Even though I had accepted Jesus as my savior and I wasn't going to hell upon falling asleep anymore, I still couldn't get over how badly God had fucked up the planet.
One of the themes that had now emerged was the idea of ruining someone's life for your own selfish purposes. Crystal had told me that that's what I had done to Blake, when she wrote the comment on my facebook wall. This wasn't true, but these words represented the ongoing theme. Brandon had ruined his little sister's life for his own selfish purposes. He had almost made the same mistake again and ruined mine. But I wouldn't have done that. At one point, I had thought that I was going to get to be with Brandon, but the cost was that I would have to ruin Erik's life. But I refused to do that.
I knew intuitively why this was a theme. It had to do with abortion. For as long as I had known about the abortion issue, I had always been pro-choice. But once I realized the idea behind this theme, I suddenly became pro-life (on the issue of abortion, not other issues such as Terri Schiavo). I realized that there was no such thing as limbo (not that I ever believed in limbo, I previously believed in reincarnation). Aborted babies go straight to hell. They never even have a chance to be saved. All they ever know is pain. Abortion was the absolute worst thing you could do to someone. You were ruining someone's life for your own selfish purposes.
I wondered if the same thing happened in the case of miscarriages. I had a nagging suspicion that it might. Man, God had fucked up this planet pretty badly. God meant well. But He had messed up.
He had messed up with the dinosaurs as well. That's why He had made them go extinct. That was no accident.
So now, we lived on a planet where the idea of getting saved was starting to become a joke. Most people were going to go to hell after they died, and on top of that the oceans were about to rise, the climate was changing and Earth was about to become a living hell as well. So we were headed toward a horrible disaster, and I was God's only hope.
I heard Brandon talking. “On one of the websites Rachel posts at, Rachel was talking about the game the Sims. There is something in the game where they ask you questions and most of them have a clear answer, but one of them just asks you to choose between the red M&M and the blue M&M and Rachel didn't get it. Rachel didn't get a common culture reference. I get the impression that Rachel has never seen The Matrix.”
He was wrong, I actually had sat through The Matrix though I wasn't paying very good attention. But that was true. There was that question in the game and I had been confused by it, and I thought that maybe I had said something about it somewhere on the internet. Regardless, now that I thought about it I did remember that that was a reference to The Matrix. Why hadn't I thought of that?
At any rate, I realized that that movie was important. I needed to watch that movie again and pay close attention.
Brandon pointed out some other things. “When Rachel took her dad's Ritalin and everyone in her delusional world got mad at her, she was talking about how she couldn't stop thinking about the Titanic sinking. I don't know if Rachel got why the Titanic sinking was significant. It was a ship that was thought to be unsinkable, and it sunk. Rachel was supposed to be infallable, but she fell. She made a mistake.”
“I have friends who work at Google. Rachel's livejournal, although it was deleted, was indexed on Google. I got to read it. Matthew says to her, 'a finer pyrrhic victory I have yet to see, Zuhl.' I don't think Rachel realized that the pyrrhic victory was when she solved the Rubik's cube.” The victory of solving the Rubik's cube ended up symbolizing the delusional victory of Brandon seeing my livejournal. If I had never imagined this, it probably would have been better, because I would never have been delusional.
Brandon had been watching my facebook. “One year, shortly before Christmas, Rachel suddenly became obsessed with the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. That year, she had a nightmare right before Christmas.” I had awoken that year from a nightmare at around midnight on Christmas Eve. I had gotten on facebook and posted a status about how I had just had a weird dream and I didn't want to talk about it. One of my friends replied, and I ended up telling her about it via a private message. The dream was about one of the guys from Innercept, a guy who had always been rude to me. In the dream, he was raping me in my sleep. I had woken up in the dream, I had awoken from the dream within a dream, and I was pulling tissues out of my ears, like the guy had stuffed them in my ears so that the sound wouldn't wake me up. It was like the dream was him saying, “I want to fuck you, I just don't want you to know.”
When I got on facebook again, I ended up sending Weirdzombie Girll and SmirkydeSmirkster Atweirdzombiegirl requests to Tim Burton. It was nighttime now. Then I got my iPod and started prancing through the house, listening to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. I started quietly singing to Jack's Lament, singing about how I could make grown men give out a shriek.
One night I began thinking about the time I hooked up with Sean. Before we had had the briefest sex, Sean was touching me. He had put together his index fingers from both hands and stuck them into my vagina. This actually did not feel good. But I had faked being turned on. Now, I heard Sean talking about it:
“Rachel's so bad at faking it.”
“Well, Sean, maybe you should learn to do it right!” This was Brandon speaking. “Girls don't like it when you just stick your fingers into their vaginas. You have to rub them around the clitoris. That's what I did to Rachel and I could tell by the way she was breathing that she really liked it when I did that, she wasn't faking it.”
The thing about this conversation was that what Sean said was supposed to have been said right after it happened, while what Brandon said was recent. Which was an indication that this conversation never happened. But regardless, Brandon was right. He had known how to touch me right.
Then it happened again where I was seeing things from God's perspective. Guys who don't know how to turn girls on right get mad at girls because they don't fake it right. This was something about the world that God found amusing. I posted a facebook status about this, saying that this is why it's important in this world for girls to take a lot of acting.
It wasn't until after I posted it that I realized that the day in theater class when I was thrashing on the bench, I was actually faking an orgasm.
At some point, my thoughts went back to Chance. I was remembering how one time, I had told my therapist about how a guy in my class used to say my name all the time. She had said that she bet that guy had the biggest crush on me. I had told her that I didn't think that was the reason he did it.
I was hearing stuff now.
“People would say to me, 'She probably thinks you say her name because you like her.' I did do it because I liked her! She would never talk to me. I thought she was just a bitch.”
You had to go through all this, because this is what you did to him.
The stuff that Brandon had put me through, this wasn't what I had done to Brandon in a past life. This is what I had done to Chance this lifetime. I thought back to the time at Bernard trying to get to Brandon, to hang out with him, to talk to him, and suddenly I saw the connection between this and Chance saying my name and trying to talk to me. He wanted to talk to me. I would never talk to him.
On top of that, Brandon ended up dating my enemy. I ended up dating Matthew. No, I had never heard Chance express any sort of opinion of Matthew, but Matthew had such a weird personality, a lot of people didn't like him. So it wasn't that unlikely that Chance didn't like him. And Matthew was always big on public displays of affection. He was always groping me in the halls at break.
You had to go through all this, because this is what you did to him.
Of course, all this was to a much lesser extent. But it was so weird to think that these things went together. And I actually did like Chance.
I had such low self-esteem back then, I didn't understand why anyone would like me. I didn't think anyone ever would. It never occurred to me that Chance actually did like me.
I remembered being in computer class, how Chance would come over, over and over again and try to talk to me. I remembered preparing a paper to turn in for social studies class during break one day in 8th grade. Chance came over, smiling, “Rachel Zuhl! Rachel Zuhl! Rachel Zuhl!” He followed me around the classroom. I just ignored him. “Rachel Zuhl! What are you working on? You wrote a paper on Measure 9?”
I pulled my paper away really fast. “Don't read my paper!”
And these were the only words I ever remember speaking to him. Don't read my paper.
“Hey, you're partners with Rachel Zuhl? Right on!”
“Rachel Zuhl, let's strike up a conversation!”
“Rachel Zuhl, what's your problem?”
We were in gym class one day. “Your face looks like this.” And he made a relaxed, open mouth, dead expression. I thought about saying, “I don't have my mouth open.” But that would break the sacred tradition of not talking to this guy. So I just didn't say anything.
He would come over, roll around on my desk and say my name over and over again. He would lean over my desk, and we would just stare each other straight in the eyes, while he said, “Rachel Zuhl. Rachel Zuhl. Rachel Zuhl.”
After several months of this, he was doing this one day when some guy told him to knock it off.
“She's catatonic!” Chance replied.
And in my mind, this is how the entire thing got painted. The entire thing was Chance making fun of me because I was catatonic.
I started imagining more stuff in my head. Chance was pissed at me, because I had never given him the time of day, and then I had chosen Matthew over him. I always hung out with the rejects, and hardly talked to anyone else. But Chance knew that I wasn't like them. For this reason, at some sort of post-high school going away party Chance had attended, a bunch of people from my high school had taken a picture of me, smeared crap all over it, and burned it in effigy. Because I was so stuck up, I was such a bitch, I would never talk to them. But really, this effigy represented them. Because they were so stuck up, they would never talk to the people I was friends with.
When I realized that Chance had liked me, I was still neglecting to go on my own facebook. I dragged myself through logging back on my regular account, looking up Chance and sending him another friend request from my own account. Then I immediately logged off. I didn't go on my own account again right away, but the next day I made myself look at my profile from the Smirkydesmirkster account, and I saw that Chance and I were now friends. He had accepted.
At some point, I began thinking about the Waterworld incident again. Sure, Sophie was a fictional character, and Brandon was in no way involved with the incident. However, Waterworld was still real. It was something that really happened. A girl named Quimby was killed at Waterworld.
I remembered back to when I visited the swim park in 2001, 4 years after the incident. As I thought about it, certain things stuck out from that day. I went on a ride with my sister, where you got on a raft and at the beginning you dropped straight down. My sister and I both screamed at the top of our lungs, because the sudden drop took both of us by surprise.
I remembered walking around the park by myself. I was looking at something on the ground, something disgusting, I don't know what it was. It reminded me of something disgusting I thought I had seen a long time ago.
I remembered standing by the lazy river, and a girl I had never seen before in my life came up and waved at me excitedly like she knew me. I stared at her blankly. I had never seen her before in my life. But she recognized me.
I remembered reading about the Waterworld incident online. Someone from Quimby's high school class had written an essay about it, about how a split-second decision could have saved Quimby's life.
Quimby was the nice girl in their high school class. It shouldn't have been her. They always say that about anyone who dies in a tragedy, but really, it should not of been her. I imagined Quimby being like the girl who was Jesus in their high school class.
One minute, everyone is having a good time. The next minute they are all in agony on the ground, in a pool of their own blood. On top of that, they killed Quimby.
I imagined what it would have been like for one of them. I imagined someone from Quimby's high school class, who had been on the water slide, talking about it. “It ruined water slides for us. Something as fun as water slides now reminds us of something horrible. We all have recurring nightmares about the incident. On top of that, we killed Quimby. We have to live with that guilt every day of our lives. People say we should have known better than to do something like this. But we didn't deserve this. If you knew all the pain that this has caused us, you wouldn't wish it on anyone.”
I felt a very strong connection to this event. I had had dreams about Waterworld before I became delusional. I had dreams about Waterworld after I became delusional as well. When I thought about the incident, I started to feel like I had been there as well, and the feeling was so strong it drove me crazy.
Quimby died, but she died in vain. She didn't save her high school class from hell.
When people don't accept Jesus, Jesus also dies in vain.
I could hear Brandon talking. He was talking to the group of mystery people who had been making fun of me for being delusional. “You guys were acting just like the Pharisees!”
“You called Rachel stupid. Rachel's a girl, and Jesus can't be a girl. Jesus was sinless, and Rachel obviously isn't sinless. Rachel doesn't know this, she must be stupid! But I knew that you guys were the ones being stupid. I knew something that you guys didn't know because I was reading her messages. Rachel thinks outside the box. It's not that she doesn't know these things, she just doesn't accept them as facts. When Rachel was sending me messages, she made fun of you guys pretty harshly for thinking that God would never do anything different!”
I felt God in me again. God was friendly. God was jolly. God was also a guy. So when I felt this way, I felt like a guy. I was making fun of these narrow-minded people on Earth. “God, do something different? BLAAHH!!!” Because the idea that God might do something different was very hard for these people to comprehend.
“I knew that there was something more to this, because I actually did have that dream about her. Alex was making fun of me for laughing at Rachel's water bottle.”
When I heard that, I was transported back to that moment. I heard Alex speaking.
“Huh? Why did you just laugh at her water bottle? 'Gee, Rachel, you have such a funny water bottle...'”
Brandon was humiliated. “Alex. That dream I just told you about? It was about Rachel.”
I was transported back to the present moment. “Rachel believed that her livejournal proved she was Jesus. Rachel doesn't understand that even if her delusions were true, people aren't that gullible. It didn't matter what her livejournal said, people wouldn't have believed that.”
It wasn't that I didn't know this. I just always had faith. Whenever I had doubts about whether or not this would work, I always told myself, “God designed this to work. That means it's going to work.”
Also, the Kundalini influenced my reasoning.
I was Jesus, and there were certain things that happened on purpose to make me look stupid. Like, the fact that I had assumed that since when I stalked Brandon on facebook it didn't say he was in a relationship, that meant he was still single. I wasn't his friend on facebook. His real relationship status was only visible to his friends. I had been away for five years. In those five years, Brandon had gotten married. But I still assumed he was alone.
Earlier that year, I had left my iPod at Abercrombie & Fitch. Brandon had been stalking me online, and he read my message to Erik saying that I had lost it. He had gone around to local pawn shops and found it. So he knew the music I listened to.
“You can tell by listening to the music on Rachel's iPod how intricately planned all this was.”
I had one song by James Blunt. The song was called Wisemen. The chorus went: “Look who's alone now. It's not me, it's not me.”
Because I thought Brandon was alone. And I wasn't.
Brandon had gotten married. And I had been at this treatment center so long, I had never really gotten to grow up. Not only was it immature, but it was stupid. You have to be his friend to see his relationship status. Duh!
I could hear Brandon talking. “But you can tell by the rest of the lyrics in this song that that happened on purpose.”
“With you pernickety little bastards in your fancy dress, Who just judge each other, and try to impress.”
Brandon forwarded the messages to Crystal to try to impress her, and Crystal judged me based on them.
However, there were other things that indicated that I was smart.
“On Rachel's blog, she demonstrates that she knows the true meaning of the word 'tweek.' Most people who aren't into drugs think that tweeking refers to shooting up. A tweek is actually a little twitch or habit you do on meth, or other drugs. Rachel must have picked that up from watching South Park. There's a character called Tweek. The reason they call him Tweek is because he tweeks all the time! Most people, even though they watch South Park, they don't pick up on that.”
On my blog, I had demonstrated that I knew what tweek meant when I talked about how I bit my lower lip a lot the time I tried meth, and I had said that biting your lower lip was a tweek.
I remembered back to high school. Freshman year, I remembered two students engaged in a heated argument over the meaning of the word tweek. At the time, I hadn't known which one of them was correct. Now I did.
No one had told me what tweek meant. Like Brandon had said, I must have picked it up from South Park.
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