Leaving Fishers

  For a minute, Dorry could almost picture it. A truck smashing into their car, broken glass and blood everywhere, Dorry dead on the street. And then God as a mysterious voice in the darkness, proclaiming, “Here’s another Fisher, not one of the greatest, but still—oh, no . . . You just quit? Too bad. You know where you go.”

  Dorry bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood. She summoned up the image of Jasmine and Zoe, wailing, because of her. “I don’t want any more discipling sessions,” Dorry said through gritted teeth. “Ever. I meant what I said about quitting.” And then she hung up.

  There were more calls after that, starting five minutes after Dorry’s mother finished her dinner break and went back to work. For the next week, the Fishers had an uncanny way of knowing when her parents weren’t around. Dimly, Dorry realized someone was spying on her—after all, it had happened before. She’d done it herself. Just as dimly, she knew she could take the phone off the hook, or tell her parents, or even call the police. But maybe she deserved the calls.

  “God is watching you. He knows your sin,” the voices said sometimes. Or “The Devil has you now. There is rejoicing in hell.” Or, “You are evil.”

  “Yes,” Dorry whispered after that call. She felt evil. But no, it was the Fishers and God who were evil. Wasn’t it?

  She still prayed. Prayed for strength when the calls were nice, “But Dorry, you’re like a sister to me. How can I let my sister go to hell?” Angela asked on Monday. Sobbing, Dorry hung up without answering.

  “Oh, Dorry, we had such hopes for you,” Pastor Jim all but purred into the phone on Wednesday. “You were such a promising member . . . Return and all will be forgiven—”

  “No,” Dorry said.

  Her greatest temptation came the next night. “Dorry, old pal, what’s this I hear about you losing your mind?” said the voice on the phone.

  It was Brad.

  Dorry felt the familiar rush of longing. Of lust. Automatically, she thought, “I’ll have to confess this to Angela.” But she wouldn’t—she never had to confess anything to Angela ever again.

  “I won’t be judging you or anything, but what do you say I come over and we talk about this. We could go out for pizza maybe.” Brad’s voice was slow and relaxed, practically a drawl. It was warm, too—Dorry could melt in that voice.

  “Just you and me? Like—like a date?”

  The instant she’d said them, Dorry wanted to draw her words back. Her face burned. She was glad Brad couldn’t see her.

  “A date? I thought you’d never ask.” The teasing Brad was back. “But you know, I only date Fishers. Second Corinthians 6:14.”

  Dorry didn’t have to reach for a Bible. The verse came into her mind unbidden: “Do not be mismated with unbelievers. For what partnership have righteousness and iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” She knew what she was. Iniquity and darkness.

  “But, hey,” Brad continued. “You reconsider your insanity, sure, we can call it a date.” He chuckled.

  It was the chuckle that did it. Dorry watched her knuckles turn white as she gripped the edge of the kitchen counter. “I—don’t—want—to—see—you,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  That night Dorry dreamed that she threw herself at Brad and they started making out and just as she was certain he really loved her, he had never been pretending, she looked at him again and it wasn’t Brad at all, but the Devil, with horns and a fiery face and eyes like burning coals. “You’re a fool,” he bellowed. “Nobody would want you but me. And I’m just trying to fill up hell.”

  Then she dreamed she was in hell, screaming in pain, and Angela looked down from heaven and said, “I told you so.”

  The next morning, when Dorry had shakily gotten herself off to school, she saw Angela in the hall. Dorry began bracing herself to speak—she would say, “Hi,” but nothing else, she decided—when Angela breezed past her, looking right through her. It was like Angela’s eyes no longer registered Dorry’s image.

  It was the same way with Brad later in the day, when Dorry was coming out of study hall. She was right in front of him—he couldn’t not see her—but somehow he didn’t.

  At lunch she sat two chairs down from her usual Bible Study group, so close she could read the small print in some of their Bibles. No one glanced her way. And then she knew: For the Fishers, she no longer existed.

  “I’m a ghost,” she whispered in bed that night, in the dark. “Am I a ghost to you, too?”

  She wasn’t really sure who she was talking to.

  Chapter

  Twenty-seven

  DORRY WAS EATING ALONE. AGAIN.

  It didn’t matter now. She didn’t care who saw her. The school cafeteria buzzed around her, with kids laughing, joking, yelling. She was on another planet. She chewed her food doggedly, not even tasting the special treat her mother had taken to slipping into her bag, declaring, “You’re losing weight too fast, honey. You’re starting to look peaked. This’ll perk you up.” Today it was a generous slice of brownie fudge pie. Dorry put it down after one bite and forgot to pick it up again.

  It’d been two weeks since she’d left Fishers. Her parents wanted to send her back to Bryden. “You’ve got to get over this church thing,” her mother fretted. “If you just go home—”

  Dorry pictured herself walking down the hall with her old friends back at Bryden High School.

  “Dorry, you’re so thin now,” Marissa would rave. “Let’s do your hair a little differently, and you’ll have all the guys asking you out.”

  Would Dorry dare answer truthfully? I don’t care about hair. I don’t care about guys. I’m in hell. I have condemned myself to hell.

  “No,” Dorry told her parents. “I want to stay here.”

  She’d overheard her parents talking about counseling, her father muttering, “Those psychiatrist types are all a bunch of fools!” and her mother protesting, “But just look at her—” Seeing her watching them, her mother twittered, “Dorry, is there anyone at school who can help you? Someone you’d trust—”

  “No,” Dorry said. “No one.”

  She wanted to go back to Fishers, she ached to go back, she wanted to have all of them and God love her again. But every time she reached for the phone or saw Angela in the hail, the vision of Zoe’s and Jasmine’s tortured faces swam up before her eyes.

  Now she stared vacantly at the milk leaking from her carton where the seams didn’t meet evenly.

  “Know what happens to fish who get caught?” a male voice said suddenly in her ear. “They die.”

  Dorry looked up. She blinked at the boy who sat down beside her. His name came to her out of memories that seemed buried a hundred years back. Zachary. He’d been at the retreat with her. He’d been at the E-Team meeting. The first one. Had she seen him after that?

  “I’m not a Fisher anymore,” she said dully. “You’re not allowed to talk to me.”

  “Sure I am,” Zachary countered. “You don’t think I’m still in that crooked outfit, do you? That’s why I asked you that riddle. Think about it. We were called Fishers because Jesus said that thing about his followers being fishers of men. But it’s a lousy metaphor, because in nature, if you’re a fish, it’s really a bummer to be caught. It’s death.”

  Dorry blinked again. “I never thought of that,” she said. “Not once.” It changed something. She wasn’t sure how.

  Zachary sat back and drummed his fingers on the table, one hand reaching over the other to make an imaginary cymbal crash at the end.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “You haven’t been out as long as me. And in Fishers—whoa. They do everything to keep you from thinking.”

  Dorry looked closely at Zachary. The wimpy, tortured kid she remembered from the E-Team meeting was gone, replaced by a peppy guy in constant motion, tapping his feet, bobbing his head, grinning. Dorry’s brain, well trained, cranked out, “The old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” Second Corinthians 5:17. But this had happened in reverse. The old Zach
ary had been the holy one. The new one was—evil?

  “I’ve got to say,” Zachary continued, “I didn’t peg you as someone who would leave. I thought you were fully convicted.”

  “I was,” Dorry said quietly. But had she been? She remembered the doubts she’d swallowed, the rebellious words she’d held back at practically every discipling session.

  “So what happened?”

  Briefly, Dorry told him about her botched attempt at converting the Garringer kids.

  “Now, see, you’ve got drama,” Zachary congratulated her when she was done. “I just had all these doubts building in me until one day I looked at my discipler and said, ‘You’re full of it.’”

  “And that was the end?” Dorry asked.

  “Haven’t looked back since,” he announced proudly

  “Even when they called and called and—”

  “The harassment, you mean? I just started arguing with them. Even talked one other guy into quitting with me. Believe me, they gave up real quick after that.”

  “Oh,” Dorry said.

  “Some kids, though—did you hear about the girl who ended up in the mental hospital? Lara somebody?”

  Dorry searched for the last name she knew. “French?”

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah. Know her? Sad case. She was so fervent, she wanted to convert everybody on the planet, but she wouldn’t play by the Fishers’ rules, following the exact procedure, letting the top level Fishers get the credit for every convert—”

  Poor Lara, Dorry thought. She remembered Lara and Angela fighting. Of course there’d been no stolen necklace, no kleptomania. They had been fighting over her, she realized now, without a single ounce of surprise. But, oh, how she’d wanted to believe everything Angela told her. “Everybody likes you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “So when this Lara finally gave up, the top Fishers were merciless,” Zachary explained. “Her mother told me she had a nervous breakdown. That’s one of the things I reported.”

  “Reported?” Dorry asked.

  Zachary looked around. “Yeah . . . I can tell you lots more. But I don’t want to waste this. Let’s sit somewhere else. Come on.”

  He stood up, picked up his tray and walked to another chair several tables away. Dorry mustered the energy to follow him.

  “What was that for?” she asked when she caught up with him. He shoved out a chair for her on the other side of the table.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said. “Now I’m going to tell you everything about Fishers you should have known going in.”

  Dorry waited.

  “First of all, it’s a cult. I wrote to the Cult Research Service right after I left, and I described Fishers, and they were very interested. They’d never heard of the group before, but it meets every one of their defining criteria.” Zachary spoke loudly, as if he wanted the whole cafeteria to hear.

  He waited for response from Dorry. When she said nothing, he added, “Don’t you understand? You were in a cult.”

  It was just a word to Dorry. “So I was really stupid and fell for something crazy,” she said. “My parents have been telling me that all along. And I keep thinking, sure, but lots of people believe in God. Lots of people believe in Jesus. They just don’t practice their faith the right way.”

  “According to Fishers,” Zachary said. “See? You were brainwashed. It’s not so much what Fishers believe that’s wrong, as how they make you believe it. They manipulate and harass and require complete obedience. They claim to be perfect and without sin, but they’ll lie and cheat and do anything to keep their members in line.”

  Dorry remembered Angela’s lies. “They say they only lie when it suits God’s purposes. When it’s God’s will,” Dorry protested.

  “But only they know God’s will, right?”

  Reluctantly Dorry nodded. “But if they sincerely believe they’re doing the right thing—” Dorry didn’t know why she felt compelled to defend the Fishers.

  Zachary cocked his head. “I’ll grant you that some of the people are sincere. They do think they’re serving God. But there’s so much that’s fake, that no one who’s in the group very long could continue to be fooled. You remember that girl who saw God that first night at our retreat?”

  “Moira,” Dorry said. She closed her eyes momentarily, remembering how awed she felt witnessing Moira’s dramatic conversion. Why hadn’t Dorry’s own faith been so simple?

  “Made an impression, didn’t it?” Zachary said. “Only problem was, it was all a sham. I mean, Moira’d been a Fisher for three years. She was just acting. They have someone perform like that at every retreat.”

  Dorry gasped. “How do you know?”

  “I ask questions.” Zachary sat back with a self-satisfied smirk.

  “But—”

  Zachary wasn’t about to be interrupted. “And didn’t you notice the pattern of it all? In the beginning, everything was so happy and joyous. Everybody loved everybody else and God was like Santa Claus and weren’t you just dying to be around these people who thought of nothing but you?”

  Dorry looked down. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “That’s called love bombing, incidentally, in cult terminology,” Zachary said. “But then there’s a whole cycle of membership after that. They can’t be loving to everybody all the time because they need to save their energy for recruiting new members. Once they’re sure they’ve gotten you, they have this big ceremony and tell you what a great person you are, you’re now a Level Two, and then everything gets intense. They give you orders they know you’ll fail at, nearly impossible things, so that you’ll feel guilty, and try even harder to please them.”

  Eyes downcast, Dorry admitted, “Angela made it seem like I did something wrong because I couldn’t convert my parents. She was always expecting me to convert people. And she told me to fast on Thanksgiving, even though we were having a huge family dinner.”

  That seemed to surprise even Zachary. “Really?” he said. “That’s truly cruel. Did you?”

  “Sort of,” Dorry said. Familiar shame flooded over her. But now, she wasn’t sure if she was ashamed of failing to fast or ashamed of trying to. Either way, remembering Thanksgiving made her want to cry. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fine,” Zachary said. “But you have to see the pattern, how things intensified. They were trying to shake out the iffy believers, the ones who weren’t fully committed, so they’d have a core group of devout, brainwashed people willing to do anything for the cause.”

  Dorry thought of nearly being arrested at the mall. “But why?” she asked, truly bewildered. “Why create this—this whole kingdom—if it’s not for God?”

  Zachary snorted. “You really were an easy mark for Fishers, weren’t you, Miss Gullible?” He shook his head. “Sorry. I thought you were smarter than that. Ever notice the offering plate at Fishers services?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Pastor Jim’s got a lot of money, thanks to Fishers. He’s got practically a mansion up in Carmel—”

  Dorry wasn’t ready to believe that. “No, he’s got an apartment in a bad part of the city. He talks about it all the time.”

  “That’s just for show. Or reverse show. You didn’t give a lot of money to Fishers, did you?”

  Dorry looked away. “My college savings,” she said.

  Zachary didn’t say anything for a minute. Dorry saw that a group of boys sitting nearby were stirring about, looking disturbed.

  “At least you didn’t sleep with him. Did you?” Zachary asked.

  “What?” Dorry stopped watching the other boys and jerked her attention back to Zachary. “Of course not. Everyone in Fishers says premarital sex is wrong.”

  Zachary laughed in a way that made Dorry feel like crying. “Sure, that’s what they say,” he said. “But Pastor Jim probably had half the girls in Fishers. That Angela who was your discipler—I think she was one of his favorites.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Dorry said. But she remembere
d the spark Angela had had with Pastor Jim at that first party, the looks that had traveled between them.

  “He tells girls it’s their sacrifice for God,” Zachary said.

  Dorry could imagine Pastor Jim saying that, could picture his mouth forming those words. And then did everyone comply? Why had he never asked her? Too ugly, a voice said in her head. Someone who could have any girl in Fishers wouldn’t have wanted you. She felt rejected all over again. Shouldn’t she feel relieved instead? She struggled to keep her expression neutral, to act like Zachary’s words didn’t bother her. Zachary wasn’t even watching.

  “Meanwhile, all the new male Fishers are told abstinence is sacred, that they mustn’t even think of girls or they will burn in hell,” he said. “Aren’t you, guys?”

  Zachary spoke over Dorry’s shoulder, directing his voice to the group of boys behind her. They whispered among themselves, then each of them shoved out his chair and stood up, almost in synchronicity. They all but marched past Zachary and Dorry, their heads held high, eyes straight ahead. Only one scrawny, nervous-looking boy darted his eyes toward Zachary and Dorry. Then he quickly looked away.

  Zachary laughed and laughed. “Can’t bear hearing the truth, huh?” he shouted after them.

  One of the boys—a tall, imposing guy, more muscular than many football players Dorry had seen—turned around and walked back. He leaned both hands on the table beside Dorry and looked down at Zachary. The table groaned. “Zachary Haines, you are filled with evil,” he said in a booming voice. “You have ensured your place in hell by trying to tempt new believers. But you will not triumph.”

  It scared Dorry, and she wasn’t even the one being condemned. Zachary only laughed harder. “You guys really have to come up with some new threats,” he shot back. “That hell thing is getting old.”

  The muscular guy didn’t respond. He glanced once at Dorry—dismissively, like she was an insect or some other creature without a soul to go to heaven or hell. Then he turned with military precision and walked away.