Camina believes in the dim morning light that the child’s tent under the Christmas tree is Mother Mary kneeling. That’s the first place her head goes when she mistakes the shape of things. She adds flourishes of color with fluorescent yellow highlighter to her first Bible. Attends church with her mother and asks why her father doesn’t have to join them. Because he’s a different religion, her mother says, and he never attends, not even on holidays. On Easter, Camina carries a stuffed blush bunny—straight from the basket left partially devoid of chocolate eggs at home—to church and places him on the wooden pew to her left. She’s into contradiction. It’s spring in the desert and already ninety degrees. The straps of Camina’s Easter dress press into her shoulders and she shifts them back and forth for seconds of relief.
Camina doesn’t flinch while at sleepaway camp the pastor’s daughter tells her never to wear her hair tucked behind her ears. Doesn’t cry when the same girl slips the protruding tag of her shirt back in with the words size large. She commits the song Pharoah Pharoah, ohh baby let my people go, yeah yeah yeah yeah belted by the other campers on stage to memory so that her body absorbs the tune and carries it forever against her will. One of the girls in her room at camp says oh fudge! instead of swearing and it occurs to Camina this calls more attention to the act than if she said nothing. Camina cries on the phone to her mother to pick her up from camp early but her mother refuses. At home, she prays opposites, just in case prayer is a trick. It feels too easy to ask for what she wants outright without hiding it behind layers of mystery.
She attends Sunday School where they watch movies on rare rainy days. Sings about her little light shining and pictures her fingertip ablaze like E.T.. There’s magic in these rituals: she might glow, she might meet an angel. Camina’s mother tells her a story about her grandfather, who swore he’d been visited by an angel while in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. Camina asks God or Jesus not to send an angel to visit because she doesn’t think she can mentally handle it.
She attends Confirmation class at a new church the spring after her family moves to a different town. Her mother has taken some time away between churches so she’s the oldest in Confirmation class and already fourteen when the pastor, leg propped faux casual on a chair, tells the group he gets it, he wanted to jump his wife’s bones when he first met her. Camina pictures skeletons in coitus. She takes her first communion, the dry wafer doing nothing to abate her hunger, the grape juice nothing for her thirst. They don’t use wine. She places her own allowance atop the pile in a golden tray every Sunday as pledged. She loves to print her name in neat cursive on the tiny envelope, sealing her dollar inside.
For high school English, she writes a ridiculous poem about how she doesn’t believe in evolution after her biology project fails, killing all the snails in an arid tank. She turns seventeen and finds depression, is given names for her ways she feels. The same kid who throws rocks at her during co-ed gym class at school attends this church with his parents, now in slacks and an ironed shirt, hair slicked back and shiny under the church lights. She sees for the first time how worlds seep together despite her attempts at isolating them: school, sadness, church. Camina stops going to church with her mother, to keep the worlds separate.
After Camina moves away from the bullies, from the small town, she attends the funeral of her high school crush. It’s held in the same church though she never saw him there when she attended—that might’ve kept her going. She sits in the back because she already feels outside, feels apart. Her soul is way out in the parking lot baking in the Arizona sun. The white lines painted onto the asphalt swim and dance, waving her over. Inside, Camina’s body watches her former classmates in the front rows, heads bowed. Camina puts down the book of songs. She gets up to leave before the music finishes. One song she won’t commit to memory.