knew I was scaring her, but I had to lay it all on the line. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“It’s okay,” she said, weeping. “It’s okay if you break my heart.” I had said all I could say. She walked into the store while I tried to compose myself, and on our drive back to the house, her focus was on encouraging me to speak to the elders. If I could just tell them these things, surely there would be a good answer. I told her I would keep trying, and she seemed relieved—not particularly worried about the troublesome case I had made against the elders themselves. So confident that all was well in the Lord’s church. Trust and obey was second nature.
Finally, after several weeks, I went to my father. Again, I tried to be calm and reasonable. I limited myself to subtle questions and gentle pushback—possible only thanks to Herculean efforts to swallow the panic rising in my chest—but at every turn, I was shut down. As day after day, week after week passed with no improvement and no obvious way forward, I began to despair again.
* * *
As September rolled in, my mantra changed. Gone were the days of Grace … I don’t think I can do this forever.
“Grace. I can’t do this forever.”
We sat together in Grace’s bedroom, she at the foot of her bed and me on the floor staring up at her. This room still felt very much like a child’s—white curtains with little blue stars printed all over them, her walls and ceiling painted in bright, primary colors. It had been such a happy time when we’d repainted it two years before. All of the siblings had been obsessed with a bizarre YouTube cartoon called Charlie the Unicorn, and in one corner of the room, I’d used a tiny brush to paint cheery polka dots and quotes from the show: “It’s a land of sweets, and joy, and … joyness.” It hit me again how very young she was. I couldn’t ask her to leave. I wouldn’t pressure her.
But I also couldn’t keep walking this fine line. How long would I be able to avoid media and funeral pickets without detection? How long until someone handed me a sign I believed unscriptural? How long could I continue to choose my words ever so carefully—like some dishonest politician? I largely escaped explicit lies, but I grew ever more uneasy as I faced the fact that I was deceiving everyone both within the church and without. I might be limiting my own behavior, but with my presence and assistance, I was endorsing the rest of Westboro’s behavior, too. The church had always been all or nothing—in or out—and this was no-man’s-land. I could not survive here.
Grace and I eventually decided that unless something major changed, and soon, we would have to leave. We would begin to prepare in earnest, and in the meantime I would also take greater risks in raising these objections with others. The closer we came to walking out the door, the less I had to lose by sticking my neck out to petition the others. And what if Grace somehow managed to get kicked out before we could actually leave? We started a new game of Words With Friends, and Grace changed her username so that it was unidentifiable. No matter what happened, we could always communicate privately there.
As soon as the decision was made, my first course of action became immediately clear: apologize to Justin and Lindsey. Mindful that I was now in the territory of direct rebellion against my father’s instructions, I drafted a text message to Justin explaining why we had suddenly disappeared from his and Lindsey’s life. Even as fearful as I was, I knew that reaching out to our erstwhile friends was the right thing to do. I should have done it months ago.
That I had to rebel in order to apologize struck me as hopelessly corrupt.
I thought my heart would stop while waiting for Justin to respond. Again, the prospect of imminent doom hung over my head—whether destruction from God or discovery by my family—and I tried to still my shaking hands as I unloaded the dishwasher. Perhaps Justin had learned his lesson last time, and was already turning me in. Perhaps the elders were launching an investigation this very second. My fear got the better of me, and I texted again to beg for a response—ironic, considering that I had left them hanging for