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Bea is six years old, old enough to know what a big sister is.
Having a sister is a promise no one but the two of you can make—and no one but the two of you can break.
Bea stands in a field alone, tears silently streaming down her face as the walls of a church build themselves around her heart.
I’m also curious; I want to hear what answers could tempt sisters away from sisters, tempt lost boys in front of oncoming trains.
It tends to resurface every time something new and terrible happens under the Trump administration, which is just about every day, these days.
He’s just a man. As soon as I think it, anger courses through my veins, alighting my blood. It’s a wrath strong enough to make me want to disappear the space between us just to break him into pieces. That Lev Warren could do everything he’s done to me— And be only a man.
Bea called me once at Patty’s. I was on painkillers and all that remains of the conversation was the last thing she ever said to me. I know that was real because it burrowed itself into my bones, became a life raft for the months that followed. We’ll see each other again.
in this small kitchen, standing across from Lev Warren, and it wants to drown me in its truth: he’s only a man, and if he’s only a man, what does that make me? Less than her sister?
Our mission is not, and has never been, to silence our detractors but to make our work louder than them. SVO is free to write what it wants and we won’t stand in its way. We will continue to do the work.”
I bite the inside of my cheek so hard, I feel the skin giving in to my teeth. The ugly taste of copper is quick to follow.
I swallow hard. I know Paul thinks he’s giving me a compliment, that there’s nothing inherently wrong with what he’s saying, but it’s hard to hear myself recast in a role I never envisioned for myself. And I feel stupid for not realizing it was all I was being offered all along. I change the subject because I can’t bring myself to thank him for making me feel so worthless.
*stares in afab fundamentalist upbringing*
But where is the line between what circumstances have turned you into and who you choose to be?
“It’s just strange how you wanted nothing to do with me when I was too young and too powerless to fight back,”
Last we talked, you were calling me angry and insolent,
“Are members calling me?” “What?” he asks. “My office, my phone … hang-up calls … intimidation tactics.”
The day I finally gave up. My heart on the verge of total disintegration.
“Do you think the abuse you endured made you desperate for the approval and love and adulation of others?”
“There was so much I cut myself off from for fear of my mother’s reprisal. I was constantly anticipating her abuse, thinking I could prevent it.
I lean back, a bitter taste in my mouth. I stare at the recorder and I can’t believe I’ve already let this get away from me, that I let that wounded little girl take over this entire interview. That I let her howl.
The only thing I can manage to offer in response is to nod. There’s no forgiveness in me, I don’t think. Just a brutal acceptance of all that has been lost and a resigned march forward in the face of no other options.
Their masks will come off, and they will spread the darkness. They will rally in hate. Innocents will die. Children will suffer.
prove you can show up when it really matters. Because that’ll make a huge difference for you in the long run.” “I’m at the bottom of a ladder that only has one rung,” I snap. “Somehow I doubt that.”
If she’s no sister, no daughter, no writer—no more than her accident—who is she? What’s left? I press both of my palms flat against the glass and I wait and I wait, but she never tells me who she is.
“If you tell a story—something real, something true—you get to be alive in other people. And writing feels like the most … the greatest chance I’ll ever have at being—alive.”
Foster offered his body to Lev, a living sacrifice, and Bea remembers his screams, remembers wishing it could have been that easy for her. After Foster recovered, he was moved to the base. He was made security.
“Nobody would—nobody would just stay there and take that—” “Oh really?” He whirls around. “Because I did. I did it over and over again and I wasn’t the only one.
what’s this”—he gestures to his abdomen—“in exchange for that love, Lo? It’s nothing. And every time I’d start to doubt, I’d watch people be held down and burned and when it was over, you know what they’d say?”
when you see your friends, your family, saying thank you like they mean it—maybe you’re the broken one. Maybe you just weren’t burned enough—”
“And despite all that, you’re changing people’s lives, you’re doing God’s work and you’re making this world a better place and you can see it becoming a better place—how can you argue with those results? And at the end of all of it, you know what he’s promising? He’s promising paradise. That the sinners of this world will burn themselves out
“You don’t think the doctors might’ve had something to do with that?”
Her family doesn’t see her yearning, her need, her anguish born of his denial.
listen as they talk about the aftermath, of the shuttered Unity Centers, of its brokenhearted members sharing their scars with one another. There are so many stories and I see myself in some, less in others—yet we all ended up under the hold of the same man. How does that happen?
“When I brought up the op-ed to you in Chapman … you said it was a lie.” “I said Rob was a false witness.” “How could you say that, if everything he said was true?” “Because—” He stops. “Because in that moment, it wasn’t. He said it was abuse. I didn’t think I was being abused.”
he is no prophet, no healer, no God, and Bea is comforted now in her faithlessness,
Lori Thibert has been a constant in my life and I will forever marvel over the fact I ended up having the kind of best friend I read about, and wished for, in books
The combined force of Somaiya Daud, Sarah Enni, Maurene Goo, and Veronica Roth’s friendship has levelled me up as a person and I’m grateful for their wicked humor, ferocious talents and smarts, and unwavering support.
