It’s a little past eleven on the last night I’ll ever spend at Bible Camp. Six years ago, when my brother was fifteen and I was nine, he got baptized here, so I’ve spent every summer since at Jesus Lake. Here, in the heart of a forgotten hollow in Manatee County, Florida, at a camp with a long-forgotten name. Tucked into a rickety top bunk in a musty wooden cabin, half-obscured by overgrown grass and heat-dried thicket. The unscreened windows are thrown open to capture a breeze and give shelter to mosquitoes and drain flies. 

When my brother came home baptized, I asked him how he knew he was ready for it. His cheeks had flushed, and he shrugged when he said he just felt a push like God was telling him it was time. The next day, when  I asked my parents if I should get baptized too, they told me that I should wait until God said to, so that it means something. 

While my family doesn’t have formal heirlooms, we did have a plot of good farmland and Southern Baptist beliefs. Upon my grandfather’s death in the late eighties, the land got divided, rezoned, and sold to a real estate developer. When the sales contract was signed, the land was gone, and his back pew Baptist beliefs became my inheritance, passed down from my grandfather– the founding pastor of our church–to my father, to me. And while my parents were almost always willing to allow leeway with the strictest Baptist rules—. I could dance, and wear my favorite homemade cutoff shorts in the Florida heat, and I had a stack of CDs marked Parental Advisory—, but there was one tenant they couldn’t give wiggle room to. 

Southern Baptists believe that unbaptized souls go to hell. No one had ever been able to steer me toward the bible verse that supported that belief, but it was there nonetheless– written into the doctrine of our church and coded into the fabric of my DNA. 

At their father’s funeral, when I was barely four, my mom’s brother whispered to me, “This is why you need to be baptized. Grandaddy was baptized, so he gets to be in heaven now. If you don’t get baptized, you go to the other place.”

I guess he figured I was too little to hear the word hell, but not too little for it to be held over me.

So, when my brother got baptized, I wanted to, as well. I wanted the assurance baptism would give me– an eternity in heaven, and being spared brimstone and hellhounds. But, I was also a younger sibling, and I didn’t want my brother to experience things that I hadn’t. 

“But what if I never feel it? Shouldn’t I get baptized just to be sure?” I asked again, wanting them to let me go through with it anyway.

My dad brushed it off and said, “You’re a good kid. God’ll come calling for you soon enough.”

“Hopefully soon,” my mom shrugged. “You don’t want to run out of time…”

So, every Wednesday and Sunday for six years, and for one impossibly long week every summer, I sat in a pew and waited to feel something. No one, not my family or youth pastor, could explain what the feeling felt like; they all just took turns telling me I’d know. 

“You’ll know it’s happening when it’s happening,” my mom said.

  Every night, I prayed for it– begged for it– but that mysterious, omnipotent push always evaded me. 

 

Now, I’m fifteen–the oldest I can be before I age out of Bible Camp. I’m in Cabin 3, on a yellowed mattress with frayed flannel sheets in a ball at my feet. I’d frantically kicked them off in search of a cross-breeze. My bed is the farthest from the screen door that barricades us in and separates us from the unkempt scrub brush, coral snakes, and male campers. Ivy, my best friend, is tucked into the bottom bunk, and the bed wobbles a little as she tries to get comfortable. I’m on the top bunk, still unsaved and wide awake.

If I walk across the pine board floors and creak the screen door open, I’ll be able to see the Chapel that, only hours ago, we were all packed into. All of the campers together for the first time all week. Sweating against one another, sharing makeshift fans and crumpled tissues.

We used separate entrances– boys used the double doors at the front of the building, girls entered through the side door. The floors sagged slightly under our steps as we shuffled to our seats– girls on the left, boys on the right, oldest at the front, youngest in the back. A tropical storm had pulled half of the roof from the chapel last summer and ruined the seat cushions. So, we wedged against each other on bare pews. They sagged a little, too.

The last night of Bible Camp is especially brutal.  It’s an hours-long war on satan, a militaristic quest to save souls by any means necessary. So we all stuffed our pockets with granola bars and bottles of water and scraps of paper for writing meet me in the bathroom notes to one another when we needed a break.  Our older siblings warned us about it years ago when we tossed our duffel bags into the camp’s shuttle van for the first time. Next year, when we’ve aged out, we’ll issue the same warning to the new batch of ten-year-olds.

Every other year, the pastor from my Southern Baptist church, Brother Henry, leads church services at camp. He’s kind, and familiar, and he shies away from fire and brimstone and righteous hellfire. He doesn’t care that I haven’t been baptized yet, and, when we see one another around our one-stoplight town, he doesn’t seem to care about how I’m dressed or whatever book is tucked under my arm.

This year, however, the pastor from the neighboring Methodist Church, Brother Cecil, is the featured pastor. Ivy has taken to calling him The Reaper because he looms over us and wears all black no matter the occasion. Slicks his thin white hair back and covers it with a black cowboy hat that fits a little too loose and hangs over his neck like a hood.  He hunches over the podium when he speaks, and grips the microphone in his hand like it’s a scythe; A whispered rumor that he was alive during the freeze of 1899 has been circulating for years. Sure, the sub-zero temperatures wiped out the cattle and the bluebirds, but Brother Cecil escaped unscathed and lived to torment generations of campers. Or, so the legend goes.

On this last night of camp, the reaper is painfully punctual, clearing his throat into the microphone at exactly six pm, and shushing any chatter coming from the pews. Our cabin chaperone, Katie, sat on my left, and Ivy on my right. The Reaper nodded curtly at me before he started to speak. An acknowledgment of his last chance to be the one to hold me underwater. A declaration that this chapel was the Appomattox courthouse, and the night would end with one of our surrenders. 

The sermon began with a reading from the book of Peter, and I opened my hand-me-down bible to the right passage. The pages felt so fragile under my fingers, like I could rip them up by turning them too quickly, and I wondered if they felt the same to my brother when he sat in his pew on the opposite side of the room. Had they felt precious to him, or were they just yellow paper under his fingers, like they were under mine? 

1 Peter 2:11 “Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.”

Brother Cecil’s voice shook when he read the verse out to us, like he was trying to catch his breath. He held himself up by bracing his forearms against the podium and leaning into the microphone, and for a moment, he didn’t look like a reaper at all. He just looked old and tired.

The microphone squealed against his sputtering breath, but didn’t drown out the gravel when he asked, “Do you know why we keep you so separate during the week?”

“Because this place sucks,” she whispered. Cecil didn’t hear her, and I didn’t know if he could even hear anything anymore. 

“We separate you,” he said,  “to save you. We won’t let you eat together, play games together, or even worship together because the only reason for your socialization at this age is to sin.” 

I shifted in my seat, and the sound of creaking wood let me know that others were squirming, too.

“Think about it. You’re too young to get married. Too young to enter into appropriate courtships. But all of you here are just old enough to feel lustful…sinful. If we let you interact with each other, then what are we encouraging? What message are we sending?” 

We weren’t meant to answer, so I fanned myself with a folded camp flyer and waited him out.

“We’d be telling you that it’s okay to feel those things and to put yourself in situations where you’ll feel temptation. So, it might seem silly that we keep you on segregated walking paths, stagger your meal times, and plan separate activities, but you’re not going to feel tempted here. You’re not going to focus on your desires or your other campers. Here, you’re just going to focus on getting right with God.”

I made the mistake of looking to the boys’ side of the room, then, and I made eye contact with Logan, one of my oldest friends. Logan, who, on non-camp summer days, swam in my pool and watched rated-R movies on my couch, and poured M&Ms into our shared bowl of microwave popcorn. Logan, who’d never tried to kiss me, and whom I’ve never wanted to kiss. In a week or two, we’d find our way back to dog day hangouts and late-night games of manhunt with the other neighborhood kids. But, in the middle of our last sermon of the summer, after a week of biblically mandated separation, we couldn’t look at each other for more than a second or two. It was different, somehow. Salacious. His cheeks turned red, and my shoulders hunched, and I looked ridiculous in my brother’s pants and a men’s large t-shirt branded with our camp’s backlit cross logo– an outfit hastily chosen to hide the sinful body I’d been cursed with. 

Just two weeks ago, the weekend before I left for camp, my brother and I took a winding, aimless drive around the labyrinth of dirt roads around our house. We had no destination in mind, but we had a styrofoam cooler full of Dr. Pepper, a Tupperware container of boiled peanuts, and an entire afternoon to kill. We’d begged my dad to let us borrow his cherry-red Jeep, and he’d reluctantly tossed us the keys. While I gathered the necessary supplies for a Saturday drive (sunglasses, ball caps, a binocular for spotting deer and hogs), my brother spent thirty minutes fussing with rusted zippers to remove the soft top. When the jeep was topless and cranked, I shoved a wrinkled $20 bill in my pocket and promised to return it with a full tank of gas. 

I was ten months too young to drive, so I propped my feet on the passenger-side dashboard and settled into my role as snack dispenser and navigator. I could already feel the inevitable sunburn on the skin left exposed by my homemade cutoffs and cropped Garth Brooks T-shirt, but I was a week away from camp’s strict dress code, so I reveled a little in the sting.

My brother tried once to plug his beaten-up iPod touch into the car’s AUX input, but I slapped his hand away.

“Uh, the driver gets to pick the music. Official road trip rules,” he said, recoiling. 

“Not if the passenger has better taste in music. Official long-drive-that-isn’t-technically-a-roadtrip rules.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a copy of Led Zeppelin II, an album that was sacred to my father and me. 

And if he opened his mouth to argue, the opening riff of Whole Lotta Love cut him off.

We weren’t even two miles down our one-lane road before one of our dad’s brothers drove past and sneered at the sight of his niece and nephew driving too fast, playing music too loud. My brother steered the car over to the right side of the road and let the passenger side tires dip off into the grass. When we offered friendly waves, we were met with an eye roll that made my brother chuckle once under his breath.

“He’s a little holier-than-thou for a guy who’s been divorced three times, don’t you think?” he asked. He steered the car back into the middle of the lane, turned the music back on, and we were off again. 

It was one of those lazy drives that alternated between screaming along to classic rock songs and waxing poetic about leaving our small town, and comfortable silence. Shouts of hold the wheel for a second while I take a sip, and you suck at driving stick shift. 

“You know, I’m thinking of moving up to Georgia and starting my own business. Processing deer meat and stuff during hunting season, running my own butcher shop the rest of the year,” my brother said somewhere between Lily Bridge and the house that left Halloween decorations up all year. 

“You should do it,” I said before admitting that I was considering applying to college in Tennessee to put some mileage between myself and home.

“You should do it,” A pause. “Hell, just pack a bag and go on a campus tour or something next week. I’ll tell Mom and Dad you’re all safe and sound at camp, and you can actually enjoy yourself.”

I knew he was joking, but there was something in his voice that let me know he wished he wasn’t. But, even at our most diabolical, we couldn’t plan a way to keep me out of camp. A well-coordinated sneak-out, sure. A forged report card here and there. But, even though I wished he’d shove cash in my pocket and drop me off at the Amtrak station, we’d never be able to pull it off. So, he reached over, shoved the rim of my baseball cap over my eyes, and laughed when I flailed to put it back in place.

“You know why Dad loves this album so much?” He asked, referencing the Zeppelin album that was starting over for the second time.

“Because he has good taste?” 

He shook his head. “It’s because his dad wouldn’t let him listen to rock music growing up. He got the whole church fired up about it, too. Wrote a bunch of sermons about how it led to temptation and glorified the devil and all of that end-of-days stuff. He wouldn’t let Dad listen to any secular music, really. So, the day Dad moved out, he drove to this shitty record store all the way out in Tampa and asked the guy working there to sell him the best rock album he could think of. It was this one. He went home to his little apartment, put it on the record player, and listened to it over and over. Said he couldn’t piece together what his dad was so afraid of.”

“I can’t picture Dad being rebellious like that.”
The corners of his mouth turned downward a little, and he shifted in the driver’s seat. 

“Yeah, well, it’s not rebellious to enjoy things. Ok? Baptists are intense about things, but sometimes an album is just an album. You know what I’m saying?”

I nodded, even though I didn’t. Not then.

I didn’t get the metaphor then, on a lazy Saturday drive with my big brother. But a week later, making forbidden eye contact with one of my oldest friends while some ancient preacher condemned our sinful nature, I felt like I got it.

Our chaperone, through gritted teeth, told me to pay attention, so I focused back on Brother Cecil and the bony finger he used to scan over his congregation of campers. 

“I’ll tell you what,” he drawled, “I am proud of the way that y’all have composed yourselves this week. No run-ins, no fraternization.” He pulled a quartered, pink piece of paper from his back pocket and made a show of unfolding it. He let it crinkle into the microphone and let his fingers run slowly over each newly-exposed edge. 

“I’m also proud of how many of you are signed up to be baptized tomorrow at our revival,” he said as he unfurled the baptism sign-up sheet.

“I won’t say who,” he said, his eyes meeting mine, “but one of our oldest campers is going to leave here tomorrow unbaptized–unwashed– unless I can reach his or her soul tonight.” 

“Campers, bow your heads and join me in prayer,” he commanded.

When heads bowed, and eyes closed, he left his perch at the podium and walked toward me as he prayed. His mouth struggled through mumbled words about salvation while he walked past one pew, and another, and another until he tapped my chaperone’s shoulder and took her place beside me. A setup, a coup, a betrayal. 

“Keep your eyes closed in silent prayer,” he said to the room around us, his voice barely loud enough to reach all the pews in the small chapel without a microphone to his lips. 

“If it’s okay, I’m going to pray over you,” he whispered to me, his face close enough that I felt his breath on my forehead, and smelled the coffee he’d drunk before service. 

“It’s okay,” I whispered back because it wasn’t a choice, as much as I wanted it to be one. 

He removed his cowboy hat and placed it on his knee. His hair was wispier than it had been two years ago, with more skin peeking through. He’d lost weight, too, and the slouch in his bony shoulders was more pronounced. Time had passed for him. But, in the pew, while he prayed over me, I was still the ten-year-old girl he’d met years before. Still wanting God to choose me, still afraid that he never would. 

 “Dear Lord, please give Sister Jess a sign and tell her what she needs to do to be worthy of an invitation into your kingdom,” he prayed. “She told me earlier this week that she hasn’t felt called to you yet, that you haven’t yet asked her to meet you in baptism. Please place on her heart the reason she’s fallen short of this honor. Amen.” 

In fifteen years, I didn’t recall ever feeling further from God than I did under those fluorescent lights as Brother Cecil breathed heavily beside me and basked in the giddy afterglow of making a teenage girl feel like a cosmic disappointment.

All at once, my potential shortcomings flooded over me, and I picked my cuticles and picked my brain, trying to find which of them had caused me to fall short of this honor.

Maybe it happened when I had tucked under the covers while my mom’s old Dell laptop bathed my face in blue light. A half-sacrilegious TV show playing on the cracked screen. A show that featured a fallen angel and a reformed demon, and that wasn’t explicitly banned from my household, but that would have been if my mom caught me watching it.  So, I hid under the covers with a borrowed DVD and a packet of M&Ms and watched episode after episode, with the volume almost muted and my finger hovering over the red X in the corner of the screen.

Or, maybe that sin wasn’t grand enough to warrant a fall from grace. Maybe it happened on the day of my thirteenth birthday party when my friends and I piled onto air mattresses on my living room floor to watch Mamma Mia. When my fingers were stained yellow from microwavable popcorn and my hair was matted with chlorine, I thought Amanda Seyfried was beautiful in a way my friends didn’t. I did the right thing, according to the sermons I’d grown up listening to, and kept those feelings locked away, discussing them only in prayers of repentance. But maybe just feeling attraction was enough.

 (Years later, when we’re both nearing thirty, Ivy will tell me she thought Amanda Seyfried was beautiful, too, and we’ll raise our glasses of chardonnay in a toast to her.)

It could have happened on dozens of other occasions: kissing the boy next door after he played my favorite song on guitar, logging into anonymous chatrooms with my best friend, loudly singing along to the lyrics, nothing more than a casual fuck, isn’t that just how we operate at a sweaty concert. Dozens of occasions where, for a moment, I didn’t have to be a Southern Baptist or a soldier for God’s army. Occasions where, for a moment, I got to be a girl.

And Brother Cecil was content to sit beside me while I wondered which moment of girlhood had broken my soul, and had me cast out of heaven.

But, as I rose from my seat, squeezed past Cecil, and walked out of the chapel through the boys’ door, the reason I hadn’t been called to baptism didn’t matter much to me. What mattered was the weight of my heirloom beliefs like a noose around my neck. It was the last church service of the week, and God hadn’t called me to baptism. He wasn’t going to, so I was going to bed.

Now, it’s a little after eleven and I’m still awake in my bunk, desperate for a comedown. I rip a page from the glossary section of my bible and scribble a note on it. 

You awake? I need to hang out.

I reach down and toss it into Ivy’s bed. There’s the faint sound of rustling and a pen being uncapped, and then Ivy’s arm is stretched up toward me with a response in hand. 

Come down here and bring a pillow. 

We build a pallet on the floor, somewhere to sit with each other. But, in the dead of summer, with minimal cross breeze and no air conditioning,  it’s too hot to even lie on top of a blanket, so we’re lying side-by-side on the cool floor, instead. Even with the layer of grime and the vague stickiness, the tile feels luxurious on the bits of my skin that are allowed to be exposed: sunburned forearms and feet blistered from shoes that I forgot to break in. Our necks are sweaty against the flannel case of the pillow we’re sharing– Her on the left, me on the right, our bodies angled away from one another, we’re careful not to accidentally trap body heat between us. 

Lights out was technically two hours ago, so we don’t talk to each other. We just read our books with the clip-on booklights she stole from Barnes and Noble last week. Her mom would have purchased them if she’d asked. But the risk of getting caught is half the fun, she’d said when she gave me one on the drive up. We aren’t allowed to bring books from home, lest a coming-of-age novel inspire a rebellion, so we’re reading battered books we borrowed from the chapel. (Left Behind, a series about non-believers trying to survive after the rapture– a favorite of evangelical youth group leaders). 

“It’s so hot I can’t even read,” Ivy whispers. I shush her, and I don’t have to look at her to know she’s rolling her eyes.  

“Oh, lighten up. What is Katie going to do? Call our moms and make them pick us up twelve hours before camp ends?” She scoffs.

Ivy closes her book and sits up. She cranes her neck and watches Katie for a few seconds. She’s asleep two bunks away from our makeshift nest on the floor. Ivy watches her chest rhythmically rise and fall, watches her kick one leg out from underneath her flannel blanket, and listens for the heavy snore that follows. 

“She’s out hard. Follow me,” Ivy says, rising and extending a hand out to me. 

“Where are we going?” I ask. I’m sitting now, but I don’t reach for her hand.

“I know just what we need. Do you trust me?” 

“Absolutely not.” But I’m lying, and she knows it. 

She laughs quietly, grabs my hand, and pulls me so that I’m standing beside her. 

Ivy is graceful as she moves through the cabin, silently grabbing her shower sandals and a pair of contraband cotton shorts she’d stashed under her mattress. She hands me my shoes and the flashlight from the foot of my bed. When she puts the pillow we were using back onto her bed, she grabs a pack of off-brand Oreos from her nightstand and nods toward the exit. In the aftershocks of evening services, I’ve forgotten that I haven’t eaten since lunchtime. 

 Her footsteps are light as she leads me toward the side door, and I’m so clunky behind her that I’m afraid I might wake someone up. But we wind through the rows of bunk beds and past the humid shower stalls, and we make it to the screen door without anyone else stirring. She pushes the door open slowly, careful not to draw any creaks from its ancient hinges, and the fresh air that hits our faces feels like freedom. 

I shut the door gently and almost turn on my flashlight, but Ivy swats at it. She shakes her head, grabs my arm, and pulls me away from the cabin and into the night. We’re too close to the cabins, and a bobbing flashlight beam would give us away, so I tuck the flashlight under my arm and follow her down the overgrown trail.

We walk for ten minutes, stopping once to pick bristles off of my baggy pajama pants, and once to watch an armadillo scurry across the path and into the woods, before Ivy grinds to a halt and tells me to turn on my light. I flick my flashlight on and find the bank of the small swimming hole our siblings’ generation had nicknamed Jesus Lake. They’d meant it as a joke, of course. A tongue-in-cheek reference to the dozens of baptisms that have happened here over the years. A nod to the generations of young protestant kids baptized in dirty water. But the adults thought it was earnest and a sign of strong faith, so the name stuck. There’s a dying mangrove off to the left that our pastor nailed a sign to. In red paint, the blood of the savior, he’d stenciled the words Jesus Lake and made the name official.

Jesus Lake is dirty in the best of times and home to catfish and the water moccasins that feed on them. Its floor is a graveyard for missing water shoes and sunglasses, and you can almost see the oil slick from years of sunscreen bodies using it to cool down. But, there’s a rickety dock that extends a few yards into the water, and a frayed rope hanging from a nearby branch serves as the perfect swing. In all of its murky glory, it’s the best part of bible camp. 

The adults had decommissioned it as a swimming hole after an unusually high number of alligator sightings a few summers back. My dad thinks it’s because a hurricane drove them inland, but I think the counselors wanted to shut down any prospects of mixed-gender swimming. Jesus Lake, a former oasis for overheating soldiers of the lord, is strictly forbidden for use by any campers who are not being actively baptized and supervised by clergymen turned camp counselors.

“Ivy, you know we can’t be out here,” I say, torn between wanting to go to the cabin to avoid potential trouble and wanting to dive in to cool my sweating body. To remember how it feels to swim in those outlawed waters.

“But we’re already here, and it’s our last year of camp. We’ll never get another chance to swim in Jesus Lake.” She counters. “You deserve it after The Reaper’s stunt tonight,” she tucks the Oreos under her arm so that she can use her fingers to put quotation marks around the word prayer.

  “Jesus Lake is only for baptisms now,” I say. 

She places a sure hand on my shoulder and says, “Jesus will forgive us our transgressions.” 

And even though I know my parents will ground me if a counselor sees us and calls them, and even though my flashlight isn’t bright enough to properly scan the water for alligator eyes, I  follow her to the edge of the dock. We intertwine our fingers and, with as much carefreeness as I can muster, we jump into Jesus Lake. 

The water hits my skin and swallows me up. It’s a good shock, the feeling of cold lake water wrapped around me–dragging me under and stinging my eyes. I’m weightless. Floating, suspended. Against better judgment, I open my eyes and blink against the sting.  It’s murky, and I can’t see my feet, but I can see the distorted moonlight on the surface above me. It’s a beacon, a fabled green light of hope. A reminder that even if it’s warped and blurry and a little bit forbidden, the light can still find me. Or whatever it is Leonard Cohen said. 

“Isn’t this better than sitting on the floor and reading some terrible book?” Ivy asks when our heads are topside again. And I nod. It is. 

A slight breeze picks up and blows through the Spanish moss, and a bullfrog croaks at us from his perch on a root-rotted stump. A heavy bellow, octaves below the fever pitch of the mosquitoes and cicadas. Even though the water is murky and my skin is littered with bug bites, and my hair will be matted beyond hope in the morning, the woods are serene. I feel at home in the half-green water under the guard of a harvest moon. 

And, I don’t think what I’m feeling is God, but I think it’s peace. I think that, even though no one has held my head underwater and declared me a sister of Christ, I’ve been washed clean of something. And I think that’s maybe good enough for now.

I don’t know how long we’re outside, but we’re lying with our backs pressed to the splintery dock when dawn starts to creep in. Soaked pajamas and air-dried hair being dampened again by the humidity. Our bodies are swim-tired and begging for sleep, but there are so few moments of this left before we trudge back to Cabin 3 and sneak back into bed. The sky turns from midnight blue to a hazy purple around us, the sun threatening to rise and end the only fun we’ve had all week.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” Ivy says. Quiet voice, sleepy tone.

I shrug because there’s enough light now so she can see me. 

“S’okay,” I whisper. 

“You seem so into all this god stuff. I don’t know why your parents keep sending you to reinforce it.”

“It’s because Travis got baptized here. They keep thinking it’ll happen to me, too.”

“You know, it’s okay if it doesn’t happen. You don’t have to prove anything. The Reaper doesn’t know you at all. This whole baptism thing is a racket, if you ask me.”

We’re quiet again for a few minutes– long enough for the cicadas to give way to a mockingbird song. Long enough for a new day to break.

Camp ends at noon the next day, after breakfast and morning chapel. Instead of lunch, there’s a lakefront revival when the parents arrive at noon. A dozen kids line up on the dock, waiting to be dunked beneath dirty water and metaphorically washed clean. Their parents line the shore, clapping and crying and fanning themselves with paper fliers. If anyone looks close enough at the dock, they can probably still see the outline from where my soaking body had been hours before. My dad waits in his truck in the parking lot to drive Ivy and me home. He didn’t get the call that his kid would be baptized, so he avoids the crowd and the heat.

One by one, they slide off the foot of the dock and shuffle through waist-deep water to meet Brother Cecil. So careful and calculated, unlike the running leap I took last night. He prays over each of them with kinder words than he’ll ever say to me: 

Lord, receive this child and welcome their soul into your kingdom. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the holy spirit, I baptize you, my sibling in Christ.

One by one, he covers their face with a white cloth, places a hand behind their back, and dips them underwater. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, surface. 

In the light of day, it looks less sacred to me. Less like devout soldiers being hand-selected by God to have their souls washed clean. More like exhausted kids being held under turbid water by a man who convinced them that the only alternative is an eternity spent in hell. 

When the last camper has been submerged,  Ivy and I shuck our duffel bags onto our shoulders and walk through the woods to my dad’s waiting truck. We’re sunburned and bug-bitten and exhausted from our near all-nighter, but there’s a lightness to us. A relief to be returning to civilization, burnt CDs, and movie marathons. The weight I was carrying on the drive-up feels easier to bear. Like some of it washed off of me during my midnight swim. I’ve felt it, finally–that kind of thoughtless wholeness I thought only baptism and faith could bring. And if it can exist in a hostile, swampy summer, it can exist anywhere. 

On the drive home, when my dad asks if I’d found salvation like my brother had all those years ago, I lean my head against the window and watch the scenery pass by. Unruly saw palmettos and oak trees blown over by a hurricane a few weeks ago. A whitetail deer waiting to cross the highway. And, it’s not God, but it’s something. When he asks again, looking for some kind of confirmation, I tell him that I think I did, after all.

In fifteen years, when my brother becomes a father and I meet his baby girl, we’ll talk about bible camp for the first time since we were kids.

“I’m not going to make Rosie get baptized or go to bible camp or anything if she doesn’t want it,” he’ll say with spit-up on his shirt and a glint in his eye. 

“No? You’re not worried about all the heaven stuff that Mom and Dad worried about?”

He’ll shrug and smile down at his sleeping baby. All pink cheeks and chubby thighs and fresh starts. 

“I just want her to be a good person. If she wants all of that, fine. But I don’t want her to beat herself up.” Like you did, he wants to say.

“It worked on you, though. You’re the baptized kid.” I’ll shrug it off like the sting of it all doesn’t still bother me sometimes. Like it doesn’t ever sneak in on sleepless nights and lurk in the corners of my therapized, post-Christian brain.

“Oh, come on, I was faking. I got dunked, but it didn’t mean anything to me. I just didn’t want to go to camp anymore.”

And in the dim light of my new niece’s nursery, fifteen years removed from bible camp, I don’t know how to react, so I tuck my head down and crack a smile. 

“Something funny?” he asks, and he’s almost alarmed at the sight of his baby sister bracing herself on his daughter’s crib, smiling at nothing.

“Was everyone faking it?” I ask, craning my neck to look up at him. His six-foot frame towering over me like it always had.

“I assumed so. All my friends faked it. We all banded together and decided to just get it over with so we could enjoy summer again.” He ushers me away from the crib, and I follow him into the living room.

“And you never thought to clue me in?” I ask as we both flop down onto the fancy new couch he’d gotten a hell of a deal on. “You really have always been such a little shit,” I tease.

“At least this little shit figured out the whole baptism thing before he spent six summers wasting away at that miserable camp.”

“You would have saved me a lot of strife if you’d told me sooner, you know.”

“I thought you and Ivy would wise up and figure it out eventually. It was like a rite of passage for my age group to fake the whole spiritual movement thing. Plus, I didn’t want word to get back to Mom and Dad that it was a sham.”

I shrugged. “Well, Ivy and I jumped Jesus Lake on the last night of camp, and she told me she thought baptism was a scam. So maybe she had it figured out.” 

“Maybe she did,” he says and tucks me under his arm. 

And, like that, I feel like I’m floating in Jesus Lake again. Weightless, unburdened, overwhelmed. It’s not God, but it’s something.

about the author

KT Novak is a Florida-born writer whose fiction reflects her upbringing in Southern evangelical culture. When she’s not writing, you can find her scouring vintage stores and annoying her two senior dogs.