: a blank space.

“Can I see the place?” my mother asked. Something about the way her voice lifted into a polite question made me feel uneasy, as if she were asking to look at real estate.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said. “Only clients allowed in the back. Security reasons.”

“Security?”

“Yes, ma’am. Many of our clients deal with repressed family issues. Seeing a parent, no matter whose parent, no matter if it’s someone nice like you”—a winning, deep-dimpled smile—“can be a little unsettling. That’s why we call this a safe zone.” He stretched out both his arms at his sides, sweeping them wide—slowly and a little rigidly, I thought, as though his movements had once been much grander and he had since learned to rein them in. “Since you’re only in the two-week program, you’ll have access to your son at all hours except program time.”

Program time would be from nine to five. Evenings, nights, and early mornings I would spend with my mother in a Hampton Inn & Suites nearby, leaving the room only for necessities. I was supposed to spend the majority of my free time in the room doing homework for the next day’s session. The schedule sheet the receptionist handed me was fairly straightforward, with each hour accounted for in a black-bordered square, words like “quiet time” and “activity time” and “counseling” written in all caps.

The receptionist handed me a thick LIA handbook and a folder. I opened the handbook, its plastic spine crackling, and was greeted by a black-and-white welcome note with my name printed in large type. Beneath my name, a few Bible verses, Psalms 32:5–6, written in a casual modern English different from the formal King James Version I’d grown up with.

I finally admitted all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, I will confess them to the Lord; and you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.

I flipped through the pages at random as my mother peered over my shoulder. I wanted to close the book the minute I saw the obvious typos and clip-art graphics. I wanted my mother to think the best of the place before she left, not because I felt like defending the poorly designed handbook, but because I wanted the moment to pass as quickly as possible without any more of her overly polite interrogations. If she started asking questions about design and casual Bible language, she might start asking questions about qualifications, about why we were even here in the first place, and I knew this would only make things worse. Questions only prolonged the pain of these moments, and they almost always went unanswered. I was done with asking questions about how I had ended up in this situation, with searching for other answers, other realities, other families or bodies I could have been born into. Every time I realized that there weren’t any other alternatives, I felt worse for asking. I was ready to take things as they came now.

“Call me if you need anything.” my mother said, squeezing my shoulder. She was all blond hair and heavy blue mascara, blue eyes and a perennial floral-print top: a spot of Technicolor in this drab place.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said, “but we have to keep his phone while he’s here.” For security reasons. “We’ll inform you if anything important pops up.”

“Do you think that’s necessary?”

My mother and the receptionist finished their conversation—“It’s the rules, ma’am. It’s in his best interest”—and then my mother was saying good-bye, telling me she was headed off to check us into the hotel, that she would be back to pick me up at five o’clock sharp. She hugged me, and I watched her go, her head high, her shoulders square, the glass double doors swinging closed behind her with a sigh from their pneumatic hinges. I’d seen her like this once before, during the year both my grandparents died. She had carried me through that year, patted a space for me next to her on the sofa as visitors wove in and out of our living room carrying casseroles and baskets filled with glazed pastries. She had run her fingers through my hair and whispered that death was a process, that my grandparents had both lived happy lives. I wondered if this was how she felt now, if she thought that LIA was part of a necessary process—difficult, yes, but easier to accept once you knew it was part of God’s plan.

“Let’s get you checked in,” the receptionist said.

I followed him to another room, also white walled and empty, where a blond-haired boy stood beside a table and asked me to remove everything in my pockets. The boy was barely older than I was, perhaps twenty, and he carried an air of authority that made me think he’d been here a while. He was handsome in a svelte, twinkish way, tall and angular, though he wasn’t my type. Then again, I didn’t really know what my type was.

On the nights when I’d allowed myself to look up images of men in underwear on line, I’d only been able get halfway down the page, the pixels threading strand by strand in a slow-motion striptease, before I felt the need to exit the browser and try to forget what I’d seen, the laptop growing too hot in my lap. There were flashes, of course, hints of attraction emerging in my occasional fantasies—a toned bicep here, the sharp V of a pelvis there, a collage of various dimples beneath a series of aquiline noses—but the picture was never complete.

The blond-haired boy waited, tapping his index finger on the folding table between us. I dug in my pockets and removed my cell phone, a black Motorola RAZR whose small screen suddenly lit up with an image of the lake, my college campus’s obligatory slice of nature: a few maple trees clustered around a glassy surface. The blond-haired boy scrunched up his nose at the sight of it, as though there were something perverse lurking under the peaceful scene.

“I’m going to have to look through all your pictures,” he said. “Messages, too.”

“Standard procedure,” the receptionist explained. “All pictures will be taken for the purpose of sobering reevaluation.” He was quoting from the False Images (FI) section of the handbook, a section I would later be asked to memorize.

We want to encourage each client, male and female, by affirming your gender identity. We also want each client to pursue integrity in all his/her actions and appearances. Therefore, any belongings, appearances, clothing, actions, or humor that might connect you to an inappropriate past are excluded from the program. These hindrances are called False Images (FI). FI behavior may include hyper-masculinity, seductive clothing, mannish/boyish attire (on women), excessive jewelry (on men), and “campy” or gay/lesbian behavior and talk.

I looked down at my white button-down, at the khaki pants my mother had pressed for me earlier that morning, starched pleats running down the center of each leg. Nothing in my wardrobe or phone could be considered an FI. I’d made sure of that before coming here, checking my reflection in the mirror for any wrinkles, deleting long strings of text messages between friends, waiting for the gray delete bar to finish eating up all of the hope and anxiety and fear I’d shared with the people I trusted. I felt newly minted, as if I’d stepped out of my old skin that morning, my “inappropriate past” still rumpled on the bedroom floor with the rest of my unwashed laundry.

“Your wallet, please.”

I did as he said. My wallet looked so small sitting there, a tiny leather square containing so much of my identity: driver’s license, Social Security card, bank card. The boy in the license photo looked like someone else, someone free from all problems: a smiling face in a vacuum. I couldn’t remember how the DMV had gotten me to smile so goofily.

“Please empty the contents of your wallet and place them on the table.”

My face grew hot. I removed each card. I removed a small wad of twenties, followed by a torn piece of wide-ruled paper with the telephone number of the college admissions office I’d written down at a time when I’d been nervous about my chances of college acceptance.

“What’s the number for?” the boy asked.

“College admissions,” I said.

“If I called this number, would I find out you’re telling the truth?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have any phone numbers or photos of ex-boyfriends anywhere on you?”

I hated the way he spoke so openly of past “boyfriends,” a word I had so carefully avoided because I felt that just saying it might reveal my shameful desire to have one. “No, I don’t have any inappropriate material.” I counted to ten, breathing out through my nose, and looked up once again at the boy. I wasn’t going to let this get to me, not this early on the first day.

“Do you have anything else in your pockets?”

His questions made me feel paranoid. Could I have unwittingly carried in some kind of inappropriate object? At the moment, it seemed as if everything about me was inappropriate, as if I might be banned from the premises simply because I was already too dirty. His tone suggested that I was desperately trying to hide an extensive sinful past, but the truth was that, although I did feel the weight of this expected sin, I had very little physical evidence, and even less physical experience, to account for it.

“Are you sure you don’t have anything else?”

I did have one other thing, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to give it up: my Moleskine journal, the one in which I wrote all of my short stories. Though I knew these stories were amateurish, that I was just playing around with serious writing, I looked forward to returning to them the minute the day’s activities ended. I suspected that the long descriptive paragraphs on nature, innocuous as they had seemed when I wrote them, could be construed as too florid, too feminine, another sign of my moral weakness. One of my latest stories even featured a young female narrator, a choice I knew was hardly gender affirming.

“There’s this,” I said, holding the Moleskine in front of me, not willing to put it on the table with the other belongings. “It’s just a notebook.”

“No journaling allowed,” the receptionist said, quoting from the handbook. “All else is distraction.”

I watched as the blond-haired boy took the Moleskine in his hands, as he laid it on the table and began flipping the pages back and forth with disinterest, frowning. I can no longer remember which story he found, but I can remember the way he ripped the pages out of my notebook, wadded them into a dense ball, and said, in a voice free of emotion, “False Image,” as if that was all they were.

“Well, that should be it,” the receptionist said. “Now I just have to do a quick pat down, and you’ll be ready.”

He patted my legs, ran his fingers beneath the cuffs of my khakis, worked his way to my arms, the cuffs of my shirt, and then, as if to comfort me, patted my shoulders—one-two-three—looking in my eyes the whole time.

“It’ll be fine,” he said, his too-blue eyes fixed on mine, hands still weighing down my shoulders. “We all have to go through this. It’s a little strange at first, but you’ll come to love it here. We’re all one big family.”

I watched as the blond-haired boy tossed my story in the trash. Lord, make me pure. If God was ever going to answer my prayer, He wouldn’t do so unless I became as transparent as a drop of water. Crumple the first half of the story and toss it in the trash. All else is distraction.

“FOR THE WAGES of sin is death,” Smid continued. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the sliding door behind him. Each time he walked past us, the shadow of the door’s central rail passed over him like the sluggish pendulum of a metronome, marking the slow tempo of his pacing. Our therapy group sat quiet and still, our breathing calibrated to the slow pulse of his legs, the casserole from our lunch break sitting heavy in our stomachs. There were seventeen or eighteen of us in the group. Some had been here long enough to know to abstain politely from the meat and processed cheese, while others had brought their own lunches, opening neon Tupperware lids that sent off a whiff of tuna and mayo. Watching the older members eat their lunches, the ones who’d been at LIA for two or three years, I’d been able to see how the receptionist was at least partially right, that this was a family, however dysfunctional. Crustless bread and ultramarine Jell-O: This was a group that knew how to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of one another’s food habits. People settled into their routines with little of the self-conscious buzz, of the surreptitious glancing that usually accompanies large groups who find themselves suddenly thrust into more intimate circumstances. I was the only one who seemed to be playing the outsider, scraping my fork through the Hamburger Helper as if I’d forgotten how to feed myself, hardly looking up from my plate.

To my left sat S, a teenage girl awkward in her mandatory skirt, who would later admit to having been caught smearing peanut butter on her vagina as a treat for her dog. “Pleased to meet you,” she’d said that morning, before I had the chance to introduce myself. She seemed always poised for a curtsey, thumb and forefinger twitching beside the folds of her cotton skirt. She looked down at my feet after the introduction, her gaze locking on the tile behind my loafers, and for a moment I felt as though I must have tracked in some kind of sinful residue from the outside world. “You’ll like it here.”

To my right sat a boy of seventeen or eighteen, J, wearing Wrangler jeans, a cowboy smirk, and a frat-boy part in his hair that tossed his dangerously long bangs over warm hazel eyes. J continually bragged that he had memorized all eight of the Bible’s “clobber passages,” so named because of their power to doctrinally condemn homosexuality and champion traditional straight relationships.

“I read them every night,” J had said, his voice serious but also a little playful. He gripped my hand in a practiced ironclad shake. There seemed to be a thousand handshakes behind this one, each of them gradually fortifying J’s grip until he was strong enough to pass this basic test of manhood. “I’ve memorized whole chapters, too.”

When our hands parted, I could feel his sweat cooling my palm in the downdraft. No hugging or physical touch between clients, I remembered from the handbook. Only the briefest of handshakes allowed.

“My favorite?” he said, smiling. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Later he would go on to tell me more about his interpretation of this “clobber” verse. “Abomination,” he would say, pushing back his bangs with the slow arc of his fingers, the white half-moons of his cuticles glowing large and bright. “Crazy word. In Hebrew, to’e’va. It can refer to shrimp as easily as it can to gay sex. All those little legs swimming through saltwater, it creeped the Israelites out, you know? They thought it was unnatural.”

The other members of our group included unfaithful married men and women, former high school teachers or educators of some kind shamed by rumors of their sexuality, and teenagers kept here against their will as part of the Refuge program, a controversial branch that targeted parents who felt that sending their children to the facility was the only option.

Most of us were from the South, most of us from some part of the Bible Belt. Most of our stories sounded remarkably similar. We had all met with ultimatums that didn’t exist for many other people, conditions often absent from the love between parents and children. At some point, a “change this or else” had come to each of us: Otherwise we would be homeless, penniless, excommunicated, exiled. We had all been too afraid to fall through the cracks; all of us had been told cautionary tales of drug addicts, of sex addicts, of people who ended up dying in the throes of AIDS in some urban West Coast gutter. The story always went this way. And we believed the story. For the most part, the media we consumed corroborated it. You could hardly find a movie in small-town theaters that spoke openly of homosexuality, and when you did, it almost always ended with someone dying of AIDS.

I was here as part of the Source, a two-week trial program meant to determine the length of therapy I would need. Most patients needed at least three months’ residency, usually longer. In many cases, college students like me dropped out of school for at least a year in order to create distance from unhealthy influences. Many stayed even longer. In fact, most of the staff members were former patients who’d been with LIA at least two years, choosing to remain inside the facility rather than reintegrate into their old lives. To be allowed to work at the facility, former patients were expected to find preapproved jobs, support themselves financially, talk only to those whose character and status had been cleared by the staff, and keep clear of the Internet or any other “secular spaces”—including “malls of any kind” or any “non-Christian bookstores.” Because patients weren’t allowed to stray too far from LIA’s offices, the support group became the central focus of patients’ lives, the way and the truth and the light Jesus spoke of in the New Testament, the one true path to God’s love.

Over the next two weeks, LIA staff, along with my parents, would determine what kind of hiatus was necessary in my case. As its name suggested, the Source was the fountainhead of a long and difficult journey.

“TELL THEM what you did, T,” Smid said. We were in the Group Sharing portion of our afternoon session. “You need to admit what you did so it won’t happen again.”

T, an obese middle-aged man wearing several black cardigans, stood before our group to confess, stone-faced, that he had once again attempted suicide.

This was T’s seventh suicide attempt since coming to the program. He’d tried pills, knives, whatever he could find.

“Typical,” J whispered, leaning in, his warm cowboy breath tickling my neck. “The guy’s an attention hog. Got too many daddy issues to name.”

T seemed to shrink into his cardigans, the buried half of him stark black against his pale face. Whatever had first devastated him had left long ago, but LIA would try and dig it up.

“Who among us will cast the first stone?” Smid said, turning back to our group. “We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

It seemed earnestness was more than half the battle in the fight for an ex-gay lifestyle. You had to want to change, and until you wanted to change so badly that you’d rather die than not change, you would never make it past Step One—admitting you were wrong. The reason pre–ex-gays like T felt powerless to change, Smid said, was that deep-seated family issues kept them separate from God. “Suicide isn’t the answer,” he said. “The answer is God. Plain and simple.”

“What I did was wrong,” T said, pocketing his pink-scarred hands inside his topmost cardigan, his words scripted. “I know that with God’s help I can learn to see the value in my life.”

J coughed a laugh into the hollow of his fist. Don’t count on it.

When T finally sat down, we all said, “I love you, T.” It was a program requirement, rule number nine in the Group Norms section: Once someone from your group stops talking, say “I love you, ________.”

All of God’s children being equal, our names were interchangeable.

“I love you, T,” Smid said.

ALTHOUGH I didn’t know it at the time, Smid had given different advice before. He was still dealing with a decade-long backlash that had arisen from alleged advice he’d given to one of the first young men to attend his program. According to Family & Friends, a Memphis newspaper, Smid had told the man that it would be better for him to kill himself than to live as a homosexual.

Various bloggers have since approximated the number of suicides resulting from LIA’s treatment as anywhere from twenty to thirty cases, though figures like these are impossible to pin down.

The controversy didn’t end there. According to a Daily Beast interview with Peterson Toscano, a former patient of Smid’s who attended LIA meetings in the late ’90s, LIA had also been responsible for staging a mock funeral for a “would-be defector,” a young man of nineteen or twenty who felt he might benefit from an openly gay lifestyle outside the facility. LIA members stood before the boy’s reposing body and spoke about “how terrible it was that he didn’t stick with God, and now look where he is, he’s dead because he left.” They read mock obituaries that described the boy’s rapid descent into HIV, then AIDS, and cried over him. This went on until the boy was fully convinced that his sinful behavior would lead him to a death without any hope of resurrection. Though the boy did finally flee LIA, it was only years later and, according to a conversation I had with Toscano, only after years of psychological damage.

It was our fear of shame, followed by our fear of Hell, that truly prevented us from committing suicide.

SMID FINISHED his speech and waited in silence for our faces to register the importance of Step One. After several long seconds, he dismissed us for a break, cupping his palms together for a single clap. The sound was jarring. I stood and stretched, then walked through the sliding glass door and kept walking across the porch, feeling like I could walk for hours, days, weeks. The others followed, their shoes scratching the concrete.

I wanted to talk more with J, who seemed like a nice-enough guy, someone who hadn’t been here long enough to forget what the first day was like. But J stayed seated inside, and I ended up standing at the far edge of the porch by myself. I could see S standing just on the other side of the glass, straightening her skirt and aiming the corner of a shy smile in my direction. T was still sitting at the end of our semicircle, his gaze fixed on a patch of concrete near my feet, where a few tawny birds pecked at crumbs left behind by one of the group members. He cupped his hands in front of him as though they were filled with birdseed, as though he might scatter a pecking trail from the door to his chair.

“NOW,” SMID SAID, walking over to a whiteboard on the opposite wall, “can anyone here tell me what a genogram is?” He clapped his hands together. “Anyone?” He picked up a black dry-erase marker from the silver tray at the bottom of the whiteboard.

S straightened her shoulders and raised one hand, the other hand tugging her skirt below the red knobs of her knees—what I would soon learn were rules two, four, and six of the Group Norms section of our handbooks: “(2) No slouching in chairs, sitting back on chairs’ hind legs, sitting with arms crossed, rolling eyes, or making disgusting faces; (4) Raise hands to speak; (6) Clients are to sit in such a way as to not cause another to stumble.” She’d obviously been here long enough to tame most of her False Images.

“Yes?” Smid said.

“A genogram is a family tree,” she said, “only one that shows patterns of family history as well. Kind of like an illustrated genealogy.” Or a character list, I thought, remembering the many hours I’d spent in my dorm room trying to chart the family history of Wuthering Heights in my Moleskine, annotations like “the meaner Cathy” written beside characters’ names. I wondered if I’d get my notebook back.

“Good answer,” Smid said, writing the words “Family Tree—Genealogy” in large cursive across the top of the board. He turned back to us. “Anything we can add to this?”

I shifted in the padded chair. I’d always felt this nervousness in classes, this need to put an end to the silence following a question no matter how inadequate my answer. I also wanted to impress my fellow group members. I wanted to show them how much I knew, let them see how much smarter I was, how I didn’t make obvious typos, how I didn’t belong here, not really, I was just passing through, I would find my way out of here in no time.

“That was a good guess, S,” Smid said, retrieving a stack of posters from the blond-haired boy. He handed the stack to T, who took one sheet and passed it on. “A genogram shows hereditary patterns and sinful behaviors in our families. It doesn’t trace our genealogy so much as the history behind our present sinful behavior.”

Smid walked back to the board. He pulled off the marker cap with a flourish. First he wrote an A for alcoholism. Then he wrote P for promiscuous. He filled the board with the thick black letters we would use as a key for our genograms. H for homosexuality; D for drugs; $ for gambling; M for mental illness; Ab for abortion; G for gang involvement; Po for pornography. I tried to ignore the lack of parallelism in Smid’s list, a basic style rule I’d picked up in junior high English class. The medium, I told myself, didn’t always have to be perfect. J took one of the poster sheets and passed the stack to me. I could feel his hand tremble as it passed between us. I placed my sheet on the beige Berber carpet at my feet.

Smid turned to face us, clicking the marker cap shut. “Trauma is often linked to generational sin,” he said. “We have to understand where the sin came from in the first place. How it trickled down from father to son, mother to daughter.” I recognized the sentiment from a Bible verse popular in our family’s church—Exodus 20:5.

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and forth generation of them that hate me.

The blond-haired boy handed each of us a stack of rubber band–wrapped colored pencils. The veteran members of our group slid from their chairs to begin the daily group project, bringing their posters with them. I quickly followed, my knees already accustomed to hours of kneeling at the tung-oiled altar of our family’s church and asking God to change me. I had spent eighteen years of my life going to church three times a week, heeding the altar call along with my father and the other men, trying to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

“The compulsive patterns of parents influencing children,” Smid continued. “This is the most common root of sexual sin.”

Our color-coded genograms would tell us where everything had begun to go wrong. Trace our genealogy back far enough and we would find, if not the answer to our own sexual sins, then at least the sense of which dead and degenerate limb in our family tree had been responsible.

I scooted my poster over on the carpet so I could be closer to J. S slid her eyes at me as I passed, but I pretended not to notice.

J nudged my ribs with a red pencil, leaving a small checkmark on my white button-down. The weight of my gaze slid down his long ropy arm to where his purple-veined wrist was drawing a wavy red arrow of abuse from his father to his mother.

“I bet that’s it,” he said. His voice was so monotone, it was hard to tell if he was serious or simply regurgitating LIA lingo. I wondered if irony had been a greater part of his personality pre-LIA. I wondered if I would have liked him more outside of this place. “I bet some of that abuse turned me gay. Or it could have been Dad’s D. Or maybe Mom had an Ab before I was born.”

I wondered how anyone could know so much about his family. My clan was tight-lipped; when our past slipped through, it was only in accidental bursts or in code.

“I don’t know where to start,” I said, staring at the blank poster. It was a problem I experienced each time I sat down to write, but I had slowly started getting better at it. Relaxing my thoughts, I could enter my psyche through a side door, sit down cross-legged and examine the hieroglyphs.

“Start with the worst,” J said, smiling, “unless you’re the worst.”

IT WAS HARD to conjure a family tree out of early childhood memories. My father’s life had, from the moment of his calling to be a preacher, filled a vacuum within our family mythology. His importance in our town and community seemed to override everything we knew about ourselves. I was His Son. My mother was His Wife.

People had always seen my father as a devout believer, but at the age of fifty he had taken the next step, stumbling down our church aisle, shaking and crying, kneeling with the entire congregation until our preacher declared that God had called my father to the service. “I was aimless before I found my calling,” my father repeated weekly, standing before pulpits across the state of Arkansas, until my mother and I started to believe him, to clap along with his audience. “I was nothing. But God healed me. He made me whole. Gave me purpose.”

In less than a week, in the middle of the Source program, my mother and I planned to drive from the LIA facility to my father’s ordination as a Missionary Baptist preacher, where we would be asked to stand with him on a brightly lit stage before a church audience of more than two hundred people. The trip was already preapproved by staff and considered integral to my development, a real opportunity to test my devotion to the cause. At the church, my mother and I would be expected to hold hands, smile, to burst into tears at the appropriate moment. Important Baptist Missionary Association of America members would be traveling from every corner of Arkansas to publicly interview the man who many were hinting might be their next Peter, their next Paul, the man whose moral compass might set things to rights for the Baptists, usher in a stronger belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, distill many of the complex issues that had recently begun to plague their association. Issues like divorce, cohabitation, and—most pressing—homosexuality.

“Just think about who you are,” J said, adding the finishing touches to his poster. He was so accustomed to these exercises he could have drawn the symbols with his eyes closed. “Then trace it back to your family history.”

I began by writing the names of my great-grandparents at the top of the poster, followed by my grandparents, then my parents. Next to my parents I added aunts and uncles and all of my cousins. At the very bottom, in slightly smaller print, I added my own name. I followed the genogram key as best I could, placing only one or two sin symbols next to each relative’s name. The grandfather with the alcohol problem: A. The grandmother who divorced him because of the alcohol problem: a line with two diagonal slashes. The two grandparents who’d died one after the other: twin Xs. The aunt whose first and second husbands both died in airplane crashes on the way to Saigon, who’d later remarried and divorced: a line with two diagonal slashes. The uncle with the drug and alcohol and gambling problems: D and A and $, respectively.

As I diagrammed my family tree, coloring in the boxes and arrows and textual symbols, the genogram started to make sense. It provided a sense of security to blame others before me, to assign everyone his or her proper symbol and erase all other characteristics. I could place an H beside my own name, and everything else about me would cease to matter. If I wondered why I was sitting on this carpeted floor with a group of strangers, I could count up the list of familial sins, shrug, and move on to the next activity without asking further questions. All of this confusion about who I was and why my life had led me to this moment could be folded up with my finished genogram, slipped inside a folder, and tucked away in one of LIA’s many filing cabinets.

“It looks like you’ve got a lot of A on both sides of the family,” J said, admiring my poster, his voice a steady monotone. “That must’ve done a real number on your mom and dad. You know, they say sometimes the biggest sins skip a generation. You must be really gay.”

“That sucks,” I said, looking up to make sure no one had heard me. Even mild profanity was strictly prohibited. “I guess it’ll take a long time to get cured.”

Smid stepped between us, eyeing our posters. “Good work,” he said, patting me on the back. Light and cool, the pads of his fingers barely registered. Later I would feel this touch again, on my elbow, as he corrected my flamboyant akimbo stance to something more straight appropriate, a flagging Cro-Magnon pose popular in small Southern towns like the one where I grew up.

“I don’t want to hear that language again,” he added, his voice lower, a filed-down baritone worn by strain. “Only God’s language is tolerated here.”

I could hear S laughing quietly behind me.

“Newbie,” she whispered.

“No shit,” I said. The curse registered as a slap, but she quickly composed herself and laughed again, loud enough to draw Smid’s attention back to us.

Looking back, I think she must have been glad, for once, not to be the object of the room’s derision, to be rid of the attention of people who considered themselves lucky to know someone like her who hid an even more shameful secret. She must have been glad that people for one second had stopped picturing her lying on her back in the cramped living room of her trailer, the half-empty jar of peanut butter like a dark stain on the kitchen counter as her parents entered through the front door to find their daughter changed beyond recognition.

“Take your time,” Smid said, circling back to me. “You’ll want to get this right.”

I slid the pencil behind my ear and surveyed the half-finished genogram, trying to recall the sins of my fathers. I sat like this until the activity time ended, afraid to write something I couldn’t erase.

The Plain Dealers

The men gathered in the showroom, the soles of their leather saddle shoes squeaking against the tile. The previous night had brought several inches of rain that by now had gathered in the gaps of their rough concrete driveways, settled into the foam-rubber seals of their car doors, and spilled out of the hidden reservoirs of suspension beneath their floorboards. It was as if the weatherman with the practiced Midwestern accent had been wrong and there had been no rain. The roads dry as usual, and in the haze of only the second or third cup of coffee of the morning, these men might never have noticed anything different if it wasn’t for the squeaking of their soles, a sound signifying that the night’s activities had gone on without them.

“I tell you it’s the End Times,” Brother Nielson was saying. Two men helped him limp to a black leather couch in the corner of the showroom. As Brother Nielson passed his reflection in the red Mustang parked in the center of the room, he smiled briefly at his hulking form then looked away. “War in the Middle East. Over what? Why don’t we just nuke them all?” Brother Nielson had earned his respect from twenty hardworking years as a deacon in our local Missionary Baptist church. As his health began to fail and his body slowly calcified, his stature as a pillar of the church and our small Arkansan town grew more pronounced. But in the end, his path to respectability had cost him his vanity. “I used to have all the girls a man could dream of,” he was known to say. “Hundreds of them. Lined up. Every make and model imaginable.”

Now, the hem of his khakis lagged behind his shoes, mopping up the hints of water that the other men had left behind. “I don’t know why people have to make things so complicated. CNN wants us to think we shouldn’t have gone over there in the first place. Don’t they know Jesus will be back any day now?” He sank into the couch with a leathery squeak. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Something my father and the other men liked to tell people about the Gospel: God has no time for anyone but a plain dealer. Speak your mind, and speak it clearly. “There is no neutral,” my father liked to say. “No gray area. No in-betweens.”

I watched them from the doorway of my father’s office, holding a leather-bound King James Bible in one hand, gripping the wooden doorjamb with the other. In less than five minutes I would be joining them on my knees in front of the couch, leading my father and his employees through the morning Bible study for the first time. Since my father moved to this town several years back to assume control of a new Ford dealership, he had held a Bible study every workday morning. Like most church members we knew, he was concerned with the lack of prayer in schools and businesses, and he believed that the country, though led by an evangelical president, was constantly trying to strip away all of Christ’s original glory from its citizens’ everyday lives, especially when it came to things like the Pledge of Allegiance and Christmas festivities, which were always rumored to be under attack. Like my mother, he had grown up in the church, and since there had been only one church where my parents had lived most of their lives, our family had always been Missionary Baptists, concerned with leading people to the Lord. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. My father took the verse literally, like all Missionary Baptists, and, like all evangelicals, he believed that the more souls you could gather in Christ’s name, the more souls you would be saving from eternal hellfire. Two souls was the minimum, three was adequate, but nine or ten or more was best. “I want to lead at least a thousand souls to the Lord before I die,” he would repeat to me almost daily.

Working for him as a car detailer each summer kept me at a respectable distance from the business of saving souls. At eighteen, I hadn’t yet performed any actual ministering duties. Though he never said it outright, each summer he required me to do the kind of manual labor that would help me turn out to be a normal red-blooded Southerner, the kind that would offset my more bookish, feminine qualities. My workday companions were spray bottles filled with sealants, polishes, body compounds, and tire glazes. Pink and purple and yellow liquids I hardly knew other than by the smell and feel of them baking into my sunburned skin, and then by the aggregations of foam that settled and eventually swirled into the shower drain at the end of each day. When my father would ask me how many customers I had witnessed to out on the lot, I was able to smile and say, “I don’t think the pressure washer has a soul, even if it does make those crazy humming noises.” And my father was able to say, “We need to get that thing fixed,” and turn his head away from the sight of me.

But when it came to the morning Bible study, jokes wouldn’t save me. I had to perform or else disappoint my father in front of the other men. Since I was seen as an extension of him—Going to turn out just like your old man; can’t wait to see what gift the Good Lord’s given you—great things were expected to pour from my lips. Wine from the jars of Cana: what was empty suddenly restored, the wedding feast continuing, the disciples believing in miracles.

When my mother would join us for our lunch breaks at the Timberline, one of the only restaurants in town, in a giant wood-paneled room whose walls were covered with splintering handsaws and rusty blades three times the size of my head, my father would look around at the people eating, and he would sigh, a wounded sound that left his voice hollow and quiet.

“How many souls in here do you think are headed straight to Hell?” he would say.

And before we could leave the restaurant, he would make a show of buying everyone’s lunch. He would stand up from our table, pull a waitress from her autopiloted course through the sea of grease-stained faces, and whisper the order in her ear. As customers brushed past us, my mother and I would stand near the entrance, waiting for him to finish paying. Sometimes a customer would walk up to my father and protest his charity, and my father would say something like “The Lord has blessed me. He’ll bless you, too, if you just let Him into your heart.” Most often, the customers would sit at their tables absorbing the smell of fried chicken livers into their jeans, T-shirts, and follicles, oblivious until it came time to pay, when they would stare narrow eyed at the passing waitress, as if she might somehow be responsible for their embarrassment. No one in this small Southern town liked to feel beholden, and no one knew this better than my father.

I JIGGLED the wooden doorjamb of my father’s office doorway until it almost came loose, listening as Brother Nielson and the others settled their speech into a steady rhythm. Many of the dealership employees regularly attended our church, some more devout than others, some perhaps exaggerating their piety for my father’s sake, but all of them my Brothers, a name the Missionary Baptists applied to any follower of Christ. Brothers and Sisters all serving the same Father in the name of the Son. I couldn’t make out their words, but I could feel their excited speech almost to the point of pain, each syllable a loud buzzing noise, a hurried wing beat.

“Another earthquake this morning,” my father said. “Are you ready for the Rapture?”

I could hear him typing at his computer behind me, one key at a time, adding his own metronomic countermovement to the ticking of the polished chrome clock above his desk. He had recently swapped his dealership’s 56k dial-up connection for high-speed DSL, and each morning he sped through Yahoo! headlines looking for Armageddon talking points. An earthquake killing hundreds somewhere in the Hindu Kush. A siege at the Church of the Nativity. The U.S. invading Afghanistan. All of this related to the predictions outlined by the dreams of St. John in the Book of Revelation. One simple logic guided these searches: If every word of the Bible was to be taken literally, then the plagues and fires of St. John’s testimony were certainly the plagues and fires of today’s news cycle. The only thing we could hope for in these End Times: the country announcing its allegiance to Jesus before the Rapture began, righting some of its wrongs, continuing to elect solid born-again Republicans into office.

“I’m ready,” I said, turning to face him.

I pictured the coming earthquake, the miniature hot rods lining his office shelves crashing to the floor, their tiny doors groaning, hinges cracking open. For someone who had built fourteen street rods from scratch, for a man who could boast of winning a national street-rod competition in Evansville, Indiana, with his aquamarine 1934 Ford, my father was ready—eager, even—to watch all of his work burn to the ground the minute the trumpets sounded. He could do nothing halfway. When he decided to build cars, he built not one, but fourteen; when he decided to work full-time for God, he did it in the only way he knew how without jeopardizing his family’s material well-being—by making his business God’s business. His idol was Billy Graham, an evangelist who used the public sphere to such an advantage that he had been able to shape our country’s political climate by whispering into the ears of no less than eleven presidents. Before my father came to be a pastor of his own church, his small-scale influence mirrored Graham’s in its intensity. Members of our town’s police force, who purchased their white square Crown Victorias from my father, never left the dealership without his admonishment to go out and bring order to our town—and, more important, to help spread the Gospel to unbelievers.

“We have to be vigilant,” my father said over his computer monitor. “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and they shall shew great signs and wonders.”

He clicked his mouse several times with his too-big hand, a hand that could take apart a carburetor but whose rough edges and burned skin made it difficult for him to operate a personal computer.

SEVERAL YEARS before I was born, my father had stopped on the side of the highway that passed through our hometown to help a man whose car had broken down. As my father crawled beneath the engine to check for any abnormalities, the stranger turned the key to his ignition, igniting the gas that had been leaking from the carburetor, an ignition that spread third-degree burns across my father’s face and hands. The burns left his nerves burned and dead so that now he could cup his hand over a candle flame for thirty seconds or more until my mother and I would scream for him to stop. When I was a colicky baby, he would comfort me by sitting in a wicker rocking chair with me and bringing a candle close to my face. He would press his palm flat against the open O of the glass holder until the fire almost fizzled out, repeating the act until I grew tired, my head falling against his chest while he quietly sang me to sleep with one of his many made-up lullabies.

He’s a good old friend to me

As simple as can be

He’s a good old pal

He’s a good old friend

He’s a good old pal to me

At certain moments in his life, my father must have asked himself why the stranger had turned the key. He must have asked himself why anyone would turn the key.

“Whatever you do,” my father had said, stepping around the stranger’s car to examine the motor, “don’t turn the key.”

There must have been some hiccup in communication, something in the stranger that said it was all right to start the engine at the exact moment the Good Samaritan crawled beneath the bumper of his car. Whatever his motivations, the stranger didn’t hesitate.

My mother later told me that when my father showed up at the front door, his clothes covered in ash and his face half burned and his whole body shaking, her first reaction had been to ask him to stay outside. She was vacuuming the carpet. She assumed he was simply caked with dirt.

“Go away,” she said. “Wait till I’m finished vacuuming.”

Hours later, standing beside my father’s hospital bed, waiting for his hand to heal so she could at least hold on to some part of him, what she felt in the place of love was pity and fear. Pity for a man who would risk his life for strangers without a second thought, and fear for a life lived with a once-handsome man, a twentysomething former quarterback with the cleft chin and deep dimples of a Saturday Night Fever John Travolta now transformed into—into what? No one could tell exactly. The bandages would have to be removed weeks later, and only then would doctors know if the grafted skin would resemble anything of his former face.

“TOO MANY earthquakes to keep track of,” my father said, tossing the mouse into a stack of papers beside him. He popped each of his knuckles. “But you don’t need shelter when you’re wearing the Armor of God.” He pointed to the Bible in my hand.

“Sure don’t,” I said. I pictured armor-plated locusts swirling in corkscrews from the clouds. Scores of unbelievers with their bodies run through by silver-plated scabbards. And somewhere in my conscience, the beginning of an idea that had recently begun to plague me: that I might be one of them.

AT EIGHTEEN, I was still very much in the closet, with a halfhearted commitment to my girlfriend, Chloe, whose predilection for French kissing ran a cold blade through the bottom of my stomach. A week earlier as we sat in my car outside her house, Chloe had reached for my leg. I had shifted away from her, and said, “It’s so cold in here,” flipping the lever for the heat, sliding back into the passenger’s seat, wishing there was an eject button. I had experienced my own Armageddon fantasy in that moment: the depressed button of a radio controller, a hooded insurgent walking calmly away from our flying debris, pieces of my flannel shirt flying through the air on flame-tipped wings, a thick-necked policeman picking through the charred remains of the explosion for Chloe’s purple hair scrunchie.

“Besides,” I said, thinking that this moment might lead to more intimacy than we had ever allowed. “We should wait until marriage.”

“Right,” she said, removing her hand. Since we had already been together for a year and a half, the church congregation was expecting us to marry before too many years of college could change us. Earlier in the summer we had traveled to Florida with my mother and my aunt. As we were leaving for the trip, Chloe’s mother leaned in through the driver’s-side window to stage whisper into my mother’s ear. “You know everything’s going to change after this, right?” she said. “All of you in the same hotel room. E-ve-ry-thing.”

But nothing had changed. Chloe and I sneaking out at night with my aunt’s wine coolers to sit by the neon pool and watch its waves ripple across the plastic lining, an angry tide pulsing somewhere in the darkness ahead. I had started to think we didn’t need anything other than friendship. Chloe had made me feel complete in a way no one else had. She made it fun to walk through the school hallways, to see the looks of approval on people’s faces. I could see in her eyes a real love I might one day be capable of returning. When we’d first met in church, her smile had been so genuine that I’d decided to ask her out right after the service, and we’d quickly settled into a happy routine. Watching movies, listening to pop music, playing video games, helping each other finish homework. It seemed there hadn’t been anything to confide until that intimate moment in the car, and suddenly there was this new pressure between us.

MY FATHER and I left his office to join the other men at the foot of the couch, each of us sinking to our knees on the cold tile. Above our heads hung a sign that read: NO CUSSING TOLERATED—THIS IS THE LORD’S BUSINESS.

The man to my left, Brother Hank, clamped his eyelids shut until faint white ripples appeared above his red cheeks. My father’s number one car salesman, Brother Hank could tailor his speech for any occasion. “Dear Lord,” he began, “give this boy the strength to deliver his message this morning.” He wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulders and tucked me close to his ribs. I could smell the sharp scent of menthol and, beneath that, the earthy smell of his farm, a place I had seen only in passing during one of my long walks through the forest paths surrounding our house.

Brother Hank continued: “Bestow upon him Thy divine grace and mercy.” He paused for a moment, allowing the distant ticking of my father’s chrome clock to sober each man’s mood. A few of the men groaned encouragement.

“Oh, yes, Lord,” they said.

“Yes oh yes oh yes oh yes oh yes Lord,” they said.

Brother Hank lifted his hand from my back and left it hovering above my hair, the way my father used to do before cracking an imaginary egg on my skull and causing the imaginary yolk to trickle down my cheeks. “Let him be a vessel for truth. Let no falsehood spill from Your blessed fountain. Amen.”

“Amen!” the men shouted, rising to their feet, knees popping.

We settled into a circle of chairs around the couch, Brother Nielson and my father taking up the middle. Brother Hank removed a stack of Bibles from a nearby desk drawer and fanned them out like a deck of cards, each man choosing carefully, examining his book before flipping open the cover.

“Tell me something before we begin,” Brother Nielson said, removing his own Bible from behind a couch cushion. His name glittered in gold on the front, along the bottom of the cracked leather cover. His cracked Bible said one thing to all of us: Here is a man whose fingers have creased and uncreased each page for the past twenty years. Here is a man who has quietly sobbed into the open spine, allowed his tears to wet and wrinkle the red letters of our Savior. “I’ve been talking with the men here,” Brother Nielson continued, “and I want to know one thing, boy. What’s your opinion on the Middle East problem? What do you think of our president’s decision?”

I froze. The existence of Chloe had shielded me from too much direct questioning about my sexuality, but there were certain opinions that would make me a suspect no matter what. I was always nervous when I had to give an opinion on anything that could open me up to judgment. To be counted a sissy was one thing; to be counted a sissy and an Arab sympathizer was another. To be counted a sissy and an Arab sympathizer would pave the way for others to finally detect the attraction I felt to men. And when they discovered that secret, nothing would stop them from retroactively dismissing each detail of my personality, each opinion of mine, as mere symptoms of homosexuality. I could boast of detailing more cars than any of my father’s other workers; I could point at a boy in high school and laugh at his tight jeans and coiffed hair; but once it was suspected that I felt certain urges or thought certain thoughts, I would cease to be a man in these men’s eyes, in my father’s eyes.

“Well, boy?” Brother Nielson said. He leaned forward and smiled a watery smile. It seemed to require all of his strength to lift his back from the leather couch. “Cat got your tongue?”

I had prepared a lesson on Job, the unluckiest of a luckless Old Testament cast. I thought that by sticking to the script I might avoid scrutiny, the feel of the showroom’s glass walls narrowing their yellow microscope light on my flagging belief, my suspect mannerisms. Now I didn’t know what to say or do.

I coughed into a closed fist and looked down at my Bible. I ignored Brother Nielson’s stare. “The lesson of Job is that we can never know God’s intentions regarding the world,” I said. “Why do bad things happen? Why do bad things happen to good people?”

I turned to the passage, trying to will my hands to be steady. I could feel the heat of Brother Nielson’s and my father’s twin gazes, but I didn’t look up. I flipped the pages back and forth, hoping my train of thought would return.

“Go on, boy,” Brother Nielson said. “Let the Holy Spirit work through you.”

I stared at the words until they became meaningless glyphs, until they swam across the pages. The simple declarative sentences I had prepared the night before refused to snap into place along the worn lines of reason the church had instilled in me three times every week since my first birthday.

“Job was a good man,” I said. “He didn’t deserve what he got. But his friends didn’t listen. They didn’t …”

What I was trying to say seemed impossible and too complicated for words. When everything went wrong in Job’s life, when he lost his wife and two children and all of his livestock to a bet between God and Satan, his friends could only think to ask him what he did wrong, why he deserved God’s punishment. To them, this seemed the only explanation: Bad things happened to bad people. But what happened when good things happened to bad people or vice versa?

I looked up at the showroom entrance in time to see Chloe drive up. She wore her long hair in a ponytail, her smile interrupted by a string of braces that I had used one too many times as an excuse to put an end to our French kissing. Though women didn’t usually attend the men’s Bible study, Chloe was a bit of a rebel when it came to the church’s separation of men’s and women’s roles, believing that women had just as much of a right to be church leaders as men, though she told me this in secret. Most of the women in my church, my mother included, believed that the Bible had clearly appointed men as the leaders of the church, though there were a few members who were beginning to question this assumption. For now, though, Chloe stayed outside in her car, watching me for signs of what my father and these men hoped I might possess: the confidence of a future church leader. The patriarchal chain would travel directly from Brother Nielson to my father and finally to me.

I could feel my face glow red. I slapped the book shut and stared at my feet.

“I don’t …”

The tile was dry now, and in the prints left behind by the men’s rubber outsoles rested a skim of ultraviolet pollen. There were floors to be mopped. Outside, rows of cars would need spraying down with the pressure washer, last night’s rain now dried water spots on my father’s inventory.

“It’s okay, son,” my father said, not looking up from his Bible. “We can do this some other day.”

My mouth was dry, my tongue a paperweight weighing down my syllables.

“I lost my train of thought,” I said, looking away, catching sight of our group’s reflection in the Mustang’s rear window. Our figures stretched by the convex glass, we looked like one long thin band of a gold ring, broken only by the space between my right leg and the arm of the couch.

Brother Nielson opened his Bible to another passage and cleared his throat. “That’s okay,” he said. “Some of us aren’t cut out for the reading of scripture.” He began to speak of the glories of Heaven and everlasting life.

SITTING WITH my mother and father and Chloe hours later at the Timberline, I would fume about Brother Nielson’s words. I would glare at the gigantic radial saw across from our table and imagine it lifting from the curved nail that pinned it to the wall. I would imagine it splitting our town in half. That night, I would dream of Brother Nielson standing at the edge of one half of a living room that had been split down the middle, drifting gradually away from the rest of our town, his sagging boxers flapping in the wind, unable to leap across the widening gap with his tired and broken body, lost in a continental drift.

The truth was, Job’s friends hadn’t understood. Not Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar. Job lost his livestock, his wife, his two beautiful daughters—everything. A toss of the coin, and everything was gone. Only a mediator like Elihu, the youngest of Job’s friends, could hint at the complexity of Job’s loss.

A good family, a good house, a good car. To these men, and to me at the time, these were the necessary elements in securing decades of good luck. No matter that we now traded in cars rather than in livestock; no matter that the machinery of war, of Humvees cutting desert paths, was something we would never come to see or understand. At the end of the story, God would provide Job with a different wife, a different set of children, new livestock. Whatever happened—no matter how much we might suffer—if we had faith, God would restore it all, graft the skin back in place, mold us new bodies from our bone-tired ones.

LIKE THE NIGHT BEFORE, a thunderhead was moving across the Ozarks. “A cold front that’ll break up by morning,” the weatherman had said, his Midwestern accent clipping his words before they could slide into a Southern drawl. “You’ll hardly feel it,” he said, smiling, hazel eyes sparkling in the studio lights.

I lay awake in my bed, rereading Job in the hopes of finding a simple explanation for the scripture. I tried to quiet the critical part of my brain, the one that had caused me to stutter and falter during that morning’s Bible study.

Sometimes it was simply the act of looking at the open Bible that gave me a sense of belonging. Sometimes opening the Bible and pressing the pages flat with my palm, adding an extra crack in the spine, brought me closer to my father. I ran my thumb down the indented tabs, pressed into the sides of the book until the words took on a heft I might carry and lift up as proof of my devotion. I closed the Bible and placed it on my nightstand.

Chloe texted me a few minutes later, the phone’s vibrations pulling me out of semiconsciousness: “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” I wrote, burying the clamshell phone under my pillow. I felt like smothering the vibrations until they stopped. From the moment she showed up at the dealership, Chloe had continually asked me how the Bible study had gone. I had evaded the question by mumbling a “fine” every now and then.

Because he wasn’t snoring as usual, I could tell my father also lay awake. I was afraid that the storm wasn’t what kept him from sleep. The reverberating claps that shook so many households awake that night, sending deer scurrying across roads to smash into the sides of cars, were less severe than those that must have accompanied my father’s own fears for his son. I listened for his praying for several minutes, wondering if he was experiencing another moment when Jesus stood over his bed and bled onto the sheets. My father claimed he was often burdened with such visions.

When he finally fell asleep, his snoring was almost loud enough to shake the gilded picture frames lining the hallway just outside my bedroom. Years before, my mother had moved to an adjacent guest bedroom, saying she needed time away from the earthquake that was my sleeping father, from the whining bedsprings accompanying each inhalation. When I was very young, seven or eight years old, I would wake from scripture-inspired nightmares—blue cones of flame licking my feet, chasm after chasm opening up out of a blackness more felt than seen—and walk the hallway to my father’s bedroom to stand at the edge of his bed and wish him awake. I thought he should have understood me without the need for words, that the current between us was so free-flowing and deep he would have no choice but to wake up that instant. I would stand beside the mirrored closet and see the reflected room limned by the blue light of the television he left going all night, shaking and furious, terrified that I would have to return to my nightmares. Hours later, I would cross the hallway to my mother’s bedroom to perform the same absurd ritual. But after only a few minutes, my mother would feel me standing there and pull me beside her in the bed, moving over so I could have the warm spot.

“Love,” she would say.

“Love,” I would mumble, turning on my side, gliding my hand across the warm sheets until the scent of her lavender body lotion covered my skin.

The phone buzzed again under my pillow. The buzzing grew stronger, louder, until the blurred edges of my vision snapped into focus. I stared into the slats of the bunk bed I had kept even through high school because my mother would sometimes take the top bunk in the middle of the night, falling asleep with one thin arm dangling over the side. Now I pictured the wood cracking, the board coming down hard. Finally, after several rounds of buzzing, I reached under the pillow and snapped open the phone.

“Why are you ignoring me?” Chloe said.

“I’m just tired,” I lied. I knew she was the one who could most comfort me, but I was afraid that by telling her about my failure at the dealership I’d have to reveal a truth I wasn’t ready to admit to anyone. Not just that I might not be cut out for my father’s line of work, but that I might not be cut out for any of the Lord’s work, that just by having certain urges and entertaining certain thoughts I had already ended up on the wrong team.

“The storm.” When she grew worried, her voice rose nearly an octave. I wanted to be the kind of boyfriend who felt like her natural protector, the one to shelter her, even if it now seemed I needed her much more than she needed me.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. When was the right time to tell her what was going on? What would I even say? And if I told her, if I just came out and said it, what would stop her from leaving me for someone more promising, someone with less baggage? I knew it was wrong to assume she’d just quit on me. Chloe wasn’t the kind of person to give up on anyone; she was one of the most optimistic people I’d ever met. But I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which she stayed, in which we both had to live with the knowledge of my brokenness. Telling her the truth would end whatever tenuous grasp I now had on a normal life. Whereas if I could just work through it on my own, if I just had enough time, I might be able to preserve our innocence. If it all worked out in the end, I might be able to live with my deception, and my past urges would come to seem like nothing more than lies Satan had tried to make me believe. I would have the satisfaction of knowing that I had never listened to those lies, never given them a proper expression, that I had chosen the true version of our life together. None of this felt like selfishness at the time.

We were now settling into the silent part of our conversation. The part where I felt anger and guilt until boredom finally conquered all. But underneath that boredom was the sense that God wanted us to be together. How could it be otherwise? How could our church be wrong? What feelings I couldn’t muster for her must only be side effects of our immaturity. We would grow into it: into each other, into God. So we would wait like this for hours each evening, Chloe on the other end of the line reading a book or watching TV while I played video games, both of us silent and waiting for the next chunk of awkward conversation to arrive.

I sat up, threw the sheets off, and sat down cross-legged in the center of my bedroom, my sunburned knees flaring with pain, the phone tucked into my neck. I could still smell the false lemony scent of the dealership’s chemicals on my skin. I turned on the TV in front of me, picked up the Sony PlayStation controller I’d left on the carpet, and pressed start. The pause menu split into thirds and disappeared to reveal the image of a tall male avatar with spiky black hair standing in the center of a vast forest. He wore a fur-lined leather jacket and a long chain that dangled from his thick black belt, and carried a sword that fascinated me not because it was part blade and part gun, but because of the gaudy silver embellishments running along its hilt. The details reminded me of my mother’s collection of Brighton bracelets, the way they sparkled in any light and rested their outsize beauty on her thin wrists.

The goal of the game was to travel from town to town in search of special items and adventure. Traveling was treacherous: There were few cars in this world, most things were done by foot, and at any moment the screen could swirl into a vortex, the colors of the forest bleeding into one another, until I was firmly planted in front of an enemy, usually some chimera that could have easily been lifted from an eighteenth-century bestiary, like horses with roaring lion heads, green slime globs with tree limbs for arms and canine fangs. A victorious battle would yield shiny new accoutrements, objects that, once itemized and collected neatly in the main menu, yielded a sense of accomplishment.

Like order out of chaos. The face of God moving over the waters of the deep. In the book of Job, it is the Creator piercing the fleeing Leviathan.

There were times when I would stare for hours into the virtual rooms of a baroque palace, never moving from my spot on the carpet, while the avatar scratched his head and shifted into the kind of contrapposto pose the men of the dealership would have considered sexually suspect. I felt that to move would be to break the spell, cause me to reenter a world where I was too old to crawl into bed with my mother if the fear of Hell got to be too bad.

When I first hit puberty and started fantasizing about men more often, I had become so entranced with the world of video games that I would hardly ever move from the carpet for entire weekends. On the few occasions when I could no longer ignore my body, I would stand up to release angry streams of piss onto the carpet at the foot of my bed. I had no way of knowing if my mother ever entered my bedroom while I was at school, but I wanted her to; I wanted her to interpret the damp hieroglyphs I had spelled out for her—sometimes my name; more often a figure eight or, depending on the angle, the symbol for infinity—even if I didn’t understand them myself. Feeling guilt after I arrived home from school, I would sneak into the bathroom, steal some cleaning chemicals, and spray them into the carpet until the room no longer smelled like piss. Though I’d stopped all this by the time I turned sixteen, I still felt like violating our house in some way, and I would sometimes even fantasize about the whole place going up in flames, our little family huddled outside while the walls collapsed in slow motion. It wasn’t that I thought violence would solve our problems. It was just that the need to tell my parents something—anything—was overpowering, and at the time I didn’t have a proper language for it.

I moved my avatar deeper into the forest path, his footfalls like wooden shoes dropped from a great height. The trees folded around him, and in the distance appeared the mouth of a cave. I moved him toward the cave and hunched forward, forgetting the phone at my neck until I heard Chloe’s sigh.

“We have to do something,” she said. “I’m worried.”

“The storm will be over soon,” I said.

“No,” she said. “About us. We have to do something drastic.” We hadn’t talked about how we would stay together once we went off to college at the end of the summer, how we would manage to pull off the miracle of a successful long-distance relationship. We’d been admitted into different colleges, would be heading in different directions, though we’d still be in the same state. It was another of the many topics I had pushed to the back of my mind. She was right. If we were going to hold this relationship together, we needed to do something drastic. But neither one of us knew what. Do it? Not do it? Get married? Break up? The questions themselves were driving us both crazy. We debated the question of virginity. Whose virginity? Mine? Hers? And if we did it, when?

“There’s no such thing as time anyway. Time only exists on earth. In Heaven there won’t be any time, so we’re technically already married. We’re technically already doing it.”

“Then we’ve technically always been doing it. So what’s the point?”

“Because we still have free will. I think God is telling us to act now in order to demonstrate our love for Him.”

At the beginning of our relationship, Chloe would sit with me while I played video games, pointing excitedly as some new creature bounced across the screen. When we first met in church a few years back, I had felt something I rarely experienced outside of the virtual world: a leveling up, a sense of worthiness, of a whole group of people smiling in approval. During lunch breaks at school, I no longer had to crouch on the toilet seat to hide from overcrowded lunch tables. There had been an easiness between us as we explored the forest behind her backyard with her younger brother, Brandon, who still liked to pretend he was on a safari. We could drive around in one of my father’s new cars, making up directions as we went, asking Brandon in the backseat whether we should turn left or right or keep going straight. “Go to Memphis,” he would say, confident as a distinguished playboy, faux-smoking a candy cigarette. “Let’s see the glass pyramid, boys.” With Brandon between us, it was less confusing; we had something to focus on other than ourselves.

The storm was growing louder, the thunder nearer. “Okay,” I said, the phone hot against my ear. “We’ll figure it out.”

Another silence stretched out between us. I stood and walked to the bedroom window and lifted one of the aluminum blinds with my index finger. Yellow lamppost lights cradled low-hanging clouds. A line of pine trees shook in the wind, their needles spilling onto the driveway. Headlights flickered for a moment on a distant highway then disappeared beneath a heavy sheet of rain that passed almost as quickly as it came. I could hear no thunder.

Unlike Brother Nielson’s and my father’s bombastic doomsday scenarios, I feared Armageddon would take the quiet form of radio static. White noise: after the thunder, the world suddenly muted by the sound of heavy rain. Even more terrifying than my nightmares was the thought of being left behind by my sleeping family, their bodies turned to husks. I might arrive home from school one day to find only a simmering pot on the stove, the radio droning on in my parents’ absence. After my parents decided to move their old television into my bedroom, I used to stay awake to watch the midnight news so I could imagine there were other people still awake, other people doing things at that moment, and I would think about how God wouldn’t leave so many people behind and I would feel safe for a few minutes. With Chloe, I had always felt safe, at least before she reached for me in the car. Until that moment I felt like God might grant me a free pass, since I was trying to be the man my father could recognize as a peer. Now, with Chloe’s growing intimacy, I thought I would need to perform. Without hesitation, without stuttering, without alternate interpretations. Perhaps one sin would be a substitute for the even greater sin of homosexuality, and then we’d at least have a chance to live our godly lives together.

“Still there?” Chloe said.

“Yeah.”

We arranged a date to watch a late-night movie at her house. There seemed to be something hidden in this arrangement, something we left unsaid but that we both must have known. When the time came for sleep, I figured Chloe could express interest in cooking a big breakfast with me the next morning and insist that I sleep in the basement, not far from Brandon’s bed. Her mother might slide her eyes at us, but she would eventually give in; after all, we had already spent the night in the same hotel room in Florida. We would be quiet. Safe. I could buy a twenty-five-cent condom from a gas station vending machine in a distant town, telling my parents I needed to go on another long drive to clear my head, to talk to God. Then, if conditions seemed right, I would sneak up to her room and see what happened between us.

When thinking about sex, I had never before wondered how long it would take. I had never wondered what postsex breakfast might taste like or what movie might be most appropriate before commencement. Most important, I had never wondered whether or not sex—not kissing or cuddling or grinding, but sex, jumping right into the very act itself and skipping all the other steps—might finally turn me, if not straight, at least into someone capable of performing straightness. I had never assumed I would want to go this far, that I would break one of the cardinal rules in our church. When I had fantasized about men, I’d always shut down the thoughts before I imagined myself entering the fantasy. It had always been one body, performing alone, performing only for me. What would it be like to do something with another person, a person you’d have to face for the rest of your life, both of you living with the knowledge of what you did in your most desperate moment? Would you ever be able to make it up to God? And what if it didn’t work? What if the transgression led to failure, and you were left alone to rot in your sin?

“Is it raining there now?” Chloe said, yawning. “It’s raining here.”

“No,” I lied, listening to the sound of raindrops pinging against the shingles. I wanted to keep our lives separate. Then I was afraid of what it would mean if I did. “I mean yes.”

“How can it be both?” she said.

“I don’t know. It just is.”

I sat back down on the carpet and pressed the start button on the controller. “It’s not both. I don’t know why I said it was both.” The cave was now directly in the avatar’s path. There was no other way around it. Whatever was hidden inside was probably going to be worth it.

IT WAS my mother’s treasures, her silver necklaces and gaudy rings, their shiny symbolism, the way many of them were handed down through the maternal line, the way these symbols could make up a home and present a family history with more than one plotline—it was their complexity I craved each time I urged my PlayStation avatar to open another treasure chest, to sink deeper into the cave with its quivering stalactites.

When I was nine, these treasures had taken on a literal quality that I could never quite shake from my mind. My family and I were on a soon-to-be-condemned pier. We were on vacation in Florida. The pier shook each time the tide slapped its splintering pillars. There was a groaning as the water made contact with its rusted metal joint bars. My father ruffled my hair. I threw a plastic Coke bottle into the water, and inside that bottle was a message.

Dear Pirate,

How are you? It’s nice to meet you even if I don’t know who you are. I’d like to know you, so please write back. Also, if you could, please send me treasure.

Your friend Garrard

We arrived back at our house, exhausted from a ten-hour car ride, to find a yellowed piece of notebook paper taped to the front door, a map of our yard with a giant X where the note claimed a pirate named Lonzo had buried his treasure. My mother feigned shock, pressing her fingertips to her cheeks and leaving ten red marks on her face after she dropped her arms. “This is wild,” she said. “This is just so wild.” My father helped me carry a shovel from the garage to the spot in the yard Lonzo had marked on his map. The X was spray-painted in silver on the grass. Together, we pressed our tennis shoes to each of the shovel’s shoulders and dug into the hard-packed clay. Three feet deep, we found a box filled mostly with costume jewelry but also with real jewelry that I would later discover belonged to my grandmother, items for which she had no further use. She and my grandfather had arranged the whole thing on the night my mother called to tell them about the message in a bottle.

After we ran water from a garden hose over the box, I kept the jewelry in the bottom drawer of my desk. I would take the shiny gold pieces out of the box and place as many of them as I could on my neck and wrists and stand in front of the mirror. Twirling. I did this again and again until my father walked in on me one day and told me I needed to stop, that Lonzo would feel sad if he saw me mocking his treasure that way.

“I want to live with Lonzo,” I said. “I want to be a pirate.”

“You probably wouldn’t like it,” my father said. “You’d have to mop the deck all day. He’d turn you into one of his slaves. You’d get sick of the water.”

THE COLD FRONT from the night before brought severe wind gusts that sent sheets of water from my pressure washer over the tops of other cars, leaving water spots on their windshields, the drops fizzling and evaporating on contact with the roasting metal. I stepped out of the service garage, shielded my eyes, and stared at the long line of car windows I would now have to Windex. Behind me, one of my father’s employees was pressing the button to a hydraulic lift, and Chloe’s car was being lifted to the height of the man’s shoulders so he could begin replacing the oil. I was to drive her car back to her house later that afternoon, leave my car at the dealership overnight, and carry out the plan.

Earlier that morning during Bible study, Brother Nielson had lingered in the showroom for a little longer than usual, holding himself upright with one hand on the side of the Mustang.

“I keep wondering,” he said, as I passed by carrying a handful of car keys, “if you’re ever going to answer my question.” I couldn’t tell if he was trying to test me or if he seriously wanted to know what I thought about the Middle East, to know that the next generation was secure in its fight against terrorism.

“Leave the boy alone,” Brother Hank said, sticking his head out of a nearby office.

“He’s not old enough to care about politics. Girls are all he’s got on the brain right now.”

“Girls, huh,” Brother Nielson said. “Nothing wrong with that.” He straightened his back as much as he could, wincing. “Just don’t forget there are bigger things in this world.”

He stuck his hand out in front of my path, and I moved the keys to my other hand and clasped his in a firm handshake that grew firmer with each second until the grip was so severe I thought we might crack each other’s knuckles. His eyes stared directly into mine, full of some secret knowledge. I felt almost as though he could detect the contamination I had passed into my palm earlier that morning before the sun rose, as though the condom I had purchased from the gas station carried a hidden scent or an oil undetectable except by the most righteous of men.

“We’re living in the End Times,” he said to me. “Stay sharp.”

I SET the pressure washer down on the concrete, grabbed the Windex bottle and some paper towels, and walked onto the blacktop lot to tackle the line of water-spotted windshields. In the distance ahead I could see the pine trees on the hills begin to sway in the wind, and I was grateful for this, for the relief of the current as it swept past me, even though I knew it might increase the chances of sunburn, my SPF-40 lotion already washed away by the water, the tips of my fingers already pruned.

I was on my fifth or sixth windshield when the woman approached me.

“Excuse me?” she said, her smile blending into the glinting line of the windshield’s sun glare. “Can you tell me something about this car? I’m looking to buy soon, and I really have no idea.”

I turned to face her. Her makeup was smeared along her dull-lidded eyes; she fidgeted with the black string of a purse draped haphazardly over one shoulder. The car in question was a standard Taurus, one among a long line of them. There seemed to be no reason for singling this one out. There seemed to be no reason for singling me out. I thought of something my father would say during Bible study: how every now and then God presented a moment of perfect opportunity. It was our job as Christians to seize that moment and lead one of His lost souls to salvation.

The woman’s dented, hail-beaten Camry idled behind her, the driver’s-side door left open. I thought of saying, Ma’am, you look lost. I thought of saying, Ma’am, there is no neutral. I thought of how happy it would make my father if I was able to tell him I’d ministered to my first customer. But I couldn’t do it. Her question had been so direct, so real, that to dodge it felt like a betrayal.

“There’s nothing wrong with a good Taurus,” I said. “Dependable. Fairly decent mileage. They hardly ever wear out on you if you take them in for tune-ups on time. But, you know, it’s just a Taurus.”

She placed her hand on my forearm and smiled again. “You’re so kind,” she said. “You didn’t have to tell me the truth.”

I wanted to fall against her chest and feel her arms wrap around my shoulders. I wanted to toss the paper towels and the Windex bottle on the asphalt, slide into her car, and disappear into the hills, then, whenever she wasn’t looking, toss the condom package out of the cracked window.

“THIS IS SO WEIRD,” Chloe said. “Where did they get these creepy sound effects?”

We watched as Janet Leigh stepped into the shower, her pale calf tensing. We knew what would happen next, but we held our breath. Though she didn’t need it, Chloe had applied extra foundation to her face, removing the shallow pockmarks where acne had once scarred her. She wore her hair down. We had both dressed for the occasion. I wore a black button-down and a light jacket that I had waited to remove until I was in the doorway. Chloe wore a dress I’d never seen before. If her mother thought there was anything strange about our outfits, she never said so.

We sat on the couch in her basement in front of the blue light of the television. Occasionally, Brandon would sneak down the stairs and hide behind the couch, jumping out to scare us.

“You’re too old for that,” Chloe said, after he had grabbed her arm just as the shower curtain parted. “Get a life.”

“You’re the one who needs to get a life,” he said, tossing his head back in a remarkably accurate parody of his sister. “Watching scary movies on your big romantic date night.”

Brandon was dressed in his Sunday-morning blazer. He wore a bright pink rose in his lapel, one he must have stolen from a neighbor’s garden. He liked to dress up like his favorite video-game characters. When we asked who he was today, he said, “I’m James Bond from GoldenEye,” and made a gun of his index finger and thumb. I was glad for his occasional interruptions, the way his sudden appearance caused Chloe to unconsciously scoot away from me.

Every movement on that couch was either a victory or a failure. Often both. I was on a different side of the war from one moment to the next.

Brandon removed a candy cigarette from his pocket and acted as though he were about to perch it delicately on the edge of his lips. Instead, he bit into it. “Don’t forget you’re rooming with me tonight,” he said, making a stabbing motion at me with what remained of the cigarette. “Psycho II. Bates strikes again.”

We watched the camera move in a gyre up from Leigh’s gaping pupil, Hitchcock’s shot held intentionally for one second too long, the fear excruciating in that second. Chloe scooted closer.

“It’s still scary,” she said. “Even with the stupid sound effects.”

I FIRST LEARNED about sex when I was Brandon’s age, on a stormless night when my father wasn’t snoring and I could be certain he was awake. I felt the house relax and settle into its hidden joints, and so I could walk through the dark living room without fear, running my fingers across the cool glass of the living-room table, fingering the sharp plastic jonquils in their china vases. I sat in my father’s leather recliner and switched on the television. Since the living room shared the same satellite connection as my father’s bedroom—but not my mother’s—I could see what he was seeing in those sleepless hours after he had already exhausted his prayer. I watched the snow-fizzled channels settle into hints of a bare thigh, an open mouth closing over something long and hard, bright red lipstick shining through static. I heard the woman’s low moaning—so scripted, so different from my father’s spiritual moaning. But the display didn’t last for more than a minute or two, the amount of time I imagine it took for my father to feel the weight of his guilt. Still, I would tell my mother of his transgression the next day, knowing even then that by airing his secret I might better hide my own darker secret.

“I’m sure it was by mistake,” she said, always the mediator. “Why would you spy on him like that?”

Then she forced a smile and said, “Let’s make crème brûlée tonight. We’ll get your grandmother’s silver out and everything.”

I HAD BEEN lying on a sleeping bag in the dark basement of Chloe’s house for about an hour. I decided to sit up and listen for Brandon’s steady breathing before I made my attempt up the stairs. I kept the condom package tucked into the elastic band of my pajama pants; the plastic scratched my skin, burning. I had no idea how I planned to do it. Sneak up to her room and announce my intentions? Stand in her doorway in the hopes that she made the first move?

“I’m not asleep, in case you’re wondering,” Brandon said. I heard him throw his sheets to the ground beside his bed. “Your movie kept me awake.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought it might be fun. Theft, murder, cars sinking into tar pits.”

“You know?” he said, bare feet slapping the concrete floor as he came toward me. I made out the outline of his cowlicked hair, then his thin arms sticking out of his pajama top. “You’re not like her other boyfriends. You’re a lot nicer.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

He stood at the edge of my sleeping bag, his toes wiggling into the taffeta lining. “Can I ask you something?”

My eyes adjusting to the dark, I could see that his face was contorted, twin wrinkles running down the center of his forehead. I could hear footsteps coming from the spot on the ceiling directly below Chloe’s bedroom floor.

“How do you get your character to level up to fifty?” He smiled an impish smile. Whatever he had planned to say was still unsaid.

He sat down on the edge of the sleeping bag. “Do you mind?” he said, holding the television remote close enough so I could see it. He switched on the television and crawled over to the PlayStation to press the power button. We settled into our gaming positions, hunching toward the screen. We were now standing in the chamber of a large Gothic castle lit by torchlight. Dark red carpet shot across the room from one door to the next, and guards in gold uniforms stood before every entryway.

Brandon’s eyes glazed over. He licked his lips unconsciously. “This part is tricky. Those guards will come running if I move another inch.”

“Check your inventory first.”

The two of us riffled through potions and equipped stronger weapons. Brandon had obviously not kept track of his inventory. Using too many potions when he didn’t have to. Tossing crossbows aside without first selling them in the market. Though I continued to think of Chloe in the bedroom above us, I tried to block her out. I had already crafted an alibi: How could I leave if her brother saw me?

After a few more hours of intense concentration, we both lay back on the sleeping bag.

Brandon propped himself up on his elbow, his palm cradling his chin. “You know what?” he said.

“I don’t,” I said.

“I think he’s probably gay,” he said, his voice suddenly breaking at the last syllable. He looked away. His breathing was shallow. It took several seconds for me to realize that he was talking about our avatar.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I really do,” he said. “So much hair gel.”

When he looked back at me, we both knew what we were.

We decided to keep playing until he reached the next level. By the time an orange sunrise worked its way through the blinds and shaped itself into slanted rectangles across the concrete, Chloe had already prepared breakfast by herself.

“Surprise,” she said, standing on the bottom step, refusing to touch the basement floor. She didn’t sound at all surprised. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her cotton gown. I tried to shut out her pain, kept my eyes on the wadded sleeping bag at my feet. “Breakfast is served.”

MY FATHER wrote a note to God, left it in my desk drawer, and told me never to open it. Never to touch it, but to leave it there. It was the formal promise he made to God after the car explosion that he had folded into a tiny square and tucked away behind the scores of mechanical pencils I would chew in frustration when I couldn’t get my journal entries to come out right.

That last summer I spent at his dealership, old enough for my curiosity to outweigh my reverence, I read the note.

Heavenly Father,

Thank you for saving me from literal hellfire. I have made a promise to you that I intend to keep. From this moment on, as for me and my house, we will serve You. I promise to raise my son in the church. I promise to be a God-fearing man and to bring others into Your divine flock. Please, spare my son from all that I have suffered, and from my mistakes. Spare him from the confusion of the world. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise. Let him rest in the truth of Your holy Word.

Your Servant

“WHY HAVEN’T you answered any of my calls?” Chloe asked.

A week of silence had passed since our failed night. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, the PlayStation controller tucked into the triangle between my crossed legs, the phone nestled against my shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“How do you not know? You either answer or you don’t.”

After a minute of silence, she hung up.

Another week passed. Two. I opened the phone, thought about pressing speed dial for Chloe’s number, snapped it shut.

“I don’t know,” I said to the screen.

It wasn’t relief I felt. More like fear: of the unknown, of myself. What kind of person was I becoming?

ANOTHER WEEK PASSED. My parents were concerned. They wanted to know why Chloe and I hadn’t been hanging out. Her mother was calling, people from church were asking, and nobody could believe we would end things so suddenly without any real explanation. I pretended I was sick on Sundays so I wouldn’t have to see her again at church.

Another week. When I could no longer fake being sick, I volunteered to work at the projector booth at the back of the sanctuary, far from the congregants’ questioning gazes. Chloe was sometimes there, sometimes not, but we made sure we never ended up in the same part of the church together.

Another week. It was almost time to move to the small liberal arts college where I’d been accepted. My mother and I took occasional trips to Walmart to buy what I’d need for the dorm, coming home with heavy sacks full of plastic storage containers, with jumbo packages of T-shirts and socks and underwear. Then, late one night, my father received a phone call from Chloe’s mother. She was hysterical. Brandon had been caught with another boy in his bed, a close friend. They had been experimenting. She couldn’t think of anyone else to call. She wanted to know if my father could come talk some sense into the boys. I sat in our living room for most of the night, trying not to shake, waiting for him to return, my mother beside me on the couch.

“Why did you two really break up?” she asked. “You were so cute together.” I couldn’t answer. There were no words, no clear explanations that didn’t involve some terrible admission. I knew my sudden silence was hurting my mother, was hurting all of us. But in only a few months I had already managed to ruin everything. I didn’t want to say anything else that might make things worse.

My father came home around four o’clock in the morning, his eyes red, his hair a mess. He wouldn’t tell us much of what happened, just stood in the kitchen shaking his head. The boys had made a mistake, he said. He had explained to Brandon and the other boy that continuing their sinful behavior would turn them against God, expel them from the Kingdom of Heaven. Brandon would grow out of it, my father said. His voice sounded unconvincing, and I could tell he was shaken by the visit, that perhaps he suspected something about me that he hadn’t suspected before. I turned away, walked to my bedroom, and shut the door.

Another week. Video games every night. I hardly thought about the next phase of my life. I hardly thought about anything other than what I would need to equip for my avatar’s journey through the wilderness. In the few moments when I wasn’t playing a game, I tried to ignore the fact that not talking to Chloe also meant that I would have to stop talking to Brandon. That the only person who seemed to know who I really was would never again be part of my life. That whatever either of us decided to do about our urges, we would be alone.

A month before I was to go to college, I finally put down the PlayStation controller. I walked into the living room, where my parents were sitting on opposite ends of the couch. I invited them to follow me to the bathroom to view the corpse of my gaming life.

“I want you to see something,” I said. I hardly knew what I was doing. I wanted to tell them everything: about why I broke up with Chloe, about how I was just like Brandon. I wanted to tell them, but I didn’t have the right words. I wanted to let them know that something was wrong, that I had been trying to ignore a part of me but that I wasn’t going to ignore it any longer. I was going to fix it.

In the center of the bathtub sat my PlayStation, its two controllers curled up beside it like sleeping cats. My parents stood in the doorway, wearing what-is-this-all-about looks on their faces. My father ran a hand through his thick black hair. My mother crossed her arms over her chest and sighed.

I slid back the clear plastic shower curtain and turned the knob for the shower. My parents and I watched the water rush over the console and swirl into an oval before disappearing with a hollow gurgle down the drain. I imagined the water trickling through the motherboard, following tributaries formed by the microchips. I kept the water running for a few extra seconds than needed until I heard my parents shift uncomfortably behind me. I slid the curtain back in place.

“I’m done with games,” I said.

Whatever I would face after this moment, I would face it directly.

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