Heretics

Mott wasn’t saying goodbye. Why wasn’t she saying goodbye? Why wasn’t she hugging her with everything she had, transferring a lifetime of hugs to her in that moment? They’d known this was a possibility. For almost four generations, every girl ever had known this was a possibility. They prepared for it. They made bon voyage cards. They didn’t steal food and try to escape.

“I can’t ignore my duties to everyone else,” Paige told her, though it was mostly automatic, words that had been branded into her brain year after year. 

If Ingrid could leave, why couldn’t she? Why couldn’t all of them?

Death, or something, was the logical answer, but logic was an abstract concept lingering somewhere in the air above them, beyond the roof of the tetriplex, when under that roof Mott was standing right in front of her, almost nose-to-nose, her almondy scent pressing a wave of calm over Paige’s shoulders. Mott’s freckles stood out when she was this close, a constellation of high-melanin stars over the rest of her creamy brown skin. Everything about Mott was dark and warm, like the sun blanketing your skin as it set at the end of a hot, spring day while you sit on the balcony with your feet up and drink cinnamon tea. Paige could see every hair on Mott’s impeccably groomed, thick eyebrows, could trace the shadow down from those eyebrows to the curved tip of her slender nose, just underneath which her normally-loud lips, quiet now and still so Paige could see the straggler freckle on the bottom one, parted ever so slightly to show the edges of her teeth—which Paige suddenly, desperately, inexplicably wanted to lick. To see what they felt like under her tongue, like that would give her access to know what made Mott Mott, the incredible girl whose skin couldn’t contain her confidence, who always seemed to understand everything. It was like if Paige could touch her teeth, gain access to the inside of Mott’s mouth, suddenly she would understand everything about her and be cured of this insatiable wanting that pushed through her veins, her pores, her hair. 

She wanted to kiss Mott. They were here, like they’d left off a few hours ago, and it was like the momentum couldn’t be stopped now; against her better reasoning, she felt her hand reach out to hold Mott’s face, tracing her jawline to her shoulder. 

“Tell me you’ll go,” Mott whispered, leaning her forehead against Paige’s, and Paige realized that she’d been wrong. This was everything she’d ever wanted. She curled her fingers in between Mott’s with one hand, brought the other one up to tentatively touch Mott’s neck, to run her fingers over the three vertebrae connecting her head to her spine. 

“I want to,” Paige whispered back.

“Then do it.”
 

Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025

Mott, the heretic.

Mott is usually everyone's favorite character. She's sassy, she's fun, she's daring, and she has a whole lot of heart. She's been secretly pining for Paige for a while now, and she's managed to mask her way through this high-control society for her entire life, but now that shit's getting real, she's sort of done. 

Mott's character focuses on this question of whether you really can "just leave" a high-control environment. The short answer is: not really, and the cost is massive. When you leave a high-control environment, you're walking away not just from the things that you hate, but the things you love, too. You can't have both, because they're enmeshed. 

In a high-control environment, you feel trapped. No one has ever really given you a different option before, and there usually are moments of happiness (though I'm not sure that can be said for some extremely bad environments like kidnapping or Children of God). When it's a culture, and you've been immersed in it your entire life, you have no other references. 

For me, it was the feeling of having to please everyone around me. My family loved me, and I knew this, but when I did stuff that deviated from what they wanted for me, I was in trouble. When I said the word "crap" in seventh grade, my mouth was washed out with soap. When I got angry about the way that I was being treated, or my mom was being treated, or my brother was being treated, I got spanked with a wooden spoon or a belt for "talking back." When I was in college and I told my mom that I'd had a religious epiphany at a Quaker meeting and realized that I could believe in pacifism and non-violence without believing that Jesus was the Messiah, and that I felt so much relief in that, I was told, coldly, to not share my beliefs with my brother. 

So as an adult, I spoke up. I spoke out. I cussed, a lot. I tried out new religions, I had my first sip of alcohol when I was 17. I denounced Christianity and decided to stop feeling guilty about not going to church. I took antidepressants. I ate sugar, gluten, dairy --- all the things those closest to me had at some point or another told me not to do. Slowly, I started to walk away, but I always felt this tether that brought me back to the things I'd been taught to value. 
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The thing about leaving is that at some point, you realize that your value system has completely changed, and you realize that in order to survive, you have to let go of the old one. The cost of staying in and pressing yourself into this tiny box at the edge of your body and pretending like that squashed thing is You is just too high, and you start to realize how miserable you really are in that environment. You start to recognize that your happiness is based on everyone else's happiness, and that even though you try to control every piece of yourself to support their happiness, it's still forever out of your hands. Something tips the scales and soon you find yourself coming up for air because you only realized just then that you were drowning. 

Paige has this sort of experience. But Mott's experience is that of the more secular regular-attenders, the people who weren't anything close to church royalty. Everyone knew that they smoked, or drank, or had tattoos, or were reformed addicts, or went pole dancing, or had gay sex, but it was okay because they were chill and they liked everyone and everyone liked them, and as long as they kept coming to church and asking jesus to be their lord and savior, then they were just sinners like the rest of us. They were performing their surrender, and so long as they practiced humility, kept believing in the same thing as everyone else, it was something of an equalizer. In fact, these were the people who were lifted up as exemplars. In some ways, they had a lower social status because they had allegedly fallen so far that they had to be lifted up even higher than most people just to get their feet back on the ground, and wasn't god so amazingly powerful to be able to do that? Incredible. Awesome. If he can save them, he can save you, you lesser sinner with fewer problems, too. 

People like this weren't particularly threatening to the purist community, because they didn't hold a lot of power. They didn't really sit on boards, or teach classes -- maybe they would act in a play, or sing in the choir, but when it came to making decisions about church power and wealth and influence, they didn't have any say. They were the poster child for how the church was effective, how diverse and inclusive the community was. That was it. 

Heretics will put up with a bunch of low-level mistreatment as long as there are people there they still love. But once you threaten the people they really, truly love, all bets are off. They won't keep their mouths shut about that mistreatment to the general public. They will get out of there and get the people they love out of there, or die trying, and death in high-control groups doesn't look so good to authorities (that is, if the group hasn't already staffed all of the local authorities with its own membership). They're exceptionally loyal and fiercely protective, and they're dangerously honest. 

This is probably why people like Mott so much. She understands the bullshit of the world around her, and makes the best of it while maintaining her healthy dose of imagining what things could be like, or delving into history to see how other people used to live differently. She keeps her judgment at bay, and she's always there to gently encourage Paige to question the things around her. She's a breath of sanity in a world that makes you feel insane. And willing to do anything for Paige, whether she has to burn the whole world down or not.  
I love her, and I'm excited for you to meet her. 
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And at this point in my life, I'm excited to be her.