Chapter One
Would it be cliché for me to say that this story begins with a girl? Well it does, so maybe it is. Shut the hell up.
Her name was Aly Raygan Whitley. I first met her in seventh grade, back when my parents were still together. We had just moved to a new church a little to the east of Jackson, Mississippi, a church that was terrifyingly massive. I’d been homeschooled all my life, and our previous church was smaller than my extended family. I have always been terrified of people, any people, all people. Only rarely have I ever willingly spoken to a stranger, but I then found myself quite suddenly swarmed with them. They crowded every nook and cranny of their already oversized building, a structure large enough itself for me to get lost in even if it were empty. As if it weren’t enough to have a church on nearly every street corner in the southern United States, we had to have some that were the size of a damn football stadium.
My mother was a cellist. A hell of a good one, too. For many years she had volunteered at whatever backwoods, hole-in-the-wall church my father decided we should attend on the given year before he had some spat with the pastor and kicked the dust off his feet. This had been the pattern for as long as I could remember, and my mother, as humble and submissive as they come, had yielded to my father’s every aggressive whim, turning down many job offers in the process. Like I said, she was a hell of a good cellist.
But one year there came job offer with too many digits to ignore, and as my father had been out of work for a while with a back injury, my mother had no choice but to accept. Thus did I find myself in a church that seemed as vast and mighty as the Death Star, and packed more densely with bible toting storm troopers than a canoe on the Rio Grande with illegal immigrants.
I was shy and terrified and raging with pubescent hormones, and the transition proved nearly more than my fragile twelve year old psychology could handle. The first day was a complete sensory overload. We parked our faded, run down Oldsmobile on the third story of an old, grey parking garage and crossed a four lane street with a crowd of fellow church goers. The pedestrian traffic was enough to back up the street for several hundred yards. Then we ascended a set of twenty or thirty smooth, stone steps, pausing at the top to shake hands with the miserable looking greeters standing just outside the door, enduring the slow bake of the Mississippi summer weather in black suits.
I was lost the moment we entered the front door. The people were a wall, a mob, a well-dressed mosh pit pressing in on all sides. I was still a head shorter than the crowd at that age, and I couldn’t even begin to tell where I was going. There were walls far to each side, arching high over the people and sloping into a high domed roof, on which was painted a giant mural reproduction of the last supper. Both walls were lined with thick columns, to which stone cherubim were affixed just below ceiling level.
I trailed in my father’s wake as we pressed our way through the tightly packed crowd. Some two or three hundred feet down the length of the foyer it was joined by an identical, adjacent foyer. At the point of their joining they arched into a sprawling, circular dome, crowned with high windows though which the steeple could be seen towering over its apex. Had I been alone in the room I’d have been entranced by the architecture, but my appreciation for art was buried under a thick layer of social terror.
On the far side of the domed room were four sets of large double doors opening into the sanctuary, a grand amphitheater furnished with thickly padded green carpet in the aisles and row upon row of foldable theater seating. This was a pleasant surprise; I’d been expecting pews. Nice pews, but pews nonetheless. There are only so many things you can do to a plain wooden bench to make it nicer.
My father selected a couple of seats about midway down the aisle and towards the center of the row. I found myself seated next to an overwhelmingly obese middle-aged man with neatly combed grey hair and a suit coat that strained against his belly. His thick arms protruded far over his arm rests and encroached heavily on my personal space. His forehead was sweaty and his cologne hung thickly in the air. In fact, everyone around me seemed to be coated in various artificial fragrances. I wanted to puke.
