If we write it in the book, it comes true. That’s an indisputable fact. Everything else is up for debate, but we know the book controls the turning of the universe.
For instance, in a fit of anger, I once wrote: All socks should be rainbow over-the-knee socks!!!!! This was after I’d received a bunch of crappy white athletic socks for Christmas instead of the oversized rainbow pair I’d asked for. No other kinds of socks exist now, and that’s why—because I decided to jot it down, as if the book were a journal that could absorb my hurt feelings. As a direct result, people only wear rainbow over-the-knee socks: ROYGBIV tights pulled over the bony kneecaps of grandfathers and stodgy bank clerks and graying, ancient schoolteachers. They only know rainbow over-the-knee socks. They’ve always worn rainbow over-the-knee socks and they always will. Only Samuel and I remember the way things were before the book.
There are other things that are probably true:
1. We’ve had the book for nearly two years, found in the attic crawlspace of the Genoma Baptist Church in Blanch City, Florida. Genoma Baptist is no longer a church, but it was then. Now it’s Samuel’s dog kennel. Over fifty breeds are lodged inside its wide, white walls. Huskies, Chihuahuas, and pit bulls swim freely in the Olympic-sized pool. They bite wildly at hundreds of chew toys, sleeping in red kennels shaped like Snoopy’s doghouse. Canines frolic under the church’s domed cathedral ceiling and stained glass windows, sun painting the wood floors in bright watercolors. Now when we say we’re going to church, we mean we’re going to play at the puppy sanctuary, all because Pastor James once told Samuel dogs didn’t have souls and couldn’t go to heaven.
2. The book belongs to Samuel Wilkie and Shawna Freeman. That’s a fact, though I wish it weren’t. Samuel and I have our names written on the front cover, and they won’t come off—not with erasers or whiteout or even black Sharpie. Samuel and I take turns with the book. We pass it back and forth, handing it over like an unwanted child shuffled between divorced parents. Samuel usually wants to hang out afterward, but I haven’t forgiven him for the long blue hair that sprouts from my head like the anime girl in the poster on his bedroom wall. I keep finding knots of it bunched in my shower drain. Wads of the stuff clogged there, like radioactive Smurf hair.
3. Roseate’s Book of Penmanship cannot be destroyed. Though it appears to be a simple how-to manual, the book can’t be burned, cut, or scorched with acid. It can’t be drowned or buried in a deep pit. You can’t throw it down a well. We’ve tried all these things and more. Once Samuel tossed the book into a trash compactor after he’d gotten drunk and written that fried chicken should fly like regular birds and maybe rain from the sky on Wednesday mornings. On those days, grease pelts our hair and clothes, making everything smell like the inside of a particularly rank KFC. Despite its time in the compactor, the book showed up the next morning on his kitchen table in pristine condition. We no longer write things about food.
But what we really know is that everything comes from the book, and we can’t trust anything that came before. We know that to be the case because we were raised to trust in books. The Good Book, specifically. I don’t know how God deals with having so much power, but I’d give it all back in a second just to have regular grocery stores again. Ours only carry Little Debbie snack cakes and pizza rolls.
Samuel and I were ditching service when we found the book. We had four packs of Red Hots and a bottle of lukewarm Coke to split between us. We were bored and wanted to nap in the crawlspace over the choir loft because I’d heard it had pillows.
I wasn’t sure how to get in, but Samuel hefted himself up onto a stool and dragged himself through the hole, grunting and scratching his overlarge belly on the lip of the opening. He pulled me up behind him. The space was small and frighteningly hot, maybe the driest air I’d ever felt in Florida. Alongside us were boxes that held costumes for the Christmas Nativity and for the Easter musical; mostly fabric that resembled twisted-up bed sheets.
“Half for me,” I said when we finally got situated. If I didn’t tell Samuel how much I wanted up front, he’d try to give me all of it. We were best friends and sixteen, but he wanted to be my boyfriend. I was gay and wanted my first time to be with a girl who looked like Ellen Page.
“You give me the Coke then,” he said, watching me sip. I purposefully backwashed into the bottle, spit bubbling up the carbonation. “Never mind, keep it.” He licked candy stains from his fingertips. “Sometimes you’re really disgusting.”
Spilled out on Baby Jesus’ white manger cloths, the Red Hots looked like sticky red braille. We took turns placing them on our tongues like communion wafers, seeing how many we could hold there before our tongues burned to crisps. After the candy was gone, we got restless and crawled farther into the attic space.
Music floated up through the cracks in the wooden floor. I could hear my mother singing “The Old Rugged Cross” during the benediction and knew that the service was winding down, but Samuel urged me to keep going, making wild claims of discovering church secrets and hidden caches of tithes. We crawled deeper, past myriad Tupperware bins full of Vacation Bible School teaching materials, an artificial Christmas tree fully decorated, outdated office equipment, old hymnals, pew cushions bitten open by animals, and a fabricated sheep with wool glued to it that looked like pieces of ceiling insulation. Near the stained glass window at the very back was a cardboard box so old that the sides were splitting and rotten. One touch and it broke, spilling out yellow papers and mimeographed sheets. Roach shit rolled around on the floor and a few crispy dead bodies were laid out like sacrifices. I stayed on my hands and knees so I wouldn’t accidentally sit on a live one.
At the top of the pile was the book, though it didn’t look like much of anything. It was an old pulp paperback, robin’s-egg blue, gilt embossed on the cover: Roseate’s Book of Penmanship. “Check it out,” I said, picking it up and leafing through the pages. “Look at this cute little thing. Super retro.”
“So what, who even uses cursive anymore? They don’t even teach it in school.” Samuel dug through the mimeograph papers, crunching them into balls and tossing them at the open boxes behind us. He missed every shot.
“Bet you can’t even sign your own name, idiot.”
That’s when he took the book from me and started writing every nasty swear he could think of. He did it all in perfect cursive: swoops, flourishes, loops. I laughed and watched him write, thinking of our oblivious parents downstairs. They were listening to Pastor James drone on and on about the Israelites in Egypt while we gorged ourselves on candy and scribbled SHIT CUNT and DICK STAIN and QUEEF JUICE in its pristine pages. Sweat dripped down our hands and dampened the paper. Some soaked through the underarms of my gray polo dress, making dark half-moons that smelled like my baby powder deodorant and stifling body odor. Then I scrawled our names on the front cover, directly under the block print that said This Book Belongs To. All the air pressing down on us in the crawlspace was sucked from the room, as if someone had turned on an industrial fan.
Underfoot, the organ brayed like an angry donkey as the congregation passed the collection plate to the tune of “Blessed Assurance.” My mother’s voice rang out over all the others, loud enough to call attention to the notes she missed. Samuel frowned and turned his bulk toward me, grunting as he heaved over onto his left side. He had a doughy face, sweet and pretty, with almost-black eyes and long blond eyelashes that matched his shaggy hair. His lips were always bright red and wet, like he’d just licked them, which he usually did because they were always chapped. He licked them then, his tongue slowly tracing the rim of his mouth as he wrote: All church music sucks, organs should be banned. Real church music = death metal.
From below came the grating whine of an electric guitar. The drone was deep and throaty. Vibrations ratcheted up through the floorboards, stunning dust off boxes and jangling loose bits of fiberglass. Drums thumped, viscerally loud, from what had to be a double bass kit. We sat with our heads cocked like springer spaniels, unsure of what we were hearing. Then a tortured human voice screamed like a murder victim, a prelude to the hideous screeching that followed.
Samuel’s eyes went wide in his chalk-pale face. “They’re listening to Obituary,” he said, spit flying out and dotting my cheeks. “I can’t fucking believe it.”
We crawled back along the dusty floorboards, falling out through the crawlspace entrance and into the choir room. The music was so loud it was like standing inside of a speaker box, the noise a drill digging down into my skull. We ran along the back hall: me in front, holding my shoes, Samuel close behind, wheezing. Peering through the glass panes set in the sanctuary doors, we beheld an unholy sight.
“Holy shit,” Samuel yelped, and I didn’t bother telling him to shut up. No one could have heard him over the howling in the church.
Behind the pulpit, the band thrashed around in near-epileptic fits. Livid red lights strobed spastically overhead. The guy behind the drum kit wore a neon green skull mask and an open leather vest over a burly chest full of hair. The safety pins in the lead singer’s pants flashed silver. When he turned to the side, I could see his junk hanging out through a ragged hole in the black pleather. A disfigured baby doll dangled naked from his outthrust hand.
Our families sat in the pews, nodding along to the music. Mrs. Jebson, a seventy-six-year-old widow in charge of the Awana club, clapped her gnarled, arthritic hands to the beat, head bobbing back and forth on her wrinkled neck. Little kids who’d skipped children’s church were dancing around in the aisles, running back and forth like Satan’s imps. When the lead singer grunted out a particularly noxious swear, the kids all howled it back at him, shrieking with laughter.
Samuel and I went outside, huddling together on the front steps of the church as the sun beat down on our heads and cooked the oil from my hair until it smelled like fried food.
“Let me try something,” I said, taking back the book from Samuel’s slack hands. I opened to a fresh page and jotted down the first outrageous thing that came to mind: Grass is sparkly purple and tastes like mint jelly.
Under my bare feet, the lawn turned the color of a bruise, lavender and purpling. Every place the sun touched brought spangles of light that broke and flashed, turning the world into a shimmering gem. Samuel snapped off a stray blade from a clump near the steps and brought it to his face. Up close, it was even more vibrant, deeply hued as an amethyst. He set the blade between his front teeth, pressed his wet red lips against the flat of it and bit down. Smiling, he opened his mouth and chewed hard, grabbing up a handful and shoving it between his molars. The smell that issued from his tongue was sweet as Doublemint gum.
We took the book home and waited a few days before trying anything else. It sat on my bookshelf, the powdery blue a beacon that called to me. We asked it for small things at first. Samuel wanted a never-ending supply of frozen chimichangas. I asked for a forty-five-foot Slip’N Slide that wrapped around my condo complex. We sat behind the rusted-out shed in his backyard and took turns jotting down nonsense in the book’s blank pages, laughing when the changes were instantaneous—howling at the fall leaves that sloughed off pine trees in the middle of a Florida summer, marveling at the gushing fountains of polar water that sprung up in the middle of a neighbor’s Chrysler convertible.
They were funny requests, stuff that seemed inconsequential. We asked for better skin, nicer clothes, and shinier hair. I wanted to always smell like a fresh piece of bubblegum. Samuel wanted to only wear new clothes, never the same thing twice. Endless stacks of T-shirts and jeans and khakis flooded his room and the rest of his house. Deliveries from Amazon arrived daily after we both asked for open-ended Prime accounts with never-ending balances.
Our families noticed nothing. My father kept going to work at the post office like he always did, accepting whatever eccentricities the book heaped on our small condo. My mother smiled and worked around the stacks of things piled in my room, putting away my laundry after I’d written that she should do all my chores. Samuel’s parents had died in a car accident when he was four. He’d gone to live with his grandmother, a quiet woman who barely left the house and valued her cats over her grandson. Aside from sleeping on piles of his clothes instead of a mattress, there was no difference in her behavior. Our teachers kept teaching, the kids at school and church walked and talked and ate. People drove their cars and stared past the oddities we’d added to the world. Nobody knew things had changed except for us.
“No more Trigonometry in school,” I said, writing it down on the sixteenth sheet of blank paper. “No more Geometry.”
“What happens when the book finally runs out of pages?” Samuel smoothed a hand down his newly slender body. He had six-pack abs and well-defined muscles in his pecs and upper arms. My body was thin, too, but now I had the boobs I’d always wanted. My chest pushed out the front of my T-shirt obscenely, like I was smuggling cantaloupes.
“I don’t think it will,” I said, and that appeared to be true. For every page we used, scribbling down the rules of our new world, there were five more fresh sheets to replace it.
We were careless. We asked for silly things just to make the world more interesting. I hated the dark and asked for permanent twilight, and the sky turned a constant sherbet azure. Samuel wanted the beach close enough to go every day, and suddenly sand dunes and ocean waves sprouted up in his backyard, right alongside the weedy patches of grass the guys from the baseball team came over to mow.
After I willed complete compliance, girls at school who were mean to me, girls who’d called me “Shawna Clit-Lick” and “Monster Dyke” began to text me nonstop, telling me how smart I was, how pretty I looked. Before, they’d stuck rotten, pulpy oranges in my locker and claimed the smell was from my pussy. Now they left me fresh-baked cookies and new tubes of baby pink lip gloss. They followed me everywhere, did anything I asked, no matter how dangerous or disgusting.
“Eat this broken piece of glass,” I told a blond, leggy girl who’d put chocolate on my seat in seventh grade to make it look like I’d shit my pants. She popped the fragment on her tongue and chewed, smiling gummily as blood dripped from either side of her mouth.
Samuel had fifteen girlfriends, rotating women who swarmed in and out of his grandmother’s house. After the Pastor had condemned dogs to soulless limbo, the girls came to the dog sanctuary and Pastor James moved to Boca Raton.
“I’m going to open dog sanctuaries all across central Florida,” Pastor James said as he climbed onto the Greyhound bus wearing only his underwear. “God bless these precious animals.”
I stayed most nights in the old church, lodged in a lacy canopy bed between two dog kennels. Samuel and I sat up with the book, passing it between us until the clocks told us we had to rest. Our eyes turned bloodshot and our skin jaundiced, hearts racing from infusions of caffeine. I didn’t know where my parents were. I’d wished my father away on a permanent business trip after he’d yelled at me for staining the rug with the bubbly pink champagne I was now allowed to drink. My mother ran errands for me—my permanent slave. Sometimes I’d see her darting around town, poking in and out of shops and groceries, preparing meals, never stopping to talk.
It was exhausting to live the lives we’d engineered. We got tired of the things we asked for. The smell of bubblegum nauseated me, wafting fresh and sugary all day and night, no matter how much I bathed. Samuel avoided the girls who’d once visited, claiming they bored him. Still they came in droves, scratching at the windows of the church in the middle of the night, calling Samuel’s name until the dogs howled and pawed the bars of their kennels.
“Let’s get rid of some of these requests,” Samuel said, holding up the book. “Just a few. Make it more manageable.”
We crossed out commands, but nothing changed. Whatever was written in the book stayed permanent. We tried contradicting earlier entries, which created strange, muddled mixtures that horrified us. After writing grass is inedible at the bottom of a fresh page, Samuel took a big bite of spangly grass and promptly threw up minty smelling puke all over my shoes. We stopped trying opposite requests, worried we’d accidentally kill ourselves.
The world remained forever purpling, always just on the cusp of breaking. No more would either of us see a sunrise, rising sharp and orange over the horizon. Samuel and I watched the ocean lap at the chainlink fence that bordered his grandmother’s yard and held each other, scared of what we’d done.
“I’m so glad I have you,” Samuel whispered one night as we huddled together in the dark of the sanctuary, dogs piled up on either side of the canopy bed as we avoided the windows and the girls who cried and cooed outside. He stroked a hand down my cheek, played with a strand of my long blue hair. “You’re the only thing I have left.”
But I didn’t want this Samuel. I wanted my old life back. I wanted my mother and father; I wanted the promise of dawn in the morning and school books and dreading church on Sunday mornings.
“I want to go to college,” I told him as we floated in the infinity pool out back of the church. “I want to find a girlfriend. I want to have my first kiss.”
Samuel followed me from house to house, from space to space. He refused to leave my side. I began avoiding him, trying to find nooks to myself, but it didn’t matter. I’d find him waiting for me outside closets and bathrooms, lurking in the back seat of cars and in empty classrooms that now served as themed party rooms. Hula girls in the luau celebration, a roast pig perpetually cooking on a spit where I used to have English classes. Later when he slept, I found a small, hastily scrawled entry on an early page: No matter where Shawna goes, Samuel always finds her.
We fought incessantly. I stopped bathing, wore the same ratty clothes every day, filthy from food and spilled coffee and grease from the fried chicken that still flew and rained every Wednesday morning.
Samuel has to take a twenty-minute nap, once every hour, I wrote, hoping to get some alone time. He’d fall asleep, frowning viciously through his yawn as he grabbed for me, passing out mid-swear.
Shawna will never leave Blanch City, Samuel scribbled down beside it one night as I attempted to hide from him, and when I saw it, I howled with rage.
I gave him webbed toes. He wrote that I could only wear stiletto heels. I hobbled after him, vowing he’d only ever taste pumpkin spice, before tossing the book at his face. After one particularly rough night where I wrote that Samuel could only see the color blue, he grabbed the book from me and ripped out the page. We both stared at it, the rip as jagged as saw teeth. Then we both yanked at it, tearing out pages, paper tumbling around our heads like confetti. When we were finally done, the binding was a husk broken open on the floor. Our beach chairs on the back patio were peppered with white, survivors of a Florida snowstorm. Exhausted, we fell asleep in the sultry purple-dusk. The plastic of the chair etched lines into my sweaty skin.
I woke to Samuel’s screams. The book was whole again, the pages pristine. Everything we’d written was still there. Our names, our wishes. The mistakes we’d put on ourselves and everyone else.
“I can’t stand it,” I said, my head pressed into my hands. I ripped out a handful of blue hair and let it fly off in the mild sea breeze. “I don’t wanna be alone anymore.”
“We aren’t alone. We’ll never be alone.”
Samuel tried to put his arm around me and I turned away, digging my face into the plastic chair. I fell asleep to the siren song of the cicada, the sound bouncing off the waves and the manufactured sand.
The next day I couldn’t find him. I searched for Samuel everywhere; he wasn’t with the dogs at the church building, flopping around with them in the giant pool and tossing plastic Frisbees. He wasn’t over at the school in our old classroom, lazing around, drinking giant margaritas. I wandered the purple-spangled grass of what had been the high school football field and climbed onto the merry-go-round set perfectly along the fifty-yard line. A girl sat down beside me, straddling a white unicorn with pale jade eyes and a solid gold saddle.
“Is this what you wanted?” she asked from Samuel’s spitty red mouth. Her nose was tiny, her eyes were dark. She looked a lot like Ellen Page.
“You know it’s not.”
The girl shrugged a tiny shoulder; my Samuel’s twin, same pale, doughy skin, now with high breasts and a small waist tucked under his clothes. She drowned in a giant red polo shirt. Her khaki cargo shorts were supported by a braided leather belt, wrapped twice around her torso. Her legs swung from the emerald stirrups, one sneaker falling from a pale, dainty foot.
“I did what you wanted,” she said. “Be nice.” She tucked a long curl of dark hair behind a small pink ear as delicate as a kitten’s. “This is what we’ve got now.”
We slept curled in the back seat of the pearly white hearse I’d once thought would be so interesting to own. I parked in the back of the dog sanctuary, Samuel’s girlfriends pressing their faces to every window until their makeup left cakey smears like dirt. Our heads touching, legs entwined, we stared at each other’s faces. Two strangers forever attached, always knowing that things should have been very different.
“Let’s write ourselves into the past.” I pressed my cheek to Samuel’s downy softness, breathing in the girl-scent of gardenia and lemon verbena. We listened to the power ballads streaming from the stereo, turned up high to drown out the girls and their moaning. Eighties glam rock was the only music that played on any radio station after Samuel had banned everything else. “It’s gotta be better than this,” I said, dipping my thumb into the dimple of her cheek.
Samuel kissed me, sucking in the pink bubblegum smell of my breath. I could taste the pumpkin spice on her little cat tongue. “In the morning. Let’s have one more night before we really fuck ourselves up.” She wove her fingers into my thick, false hair and fell asleep at twenty after eleven.
Now it’s closing in on three in the morning, but the sky looks the same as it did at 2:00 pm and there’ll never be a sunrise to make it any different. I sit up in the back seat and stretch out my kinked back, which has curled into a hump. Samuel snores lightly at my side, her face as precious and breakable as a china doll. Down the road, fried chicken parts fall from the sky. I count four breasts, eight thighs, and dozens of drumsticks. Digging out a pen from the back pocket of the car seat, I open to a bare page at the heart of the book and write us back to the crawlspace where it all started.
She and I are in the attic, breathing in the same dry heat and dusty particles, but we’re not alone. Our former selves are here, too, and I’m picking up the book from the wrecked box. There’s the old Samuel, plump and honey-blond, curled up next to me and my skinny calves and ironing-board chest, hair greasy from an excess of hormones in an already rocky puberty. I want to tell myself to put it down, that it’s not worth it, but I’m distracted by the sounds coming from below. The boards at my feet, cracked and warped, let through slips of music. My mother’s singing. Lilting strains of “Blessed Assurance” float up from the crowded sanctuary and seep into my ears. Her voice is sweet and familiar, pitched full of vibrato.
Wind blasts through the scorched air and I know it’s too late; we’ve already signed our names into purgatory.
“Don’t worry,” Samuel says, lacing her fingers through mine. She squeezes, tight enough that I can feel the pressure all the way through my joints. “We can try again tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.”