andrew, nathan, cameron, and daniella: a short story from andrew's perspective

additional material from my 2019 novel Daniella

In 6th grade, my friends and I decided we wanted to start a band even though almost none of us could play any instruments. We wrote songs about fucking different chicks and my dad found one of them. He told me he was disgusted and couldn’t believe such things would occur to me. I told him my friend wrote it alone and I just had a copy.

“This is absolutely disgusting,” my dad emphasized.

“I’ll never do it again,” I lied. I’d be careful next time.

That same year, 2000, my parents bought me the first Left Behind book. I read it. It was a novel about how the world was going to end. About all the Christians vanishing into Heaven one day out of nowhere. Pilots and drivers would vanish; planes and cars would crash. Then an Antichrist - in the book, the UN Secretary General, a guy from Romania - would promise peace on Earth. He would govern the world as a servant of Satan. Seven years of horrors would befall those “left behind,” like demons roaming around torturing people, before Jesus returned and defeated the Antichrist in battle.

I was happy that I was a Christian who had faith in Jesus. I was sad about the few people I knew who weren’t Christians and would go to Hell. I felt bad for the Hindu kid and the Muslim girl at my school. But I was happy that almost everyone I knew would be going to Heaven with me because they believed in Jesus.

The summer before eighth grade, I met a guy named Nathan at a Christian summer camp. We became close. Once we were back at school, I always lied to him on AIM that I was fucking a bunch of girls from the local college. I sent him pictures and told him I was having sex with all the girls he’d ever loved.

“Care for them,” he messaged me. “Look out for them.”

“I will always protect them,” I wrote back. “They will always be safe with me.”

“I am glad you’re the one who is watching over them,” he wrote.

“I’m happy to give them my dick,” I wrote.

“Send me a picture of the college girls you fuck,” he requested one day.

I found a picture on Yahoo.com of two naked women making out. I sent him the file. “Wait,” he said, “why is the file called HotLesbians.jpeg?”

I told him it was to protect their identities.

Nathan was a Democrat. He supported the United Nations, which was probably going to be a tool of the Antichrist one day. I knew all that made him sinful. I tried to get him to read Left Behind. I argued with him every day in our geography class about abortion. I told him women who try to do that should be imprisoned.

He told me he was an agnostic. I brought him up in my youth group and we prayed for him to be saved.

I went to my youth group whenever I could in middle school because Britney was so hot. She was the same reason I went to ski club on Fridays, where we’d all ski down the slope of a landfill. Sometimes I’d pretend I was fucking her in my bed. As soon as I started going chemical, I’d tell her - “I hope Gore wins, so you can abort the baby.” “Oh,” she’d always respond, “yes, yes, yes, go chemical inside of me…. I know Gore will win…. I know he will….” Then I’d let out my chemicals inside of her.

I had a sleepover at my friend Nathan’s once in 8th grade. At my suggestion, just the two of us played truth or dare. I dared him to let me suck his dick. He took off his pants and put his penis in my mouth. I did the best I could. His chemicals poured out all over my tongue. I put my hands on his ass and felt him tremble.

“I dare you to let me fuck you,” I told him later.

He got down in front of me and I saw his asshole between his cheeks. I tried to shove my dick in there. I humped and I thrusted. I couldn’t get it to work. My dick just kept sliding between his butt cheeks. I flipped him over and fucked him against his belly. I ended up going chemical all over his stomach.

I stood up. He saw all my semen on his abdomen. He grabbed a towel and wiped it off.

I still had an erection. I was standing over him. “I want a blowjob, too,” I said.

He gave me one. I came in his mouth.

We put our clothes back on. We sat for a while on the couch. My erection was gone now; I sat as far away from him as I could. I kept getting a feeling he wanted to touch me. I kept thinking he wanted to cuddle with me or kiss me or something.

“I love orgasming,” he told me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s the really good feeling you get,” he said, “right before you come.”

“When the chemicals come out,” I said.

“Yes,” he laughed. “When the chemicals come out.”

“You know,” I said to him, “this doesn’t make us faggots, right? This was just to see how it feels. We aren’t fucking faggots, right?”

Nathan nodded. “No,” he said. “We are not faggots.”

“No one can ever know about it, either,” I said.

“No one,” he agreed.

**********

I remember one of the first times Erica came to see me face-to-face. It was a night in late September in 10th grade. I had asked her on AIM what she was eating. She told me she was eating some grapes. I asked her if she could bring me one. I was too scared to meet her half way. There were aliens hiding in the trees between my road and hers. Maybe tall skinny Greys, maybe small little beings. She walked bravely through those trees, crunched through the frigid grass to my door, handed me a grape, said goodbye, vanished again into the faint light of the subdivisions.

Erica and I started to see each other in person at night all through October and November. That fall, we’d sneak out of our houses on Fridays and Saturdays to roam around in the night with Jeremy and Erica’s friend, Daniella. Nathan, who was close with Daniella, was often there, too. It made me nervous at first, but he never brought up what happened.

I thought Daniella was one of the hottest girls at school. She had her hair dyed black and pink which turned me on. I started masturbating about her often. In my fantasies, even though Bush was president, I couldn’t limit myself just to anal. I wanted to put my dick inside her vagina, too. And I did that in my dreams, night after night.

“We’ll just have to risk an illegal abortion,” she’d whisper to me in my fantasies.

We were all convinced there were aliens living in the forests around our subdivisions. We would find them. The exception was Daniella, who insisted they were demons. And sometimes Nathan, who liked to offer up rational explanations.

But so often we heard rustling in the leaves. We heard the strange screeches of distant creatures in the darkness. We saw the shapes of humanoid figures moving through the bushes. Jeremy told us stories about waking up paralyzed in his bed. He would float out the window and the Greys would do all kinds of shit to his body. Once we were all home from a scary night wandering the neighborhood, he always sent me links to forums where others described similar encounters with the Greys.

Daniella told me stories, too. Once after midnight it was just me, her, and Erica sitting in a circle in a big expanse of grass. She told me about a creature who’d been in her bunk bed when she was a little girl. She told me about the same creature coming down into her basement during a sleepover with Erica. She told me how she and Erica once tried to capture demons using pogs in her living room.

“And you don’t think it was an alien?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It was a demon,” she said.

“So you believe in God?” I asked her.

“No way,” she said.

Another atheist, I thought with shock.

Daniella turned me on the most, but it was Erica I liked. I started to wonder if one day me and Erica would kiss while we were wandering around. But I was afraid of what might happen to me if I kissed an atheist girl. I knew it was better to keep pursuing Layla the Christian. She’d keep me on the right path. She wouldn’t try to suck my penis or put her fingers up my butt. If I dated an atheist like Erica, I couldn’t know.

Christmas came and with it New Year’s Eve before the beginning of 2004. By then, I knew things were over with Layla. She sat in front of me in German class but never spoke to me. She never moved beyond her “oic” responses on AIM. And I never spoken to her in person either, only online.

Erica had just broken up with her boyfriend. She invited me to a New Year’s Eve party at Daniella’s, but I didn’t go. I stayed home and played Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Xbox Live. I liked to make my character hump the bodies of other players I had killed. All you had to do was send your guy on their corpse and have your guy crouch down over and over until the dead body vanished to respawn.

Erica and I messaged on AIM shortly after midnight. She had just gotten home from the party. We agreed to meet up just the two of us, right then.

She walked over and emerged from the trees that separated my subdivision from hers. We walked around in my subdivision with the snow all around us at two in the morning. I saw her breath coming out of her mouth and she handed us both some gum. I wondered if my breath was bad. We finished chewing the gum and stood for a moment looking at each other.

I kissed her. I kept kissing her and I felt a sharp sting extend from my groin up through my brain. I loved that feeling of her lips against mine. I loved her tongue in my mouth and mine in hers. Over and over, that sharp sting kept jolting up and down through my body. We made out like that in the cold and the snow for hours.

I texted her from my bed at around 5 in the morning. I told her I needed to think about whether I could date her. She sent me an angry response, demanding to know what the issue could be. I caved and told her I’d date her. I did like her, after all.

But I was afraid. Six hours later, when I woke up, I rushed down to the family desktop. I looked up the e-mail address of one of the main pastors at the megachurch my family went to. I told him my situation and asked him if it was okay to date an atheist.

I had a response from him a day later. He quoted a Bible verse to me, where Jesus warned his followers not to be “unequally yoked with a non-believer.” He told me to direct all further questions on the matter to the youth minister.

***********

I had government class that autumn of 11th grade. I put Bush Cheney 2004 bumper stickers on all of my binders for all of my classes.

I sat in a table group of 4 in government class. There was Donald, a staunch conservative who wore Pittsburgh Steelers jerseys every day. There was Luis, a left-wing German kid, the first godless European I’d ever meaningfully interacted with. There was Roxanne, a Wiccan. She frightened me. She sat next to me.

We debated gay marriage one day in class. Michigan was about to vote on a state constitutional amendment to ban it forever. I wrote a paper outlining the problems with it and presented my findings to my table group.

“Gay people,” I said, “have higher rates of pedophilia and suicide. They are not happy with their lives. There is something wrong with them. They are going against their own natures and it leaves them in despair, it makes them kill themselves.”

Luis told me that was impossible. “They kill themselves because people like you bully them,” he said, in a thick German accent.

“I have never bullied a gay person,” I said. “I love gay people, like I love everyone. But I can’t condone the lifestyle they’ve chosen.”

“They don’t choose to be gay,” Roxanne said. “Since when do people choose who to be attracted to and who not to be? Since when do you choose what girl you think is pretty?”

“It’s complicated,” I conceded. “But alcoholics, drug addicts, they’re sinning, too. They’re addicted. They are at a point where it’s not a complete choice anymore.” Roxanne and Luis both looked at each other and scoffed as a I spoke. I can still see Luis shaking his head and throwing up his hands. “They still have a responsibility to get help and stop going down that road. At some point someone convinced a gay person to start trying it out, to start being gay, and it became an addiction. It’s just like any human addiction to any sin.”

“I mean come on,” said Donald. “Being a faggot is fucking disgusting.” He looked at Luis. “What do you think could make someone want to put their dick into another guy’s butt? Seriously? What the fuck could make someone do that? You can’t tell me that shit is natural. It’s disgusting.” He looked at Roxanne. “And lesbos - what could really replace a dick for them?”

The teacher, who was also the football coach, came over to our table. “Let’s watch our language,” he said.

I remember Nathan and Daniella were in my government class, too. They at the table next to us. I realized they were both silently listening to our conversation, ignoring the conversation about gay marriage happening at their own table.

Suddenly a guy from another table, Cameron, shouted at me. “You’re a fucking faggot yourself, Andrew.”

“Whoa, whoa! Settle down!” the football coach implored us.

“Fucking faggot,” repeated Cameron.

I looked at him. I wondered - did he know? Were there people who knew?

“Nathan’s a fag, too,” Cameron said.

“Gentlemen!” the teacher said. “That’s enough!”

I don’t know how Nathan reacted. I was too ashamed to even look at him.

Then I remembered something I knew about Cameron. “I heard you ejaculated all over the place before you even got it inside your girlfriend,” I said.

The guys at Cameron’s table started laughing. Danella laughed, too. Cameron started to say something back but stopped.

“Stop this now!” the teacher said.

We stopped, but only because Cameron seemed too ashamed to continue.

“Now,” the teacher continued, looking at our table, “it seems like we’re having a productive debate, but watch the language, watch the language.” And he walked off.

“You say you don’t bully them,” said Roxanne, her voice trembling, “but you” - she looked at Donald - “just called them a derogatory word and said they are disgusting. Are you guys serious? You won’t take any responsibility for gay suicide? You should both be fucking ashamed. Fucking ashamed.” She stood up and walked out of the room. The teacher trotted after her and spoke with her for a bit in the hallway.

I was excited for the constitutional amendment being proposed that year to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. I knew my mom and dad would vote to ban gay marriage. I knew also that it would increase voter turnout by conservative, boosting Bush’s chances of winning Michigan. Not to mention the other 10 states that had their own amendments to ban this abomination - Ohio, a key swing state, among them.

I watched Fox News in the basement most nights when I got home from school. I was still scared Bush might not win. I watched him give a speech one night and I wondered if I’d savored his presidency enough. I wondered if I’d have to spend the next four years dealing with a godless Democrat running the country.

*************

We debated climate change in government class.

“There is no evidence,” I said to Luis and Roxanne, “that it is caused by humans. And God is in control of what happens to the Earth. God will decide when the Earth ends.”

“Are you serious right now?” Roxanne asked me.

A fucking legit witch, I thought to myself. And a Canadian. I must pray for her.

“You seriously think humans could actually destroy Earth’s climate?” I asked her.

“Yes!” Luis interjected. “Think about all the pollutants we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere for nearly two centuries! Of course we can. Don’t you know how greenhouse gases work?”

“Do you believe in God?” I asked Luis.

“Yes,” he said. “That has nothing to do with this.”

“It has everything to do with it,” I insisted. “God is in control. God has a plan. God has a plan for us and He has a plan for the Earth. And the Earth ending is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. This world is sinful, Luis. It’s sinful. It’s fallen.”

“Fallen?” he repeated. “You are saying you want the world to be destroyed?”

“I want sin to be destroyed,” I said,

Donald nodded passionately.

“And this world,” I continued, “is fundamentally sinful, depraved, and hopeless. The plan is eventually to destroy it. Maybe climate change is part of God’s plan to do that, I don’t know. But what I do know is God is in control. And as a Christian, as a Christian, Luis, which you have said you are, too, for me the end of the world is something to be excited about.”

“Oh my fucking God,” Roxanne said. “I can’t believe you’re for real right now.”

“The end of the world,” I said, “is when Jesus returns like He promised. It’s when He delivers us from this fallen world and sin forever. It’s when He casts Satan into the abyss!”

I noticed Mr. M was standing next to me, listening in. Daniella and Nathan were also just staring at our table now. It was hard not to glance over at Daniella. I still thought she was the hottest girl in the school. We hadn’t talked in months. She was the one person I hung out with before being born again who had never reached out to me.

“Mr. M,” I said, “you’re a Christian, right?”

He looked at me in surprise. “Well,” he said. “I believe in the separation of church and state, like our Constitution says. And as a part of that I guess I’ll say two things to your question. First - I don’t think as a teacher, basically as a government official, I should take a stand here. Second - I don’t think we should make public policies based on religious beliefs. So I don’t think we should shape our response to climate change or gay marriage or anything based on religion. I think that would violate the separation of church and state.”

“But that’s not what the Constitution says,” I quickly replied.

Mr. M looked at me, puzzled. “Oh?” he said.

“It says,” I explained, “that the government cannot establish a church as the official religion. It doesn’t say we can’t make policies based on religion or have the government influenced by Christianity.”

“What about religious minorities?” asked Roxanne.

“Like you?” I asked. “Right?”

She stared at me. “Yes,” she said.

“I think the next chapter in the textbook will shed some light on this,” Mr. M said. He walked off to another table.

I thought about Roxanne that night and her Wiccanism. I wondered what kinds of rituals she practised. I wondered if they had orgies. I thought about her naked in the middle of an orgy, with men and women kissing her everywhere all over her body. I thought about women eating her out, different dicks going into her. I masturbated. I prayed to Jesus for her soul and mine. “I am depraved, Oh Lord,” I said. “I am depraved.”

***********

I didn’t need to leave my house for school until just after 7 each morning. But I began waking up at 5 in the morning every day, to read the Bible and pray for two hours.

I thought a lot about the end of the world and the Antichrist. I often feared that perhaps I was the Antichrist, a leader who would come promising peace, who would come cloaked up as an angel of light, but who in truth was serving Satan. And I knew God was sovereign. So I knew that if I was the Antichrist, it was by God’s predestination, that there was nothing I could do to stop it.

It was witches that scared me most of all. I knew why it had been wrong years ago for me to try and read Harry Potter. It was a book that made witches seem like a game, like a fantasy. But I knew they were real. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” God had said. I knew witches had played a role in the Bible, communicating with demons and the dead. I knew they got their powers from Satan and not from God.

It wasn’t a joke that Roxanne was a witch. It meant I sat directly next to a Satanist every day in government class. But most troubling of all were my recurring fantasies about her Satanic orgies. My true desire, a yearning deep inside me, to find that it was true that she had orgies in her Wiccan house. My knowledge that if it were true, I’d find it impossible to resist joining one, even in the very presence of the devil.

And all the while I claimed to be a Christian. A Christian who wanted to be in an orgy, a Christian who snuck glances at Daniella during government class, a Christian who wanted to fuck men, a Christian who had sucked a boy’s dick and liked it, a Christian who masturbated every single day and was incapable of stopping. My faith was weak. God would punish me. God knew my heart, he knew all this corruption inside of me. Maybe Luis thought I was a real fundamentalist Christian, maybe I could present myself that way to the world. But I could not deceive God, nor could I deceive myself.

**************

Herr Schmidt, my German teacher, talked to us more that September about signing up for the summer program in Bad Neustadt, a small town in northern Bavaria. We had the opportunity to stay there with a German host family and improve our skills. He told us it’d also be a chance to compare all kinds of perspectives on politics, religion, foreign policy, immigration, drinking laws, anything we could think of.

Daniella and Nathan were going. I decided I’d go, too. I thought it would be nice to improve my German. I thought it would help me to see more of the world. I knew Europe was a godless place where people didn’t go to church anymore, but I knew God might want me to go there for that very reason. And in the back of my mind, there fluttered fantasies about getting drunk with Daniella and having sex with her. Deep down, there was the memory of what I’d done with Nathan, and the hope it’d happen again, perhaps in a moment of poor judgment, perhaps after making the mistake of getting drunk. There was the dream it would be with both of them at once.

My parents agreed it was a good idea. They signed off on me going and it was official.

I filled out an information packet about myself to turn into Herr Schmidt. It would go to my future host family in Germany, whoever they might be.

I wrote that I was a very serious Christian. I wrote that I wanted to go to church every Sunday. I wrote that I liked to read about theology and that I spent a lot of time studying the Bible. I wrote about how I’d been in Greece and seen the ruins of all of the old cities where Paul had spread the Gospel.

In an essay reflection just for Herr Schmidt about what I hoped I’d get from the trip, I wrote that I would resist the godless influence of Europe. In a red marker, he wrote several question marks next to that sentence before returning it to me.'

**********

At the beginning of October, J and I were assigned to be partner’s together in the famous “My Country’s Better Than Your Country” tournament for geography class. Everyone picked out a small country and participated in a tournament that would crown the greatest of all of them. We were assigned seeds based on how shitty our countries were. We had debates in front of the class. The class voted on the winner of each debate by secret ballot, and that team would move on to the next round.

J and I chose Romania. We’d watched a movie together recently about vampires in Romania. I’d found the movie to be a bit ungodly, especially because it portrayed the Vatican in a positive light. But J hadn’t seemed to mind it.

In round one, we were up against Tonga.

We presented economic and social data to prove that life in Romania was better. I told the class that in Tonga, the government forces you to send your kids to Catholic schools. I asked them if they really wanted to accept limits on their freedom of religion. Some of them laughed.

Cameron and his friend represented Tonga. They started their PowerPoint presentation with pictures of old wrinkly women they claimed were Romanians.

“These are the kinds of girls you will find in Romania,” Cameron said.

The whole class laughed.

J gasped. “What the hell?” she whispered. “This is so unfair!”

They showed pictures of crumbling buildings. “Look at this bombed out dump,” they said, laughing. “Where do you think you’re going to live? Seriously?”

J crossed her arms over her pink sweater as the class kept laughing.

Then Cameron and his partner showed pictures of hot women in bikinis on beaches. “These are the girls in Tonga,” Cameron said. He flipped to the next slide. It showed a hot girl in a bikini next to another picture of a wrinkly old woman. “Just look at the difference between Tonga and Romania,” they shouted over the laughter of the class. The teacher was laughing, too.

Only two people - Daniella and Nathan - weren’t laughing.

The class voted. The presenters, of course, could not vote. Only two votes were cast for Romania. J was furious, saying over and over that it was unfair. “They can’t be allowed to win like that,” she said.

A few weeks later, toward the end of October, Tonga went on to win the whole tournament deploying the same tactics against other countries.

“Don’t worry about them,” I told J. “They’re sinners. They’re going to burn in Hell.”

In the following weeks, I noticed more and more people were calling Nathan a faggot in the hallways and in classes. Nathan was suddenly absent from school a lot. The last week of October, he missed an entire week of school.

**********

On the last Saturday of October, I learned that Nathan had committed suicide that day. He had shot himself with his dad’s gun.

I thought about him all day. I didn’t read the Bible or any theology books that day. I just sat thinking about Nathan.

I went with my mom to the voting booth a few days later. I watched her vote to ban gay marriage. I wanted to be excited; I’d yearned for this moment.

I watched the election results that night on Fox News. I wondered again - what if Bush loses? Had I savored his presidency enough?

The results: Gore won Michigan, but Bush won the election overall. And my state - along with 10 others - had banned gay marriage by constitutional amendment.

I wanted to celebrate somehow, but again I kept thinking of Nathan. I wondered what Nathan, Daniella, Benjamin, Jeremy, and Erica had been up to over the last several months. I knew they hung out all the time in playgrounds and basements and department stores. I knew they drove around, ate together at Taco Bell, went to diners together, listened to Death Cab for Cutie in the car together. I knew because once I’d done it all with them. I knew I’d rejected their invitation for me to lay it all aside and go to Homecoming with them.

And now Nathan was dead.

I will not be dragged back down into sin by these temptations, I told myself. I must resist these temptations.

I messaged Erica on AIM that night. It was the first time we’d spoken in months. “Hahahaha!” I wrote to her. “GAY MARRIAGE IS BANNED!”

“Wtf?” she messaged back. “You’re so fucking hateful.”

“God has prevailed!” I wrote to her, alone in my bedroom and holding back tears. “Praise Jesus! Praise the Holy Spirit!”

I heard a door closing and saw her disappear as offline. She’d blocked me.

Sitting alone in my room the rest of that night, I ignored all the messages on AIM from my Christianity.com friends. I didn’t want to talk to them. I wanted to talk to Erica. I wanted to talk to Benjamin. I wanted to talk to Daniella. I wanted to talk to Jeremy. I cried.

In government class the next day, Donald and I high-fived. “No gay marriage!” I exclaimed with excitement. “Bush wins! Bush wins!” I proudly held up a binder with my Bush Cheney sticker.

In the corner of my eye, I saw Daniella glaring at me with her arms crossed over her chest. I wondered in terror if she knew the truth about me and Nathan. I realized how sad she must be now.

Suddenly, I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. But I couldn’t.

“Who’d you vote for Mr. M?” I asked our teacher.

Daniella kept staring at me.

“I voted for Gore,” he said.

“Ohhhh!” I said. “Come on!”

Daniella was quiet the whole period. Her table was missing a person. I kept wanting to reach out to her and tell her that once I had been very close to Nathan, too. But I couldn’t break out of the way I had learned to act during that class. I couldn’t break out of the norms I’d built around my interactions with Daniella and the others. And I knew intellectually that I must not fall back into sin by being unequally yoked to someone like her. I kept boasting about Bush and the ban on gay marriage.

Luis told us he was happier than ever to be a German.

“You’ll go back soon enough,” I told him.

I saw my old friends around the hallways that day, but they ignored me as usual. I kept wanting to talk to them about Nathan.

I saw Erica, too. She avoided eye contact with me. She rushed past me we moved in opposite directions to our classes. I wanted suddenly to tell her I was sorry for the messages I’d sent her. And in fact I felt truly sorry. I was so confused by these sins I wanted to commit by impulse - to hug my ungodly friends, to comfort my ungodly friends, to tell them I was sorry.

“Those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples,” Jesus had said. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”