“This here building used to be a place where women came to kill their babies, but God saw fit to turn it around. He laid it on my pastor’s heart to use this place for good instead of for evil, and so now we bring girls like you in here to teach y’all about how God wants you to wait. I’m telling you girls, even if you’ve already had sex before, you can ask God to forgive. You can leave here better than when you came in. Amen?”

For the next eight hours, Miss Cindy, as she asked to be called, took us through her course on abstinence. She showed us slideshows of the spotted, oozing, stop-sign-red genitalia afflicted by STDs. She spoke about her own teen pregnancy. (“I love my daughter and I believe everything happens for a reason, but if I could go back and tell my younger self to keep her legs closed, I would.”) The only good part about all of this was when we got Steak-Out for lunch.

At one point, six hours in, Miss Cindy said, “If you and I were neighbors and we went into a covenant agreement so that our lambs could graze freely on each other’s land, we would have to seal that covenant by slaughtering one of our lambs. A covenant is not a promise. It’s so much more than that. A covenant requires bloodshed. Remember that the Bible says that marriage is a covenant and when you sleep with your husband on your wedding night and your hymen breaks, that blood is what is sealing your covenant. If you’ve already had sex with other men, you’ve already made promises you can’t keep.”

We spent the rest of our time wide-eyed with fear, looking at the wreckage of this woman and wondering who, what, had wrecked her.

* * *

—

    I have made promises I can’t keep, but it took me a while to make them. For years, Miss Cindy’s words were enough to keep me from exploring the “secret world” between my legs lest I destroy my imaginary marriage before it even began. Not too long after my eight-hour session in the abandoned abortion clinic, I started my period. My mother placed her hand on my shoulder and prayed that I’d be a good steward of my womanhood, and then she handed me a box of tampons and sent me on my way.

It’s ridiculous to me now to think about how limited my understanding of human anatomy was back then. I stared at the tampon applicator. I put it against my outer labia and pushed. I watched the white tail of the tampon slip out of the applicator as both fell to the ground. I repeated this with half of the box before I gave up, decided it was best to keep some things a mystery. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college, in biology class, that I learned what and where a vagina truly was.

In class that day, I stared at the diagram in wonder, the secret world, an inner world, revealed. I looked around at my classmates and could see in their business-as-usual faces that they already knew all of this. Their bodies had not been kept from them. It was neither the first nor the last time at Harvard that I would feel as though I was starting from behind, trying to make up for an early education that had been full of holes. I went back to my dorm room and tentatively, furtively pulled out a hand mirror and examined myself, wondering all the while how, if I hadn’t left my town, if I hadn’t continued my education, this particular hole, the question of anatomy, of sex, would have been filled. I was tired of learning things the hard way.

* * *

—

“Sorry for being kind of a bitch back there. It’s just weird to hear people talk about Jesus in a science class, you know?”

Anne from my small group had caught up with me after my outburst in Integrated Science. I didn’t bother telling her that I hadn’t mentioned Jesus at all. I just quickened my pace through the quad, which was eerily empty at that hour. She kept walking with me until we reached my building, and then she stood there and stared at me.

    “Do you live here too?” I asked.

“No, but I thought we could hang out.”

I didn’t want to hang out. I wanted her to leave. I wanted that class to end, school to end, the world to end, so that everyone could forget about me and what a fool I had made of myself. I looked at Anne as if for the first time. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun pierced through with chopsticks from the dining hall. Her cheeks were red from walking or the weather. She looked tired and a little mean. I let her in.

That year the two of us became inseparable. I don’t know how it happened, really. Anne was a senior. She and her group of many-gendered, multiracial friends made me feel like maybe there was a place for me in that East Coast tundra. Anne was funny, strange, beautiful, and mordant. She didn’t suffer fools, and sometimes I was the fool.

“It’s ridiculous. Like do you have to spend the rest of your life flagellating yourself for all the shit you think you’ve done wrong that ‘God’ doesn’t approve of?” she said one day toward the middle of our spring semester, when the winter weather had started to relent and a few flowers were just beginning to break ground, stretch toward the sun. We were sitting on my bed while Anne skipped class and I waited for my next one to start. Sometimes she would spend the whole day in my room. I’d finish all my classes and come back to find her curled up in my bed, laptop warming her stomach as she binge-watched Sex and the City for the millionth time.

Anne always said “God” with air quotes and an eye roll. Her father was Brazilian and her mother was American. They had met at a Buddhist meditation retreat in Bali before abandoning religion altogether and moving to Oregon to raise their two children godlessly. Anne looked at me as one might look at an alien who had dropped from the sky and needed to be taught how to assimilate into human life.

    “I don’t flagellate myself. I don’t even believe in God anymore,” I said.

“But you’re so rigid with yourself. You never skip class. You don’t drink. You won’t even try drugs.”

“That’s not because of my religion,” I said with a look that I hoped said, Drop it.

“You’re weird about sex.”

“I’m not weird about sex.”

“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

“Lots of people are virgins.”

Anne moved over on the bed so that she was facing me. She leaned in so close to me that I could feel her breath on my lips.

“Have you ever been kissed?” she asked.

27

Basketball season started in November, but for Nana the sport was year-round. He went to basketball camp in the summers, played on his school team during the season, and spent all year long in our driveway or heading over to the outdoor courts in and around Huntsville so that he could play pickup games with the kids there. My mother and I were subjected to hours upon hours of watching basketball on television. When Nana had friends over, all of them would shout at the television loudly and unintelligibly, as though the players on the screen owed them something. Nana joined in when others were there, but when it was just him, he watched silently and with intense concentration. Sometimes, he even took notes.

It wasn’t long before college recruiters started showing up to his games. Alabama, Auburn, Vanderbilt, UNC. Nana played well regardless of who was watching. My mother and I made more of an effort to learn the rules so that we could better share in his victories, but even as we tried, we knew it didn’t matter. Nana was the triumph. It was only the beginning of his sophomore year’s season, and he had broken records statewide. All the practices and workouts and away games made it easy for Nana to worm his way out of Wednesday-night and Sunday-morning services at First Assemblies. I knew it hurt my mother to see Nana choosing ball over God, so, instead of heading to youth group, I started going to “big church.” I wanted to sit beside her, to have her feel like at least one of her children still cared about what she cared about.

    I was eight, then nine. I was bored. If I fell asleep, as I often did, my mother would pinch my arm and stage-whisper, “Pay attention.”

I don’t remember the sermons very well, but I remember the altar calls that came at the end of them every Sunday. Pastor John’s speech was always the same. To this day I can recite it from memory:

“Now, I know someone out there is sitting with a heavy heart. I know someone out there is tired of carrying a cross. And I’m telling you now, you don’t have to leave here the same as when you came in. Amen? God’s got a plan for you. Amen? All you have to do is ask Jesus into your heart. He’ll do the rest.”

Pastor John would say this, and then the worship leader would rush up to the piano and start to play.

“Is there anyone who’d like to come down to the altar today?” Pastor John would ask, the music filling up the room. “Is there anyone who’d like to give their life to Christ?”

After a few months of big church, I noticed my mother sneaking glances at me whenever Pastor John made his altar call. I knew what those glances meant, but I wasn’t ready for that long walk down to the altar, for the entire congregation to train their eyes on me, praying that Jesus take my sins away.

I still wanted my sins. I still wanted my childhood, my freedom to fall asleep in big church with little consequence. I didn’t know what would become of me once I crossed the line from sinner to saved.

* * *