Brandon would replay the highlights of the video footage over for people. When Brandon would replay “lasagna pan,” I would sit there, whether it would be in my room, on the toilet, or in the kitchen, and whisper “lasagna pan!” to myself. “Lasagna pan! Lasagna pan! Lasagna pan!”
I imagined that all sorts of people from my high school were finding out about this.
One time, when I was back in my dorm at college after I had became delusional in the spring, I was on AOL Instant Messenger when someone I had never talked to before messaged me. He claimed to be this one guy, Stephen, who went to my high school and added me as a friend on facebook about a year prior. He started asking me all these sexual questions. And I was kind of answering, but at the same time I was like, dude, are you really Stephen? Aren't you like a really religious person? I had never talked to Stephen before, but I knew this because I had him as a friend on facebook. This guy claimed that that was just a front he put on, and really he was all about sex. I was pretty skeptical of this, I didn't believe this was really Stephen. I looked at his facebook profile, and saw that he had a recent status that said he was currently hanging out with his mother. I told this guy on AIM this. “Okay, I'm not really Stephen, I was just pretending to be someone on your friend's list.”
“Are you sure? Because you sound like someone else I was talking to...”
I got the impression that whomever this was found this very humorous, and he left.
I didn't think much of this interaction at the time. But now, my eyes were being opened, and I was realizing things I should have realized before but for whatever reason didn't. Was that supposed to be some sort of diss? Like, I don't know anyone on my friends list, otherwise I would have known right off the bat that Stephen wouldn't have said those things. Implying that I don't have any friends.
It was those damn kids from my high school. Really, I didn't give a fuck. This guy was the one with the problem. Why was it any of his business how many friends I had? Seriously, why did he care?
But anyway, I imagined that the real Stephen was finding out about this now. And he was really glad I didn't believe that guy! I laughed about that.
When people found out about Brandon bugging my house, they also found out about me being the second coming of Christ, and the hell problem. They learned that all their loved ones who were dead who had not accepted Jesus as their savior were in hell right now. This was a horrifying reality. As a result, they would direct that negative energy towards me, and I could feel it at times. Sometimes, I felt good, sometimes I just felt really drained, used up, and hated. I felt hatred towards me, towards Jesus, for allowing there to be such a horrible flaw in the universe. God had warned them to get saved. But in this day and age, who believed some old outdated book? I had to keep constantly reminding people that it wasn't my fault, I was just like them practically. Happy energy. Happy energy. Happy energy!
It's good to have compassion. It's good to care when other people are in pain, most of the time. But when it comes to the hell problem, and the people who are in hell, there was absolutely nothing we could do. No amount of concern over these departed souls would ease their horrible suffering. Their suffering was the same, whether people gave a damn or not. There was less suffering as a whole if we forgot about these people, cut all emotional ties with them, gave up on them, ceased to care about them, accepted Jesus, and moved on.
I kept hearing it over and over again. “Rachel Zuhl, a girl from our high school, is, for real, the second coming of Christ.”
“You're kidding!”
Brandon spoke to me again. “Rachel. Who was your eleventh grade history teacher?”
I racked my brain. Oh God, I had no idea. I could not remember his name for the life of me.
Maybe I could find him in one of my yearbooks. I looked on the shelf in the family room, then headed over to the shelf on the backstairs. I searched through the yearbook I found and didn't find it. Exasperated, I looked up at the bookshelf. Something on it caught my eye. A book called “My Stroke of Insight.”
“Rachel.” Brandon was talking to me again. “What if the thing that happened to you back in 2006 wasn't the onset of a mental illness, but rather a stroke? Did your parents ever consider that?”
I didn't know, but there was only one way to find out! My dad was upstairs in his office. I headed up to find out.
As I walked in his room and stood next to his desk, the butt wiggles took over. Brandon had put a camera in here too. I smiled, knowing that I was on camera.
I asked my dad if he had ever considered that it might have been a stroke.
“Well, we know almost for certain that's not what it was. There's maybe a fifteen percent chance that you had a stroke.”
Huh. I didn't know what to say. So I left. It wasn't until the next day that the perfect response came to me. Like, what Jesus would have said in this situation. I called up my dad on his cell. “That means there's a fifteen percent chance you ruined my life!” Then I hung up. Of course, the phone cut out, and all my dad heard was me yell at him, “You ruined my life!”
“I can't believe Rachel didn't think to say that! That was so obvious!” Brandon said.
I would feel people come and go, through wherever it was that Brandon was watching me in my house. I would react to things that Brandon said when he talked to me. I would laugh when he laughed, most of the time not knowing what I was laughing at. I would mimic his emotions.
I brought up the situation with me and Ted. That I was worried what he thought of that.
Brandon told me the truth, what he really thought about that. “I thought you just made that story up to impress me!”
I laughed my head off. Yeah, because that was so impressive. Like I'd make something like that up!
I imagined that both Brandon and Chance were a little bit wary of me because of that story, but Orion was there. Orion was the first person, apart from Brandon, whom I had told about Ted and I. He reassured them that outside of Lake Oswego, something like that wasn't that big of a deal.
“You thought I just made up that story to impress you!” I kept bringing that up again, and laughing.
“You know Rachel, you give good head, but it's really stupid how you think about it all the time.”
It was true. I would sometimes sit and think about it. I hated that about myself.
I mouthed the words “I know” to the pen on my bedside table, and did a little shooting myself in the head motion with my finger.
I would feel the energy of the people behind the screens, the people who were watching me. Most of the time, when I laughed, I had no clue why I was laughing.
Suddenly, out of the blue, I felt an energy change, and I started laughing my head off!
And this time I knew why. Chelsea was there with Brandon. Brandon told Chelsea about how I think about how I may not be pretty, but at least I give good head.
When Brandon told her this, Elaine paused and went silent. “Because I think about that all the time.”
Because everyone else's sins were cast upon me.
But that's not all. There had been a summer, the same summer when Matthew III was possessing Matthew, that the four of them, Matthew, Elaine, Timmy, and Tyler, all went down on each other all the time, because they wanted to think that they as nerds were better in bed (of course, this was a very short-lived delusion of mine).
I remembered the day I went over to Timmy and Tyler's house to be let in on the secret. Elaine had said something kind of odd to Matthew. She had said, “We can't do anything today because I have my period.”
The thing is, I noticed when I was there, Matthew would always kind of hit on Elaine.
The other thing I remembered was around the time Matthew and I first started fooling around. The thing Elaine really wanted to know was, “Were there any complaints?”
I imagined that the reason they had done this, was because Elaine felt inferior to other girls because of her appearance, one of those girls being me. So she wanted to be sexually experienced. So, in particular, she wanted to think that she was better in bed than me. So she wanted Matthew to tell her that I was really bad in bed.
I imagined that that was the reason Matthew had complained about me using teeth on the message board. And that's why he said once, to himself, as if he were talking to me, “maybe you need some practice!” First I imagined that he really didn't know that I was actually good at giving head. Then, I imagined that he was impressed that after all the practice that Elaine had got, and me supposedly having none, I was still better at it than Elaine.
I remembered what Elaine had said in response to Matthew's comment about teeth on the message board, “She's vicious, isn't she?”
There was something I realized now, that I hadn't realized before. When Matthew had written that about me on the message board, I hadn't confronted him because the message board was such a valuable resource. In reality, I should have confronted him about it, because there are other places he could say things about me apart from the message board! What if he said something like that at school?
I imagined he had said something about me in the locker room, and Chance had overheard this fucked up conversation.
“Rachel wouldn't swallow, so I shoved it down her throat and made her swallow!” Matthew said.
“Woah, she probably didn't like that!”
“Oh, she liked it. I saw her licking her lips afterwards!”
And Chance was thinking, whatever she did afterwards, she was doing because she didn't like it.
This conversation, while imaginary, was based on a real event between Matthew and I.
“Rachel! You were force-fed semen! Most guys don't do that!” Brandon screamed at me.
Though, with the thing about Chance overhearing, Chance suspected that Matthew Mason liked to make up stories, so he didn't really believe it. The confirmation of this came right after graduation, when he happened to witness Kristen, Matthew, and I making a video outside on the bleachers.
My sister videotaped as the two of us looked off over the football field. And then I turned to Matthew, and said, “Matthew, I think I'm finally ready to go all the way!”
The idea behind this video was that I was making fun of girls. Like, girls were supposed to be terrified to have sex for the first time, they have to spend all this time waiting until they “were ready.” I was not a typical girl. I jumped right into sex. So I was making fun of the way girls were supposed to be.
But Chance didn't know this. And my acting was so good, that he believed the entire thing was serious, that I was for real, and that this was such a big long-awaited moment for us that we were getting it on camera. Because I wasn't that bad of an actor after all.
Previously, I had been imagining that back in Idaho people from my theater class had been talking about how bad I was at acting. Jordan was the only one who knew that I wasn't serious about acting. Because we had done some survey at the beginning of one term, in which I had written on the sheet that I was just doing acting for fun and I was actually majoring in computer science, and Jordan had happened to read my paper. Which was the real reason I added Jordan as a friend and no one else, which I hadn't known at the time. But, as you rise to higher levels of awareness, you realize there are different motives behind peoples' actions.
Anyway, all this came to me, and I couldn't stop laughing about the fact that my four friends from high school used to go down on each other.
Brandon was trying not to laugh himself, but he had better composure about this than I did. “Rachel. Stop laughing!”
I stopped laughing for a second. I put my hands over my mouth, when I felt more giggles coming on. I covered my mouth, desperately trying to hold them on. Then I burst out in more fits of laughter, abandoning any pretense that I was trying to compose myself.
Elaine was mad at me. “Rachel, knock it off. I just found out my mother is in hell.”
Elaine’s mom had died shortly before we started junior high, and they were Jewish.
I composed myself. Wiped the tears of mirth out of my eyes. “I'm sorry Elaine. I really am. You just got to cut all emotional cords with your mom.” I made a cutting motion with my hands. “She's gone. Now what you got to do is get saved.”
I would hear things floating through my head. Two thousand seven. Two thousand seven. One of our friends from high school graduated in 2007. I looked him up on facebook. I followed this lead where it took me. I clicked on his friends list. Then on mutual friends. Under mutual friends, it was only people from high school whom I had actually talked to, Chelsea, Timmy, Tyler, Leah, and Lily, amongst others. I looked at all of their profiles pictures, read all their energies, and I was surprised to find not the slightest degree of negativity from any of them towards me. It was as if it were saying, Rachel, relax, no one's mad at you. No one's mad at you.
I made a hugging motion with my arms, as my way of projecting love back to all of them.
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