“But it won’t be us,” Tina assured her. This was when they were maybe seven or eight, cocooned in the blankets of Tina’s bed.
“But what if it is us?” she persisted. “We can’t possibly do everything right.”
“Sure we can.” Even that young, Tina was already becoming gorgeous, and it was no secret at Grover Street that all the boys liked her. She reminded Stacey of a Siamese cat, her wide cheekbones giving her face the shape of a heart. She had flawless, seductive skin—some ancestor having added a dash of bronze. Maybe it had to do with envy, but she felt like Tina never lost an argument, certainly not about their faith. “We’ve accepted Jesus,” Tina said. “We believe in Him, and we do His work. The only people who are in Hell are the ones who are supposed to be. They get their skin cut off in big strips and have hot needles put their eyes out over and over.”
Tears came crawling to the corners of Stacey’s eyes, and she wanted to tell Tina to stop but couldn’t. She needed to know. Tina’s dad ended up having to take her home that night when she refused to sleep with the lights off. A few nights later, Stacey’s parents had Pastor Jack over so he could issue some corrections about what Hell meant and to reassure her that she had nothing to fear. The entire time, she could only picture Tina’s descriptions.
When they got to high school, the two girls had the goal of taking over Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Stacey never attained higher office but Tina became secretary when she was just a sophomore. The school’s largest extracurricular club met once a week in the cafeteria. It hosted speakers, shared stories, and prayed for various things (sick family members, sports victories, the usual). Members had locker signs with large crosses and Bible quotes (Stacey recalled only Lisa’s: Paul’s take on Romans 5:8, I loved you at your darkest). You didn’t even have to be an athlete to attend. Every once in a while a troublemaking parent would protest the use of school property for religious organizing, but New Canaan was the wrong community in which to pick that fight. It wasn’t until her senior year when she was agonizing about Lisa that Stacey heard the Sexual Purity Policy on the ministry leadership application form: “Neither heterosexual sex outside of marriage nor any homosexual act constitute an alternate lifestyle acceptable to God.”
Tina, who colored the cross on her FCA locker sign pink and soon took up with the football team’s co-captain, led the group in stridently, unapologetically earnest prayers. She wanted you to know the love of Jesus Christ so badly it made her ache at night. By high school, not only had their friendship withered and vanished, but for the first time Stacey had doubts.
It was hard for her to pin down when it started, but she remembered very well what Ben had to say during a double date to Columbus with Rick and Kaylyn.
“We’re not Catholics,” Rick said, in regards to Kaylyn being on birth control. Stacey had been plotting to do the same herself, but the thought of broaching the topic with her parents was semi-horrifying. “Premarital sex is one of those sins you can definitely get forgiveness for when the time comes. Jesus probably spends half his time rolling his eyes and saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, premarital boning. Got it. Forgiven. Let’s keep it moving.’ ” Rick was joking but not.
“Or it’s all total horseshit malarkey, and you can have all the sex you want,” said Ben, gazing out the window at the flat expanse of cornfields, barns, and country homes that peppered the drive south to Ohio’s capital. Rick was behind the wheel, and his eyes fixed on Ben in the rearview mirror.
“Better be careful talking like that. A lightning bolt might hit the car, and I don’t wanna get taken with you.”
Ben sniggered. “If that’s how it all works, maybe we should get God some Prozac or something.”
“So wait.” Kaylyn turned around and leaned all the way into the backseat. She never wore her belt. “You’re with Ashcraft? You don’t believe in God at all? Like, no God?”
“Him and Ashcraft believe in each other’s buttholes,” Rick chimed in.
“Bill’s wrong about almost everything ever except this,” said Ben. “I’m not saying there’s no way, no how not a God, but the way they tell it to you? Like there’s this omniscient dude watching us CIA-style and—you know—doling out rewards and punishments based on obscure, occasionally incoherent moral programs… Pretty dumb if you think about it.”
Rick gave him a stupefied look. “Lightning is definitely striking you, Harrington. Stacey, you hearing this?”
She felt the clammy-palmed sensation of being asked to choose a side. This was early in her relationship with Ben, and all three of them were older, more popular, ready to judge her answer. She wanted to melt into the gray fuzzy material of the backseat.
“I don’t know. I guess it’s Ben’s choice what he wants to believe.”
“Yeah, it’s just your eternal soul, dude. No biggie.” Rick pushed back the Cleveland Indians hat on his skull and scratched at his hairline. “My question, I guess, is why not just believe anyway? Better safe than sorry, right? You pray a little, go to church enough, get right with God no matter what—and then what do you got to lose, Harrington?”
“That’s Pascal’s Wager, Brinklan. Someone already thought of that.”
“So? Doesn’t make it not true.”
Ben shook his head, hair slipping across his brow, and he tossed it off with a buck of his head. “I’m saying this guy Pascal thought of that idea in like the seventeenth century. If that’s all you got—better safe than sorry?—I’d start worshipping every other god you can. There’s a long list of people out there who might be right about their god instead of yours.”
“Jesus, please don’t strike my car,” Rick said to the roof. “Just because my sinning friend is in it. Wait till he’s outside to get him.”
They moved on to other topics, but that thing about Pascal sat with her. Later, at home, she looked it up and couldn’t believe that Ben was right. She’d had this same theory, this wager, put in her head by Pastor Jack in different form, as the airtight case for why it’s best to believe past all doubts and skepticism. For the longest time she’d thought it bulletproof. Many years later, she found herself unable to stomach her teenage naivety.
Even as an adult, Hell would return to her on occasion, unexpectedly, with violence. Like when her oldest brother sat her down in his kitchen and tried to save her. Patrick and his wife, Becky, had an unambiguous position about her “lifestyle,” which they never brought up when the rest of the family was around. This began in 2005. After she came out to them, they were unfailingly polite and loving in the moment and then began to forward her the most offensive material one could possibly send a gay family member: the hard-core electroshock-the-fag-outta-you websites and “therapy” centers operated in Evangelical circles despite increasing ridicule by the mainstream.
“I’m not trying to hurt you. Or be cruel to you.” Patrick wanted to know what she thought about seeing one of these therapists. “I love you. I’m concerned for you.”
What she wanted to say—If anyone other than you sent me a link to “therapy” like that, I’d set their fucking car on fire—dangled on the tip of her tongue. And it stayed there. Becky had left the room on purpose, off pretending to fold laundry in the basement. Stacey’s nieces, Jamie and Elyse, were in bed. After dinner she’d played with them, their blinding blaze of adorable so acute, she knew she’d never risk estrangement.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” she told him. “This is just the way it is.”
“It’s the ‘No Exception’ clause, Stacey,” he said gently. “You can’t call yourself a Christian and then pick and choose which parts of it to follow. You commit to following Christ in every aspect of your life.”