Faking Faith (3 page)

For two weeks, I did nothing but lie in bed and read Harry Potter books, blocking out the rest of the world and living in as much denial as possible.

But I still heard that the story of my misfortune was picked up by a couple of Chicago news outlets. My name wasn’t officially mentioned, of course, but there was no hiding. Every kid in school, every parent, every teacher, everyone I knew in the whole world was aware that the sexter who’d taken a golf club to her boyfriend’s car was me. A simple Google search connected my name to the photos and the YouTube clip of me bashing in Blake’s windshield. The story spread throughout the Internet and onto the cruelest websites as the newest unfortunate thing to point at and laugh at.

My first day back at school after the suspension was the worst day of my life.

THREE

S
o, I had been lonely for a long time when I found them.

It was about a month after the incident with Blake and the webcam pictures. Which made it about a month since I’d become the social pariah of my school. And a month since my parents had found out about the pictures and grounded me until the end of time or the end of the school year, whichever came first.

Not that being grounded mattered. I had no friends and nowhere to go. It was a moot point.

I’d been hanging out by myself a lot, is what I’m trying to say. Which had led to lots of quality alone time with the Internet.

I’m not sure of the exact path of clicks I took to find the first website. It was probably a link from one of the snarky forums I’d started to frequent … the kind of sites that find funny or ridiculous or tragic things to make fun of in the vast wilds of the Internet. And as everyone knows, there are infinite amounts of funny and ridiculous and tragic things on the Internet. Forums that made fun of other people helped me feel better about my own stupid situation. At least I wasn’t a weird kid posting fan videos about Justin Bieber or a baby kissing a pig or some dude getting blown into the side of a barn during a tornado.

There were more humiliating and painful things out there than what had happened to me. Not many, but a few. And for a while it was my personal quest to find the worst of them.

So I clicked on some link on some random forum post titled
The most effed-up crazies on the Internets
, expecting to be briefly entertained by someone else’s idiocy or misfortune.

Instead, I was transported to another world.

A world with a pale pink background, a flowery border, a precious banner image of an Edwardian girl reading while kittens cavorted at her feet. And the dulcet strains of religious hymns emanating from an automatic media player to make the experience complete.

Somehow, I immediately knew I’d found my new obsession.

The blogs of fundamentalist Christian homeschooled teenage girls. I couldn’t look away.

. . .

There were so many more of them online then I would have expected. On that first night, I clicked around for hours, following webs of links and follower lists and commenter names and getting lost in endless pastel websites and Bible verses.

Some of the girls were genuinely terrible writers and unreliable updaters, but I quickly zeroed in on the queen bees of this particular blogger community. They were the ones who wrote daily, posted the prettiest pictures, and got the most adoring comments. And though most of them wrote in a sticky-sweet and florid style that often made me roll my eyes, they weren’t afraid to be blunt about their lives and beliefs.

Slowly I began to understand what I was looking at—a culture that was so different from my own that these girls were barely on the same planet as me, let alone speaking the same language.

My first thought was that I didn’t understand how they were possibly allowed to be online. Didn’t their watchful parents worry about what their precious, innocent daughters saw? Sometimes I thought that
I
shouldn’t even be allowed to look at some of the things I found online, and I was a jaded old Internet veteran.

But as I read back through archives, I found them talking cheerfully about how their Internet usage was fastidiously tracked by their vigilant parents. And the girls themselves talked of being ultra-careful to not go to sites that might “defraud” them or force them to consider sinful acts or make them anything less than pure white vessels of virgin holiness. They quite happily policed themselves.

It was so … weird.

My second thought was to wonder why the hell they were putting their lives out there for public consumption. Didn’t they know about online privacy? Weren’t they afraid of strangers reading? Didn’t they look at their website stats and realize it wasn’t just other nice devout girls who were reading their deep thoughts and looking at their personal pictures?

Then I realized that their blogs were a form of preaching. They
wanted
people like me to stumble upon them and read. They believed that sharing their lives and beliefs might help some random Internet strangers find the Truth. They were missionaries without even leaving the house.

Personally, I wasn’t particularly looking for religious instruction, but that didn’t stop me from taking their blogs on as my new pastime.

At first I just gawked like a slack-mouthed tourist, but it soon became something deeper. I wanted to do much more than just anonymously read. I wanted to participate.

. . .

“Dylan,” my mom said at breakfast one day in February. “You’re spending far too much time on that computer.”

I stopped shoveling cereal into my mouth and reluctantly looked up from my laptop, where I was catching up on the early morning updates. Some of my favorite bloggers prided themselves on getting up at the butt-crack of dawn to milk the cow, read their daily Bible verses, make the family hot breakfast, and update their sites. They were hardcore like that.

“Oh really?” I said, giving Mom’s ever-present work laptop a pointed glance.

“I’m working on a motion for the arbitration,” she said, frowning.

I shrugged. “Well,
I’m
doing research for a school
project.”

My fourteen-year-old brother, Scottie, snorted into his graphic novel. I’d made the mistake of showing him some of the sites, and he thought the fact that I was fascinated with these girls made me certifiably crazy.

Mom squinted at me. “You haven’t reinstalled that instant messenger thing, have you? Dad and I told you, that’s off-limits.”

I rolled my eyes. “No, Mom. God.”

It’s not as if I couldn’t hide the programs if I wanted to. Mom and Dad liked to think they were badass electronics experts, but they hadn’t been plugged into a computer for practically their whole lives like I’d been.

I didn’t have anyone to talk to on instant messenger anyway.

“Okay, well,” Mom said, going back to her own screen, parental duty accomplished. “Good.”

Breakfast was basically the only time I saw Mom those days. As a lawyer for a big downtown Chicago firm, she was working on some endless insurance arbitration that had been going on since before my freshman year. Scottie and I had started referring to the case as her third child, which always made Mom laugh halfheartedly and then look depressed.

Mom usually took the morning shift with me and my brother, while Dad, a corporate partner in the same firm, was supposed to be home in time to have dinner with us every night.

As if Dad managed to make
that
happen more than once a week. And even when he was home, his bigwig clients were constantly calling and harassing him. He usually just stayed late at the office and rolled in around nine at night with bags under his eyes.

The one bright spot was that the previous year, Scottie and I had been deemed old enough not to have a nanny hanging around anymore. And at least my parents had given up on keeping me “scheduled” with lessons and sports teams and tutors. I mean, I knew I was lucky they could afford all that stuff, but it had been seriously exhausting to never have a moment to myself.

Now I had plenty of moments. An infinity of moments.

I went back to my cereal and my computer screen, and resumed clicking through my bookmarks.

I’d built up a solid list of blogs that I checked several times a day. Sometimes it felt like a part-time job to keep up with them all, even though I’d narrowed it down to a very particular group of girls with similar fascinating lifestyles. The ones who were the most wildly different from me.

I was really only interested in girls who were homeschooled. The more siblings they had, the more intrigued I was about their lives and how their families worked. And I gave epic bonus points for living on a farm in the country and posting pictures of farm animals. Especially cute baby farm animals.

In terms of actual religious beliefs, none of the bloggers I read seemed to be part of any particular Christian denomination, and they almost always belonged to congregations that met in people’s homes instead of an actual church building. I did some research and found out that these churches were the most hardcore conservative and used the most literal, fire-and-brimstone interpretations of the Bible. They thought mainstream churches—with their youth groups and book clubs and Sunday schools, like the big Presbyterian one my ex-friend Amanda belonged to—were too soft and worldly. Home churches didn’t fluff around.

I felt sure that my bloggers’ families didn’t exactly belong to a cult, since they were spread all over the country and only very loosely affiliated. But in some ways, it was pretty damn close to a cult. They were convinced they were right and that the rest of us were going straight to hell.

Something about that sort of complete and utter devotion sucked me right in and made me want to poke at it.

So, after reading non-stop for two months, I’d determined my favorite blogger—Abigail from
Abigail’s Walk With The Lord
. Hers was the first site I checked in the morning and the last site I visited at night. She was clearly one of the most popular on the fundamentalist Christian homeschooled teenage girl blog circuit, and she got dozens of comments on every single one of her posts. Even if it was just something silly like a picture of her little sister with a cow.

Abigail was the third oldest out of ten kids, seventeen years old like me, and lived on a farm in southern Illinois. She was, of course, homeschooled and wrote cheerfully about her dream to get married soon and have as many children as the Lord saw fit to send, just like her mother and older sister. Abigail believed that becoming a wife and “furthering the vision” of her husband was the sole duty and purpose of a woman, and she wrote like she was perfectly content with her fate.

No, more than that. She wrote like she was blissed
out
. Like it was the best fate anyone could ever hope for.

No SAT’s. No college. No career.

“Oh, ladies, it’s the most blessed and spiritually fulfilling thing in the universe to know our appropriate biblical roles as women and future keepers of the home, isn’t it?” Abigail would write. “I don’t know about you girls, but I’m excited!”

And then twenty commentators would chime in that it totally was the best thing ever.

The weirdness didn’t stop there. Abigail was considered something of an expert at being a Virtuous Maiden and girls had started to write to her with their burning questions, which Abigail posted and answered (with the permission of her parents) like some sort of saintly Miss Manners. If she hadn’t been a sheltered, homeschooled chick who lived in the sticks and rarely saw people outside of her own family and little church, she definitely would have been one of those high school girls that friends turn to as the group therapist.

I ate up every word she wrote like it was topped with whipped cream.

But I didn’t understand. Given that these girls were more or less kept under constant surveillance by their ultra-conservative parents, not allowed to go to regular school or hardly ever out in public, and barely permitted to so much as glance in the direction of an unrelated boy until they were involved in a parent-approved “courtship,” at which point they were basically already engaged to be married … in this culture without access to boys and flirting and dating and snide gossiping in high school halls, how could these girls possibly make mistakes and need advice?

But as I read further, I found I was wrong. Of course, the problems the sheltered readers wrote about to Abigail were sort of adorable, but it seemed there was still plenty to fret over even in this protected and seemingly clear-cut culture.

Q: How can I be sure that my skirt is modest enough for a church event?

Q: I would like to have a feminine countenance that pleases the Lord, but I don’t want to defraud boys or men. How much makeup should I wear?

Q: How can I practice godly submission before I’m married?

I’d gasped when I read that last one, shocked to see how they viewed gender roles in such black-and-white terms. We’re talking, like, “yes, sir” submission. Men are the bosses and women are the helpers. There is a master and a servant, a leader and a follower. The world is that simple.