Ourselves Read online

  “Why don’t we step out onto the porch for some lemonade?” Tatiana said. “It’s crowded in here.”

  As chairs scraped back from the table and the crowd made their move toward the porch, Stell tried and failed to catch Tomas’s eye for reassurance. The shorter, stockier young man who was obviously his cousin Louis watched her from the corner of his eye; Stell could see the smirk on his face. It was the only part of the afternoon that reminded Stell of home.

  Tomas followed Tatiana, reaching over her into the upper cabinets for lemonade glasses.

  “Go on out on the porch, everybody.” Tatiana called out. “We’ll just be minute.” Aricelli and Louis surrounded Stell, leading her out the door with warm smiles and, Tomas would probably guess, hell in their eyes.

  “You haven’t introduced Stell to your friends yet, Tomas?” He said nothing but made a great effort of putting napkins into a basket. “Are you keeping her a secret?”

  “No, Grandma. There just hasn’t been time. Or an opportunity.”

  Tatiana put her hand on his arm. “Have you told them what she is?” Tomas turned away, brushing her hand off his shoulder. “Tomas, I am speaking to you. Do you know what she is?”

  “She’s just a girl.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “No, Tomas. She’s part of the True Family.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Tomas.” She lifted his chin to look him in the eyes. “You know it.”

  He did. More than anything in the world he wished he didn’t but for weeks now the message had been coming to him, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it. Her odd manner, her strange scriptures, they were all signs of the True Family, a fundamentalist cult of Nahan that preached the inherent sinfulness of the Nahan nature. They hated themselves. They hated other Nahan. Their lives were lives of repentance and prayer.

  “I don’t think she’s like them.”

  Tatiana stroked his cheek. “Maybe, maybe not, but this will not be an easy relationship to maintain. I can only assume her family does not know about you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She sighed. “Well, she is here now and so are your friends. You cannot leave her alone with the likes of Louis. It may be, sometime soon, you will have to make a choice between your friends and your girl.”

  “Why?” His eyes told her he had been worrying over that very thought.

  “Because, my dear boy, your life will be bigger than Calstow Mountain. And for Stell? The world may be too big.”

  On the porch, Charles and Louis sprawled out in wicker chairs, Louis insisting that Stell join Aricelli on the porch swing. Aricelli leaned back easily, one shapely leg tucked under her, the other pushing the swing with her white canvas sneaker. Stell knew nothing of the fashions of the outside world, but she had a pretty good idea that her simple cotton dress and white sandals, the very clothes she had nearly burst with pride putting on only hours ago, were grossly out of place. Every way she sat seemed wrong, every sound she made sounded slow and out of place. Despite all the smiles and the attempts to include her in the conversation, Stell felt every bit as miserable as she did at any church service. When Tomas finally pushed through the screen door, lemonade in hand, it was all she could do to not cry out.

  “There they are!” Charles applauded. “Thought you’d flown to California to pick the lemons yourself.” Tatiana bustled around setting up a table, which led to a general commotion on the porch, everyone but Stell rising and making gestures of helping out, however useless.

  “Here, Tomas.” Aricelli stepped away from the swing, brushing close past him. “You sit on the swing with Stell. I’ll sit here on the floor next to Louis.”

  Without an actual protest, Tomas settled next to Stell, close but not touching.

  “So we were talking about our avalentu.” Aricelli clapped her hands. “Kitty and I are going to head to New York City and do a few weeks there.”

  “You can keep it.” Louis said. “We’re heading west, aren’t we, Tomas? You and me and the big red machine. I’ve got a good feeling Vegas will be on our itinerary. Next Thursday, dude, we are outta here.”

  The words fell out of Stell’s mouth before she could stop them. “You’re leaving?”

  “I meant to tell you about it,” Tomas said, his cheeks burning. “It’s this thing we do when we’re old enough. We get some money and go out on the road. Technically we’re supposed to be looking for jobs but no one does. We just hang and hunt and find out what we’re good at and stuff like that.”

  “It’s our avalentu.” Aricelli said as if the word explained itself. “Have you had yours? Do you get to go anywhere?”

  Stell looked from Aricelli to Louis, who both watched her with veiled amusement. Charles and Tatiana met her eyes with gentleness but she could see the shade of embarrassment behind their smiles. It was when she looked at Tomas, wondrous Tomas, that she saw the true gap yawning between them. The six inches that separated them might as well have been the gorge off northern Calstow. She didn’t belong here.

  “I am only going home.”

  Tomas jumped up and reached for her hand. “Don’t go. Or at least let me walk you.”

  Stell freed her hand from his, clasping them behind her back, and gave Charles and Tatiana a small bow. “Thank you for your hospitality.” She looked up at Tomas. “Stay with your friends. It is a long way to my home.”

  Before he could protest, she was off the porch and well across the yard. Not caring if they watched, she ripped the uncomfortable sandals off her feet and ran up the hill into the forest.

  Chapter Two:

  AVALENTU

  Avalentu: Literally flight; a road trip or excursion taken by Nahan youths as a rite of passage into adulthood

  AUGUST

  Tomas drove with his elbow out the window, hot wind drying the sweat on his face as the Kansas landscape sped by. Beside him in the pick-up truck, Louis laid his head back on the seat and sighed.

  “Wow.”

  Tomas nodded. “Wow.”

  “Maybe we should rethink college.”

  “Think they’d let us in a sorority?”

  Louis grinned. “They let us in that one.”

  One look from Tomas and the two cousins burst out laughing. They’d just spent one astonishing night in the Kappa Delta house at Kansas University. They’d followed a trail of rush parties and ended up groin deep in a sea of drunken college girls.

  Tomas blushed at the memory. “I thought it would be tougher getting common girls to do that. I didn’t think it would be so easy, that they’d be so . . . so . . .”

  “Persuadable?” Louis arched his brow. “For a late bloomer, you certainly got the hang of it quickly. How many did you have in that bed? And weren’t they all cheerleaders?”

  “No, two of them were. The other was on a gymnastics scholarship.” Tomas grinned and Louis swore in disbelief. “You didn’t do too bad yourself, from what I saw. It sounded like you had that one girl meowing.”

  “Well yeah but there’s nothing surprising about that. I’ve been tapping commons since grade school. You on the other hand”—he patted Tomas on the shoulder, ignoring his cousin’s eye roll. “All I’m saying is that I’m glad you’re coming out of your shell. If it took getting your cherry popped by a True Family member then so be it.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I mean nothing bad by it. Seriously. As long as you’ve got her out of your system and are now ready to act like a grown-up, I’m cool with it.” Louis cupped his hand around a cigarette to block the wind while he lit it. He blew a stream of smoke out the window. “You’re still writing to her, aren’t you?”

  “Sometimes. I send them to Grandma Tat. I don’t know if she’s getting them.”

  Louis sighed. “Yeah, I guess you can’t address them to Cult Road One, Back Ass Nowhereville, huh?” Tomas just stared out at the flat land ahead and Louis shifted in his seat. “I know you liked her and I’m glad you got that out of the way.”


  “Can we drop it, please?”

  “Sure. I’m just saying that I’m not going to be around forever to smooth things over.”

  “Is this what you call dropping it?”

  Louis slouched down in the seat and closed his eyes. After three weeks on the road together, Tomas knew that was his sign of surrender. They’d been having versions of the same almost-argument since they’d rolled off of Calstow Mountain. Louis wanted Tomas to admit that Stell was just a passing thing and Tomas refused. The problem was he couldn’t wholly deny it.

  Stell didn’t feel like a passing thing. What he’d experienced with her on the mountain moved him; it changed him. He didn’t know why he hadn’t told her about their upcoming trip. He tried to fool himself by saying he assumed she’d understand the avalentu but he didn’t get far with that. Stell had never heard of Star Wars or gas stations. Something told him her education lacked some pretty big chunks of information.

  If he was honest with himself—and unbroken hours on Midwestern highways made that almost unavoidable—he hadn’t wanted his worlds to collide. He didn’t want Stell to know Louis and Aricelli. He didn’t want her to know the Tomas that Louis called cousin. Alone with Stell, Tomas wasn’t the awkward weird kid hiding behind Louis. But that train of thought led down an ugly track. Tomas didn’t seem weird with Stell because Stell was weird. Tomas was downright normal by comparison.

  It was hardly the stuff of eternal romances.

  But he knew what he felt and, as usual, was unable to express it in any sort of rational method. So he and Louis had fallen into their same old patterns—Louis taking the lead, Tomas following along. He couldn’t complain. The trip had been educational, to say the least. Tomas had discovered that he had a knack for creating back stories and aliases to ease them into whatever scene drew their attention. While Louis would have been content to just introduce himself with a fake name and seduce a common or two for a tumble and some quick feeding, Tomas found he liked to engage them in conversation. He liked to tell them lies, to seduce them, to lure them in with more than just Nahan pheromones and charm.

  Tomas discovered that he liked the common.

  Funny that after all those years surrounded by commons in school and in the neighborhood, it had taken a trip across country to learn that.

  The bus was old, its white paint rusted through. Both sides were painted in a shaky print “Fellowship of God’s Word.” Beside her, Stell could feel Malbette tremble with—what? Anxiety? Excitement? The high-pitched hum of her energy made Stell’s heart beat even harder than it had when she had received word that she would be going out into the world.

  “Is this our avalentu?”

  Malbette turned at that and Stell felt an ugly pleasure in surprising her mother. Again. Things had changed since her luncheon with Tomas. Malbette had been waiting for her when she returned to the house. Stell had fought back tears the entire run. They’d clouded her vision and one or two had slipped down her cheeks as she thought about Tomas hiding the truth from her, hiding her from his family.

  But when she saw the look of pity on her mother’s face—expectant pity, anticipating pity, pity wrapped up in the certainty that it would be needed—the tears dried up.

  Stell hadn’t explained. She hadn’t said a word about it. She didn’t slip out to go back up the mountain but danced in tense silence with her mother in the cramped shack for days until Malbette had sprung the news of the trip.

  “I doubt Uncle Rom would use that word.” Malbette folded a woolen skirt and slid it into a satchel. “He would call it our pilgrimage. You probably don’t remember the last outing several years ago. Maybe if you would attend school once in a while, you would have heard people talking about this.” The criticism was lost in her carefully controlled enthusiasm.

  “Where do we go?”

  “We pack up all the jellies and jams we’ve produced, all the quilts, any carvings or crafts any of us have made since the last pilgrimage. Arrangements have been made for us to visit churches that are having revivals. We have permission to sell our wares and sing the good news and hopefully make enough money to last for another three or four years.” She smiled into the bag, smoothing the cloth beneath her fingers.

  “Nahan churches?”

  Malbette laughed. “No, Stell. Not Nahan churches. We’re going to be Christians for the week.” Stell stared at her, not understanding. “You know, Jesus.”

  “Jesus.” Stell nodded, trying to remember what she had learned of this god. “He was born in a basket of reeds, right? And ran from the king with the locusts?”

  Malbette put her hands on either side of Stell’s face. “My sweet button, on this trip, try not to speak.”

  Stell shook off her touch. “How is it we are allowed to go? We haven’t made anything.”

  Malbette chuckled again, a strange sound to her daughter and not altogether unpleasant. “Well, at first I was going to beg but I knew how far that would get me. Then I used the one tactic that I knew could not fail. I let someone overhear me saying how happy you would be to finally be free of your classmates for a whole month. They couldn’t get us on the bus fast enough. Don’t forget to take a book. It’s a long drive.”

  By the time they made it to the highway, the handle of Stell’s satchel was damp from her tight grip. She could feel the anticipation, could hear the giggles and whispers of the girls around her, and watched the roughhousing of the boys. Like many of her companions, this was the first time she had ever been in a motorized vehicle. The sound and vibrations moved through her, distracting her. Beside her, Malbette hummed under her breath, occasionally catching her eye and winking. For the first time since running up Calstow Mountain, thoughts of Tomas didn’t twist in her stomach like stones.

  As farmland turned to suburbs then turned to strip malls and cineplexes, Stell felt something opening up inside of her. She watched commons in their cars, wearing fashionable clothes like those worn by Aricelli and Louis. She saw Starbucks and Walmarts, exotic names that had dropped from Tomas’s lips like the names of gods. Those places were real. She was out among them. Even in the heavy woolen clothes, the clumsy shoes, the uncomfortable black cotton head scarf, she was out. This was the world.

  It was a long ride, long and bewildering, broken up with stops at 4-H camps and state parks and ugly tents in muddy fields. Every stop had lumpy women with piles of hair introducing themselves as Sister This or Sister That, and pawning them off to sweaty men called Brother Something Else.

  Everyone smiled and everyone shouted, “Praise the Lord!” while they stared at the congregation, checking out the dark clothes and head scarves. Once Malbette had caught Stell staring back at a woman gawking at her heavy shoes. Her mother had elbowed Stell hard and the gawker, realizing she’d been caught, clasped her hands between her enormous breasts and cried, “Praise Jesus!” Malbette had dragged Stell away.

  In and out of tents and Quonset huts and cinderblock buildings they filed. The first time the Nahan congregation stood up and sang in harmony, Stell could only gape.

  When did they learn that?

  Was this what she’d been missing by skipping school? All Stell knew of Nahan church and Uncle Rom were beratings and threats, punches, hair pulling, and ritual knives.

  When did Jesus-singing come into the picture?

  Stell had so many questions and only her mother to answer them but there never seemed to be any time to talk. They were forever being herded into and out of revivals, each one hotter and more crowded than the last. Stell thought she might be bruised from all the hugging and grabbing. One preacher had even smacked her on the forehead, forcing Malbette to once more hold her back.

  The bus offered no chance to pummel her mother with questions either. Chatter on the bus stayed low since Uncle Rom walked the aisle at every chance. He’d stalk up and down, staring into faces as he passed. Stell made a point of keeping her eyes down.

  Rom walked the aisle as they crossed into Ohio. “You did very well last night, my chil
dren. I am proud of you.” He smiled that yellow smile of his. “For many of you, this is your first interaction with the common and I am sure many of you were sorely tested.” His eyes roamed over the faces before him as if he knew exactly of whom he spoke.

  “This pilgrimage of ours is not about raising funds for our way of life. That is simply a side benefit of our good work. No, children. It is far more than that.” He made his way down the aisle, the lurching of the bus only adding to the hypnotic rise and fall of his voice. Stell noticed he was paler than usual and his skin wore a sickly waxen sheen. “It is on this pilgrimage that we move among those we are compelled to slaughter. It is on this pilgrimage that we are forced to rely on the kindness of the very people our abomination compels us to devour.” He grabbed a young man by the hair and shook him violently. “Did you feel that bloodlust, brother?”

  “Yes, Uncle Rom.” Tobias could barely choke the words out past the shaking.

  “And did you lower yourself into that debauchery, brother?”

  “No, Uncle Rom. I swear!”

  “You swear.” The old man dropped Tobias’s head like a handful of trash. He addressed everyone on the bus, his voice dropping to a menacing whisper. “He swears when what he needs to do is pray. Prayer. Atonement. Vigilance. That is what keeps the curse of our people at bay. Prayer. Atonement. Vigilance. Prayer. Atonement. Vigilance. Say it with me.”

  “Prayer. Atonement. Vigilance.” The crowd spoke in one muffled murmur, repeating the chant, rising in volume, until the words ran together, joining with the rattles and groans of the old bus as it made its way to the next revival.

  During the last revival in Ohio, Stell caught her classmates Davina and Luanna sneaking away from the group, followed by Thor and Lucas. She tracked their escape at two more stops and at the third, Thor caught her watching them and flicked her ear hard with his finger.