Archive of Our Own ^beta

Rachel Barnes, fourteen, peruses an old medical encyclopedia in her middle school library. Three more days and she’ll be a “rising” high school student, whatever “rising” means. The building is sunny and old and wooden-and-brick and comforting to her. Her classmates are all watching Ratatouille or maybe Ladyhawke; their teacher is a child of the eighties and their paraprofessional thinks they are several years younger than they are, so it’s generally one or the other on these state-mandated dead days at the end of the school year. Her classmates mostly don’t have dead or dying dads.

Janna Baldiga’s dad got a leg blown off in Afghanistan, it’s true, back when she and Rachel were tiny tots in preschool together, before the Taco Hell incident, before Janna’s parents’ divorce, before the Barnes family made the (to others) incomprehensible decision to convert to Mormonism, before any of it. Janna’s dad’s leg getting blown off doesn’t count, because Janna’s dad is still around to have night terrors and work at the Wawa where Rachel loads up on soft pretzels and take Janna to Six Flags Great Adventure to apologize for not paying child support. None of which is going to happen with Rachel’s dad if what this book is saying about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is at all accurate.

“The diagnosis wasn’t even that recent,” she mutters to Janna next time she sees her, between Ladyhawke and something called The A-Team. “He didn’t want to scare us. I have to wonder what he thought would scare somebody more—just hearing it, or this?”

“People do that, just hide that from their wives and their kids?” Janna asks. “Is that a—?”

“Don’t you dare ask if it’s a Mormon thing, Janna; you know how Dad is.”

“The strong, silent type. Like Tony Soprano.”

“Hah,” says Rachel—saying the word “hah,” not laughing. “He’d pull this, too. Yeah. I bet.”

~*~

Keighti Paxton, thirteen, gets home from her YW meeting to find her mother and three of her five older sisters all in a tizzy trying to get everyone in the Toyota Land Cruiser for an overnight trip to Antelope Island. Keighti’s dad got this in his head because Calvin’s dad, like from Calvin & Hobbes, was always saying that camping trips were to “build character,” and now that Keighti’s two oldest sisters are both back from their missions, there’s a lassitude (a word Keighti found in some Regency romance) to their daily life that their parents want to do something about. Keighti’s dad is waiting in the Land Cruiser already, apparently.

“Keighti! You good?” her mother almost shouts as soon as she sees her. “Packed yesterday?” Keighti nods. “Change of clothes, pajamas, toothbrush, toothpaste, meds? Swimsuit—one-piece swimsuit, keep that in mind, and that doesn’t just go for you, Keighti—something to read if it rains?” It was almost certainly not going to rain and Keighti did not expect to get much reading done at all. She would be too busy swimming or hiking or trying to take pictures of the antelopes (and coyotes, and bighorn sheep. And bison! She had seen bison twice before and pet one once and had been astonished by how soft, rather than shaggy, its coat was).

“All good, Mom!” Keighti chirps. She’s still at the age where you can chirp something like this and come across as cute rather than pert and annoying. The guy whose name she can’t remember whom she went on one chaperoned-to-hell-and-back bowling “date” with a few weeks ago said that maybe she always will be that way. Looking back she’s not sure she took that as a compliment. At least he probably meant it as one. That guy was never really the backhanded or underhanded or, for that matter, good-bowler-handed type.

~*~

Rachel Barnes, seventeen, overhears her visiting sister Jessica, ten years her elder, venting to their mother.

“We might have gotten married too young. I just can’t deal with it. Even the sex isn’t what it used to be—sorry, Mom—I mean finding the right condoms is, well. Even Magnums are barely enough. It’s ridiculous. It’s a fucking elephant trunk. And if even that’s getting old, what about the rest of the marriage?”

Jessica has complained about this before, including once or twice when she knew Rachel was there. Rachel, lonely, recently moved across seven states, never really wants to hear it. Now Rachel, who has hooked up with Brady Tanner or with Orson Blanchard several times now after their band practice, frenetically enough and unpredictably enough and irresponsibly enough and unsatisfyingly enough that she worries she might have to swallow her pride and get one of those arm contraceptives before she swallows her pride and starts going to church again, steals back to her room and puts on one of the old singles she got at Last Trace right before they left Philly for the last time. Diana Ross’s voice wafts out at her—“you can’t hurry love; no, you just have to wait…” That’s true enough, she thinks, and maybe that’s been her problem, just as maybe it’s been everyone’s problem. And of course there is way more than one kind of love that one might try to hurry.

She doesn’t talk about her sister’s marital problems with anyone, other than Jessica herself another once or twice, for about three years.

~*~

Keighti Paxton, sixteen, looks around to make sure none of her sisters are snooping (especially the older, more responsible ones, who tend to side with the parentals on these things), fires up the old Mozilla Firefox Private Browsing window, and types “girls having sex” into the search bar.

She saw this map on Reddit once, when she was trying to look up how she could get her money back for the fake Detective Comics #27—Batman’s first appearance!—that “Bro” Bentley sold her at FanX Salt Lake. The map was unsourced, but what it claimed to show was that Utah had the highest rate of people watching porno in the whole nation. She found it embarrassing then and she finds it embarrassing now, but she guesses that, given how many people watch it and how much of it they watch, she’s not going to appreciably contribute to that if she sates her curiosity just the one time.

She sates her curiosity all right. The video she finds is seedy, gross, not hot at all (the girl is sort of pretty but the guy looks like the warlord with nipple armor in that old Italian Francis of Assisi movie her oldest sister Cassie showed her the other month), and seems to go on forever. The plot, such as it is, makes no sense. It’s like watching paint dry until, eventually, someone shouts “we can hear you!” from another room, and the look of horror—of wounded dignity, dignity that’s bent but never broken—on the girl’s face tells Keighti something important, tells Keighti the most important thing there is.

~*~

Rachel Barnes, twenty, is so deep into mid-to-late-stage missionary burnout that she’s making up new slurs to call herself as punishment for being so full of herself that she even cares. “The sour-featured Neck in the glass castle plays,” from a poem that she found snooping in a book of Germanic folklore owned by Sister Anstrom (whom she suspects was one of those #DezNat hyper-racists), is a good one. It hits her personality, her rigidity and the fragility of her faith, her background, even, if you play around with antiquated slang meanings of “neck” a bit, her sins. But nobody knows what it means except Sister Anstrom, and Rachel is not speaking to Sister Anstrom any more, not even in the vague and tenuous and diffuse way in which she normally tries to stay in touch with her previous companions.

The new girl, Paxton, is sweet. Sincere, impassioned, maybe a little dopey but by no means unintelligent—in a word, very Utah; in a bit more than a word, very Utah-outside-Salt-Lake-City. She is from Ogden. That’s a bit to the north of SLC, although you can get there by the light rail so it’s not like with Sister Furnival, who was from St. George, practically an Arizonan, like from The Good Place.

Rachel is almost afraid of that sweetness. There is a pain to it, to letting herself feel about that sweetness or want it or wonder about it. She does not want it to fix her in place, necessarily; she does not want to stay here, where she is, as devout as she is, necessarily. She might yield to that honey, she fears, might let a comb be built up on her lips so that they can do nothing but preach about God any longer.

~*~

Keighti Paxton, nineteen, gets a crush on her mission companion. It happens. She’s heard of it. Close quarters for a while, it is, and you get to know people very quickly. All but the absolutely most straight-and-narrow probably at least consider it now and then, according to her older sisters, although most don’t act on it. Sister Barnes is older and a little mysterious and seems annoyed with her sometimes but mostly treats her really well, listening to her and hearing out even her cringier stories or takes or ideas. It’s all Keighti could ask for from someone whose job it is to take her under her wing, and Barnes is so good at this—which is great, because Keighti is aware that she kind of stinks, that when her ward in Ogden sent her to the MTC they weren’t actually sending their best. Keighti wishes so very badly that she was their best.

It isn’t only her first crush of this kind, arguably her first crush of any kind depending on how you count it or look at it and how “sincere” you expect a crush to be, that Barnes gives her. It’s more too, strength and the ability to stand and tell the world that here she is, here is what she values and believes. Barnes gives her a self, a version of Keighti Paxton, that can stand up and say no, or that can say yes and know what it is she’s saying, or that can even say “maybe; let me think about it,” something people seem weirdly uninterested in hearing from young ladies like her.

Some of those things, even, Barnes buys for Paxton with her blood; yet even more of them, in the end, Paxton buys for herself with her own.