booth. Black trench coats, black hats. Their faces are painted Henchmen-white and they’ve got the red contact lenses and the same cool concentrated stares, like they’re unlocking the dark little room in your brain where you stuff all the thoughts that would make your parents blush.
But what I really notice are the t-shirts.
They’re hidden at first, just thin slices of white underneath the coats. But then the taller guy moves his arm and I see the intricate image on the shirt. It has to be homemade. There’s no official merch with that picture on it, and it looks hand-drawn by someone devoted to detail.
Obsessively, psychotically devoted.
The Hell Bells.
I zip up my vest. Status: High alert. I feel every one of the zipper teeth, the sick uphill click-clack of a roller coaster ready to drop you into blackness. Their white faces tilt together. One of them starts to whisper.
They’re walking my way.
***
I don’t wait. I run for the RV. Through the lobby, down a glass corridor, out the doors and across the hot parking lot. Abel’s face looms in front of me as my sneakers smack the pavement. He wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t run from them. He’d walk right up to them and say something bold like What’s your deal? Like Cadmus did to Xaarg in 1-04, like Abel did to Shandley in the Q&A room.
I’m running so hard I can’t stop in time. I smack into the side of the Sunseeker. I gasp in a breath, look behind me. Scan the parking lot.
No one. Empty.
I open the door, slowly. It’s dark and stifling inside, like a confessional on a summer day.
“Abel…?”
He’s not the one who answers.
Come in, Brandon.
I always hated confession. I would make up sins like swearing and shoplifting gum to hide the real ones: masturbating in the shower, impure thoughts about Luke Perry in those ancient 90210s Bec loves.
Someone important wants to talk to you. Isn’t it time you started listening to Him?
I lock the door, latch all the windows, and pull down the blinds. I thump down in the passenger seat and dial my parents. I don’t know why. It’s not like I can talk to them about this, but I like tapping the familiar pattern of their phone number. They’re not home. Of course. Saturday dinner with the Donnellys. Mom’s curled her hair and brought her shepherd’s pie in a white casserole dish; Dad’s wearing a plaid shortsleeved button-down and his thin hair is wet and carefully combed. They’re drinking red wine and saying the words “Loyola” and “Communications major” a million times, trying to convince everyone they’re still proud of me.
I try Nat next, but who knows where she is. Her cell’s turned off and I get her message: I’ll call you back, maybe, over the anguished background yodels of some girl-punk band I’m not cool enough to listen to. Whatever. I don’t want to talk to her anyway. Last time I asked her for advice she lit a cigarette and said “God is like junior high, Brandon. Graduate already.” Then she told me she was thinking of moving to Kenya with some greasy philosophy major she’d known for five weeks, and possibly getting an ankh tattooed on her shoulder.
Plastic Sim is still in my vest pocket. I fish him out and spread his arms to the sides; trace a slow T across his body—wrist to wrist, chin to shin. One time when I was eleven or twelve, I was in St. Matt’s alone after serving Sunday Mass, and I sat down in the front pew and stared up at Jesus on the cross. Our Jesus was really realistic. You could count his ribs, trace the subtle definition of his muscles, gauge the strength of his legs just by the synthesis of sinew and bone. I tried to pray a decade of the rosary but the prayers never made me feel much; the thees and hallowed bes were too foreign and too familiar all at once, and God was probably so mad at me he didn’t want to hear it anyway. I ended up dreaming of what sex would feel like, to be so close to a man you could feel his bones with your bones. And then a shadow slanted across the pew, and a warm hand clapped the back of my neck.
“Whatcha thinking about, Brandon?”
Father Mike above me, smiling in black with a white square at his neck, boyish in a blue-and-gold St. Matt’s windbreaker.
My stomach contorted. I weighed the choices: Confess