in the days after we left—running away to France was her actual proposal—I rejected the idea. She couldn’t possibly be serious, could she? “If we can’t have our family,” I’d told her, both of us in tears, “then it doesn’t matter if we’re thirty minutes away from them or three thousand miles. Nothing will bring them back to us.” I had argued that running away from that reality wouldn’t change anything; it would only waste our ever-dwindling resources. She had just a few weeks left of the semester, anyway. Did she want to waste all the effort she’d already put in? None of these practicalities moved my sister. She was still determined to go, weeping in desperate frustration and despair that I refused. If I truly cared about her, Grace reasoned, then I would go with her.
But after two weeks, I’d started to realize that Grace was right. It did matter that we were still so close to home. I’d thought that staying with Libby and her husband would be ideal: Libby had been one of my best friends before she left Westboro three and a half years earlier, and I thought we could pick up right where we left off. And while spending time with her helped me start to find some perspective—not to mention comic relief—it quickly became clear that the thirty miles between Westboro and her home in Lawrence weren’t nearly enough. We were commuting to Topeka four days a week for Grace’s classes, and though it was a city of 140,000, we seemed to run into our family everywhere. We saw them while driving by pickets on the way to school. At the mall. The university. I was shopping for groceries while Grace was in class one evening, turning into an aisle only to immediately duck back around the corner—there was Margie, reaching for an item on the top shelf at the far end.
When I spoke to Newbery of these incidents, he didn’t seem to understand my overpowering physiological need to conceal myself from their gaze, and I couldn’t explain it. No, they wouldn’t yell at me. They wouldn’t attack me or otherwise make a scene. They would just pretend that I didn’t exist. To say that I hid to avoid judgment and the silent treatment could not convey or justify the depths of that savage instinct to hide, but it was the best I could come up with. I couldn’t bear to think of the things my siblings would hear from the rest of the church members, who made it a habit to report back whenever they saw ex-members. If Grace and I seemed in good spirits, we would be considered foolish and bestial, not recognizing how vain and worthless our lives now were. If we seemed mournful, we were pathetic, feeling the sentence of death in ourselves. In their eyes, we would never be truly happy—and we were delusional if we thought we could be.
And then there were the messages from church members that stopped my heart each time they appeared on my phone’s screen. They’d begun back at home, the moment word got to the rest of the church that Grace and I were leaving, but I had assumed they would stop once we were gone. They did not. Gran texted me the morning following our departure: “You need to consider the rebellion of Korah!!!! FLEE the wrath to come!” Jael sent several text messages and emails, as well, and she had changed my name to “Korah” in her phone. In a way, it was nice to know the narrative church members were spinning in my absence. Korah was a biblical figure who publicly challenged the legitimacy of Moses’s leadership over the children of Israel. As a result, God made a spectacular display of demonstrating that He had chosen Moses: He caused the earth to open up and swallow Korah, his cohorts, and their families—including their little children. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. Afterward, God had sent fire and then a fast-moving plague to kill all who supported Korah. At the end of it all, about fifteen thousand were dead.
On receiving these messages from Gran and Jael, I’d read the story again and was struck by how much my complaints about Westboro’s elders sounded like Korah’s complaint against Moses: Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every