Trip Like Jesus: Part 18 (Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, 18+)

At the hospital, I had to sit alone in a room, on a padded table, like the first time I came to the hospital back when I was first diagnosed. On the way to the hospital, I had sneaked an Adderall out of my bag and popped it. I sat on the table and thought. What do I do now? Well, I had gained something from this experience, and everything that had happened. I had gained a lot of self-confidence, confidence in what I was doing, confidence talking to people. I would have to refuse all medications, that was for sure.

I was Jesus. But would anybody know that? Maybe, but probably not.

So what I do now is, once the put me off in a ward, I go around asking people: “Would you know Jesus if he was staring you straight in the face?”

The implication was that I was Jesus. But I wasn't actually going to say that. Just ask this question.

Eventually, after a really long time, I was given a room in a ward. This was not the psych ward, yet. I actually don't know what ward this was. So I did exactly as I planned. I went off and asked people, “Would you know Jesus if you were staring him straight in the face?” I asked both patients and hospital staff. Most people said that no, they wouldn't. They would not know Jesus. They treated this like a serious question. Because it was a serious question.

I honestly don't remember if I told anyone that I believed I was Jesus. But what I do remember is that they tried to give me medication, which I refused of course, and they were prepared for that. They were going to inject me with it.

I was distressed at first. Then I got an idea. I would willingly take the medication. Then I would like, go crazy. For as long as I could stand I would act out of control. Then, they would think it was the medication, and they wouldn't give me medication anymore.

That's the thing. They didn't treat us like we were humans, with free will. They treated us like everything we did was the product of chemicals, weird behavior was unbalanced chemicals.

It was too late to willingly take the medication by mouth. They were going to inject me with them. They were injecting me with an antipsychotic called Haldol.

A whole herd of doctors and nurses were required to pull it off. They held me down, injected me. I forgot to scream.

I got up and started dancing wildly. This was some of my acting at its finest. All the doctors and nurses quickly moved outside the hospital room, and all stood around watching me through the window, while I performed for them.

I danced around, jumped, and went crazy. “Oh, the medication! The medication! Acting like a fucking weirdo because I was injected with medication!” I moved my whole body about wildly, jumping from one side of the room to the other, repeating this over and over again. I tried to leave the room. The door wasn't locked, but the doctors were all standing there and held it close. They watched me. And watched me. I danced and danced until I got tired out. I couldn't keep it up. Eventually, the drugs started to take effect, and made me sleepy. I went to bed and fell asleep.

I was moved to the psych ward of the hospital. When I got there, I took a pen, and wrote all over the walls. “If I'm not free to make my own decisions, how can I be responsible for my own actions?” The hospital staff were quite upset that I had done this.

I was scared about something. What if I act crazy after all the medications they give me, and they decide to move on to another form of treatment? What if they decided to give me electroshock therapy? That could permanently damage my brain. When I first got to the ward, they gave me my phone. I texted Erik, telling him I thought they were going to give me electroshock therapy. Then I had my phone taken away, so I couldn't receive his response or text back.

I was given medications. My antipsychotic Invega. And then... Adderall. They actually gave me Adderall! I had never gotten Adderall in the psych ward before.

My parents came in, I tried to reason with them, perhaps tried to convince them that I was Jesus. But it was useless. My parents wouldn't respond to reason.

Then I got an idea. Instead of writing on the walls, I could make signs and put them on the walls. That way, I could try to kill everyone with the great amount of intelligence and wisdom that I possessed.

The hospital staff were all for this. They didn't want to see me writing on the walls anymore. So they got me poster paper, and crayons.

While doing this, I remembered that I had synesthesia, a condition where you most commonly associate numbers and letters with specific colors. I had observed that this condition was commonly associated with intelligence and creativity, though I wasn't sure there was actually any correlation. So when I colored the letters on my signs, I colored them according to my own synesthesia, and the colors I associated each letter with.

“When will we stop telling Rachel what she needs and listen when she tells us what she needs?”

“When will we learn that forced druggings and hospitalizations are ineffective?”

“We don't want Rachel to talk. We hate the sound of her voice.”

That one wasn't about my parents or any of the doctors, but rather the people from my high school.

“If I am absolutely certain of something that means it's true. I know this for a fact.”

I wasn't sure if people would get it or not that I was being sarcastic, because sometimes, people could be slow. So at the end I added: “/sarcasm.”

Then, I decided to make a fake advertisement for Fox News: “Fox News. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.”

“I can lead you to the truth. But you have to open your own eyes and look.”

“Your daughter does not need makeup. She is beautiful just the way she is.”

“Medication: Makeup for your mood.”

“Feeble minds refuse to accept things that are unusual.”

“The minority opinion is always wrong.”

With that one, I was being sarcastic.

“We are too old to encounter something we have never before encountered.”

“Medieval medicine: Barbaric! Modern day medicine: Ever so peachy!”

I got really, really sick of coloring when I got to this one. I didn't even bother to color it. I also made a point of defining peachy for them, because they were slow.

“Peachy: Wonderful.”

“I believe in the impossible. I don't place limits on my thinking.”

“You hear what I say. But you aren't really listening.”

“A guy poked Kristen in the boob with a knife. He was just pointing at her Gap shirt.”

This one was a reference to something that happened during a vacation to Italy when I was twelve. Kristen, who was fifteen, was sitting at the breakfast table alone while a guy set the table. While he was putting a knife down, he poked Kristen in the boob with it. She looked up at him and he was smiling weirdly at her. Kristen told people about it, and my mom said he was probably just pointing at her Gap shirt, since her shirt said Gap on it. How naïve, I thought. Sure, that guy wasn't thinking anything sexual. How naïve. She must not understand how guys think. Of course it was sexual.

I worked hard on these signs, while hyped up on Adderall, and proudly displayed them on the walls all around my room.

My mom came in to visit. When she walked in the room, she didn't even look at the signs. I expected her to walk around reading them but she didn't even look. She said she refused to look at something so childish and negative. Obviously, she didn't even read them. They were not all negative.

They didn't do mouth checks at the hospital. So I was cheeking and spitting out my Invega.

All day, I would make signs, and think. I thought deeply about a wide variety of subjects. It was a catholic hospital. I requested to talk to a chaplain. I ended up arguing with him. I told him that the reason Jesus was perfect was because he didn't have free will. The chaplain argued that the bible said that Jesus was obedient, which implied that he had free will, and the power to choose. I argued that from a philosophical perspective, it didn't mean that.

Which lead me to wonder. How can anyone say the bible was the inerrant word of God? In this current day and age, we couldn't even agree amongst ourselves on what words mean. And then you add in the fact that the bible has been translated time after time, and the meaning of words change over time. There's no way it means the same thing today as it did when it was written. Words are fluid.

My dad came in to visit me. This time I took a different, smarter approach to talking with him. I wasn't going to argue. When he came in, I said, “It's weird, because you like a lot of really intelligent things. It's weird that I talk and you don't understand what I am saying.”

I talked about the guy who shot congresswoman Gabriel Gifford. I had read in a magazine that at some sort of conference, this man asked Gabriel Gifford a question. The question he asked was, “What is government when words are meaningless?” Gabriel Gifford paused, and then quickly moved to the next question. How was she supposed to answer that? But this is what angered her shooter. This was the reason he shot her, later. Because she didn't answer his question.

While that was kind of a silly question, it had an aspect of truth to it. The meaning of words is fluid. The meanings change. Like the meanings of words in the bible.

My dad pointed to one of the signs on the wall. “You believe in the impossible. How can you believe in the impossible?”

“I was using your definition of impossible, not mine.”

We had a good talk that day. I went into more depth than I had in the past about the Matthew III situation that happened senior year. My dad was interested. I could tell he was interested. I talked about God. My dad is an atheist, and he explained that he just doesn't think the idea of God is likely or necessary. I told him he didn't have a God spot, the part of the brain that is necessary for belief in the divine. That was another mistake God had made. Through evolution, some people had evolved to not have a God spot. At the end of the night, I shook his hand, and made an agreement with him. He didn't like the divine Rachel. He was unwilling to accept the divine Rachel. Therefore, I would go back to being the human Rachel.

After he left, I sat, and I thought. I had proved my point to my dad. I had proved it to him. I was Jesus. But there is an error in human thinking, where they are unable to accept, at least consciously, things that seem so grandiose. He left that night, thinking everything was fine and normal. Soon, some night soon, he would wake up one night with the knowledge that his daughter was Jesus. I believed that this was going to happen. And thinking about it brought me to tears, tears of joy.

That's one thing about being delusional. You become very familiar with what tears of joy feel like.

So that night, I didn't cheek the Invega. I swallowed it, along with some Zyprexa, which was an optional medication, an antipsychotic, that I agreed to take. From here on out, I would take all my medications, so that I could go back to human Rachel.

On the ward, there was an older man named Bill who was really out of it. I was standing at the end of the hall, when Bill came up and pointed to one of the lights by one of the doors. This directed my attention, for the first time, to this room. There was a sign that said “Lorena's room.” I had never met Lorena. Never even heard of her. How could I be living on this ward for as long as I had and not know who this woman was?

“Who's Lorena?” I asked one of the staff members on the ward.

“That's none of your business! Go to your room! Do we need to inject you with Zyprexa?”

Boy, so friendly! There was something funny about this Lorena girl. People got really evasive and angry when I asked about her. There was something about her. It was almost like I had a memory of this, that this was part of the second coming of Christ experience. This woman Lorena. But I didn't know what it was. I was very curious. I wondered if maybe she had died.

It wasn't until the following evening, early in the evening, I was out of my room in the sitting area when the phone in the hall kept ringing. No one wanted to answer it.

“Rachel. Maybe... you should answer. It's for you.” someone told me.

I went over to the phone and answered it. It was Lorena's mother, asking for Lorena. Now, I didn't know anything about Lorena, or what was going on with her, or if she was even still alive. But I did my best.

“Oh, well Lorena's fine, she's actually doing really well, but... she's busy right now. Can't come to the phone. Call back later?” I didn't have the slightest clue how Lorena was doing. But this is what I said. We hung up.

Later, I met Lorena. She looked like she was in her thirties, dark hair, with bangs. I told her that her mom had called and I had answered and what I had said to her.

“Oh, God.”

“Did I say the right thing?”

“Yeah. You were fine.” I got the impression she was annoyed that her mother was calling her.

Later, I realized there was nothing behind this Lorena mystery. She was just a regular, everyday woman on the ward.

Which made me realize that my mind might be playing tricks on me.

Trip Like Jesus: Part 17 (Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, 18+)

“Rachel, you know what I think is stupid?” Brandon asked me. “The way you just sleep with people. You didn't want to sleep with that guy downtown. But you just let him sleep with you. You figured it was okay because he was wearing a condom. You know condoms can fail.”

I thought about it. Yes, it was stupid. Oh God. What if I had a disease? Or what if I was pregnant? If I was pregnant I couldn't get an abortion, because the souls of aborted babies go straight to hell! I would have to carry it to term.

I was really worried about being pregnant. I forgot that the chances were infinitesimally small, with both a condom and me having an IUD. Part of me said, “Nope, I know I'm not pregnant.” How did I know that?

God, this is what would happen. The second coming of Christ has to go through the struggle that mothers go through who want an abortion but can't get one.

I stood downstairs. I had drank coffee without eating anything that morning, so my stomach started to hurt.

“URRGHHHHAAAA!!”

“What's wrong Rachel?” my mom asked.

“Morning sickness.” I said as I ran to the fridge to grab my leftover burrito.

I went back upstairs to look up pregnancy symptom. First symptom: missed period. I laughed out loud. I had just finished a period! All this fretting, and I had completely forgotten that I couldn't be pregnant because I just had my period.

Brandon was laughing with me. He was familiar with these intimate details of my life, having put cameras all over the house. He had also known I couldn't be pregnant because I just had my period.

“I couldn't get pregnant anyway. You know why? The IUD made me sterile.” That's why I had had a funny feeling that I wasn't pregnant. Because I knew that. I didn't know if they had discovered it yet or not, but IUD's were relatively new and they would shortly discover that they could do that. Sure, I didn't really know this for a fact. But I was getting funny feelings about things. I just knew things.

I knew this, because I knew something about this whole thing, and about Jesus. Jesus' story will always have a happy ending. It might get bad. It might get ugly. But in the end, things will be good. Things will always be okay. Things will always be happy for Jesus. God wouldn't honestly let Jesus go to hell. If Jesus goes to hell, everyone goes to hell. Sure, I wouldn't be able to have children. But that was okay. Jesus would always have a happy ending.

I was worried about something though. I was worried about the sex. Sex for me was often hard to enjoy. Sure, I would learn to enjoy sex. But I would never actually have an orgasm.

Brandon pointed something out to me. “Rachel. Remember how you were writing in your book, and you wrote that Crystal had a putrid voice? That's what the people you went to high school with think about your voice. They think your voice sounds putrid.”

Chance said something to Brandon about this, to which Brandon replied, “You get used to the sound of Rachel's voice after awhile.”

He was right. I had a horrible voice. My voice sounded like hell. Because that's all that hell really was: a vibration. A horrible, horrible vibration that drives you mad. Everything you experience is a vibration. My voice bothered people, because it reminded people of the hell vibration. People didn't want me to talk, they didn't want to hear my voice. God tried to talk, to warn people about hell, but no one would listen. No one wanted to hear about it. He was trying to warn them out of love.

I was sitting at my computer, thinking about all this. I got a message from my friend Sarah from Innercept:

Sarah: Wow I orgasm so easily now that I'm off Abilify!

I sat back, and laughed, and laughed. I hadn't thought of that. Of course it was hard for me to have orgasms. I was still on psych meds! Once I got off them, things might be easier.

Jesus would always have a happy ending. A happy ending. Like with erotic massages, where they get the customer off at the end. It was called a happy ending. Jesus would always have a happy ending. Jesus would always have a happy ending.

Rachel: Sarah. Can you tell me the truth about something? Don't worry about hurting my feelings.

Sarah: What is it?

Rachel: Do I have a bad sounding voice?

Sarah: Haha no! I find it alluring. In a beautiful, mysterious, maybe sensual way.

Rachel: Are you making this up? What did you think when you first heard my voice?

Sarah: No I'm not making this up. I mean, I don't remember everything, but there's like a snazzy unique, bubbly ring to it.

Rachel: I don't know about you.

Sarah: What?

Rachel: I don't know if you are telling me the truth.

I continued to badger her about it, accusing her of lying, until I ended up upsetting her.

Some people just refused to tell the truth about things. She wouldn't tell me that she secretly hated the sound of my voice, because she didn't want to upset me. She didn't understand that that's what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that listening to my voice brought on horrible agony. That was the answer I was looking for.

I updated my status: Sometimes people just need to know the truth more than anything else in the world. They don't care about getting their fucking feelings hurt.

I was unwilling to accept that maybe my voice wasn't as bad as I thought it was.

I continued to talk to and argue with my dad. I was waiting for the right moment. The right moment to ask him what it was that he did in his office at night. Finally, I asked him. I let it slip mysteriously into conversation. “What do you do in your office at night?” I said it, then continued as if I hadn't.

We were arguing downstairs, when something told me the time was right.

“What do you do in your office at night? Maybe you should go to confession.”

“Huh?”

“She's your daughter.”

“What?”

“The pictures on your computer.”

“Yeah which ones?”

“The sexual ones.”

My dad stared at me perplexed. “That's silly.”

“Why do you have them?”

“I don't know. You're mother sent them to me. I don't remember.”

“Huh.” Suddenly I was worried. I was wrong. He had addressed my question and denied it. I was wrong. He didn't look at those pictures at night. Then it started to happen again. I got that horrible feeling, and the world around me started to fade. I was going to hell again.

Whatever you do Rachel, don't doubt yourself! Whatever you do, continue to believe in yourself!

“Huh.” I said. “You're not mad.”

“No, why?”

“It's human psychology to get mad when you are falsely accused of something, especially something like that. You're not mad? Wasn't that really weird what I just said? Isn't this a really weird conversation we are having?”

“No, if you get mad, that means you are being defensive and you are guilty.” He was wrong though, and I knew that. I had heard somewhere that false accusations generate anger.

I left it at that. Something had occurred to me. Maybe my dad did this, but he didn't remember. Sometimes he gets so out of it he doesn't realize what he is doing.

So that was it. He didn't remember. He didn't know. But we had proof. We had the cameras in his office. There would come a time when we would show him the video of him looking at the pictures, and he wouldn't remember, but he would remember me accusing him of this. And he would realize, I was right. Who can't trust their brain now? Sure, maybe I couldn't trust my brain. But neither could he. Because we are human. We are only human and our brains are faulty.

At any rate, I had questioned him about what he did in his office at night for quite awhile. All the while, I was keenly aware that I was on camera. I was acting for the cameras.

I went up to my room, at some point, on some day, maybe the next day. I started looking up something on the internet. It was about prisoners. And then I saw the word rape, and it triggered a response in my brain. I screamed out loud, at the top of my lungs. All the while, I was keenly aware that I was on camera. But it didn't matter. I wasn't even acting anymore, this was real.

I ran downstairs. My sister was here at this time. “Beev, tell me the truth! Was I molested?” “No!”

“Kristen was raped and Feether Meeke told her that it was her fault! That's not normal! That's not normal!” I screamed.

This was true. My dad was incredibly insensitive about the subject of rape. He had basically told her that she had been asking for it.

I ran out the door. Kristen followed me. I was worried that my parents would take me to the hospital, since that was what they had been threatening.

I stood in a parking lot near our house. “Kristen, growing up, were you normal sexually?”

“No. I'm still not, though I don't have any fetishes.” However, she didn't believe we had been molested. That was okay. I wouldn't expect her to accept something like that, since I didn't fully believe it myself.

I began to lose sight of who these people were that I had been living with most of my life. How well did I really know my parents? Could they have done something like this? Sure, it didn't seem true. But it was possible that they had been deceiving everyone.

After awhile we headed back into the house. When I got inside, I hugged my dad. We ate dinner, then, we got into another argument after dinner. I was trying to make them see that they themselves couldn't trust their own brains. Sure, I believed them. I believed that they didn't remember molesting me.

I referred to this household as the “house that worships doctors.” I threatened to make little shrines for doctors and put them around the house.

I tried to explain to them that the way I thought when I was delusional, it made sense. It was just different than the way people normally think. My parents argued that there was absolutely no logic behind it. I brought up quantum mechanics. My dad laughed at me. “She's comparing her logic to quantum mechanics!” Brandon whispered in my ear, “This is also the house that worships quantum mechanics!” I was exasperated. I couldn't believe they didn't get it. I wasn't saying that my delusional logic was exactly the same as quantum mechanics. I was just saying that really high level logic, or any logic for that matter that someone doesn't understand, sounds illogical to the person who doesn't understand it. There was logic behind my delusional thinking, I just hadn't given them enough information to follow the thought processes.

I brought up the song Mary by Oingo Boingo. It was a song about a girl who was unhappy about her life, ventured off and experienced things, grew a lot and when she came back, realized she couldn't come back to these people she used to live with because she had grown above and beyond them.

“Print out the lyrics to that song,” Brandon whispered in my ear. So I went upstairs, printed them out, and then gave it to my family. My dad said he didn't understand them.

I don't remember everything I was arguing. I guess for those most part, I was just trying to get them to acknowledge that they couldn't trust their own brains. They didn't remember molesting me. I believed that. They had blocked it out.

I started thinking with the mind of God. “We don't believe in that guy in the sky anymore! We must be... evolving as a species.”

I said something, comparing myself to Jesus.

“Rachel, you're not acting like Jesus!” Kristen said to me.

I thought with the mind of God. “So here's Kristen. Excuse me, I have a personal relationship with Jesus, Jesus wouldn't act like that.”

I talked about Erik. Erik had told me that I didn't know how I felt about him, he knew how I felt about him. Of course my parents would think that was ridiculous. But they were doing the same thing to me. They were telling me I didn't know when I was happy, they could tell better than I could when I was happy.

“That's different! That's a relationship issue! Haha, Rachel didn't know that relationship issues are different.” This was me making fun of them.

I told my mom that I wasn't normal, sexually. She refused to believe it. She told me I could just be making that up. In my mind, this confirmed my theory about them molesting me. Why would I just be making that up? They were always happy that I had turned out normal sexually, after what they had done to me. But I hadn't. So when I told them otherwise, they refused to believe it. I thought it was weird that my mom did this. Didn't she understand that that was my reason for believing that I was molested? If I were normal sexually, there would be no issue. It would have been much better if my mom had said something like, “well there are other reasons why you could have turned out that way.” But no. Instead, she had to accuse me of lying.

I continued to argue, but my parents weren't getting it. Brandon told me that this was a lost cause. I imagined Chance watching. Not that this was a particularly flattering moment. But something came to me. I didn't need to be worried about whether or not he still liked me, after seeing the video clips. Of course he did. Of course he did. Everything was going to be okay.

As I was arguing, I was having trouble with my speaking. I was having trouble speaking coherently. I was reminding myself of Bush. But I was thinking so intelligently. I started talking about Bush. Bush wasn't stupid. His brain just worked differently than other peoples'.

So we were done arguing. I put a bunch of ideas, a bunch of points from arguments as facebook statuses. I wasn't trying to impress anyone. My parents said I wasn't making sense. Let's see if my friends understand. A couple of my friends liked a bunch of them.

Kristen's the pretty one. She's going to be a whore. Let's treat her like a whore. Oh Rachel's the ugly one. She's going to be very studious. We don't need to watch her behavior. She would never be a whore.

After all this arguing, after writing statuses on facebook, I went back downstairs. No one was around. I stared at my reflection in the glass window of the back door as I made funny facial expression, and said, what? What? I had just realized that I was molested! I was molested! I was molested!

I went back upstairs and said something about it to my dad. “You weren't molested, Rachel. I know that didn't happen.” And he just says it so calmly. Yes, we know that didn't happen. We know that didn't happen. We know that didn't happen. They keep repeating that because they are trying to convince themselves that it didn't happen. Yeah, keep telling yourself that!

At first, I wasn't sure why my parents would have molested me. Did they molest my sister too? Maybe not. I began imagining that the reason they molested me was to punish me for not being a boy. My parents were only going to have two kids. They were okay with their first child being a girl, as long as the second one was a boy. But I was a girl too. So one day, they decided to molest me as punishment. Which fucked me up sexually. That also explained why they let a homeless guy live at the house. They always wanted a son. This was their chance! My mom would take him out shopping and spend a whole bunch of money on him. When I had my break with reality, my parents jumped at the chance to secure a guardianship over me. They were imprisoning me. Imprisoning me because I wasn't a boy.

I got mischievious. I went downstairs, got out some computer paper, and started cutting out letters. I took scotch tape and taped them to the island. When I finished, it read: “Let your daughter go, said the lord to moses – you forgot you molested me.” I was having trouble with my brain. I was having trouble remembering what letters looked like. Sometimes I would have to write the letter out before I cut it out. I went in the fridge, got out an open jar of tomato sauce, and spread drops around the island.

As I worked, I chattered to Brandon. I made fun of myself. Back in Idaho, when I was at bible study, a lady, who used to be an atheist, said something about how when you are an atheist, no one challenges your beliefs. When you are Christian, they do.

I made fun of what I had thought at the time. “Ha! People don't make fun of you for being Christian!” Yeah, yeah they do. I had only been Christian a couple months, and people had made fun of me. I had made fun of Brandon myself for being Christian! “Yeah, people make fun of you for being Christian!”

I finished with the tomato sauce. I asked Brandon, “What now? What do you think of this?”

“Let's make it a little bit more biblical.”

“That's exactly what I was thinking!” This was supposed to be like Passover. I got out the ketchup, to represent blood. I smeared ketchup over the doors of the appliances: the oven, the fridge, the microwave, the dishwasher.

It was all done. I went to bed, and fell asleep.

I went downstairs the next morning. My parents were up. My mom was calmly cleaning up the kitchen. I was surprised. I expected her to say something like, “Rachel, what the fuck?!” when she saw the mess I made in the kitchen. But she didn't. She just calmly cleaned it up.

As she was picking the paper letters off the counter, she looked up at me with a disgruntled frown. In my mind, I saw that evil look. She reminded me of the mom from Cybil, a movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder. As a kid, Cybil was severely abused by her mother.

Later that day, my head was in turmoil. My parents were child molesters. My parents were child molesters! And they had a guardianship over me! What do I do about this? There was one thing I could do. I could call the police. Maybe, they would take that seriously. Don't they always take that kind of thing seriously? And in the process, I could get them to remove the guardianship.

So that evening, I went down to the Mormon temple with my cell phone, and called the police.

A police officer came to my home, and I talked calmly with him about matters that were going on. I thought I was doing well with communication, but I realized that now that I was in this state, I had trouble with listening. At the end of our conversation, he said, “For all I know you are Jesus Christ.” And I smiled.

He talked to my parents. It turns out, the police didn't believe me. No one believed me. I guess the thing about accusing your parents of child molestation, it only works when you are a kid. It doesn't work if you are twenty-six.

Night time rolled around and I was wide awake. I went into my dad's bedroom.

“Feether Meeke. You need to give me something to sleep. I haven't slept in several nights. If I don't get some sleep really soon, I am going to die.”

“That's not true, you just don't know how to read your body right,” my dad told me.

“And you know all about reading your body right, that's why you're so fat,” I remarked.

Usually, I don't make fun of people about their weight. I really don't. I struggle with my weight, I know what's it's like to feel like you've lost control over your appetite. But in this case, I thought this comment was warranted.

He didn't have anything to help me sleep. I went downstairs, and paced. I felt something funny happening with my body. Something with my heart, like I might have a heart attack or something. I didn't know what to do. Then, I felt something direct me to go to the garage and get a beer. There were a few beers in the fridge. No one was up now. I got a beer, drank it, and felt better. Now I was way more relaxed. But I still couldn't sleep.

I paced the kitchen. And it all started to sink in. My parents were imprisoning me. They didn't really love me. My parents really didn't love me. I thought of Matthew. I remembered his sister, and how back when I was in high school her screen name was Noonelovesyou. No one loved me. I was alone in the world. But I had Matthew. Matthew loved me, or at least, he cared about me. And he lived nearby. I could walk to his house.

I paced around the kitchen, and I felt really uncomfortable, in tears. Except, there were no tears. But I was crying. My eyes refused to produce tears, though I was in misery. I knew the way this progressed, the way that I suddenly felt so sad and uncomfortable, it was meant to happen. It was like birth pain, meant to get me to do something. Meant to get me to leave.

I went up to my mom's sewing room where she slept. It was 3 am now. I woke her up.

“You don't really love me!” I said, crying.

“You can say you don't remember molesting me, say what you will, but I know you molested me because I have the scars on my body.” I felt that this was a scripted line, scripted for me to say. Everything I was doing now, I did it for God. This was the hardest part of the whole thing, where I had to just do what I felt I needed to do, and it would be right. The “scars on my body” line was a line scripted by God. I remembered Harry Potter, and his scar. He didn't remember his parent's death, but he had a scar to remind him. That's all that I had. Not physical scars, but the quirks in my own sexuality that I suffered as a result.

“You know that's not true Rachel! You know we love you.”

“No. I don't.” And I left.

I remembered Erik's card on Valentine's Day. “It's always darkest right before the dawn.” This was my darkest hour. Right after this, I would experience a dawn. Where things suddenly got massively better.

I packed my things. I packed my computer. I made sure to pack my bible. Where do you turn when you find out no one loves you? You turn to God. God loves you. I packed some of my clothes. And I took off, through the side door in the back, because the front door squeeks. I walked to the house where Matthew lived.

When I got close, I got out my cell phone and called him. He was still up. Turns out, I was standing right in front of his house. I went to the door and Matthew let me in. When I saw him, I was kind of repulsed. He was shirtless, and he had gained a fair amount of weight. He needed a hair cut. He smelled strongly of body odor. But none of that mattered. All that mattered was that he was my friend and he cared about me. I went down to the basement where he lived with some roommates. The basement smelled really bad. His roommates probably thought I was weird. I explained what was going on. I explained how I had smeared ketchup over the appliances to make a biblical scene. I explained how they needed to hide me for awhile now.

Eventually, I decided I should get some sleep, so I lay down on a couch or a mattress, and tried to sleep. I was kind of in a state of misery. I heard sirens wailing outside, which added to that misery. I thought about all the horrible stuff in the world. They seemed even more horrible in the dark of night.

Eventually, I went to sleep. I had a dream about a mysterious shadow person.

When I woke up the next morning, my parents were there. Matthew had called them. I wasn't really mad at him, because deep down I had known I wouldn't be able to stay here anyway. I went willingly, without complaining. My parents took me to the hospital.

Trip Like Jesus: Part 16 (Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, 18+)

I was sitting on my bed, when I felt a message from Brandon coming through. I stopped and focused my mind.

“Rachel. Like Arthur on facebook.” He was referring to that little kid show with Arthur the aardvark. I used to watch this show on TV when I was at Innercept, along with another kid show called Martha Speaks. I hadn't watched them since I had been at home, however.

“I like it how you sit around and watch little kid shows. Another thing. Remember that message you sent me about how your parents tested your blood to see if you had pyromania? You should make that your facebook status.”

So I wrote a facebook status:

My parents tested my blood. It turns out I have pyromania.

“The reason that one's funny is because the stupid people from Lake Oswego won't know you're joking. It goes along well with your other statuses. Back when you wrote that message to me, I didn't realize that you were joking, and I thought you were stupid.”

When I talked about being tested for pyromania, I was actually referring to a condition called pyroluria. I always called it pyromania as a joke.

I had actually made a small breakthrough in my own thinking. Previously, I would have dismissed as impossible anything I didn't understand. Now, I was accepting that these were things I was incapable of understanding because I didn't have that problem myself. I didn't understand how you could make up lies and tell stories and not realize that they weren't true. But pathological liars could do this. I just had to accept that what was going on with Erik and his family, it was something I didn't understand.

However, I later realized it wasn't true. This is a family with a strange past that never lies. However, at the time I didn't know.

My problem had been that previously, I was incapable of seeing through people. I was often fooled by people when they were being fake. I didn't see their true intentions.

For several months now, I had really like Facebook God, despite being Christian. I had always wondered why that page upset so many Christians. Now I was looking at the page, and I was seeing that Facebook God really just made fun of Christians. Except I already knew this, but this was in a slightly nasty, negative way. For the first time, I was seeing this.

“Rachel sees through Facebook God now,” Brandon told Chance.

I was looking at the Facebook God's page. “Hey! But that's okay! I still think Facebook God is funny! Facebook God is still funny!” I was stubborn and unwilling to back down on this.

I scrolled through the page. I came to one picture in particular. “Mary gave birth to Jesus, Jesus was the lamb of God... Does that mean Mary had a little lamb?”

I stared at this picture for awhile, and then gasped. “WOOAHH!!”

I heard Brandon and Chance laughing at my reaction to this picture. Then I started laughing at myself.

“We thought that was trippy too,” Brandon said to me.

Chance showed up as one of my top nine friends. I looked at his picture on my facebook page. As I stared at his picture, I could feel the graveness of this situation. Everything depended on him. Everything.

Chance and I weren't in love. No, but Chance and I were soul mates. Love had yet to develop. That's why he was interested in me in eighth grade, despite the fact that I wasn't that attractive and didn't talk. Chance could sense this about me. He liked me. But was that enough? Somehow, that feeling had to outlast all the horrible things that we had gotten on camera.

In reality, it wouldn't have been all that bad. But I had misconstrued ideas, and with misconstrued ideas, things tend to present themselves in extremes. So in my delirious state, I thought that these video clips of me, a lot of them, were extremely ugly. For one, my room was a mess. I was a slob. I would take food in to my room, lots of food, and eat it messily while sprawled out on the bed and absorbed in my online, facebook life. I would drink soda, and belch. I would fart. I imagined that this was due to an intolerance for lactose. That was another thing. Aspartame wasn't fit for human consumption, neither were dairy products or carbonated beverages. This problem with the American diet was represented through me, and my flatulence/belching habits. Because I was Jesus, of course. My unpleasant burps and farts weren't representative of those of our entire nation.

So I looked at Chance's picture, and I knew that he had to forgive me for all of this. He had to get past all of this about me. If he could, we would be together, but more importantly, the souls of everyone in existence would not have to go to hell, rather, people would be given a chance to get saved, and the saved souls would go to heaven. And, we would warn people about global warming together. But first and foremost, hell. Because hell was a more pressing concern.

I looked at Chance's picture, knew it all rested on him, and laughed about it. Because that was all I could do, laugh. I picked up my iPod, put on the song “Inside the Fire” by Disturbed, and danced around the kitchen. Pick me. Pick me.

“Rachel.” Brandon spoke to me. “Chance says he'll pick you, but first you need to do some housekeeping. Clean up your room a bit.”

So I went upstairs and furiously got to work on my room, picking up clothes that were on the floor, discarding trash, recycling cans and bottles, doing anything I could to beautify the place.

I hadn't been taking my Adderall. Problem was, I was still on Invega. Now, Adderall was an appetite suppressant, and Invega was an appetite stimulant. So from that moment on, I stopped taking Invega. In the mean time, for a few days, I had to continue taking Adderall, until the Invega left my bloodstream.

But I hadn't taken any Adderall today. I stopped what I was doing, hunched over, and held my stomach. Kind of like a Sim.

“I see your problem. I feel it. Go take some Adderall!” Brandon ordered me reluctantly. I went to my mom's bedroom and found some Adderall on her dresser. It was almost as if Brandon had known it was there, because he could see it on camera. I swallowed the pill.

I started arguing with my dad. I told him that maybe I had never really been delusional, maybe they just weren't smart enough to understand the stuff I said. I remembered something, a pattern in my dreams. Several dreams I had had involved people being taunted with songs. I took the cue from these dreams. I began taunting my dad with a song. “If you don't understand it that means it's not true, you can't accept that your daughter might be smarter than you!” To which my dad responded, “Just because it can't be seen, doesn't mean the alien's not green!” A purely silly taunt, to counteract the silliness that I was spewing.

So I taunted my dad with my song. He taunted me back with his. He chased me around taunting me with his. I laughed. This was kind of fun.

I was reminded of an Einstein quote I had seen on facebook. The problem with really smart people is they sound like really crazy people to really stupid people. My dad said he didn't believe this was true. But Einstein said it! How could it not be true?

I went back to my computer to look this up. My computer froze. “That's me, Rachel. Go taunt your dad some more,” Brandon told me. So I went and taunted him some more.

Something else started coming in. I picked up on this psychically. Brandon had put a camera in my dad's office. My sister had gone through my dad's computer one time, and she was disgusted to find that my dad had file where he had saved a bunch of suggestive pictures of her from when she was younger. What I was imagining now, I was imagining that at night, late at night, my dad looked at these pictures. And touched himself. Almost without realizing what he was doing. God, that was gross! Brandon had gotten it on camera.

I thought about bringing this up. Should I do it? Should I say it? No, not yet. I could feel the time wasn't right yet. Not yet. Wait until the time is right. Wait until the moment, that moment when you feel it is the right thing to do.

Trip Like Jesus: Part 15 (The Party Scene) (Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, 18+)

I began wondering who these people were, these people from my high school who made fun of me. Even though, overall, I was having the time of my life. Seriously, I was. I felt better than I had ever felt before. I felt confident in myself as a person. I felt whole. I felt like I had gained something through this experience that no one could take away from me. I no longer cared about the stuff that had embarrassed me previously, the embarrassing shit I had said to Brandon. Still, I was under attack. People were attacking me, or at least I was imagining people were attacking me, because now they knew my own thoughts. They knew the stupid things I thought about in my head. And they were making fun of me.

I started thinking about the guy from my high school, Jeremy's friend, Chris. I imagined that he had been one of the people who made fun of me. So I aimed my thoughts at him. “Yeah. That's why Megan told you to talk to her when your IQ got in the double digits. Because you're not very smart.”

Chris was there, with Brandon. “The reason I didn't remove her earlier was because I believed her! I didn't think she made up the stuff in her book. Jeremy decided to hook up with her to see if it was true or not, what they said about her giving good head. I removed her when he told me it was false. I figured that meant she had just made everything up, and that was such a stupid thing to make up.”

What happened was, Jeremy had had a good time with me that first night, but the sex in itself wasn't particularly good. They were all making fun of me after that, for making such a thing up. Brandon had had to call up Jeremy to tell him to look me up again, because I didn't give very good head the first night. So he did, and it turned out I indeed know the coveted secret to giving good head.

Imagine Brandon calling Jeremy up. “Hey, I'm the guy who bugged Rachel's house. She didn't give good head that night. Look her up again!”

This didn't register at first, and I kept sending negative energy toward Chris.

Stop, Rachel! STOP!

“When Rachel hates you, you feel it.”

Then I realized something. I was a mind bully. I had the power to beat people up with my mind.

I wasn't physically strong, or particularly attractive, but I had something else. I had a powerful mind.

I went online and added Chris as a friend again, to see if he would accept. He did. I took that as evidence that I was right about this, and not delusional.

I was just so sick of this. All my thoughts had been planned out ahead of time. I didn't have free will. I didn't have free will! Why wouldn't people leave me alone?

“Rachel, you know, it's all in your head. Remember the time when you were in class, and one of the retarded kids was screaming in the hall? One guy in your class yelled 'shut up' but later apologized and felt really bad when he realized it was the developmentally disabled kid who had been screaming. If everyone had known this about you, if they had known that you were different than the rest of them, they would have been the same way about you.”

I thought about this, and accepted this. Then I laughed to myself. “Heh. Yeah. I'm a mind bully! Don't mess with Rachel, she'll beat you up with her mind!”

I began arguing with my parents about them treating me like a child. They wouldn't let me out past dark. Why the fuck couldn't I go out past dark? This was a good neighborhood.

I don't even remember all the things I argued with them about, I just know that afterwards I was exhausted and went back up to my room.

When were Chance and Brandon going to help me?

“Rachel. When we come over, I want you to be high. You still have some marijuana. Go smoke it with your sister. I like you better when you are high.”

I got wrapped up in my thought processes again. Talking to Brandon about things, talking to myself about things. So much stuff had happened in such a short period of time.

“Rachel, look at the clock.”

I looked. It was 4:20 pm. Message received loud and clear.

I called up my sister. “Kristen. Can I come over and smoke weed with you? I really need to smoke, it is kind of like an emergency. This is really important.”

“Really, Rachel? I'm with Tiger. We just picked up his friend's ashes at the morgue.”

Oh, God. Not a good time. “Okay, sorry.”

“Maybe you should learn to smoke by yourself.”

“Okay. I'll try.”

I didn't have a pipe, but I could try rolling a joint, I thought.

“Rachel, we think you should play the part of a Lake Oswego teenager going out to smoke a joint,” Brandon told me.

What did that mean? I should put on my Abercrombie & Fitch clothes. I put on my A & F sweatshirt, and got out the Abercrombie jeans my sister had given me. I put them on.

“God, these pants are uncomfortable!” I rolled around and jumped around the room to try to loosen up the jeans so they fit my body better.

Okay, so what did I need? My marijuana. I began searching for it. “Where's my marijuana? Where's my marijuana? Where is my fucking marijuana!?” I finally located it. Okay, weed, lighter, ID in case they card me buying rolling paper, and money. All set.

“Beev, F. Meeke! I'm going out for a walk!”

“Ok honey! Bring your phone!” My mom said.

“Leave the porch light on!” my dad added. Which was odd. Normally they didn't tell me this, they just counted on me being home before dark.

I walked over to a store near my house. No rolling paper. Try the gas station. I walked over to the gas station. There was a choice between two different types of rolling paper. I didn't know the difference, or if it mattered. I picked one at random. Paid and left.

Okay, where to smoke?

I walked into some woods nearby. My feet started to sink in mud. No, this was a terrible place to smoke. Back up to the street, over to a nearby hotel. I sat under a window and tried to roll a joint. I tried for awhile and failed.

“Oh... must have bought the wrong type of rolling paper!” I began to walk back.

“Wrong type of rolling paper, wrong type of rolling paper,” I whispered to myself.

“Rachel! You can use that paper, it'll work.” Brandon whispered to me.

I went back and sat by the trash cans this time. I remembered Larry instructing me how to roll a blunt. You seal it in place by putting a whole bunch of saliva all over it.

Still it wasn't working.

How do you roll a joint? Isn't there a song about this? How does the song go? “'Pick out the seeds and stems...' Nahh, I don't want to do that. 'Twist it on the ends!'” I twisted both ends of the joint. “More saliva. Let it dry.”

I sat there and hummed silently in my head and waited for it to dry.

“Is it dry yet?”

“Let it dry a little bit longer,” Brandon said to me.

“What about now?”

“Longer.”

After I waited what I thought had to be a sufficient amount of time, I tried lighting it. I'm no good with lighters. But occasionally, I can get them to work. Finally, after trying for awhile, I succeeded at lighting a little bit. It just burned the ends, the place where I had twisted it. I ripped the twisted part off. I lit it again and took a little puff. Marijuana hit my bloodstream. I put the joint away, walked back toward my house and laughed. Laughed because I felt good. This was a really small high, but it would do.

I got back to the house and ran upstairs to the bathroom. My thoughts went like this: “I found a bottle of Adderall! This is better than Christmas.” This was a message I had sent Brandon, five years ago. Christmas. Christmas songs. Rudolph the red nose reindeer!

I got off the toilet and looked in the mirror. I had burnt my nose, from lighting the joint. It was bright red. I stared at it for awhile before Brandon pointed out to me: “They'll think it's a zit.”

“Rachel. This is how you are to the people from your high school. You are like Rudolph.” Brandon told me. What was that song about anyway? I had to look up the lyrics to the song on the internet to remind me what the song was about. Yep. That's right. Someone was ostracized, someone was an outcast. Then, it turns out, while imperfect by himself, the ostracized person's quirks end up being appreciated. In the end, he is appreciated for his imperfections. That was like me. Even though I was Jesus, I was by no means perfect. But that was okay. I was perfect, in another sense. My imperfections had a place in the world.

“They now think you are the coolest person in school,” Brandon told me.

I typed in “birth control.” I clicked on one of the links that came up. Methods of birth control. Abstinence. How does abstinence work?

“Abstinence works by keeping sperm out of the vagina.” Seriously, that's what it said. I burst out laughing. I rolled and rolled around laughing, then fell on the floor, still laughing.

I got up. I had a picture of Brandon up on my computer, the picture of him in Venice. I kept staring at the picture. He was smiling in the picture. I could feel Brandon smiling at me. He was laughing along with me.

“Reading Rachel's mind, I discovered that one of the thoughts that goes through her mind a lot is something that happened sophomore year. At school in health class, they had a choice between a condom lesson and an abstinence video. About 75% of the class chose the abstinence video. Rachel chose the condom lesson. In her head, Rachel still makes fun of everyone for being too embarrassed to choose the condom lesson. Come on, were all those people really choosing abstinence in real life? Yeah Rachel, you make fun of them, and you are right. But did you know that they made fun of you for not picking the abstinence video?”

I made a status on facebook about people in high school being forced to watch a video about how abstinence keeps sperm out of your vagina. Then, I made another one:

Isn't it weird how people think abstinence is 100% effective?

To which someone replied, “But it is!”

I replied, “What if you are raped?” That's what I was referring to, not immaculate conception which was bogus, but rape. That's why at Innercept they put all the girls on some form of birth control, even the ones who didn't want to have sex. In case they were raped.

Personally, I thought this was my best status.

“Rachel, look at my picture some more,” Brandon said to me. I focused my attention on his smiling face, I thought about how much I adored him.

“All this time, I hated Rachel. At the same time, for the first time in my life, I started to feel good about myself. I thought I was just outgrowing my insecurities. What I didn't know was that it was because all this time, all this time I hated Rachel, Rachel was projecting love to me. It wasn't until around February when Rachel started focusing her attention elsewhere, I felt it start to slip.

“Come on, Rachel. Project some more love to me.”

I knew I was still on camera. But it was easy to forget, and get lost in my own thoughts.

I began thinking with the mind of God again. I thought about everyone who had gone to hell. Compared to hell, life on Earth was euphoric bliss. Hell was like the worst you could possibly feel. It was the combined feeling of being in horrific pain, suffocating, extreme revulsion, horror, unimagineable sadness, every unpleasant emotion you could feel combined and experienced simultaneously, and it went on ceaselessly for all of eternity. There was no hope. It never ended.

It was so bad, Jesus wouldn't do it himself. I was Jesus. I refused to go to hell. It was so bad, Jesus wouldn't even do it.

Yet, despite Jesus being too chicken, millions of people had done, or will do it. They would leave the comforts of Earth to experience the unimaginable pain of hell.

“Wow! Those people experienced agony to a degree that Jesus Himself would not do! Those people were a lot better than Jesus was!” I whispered this to myself. Then I laughed. I kept laughing. Laughing at something that was not funny.

“Those people were a lot better than Jesus was!” These were God's thoughts now. God was a jolly fellow. He found humor in unhumorous situations. I was God. It made me sad, but what could I do? These people chose this. They chose to go against Me. But still, it wasn't their fault. No one deserves that. No one deserves to go to hell. God hadn't intended for anyone, apart from the ugly soul, to go to hell.

“Those people were a lot better than Jesus was! A lot better than Jesus was!” I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Then I got out my iPod, turned on the song “Mad World,” covered by Adam Lambert, and walked solemnly downstairs, around the neighborhood, feeling the sorrow of this situation.

All around me are familiar faces

Worn out places, worn out faces

Bright and early for the daily races

Going nowhere, going nowhere

Their tears or filling up their glasses

No expression, no expression

Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow

No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny

I find it kind of sad

The dreams in which I'm dying

Are the best I've ever had

At this point, Brandon pointed out to me something I had been telling him earlier. I have a lot of nightmares with happy endings. That's because my story will always have a happy ending. Jesus will always have a happy ending. Unlike those souls damned to hell, who were a lot better than Jesus was.

I find it hard to tell you

I find it hard to take

When people run in circles

It's a very very mad world, mad world

At this point, Brandon pointed out how many times he's watched me go downstairs and walk around the island in circles.

Trip Like Jesus: Part 14 (Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, 18+)

Later that morning, after I sent the message, I was sitting in my room on my bed with my laptop open. Suddenly, out of the blue, I was hit with an immense wave of energy.

The energy drove me out of my seat. As I was getting up, I saw that Chance had responded to my message.

What he wrote was, “FUN.”

The energy wave I felt caused me to jump up and scream while walking across the room. It was a scream, but it wasn't at the top of my lungs like when I was going through Dark Night of the Soul. This was an excited scream, a happy scream. It wasn't my response to seeing Chance's response to my message, but rather, the energy I was receiving, psychically, from Chance. It was intense.

As I was walking, I heard Brandon say to me, “...because that's a game you play to see if someone you like likes you back!” I didn't know this, because I was isolated and sheltered from online social things like this. When you like someone, you send them a message that says, “I'm sweaty.” And if they say “fun,” that means they like you. This was a perfectly normal, everyday thing for someone to do.

I had to quickly sit myself back down from being driven out of my seat to continue the conversation.

Rachel: Lasagna pan.

Chance: Hubble telescope.

Rachel: Look up Brandon Williams.

Chance: Okay. Does he like lasagna?

Rachel: Yes he does.

Chance: Does he work on the Hubble telescope?

At this, I paused. “I don't know,” I wrote in response. Then I went offline.

Wow, that had gone well! Better than I had hoped! But I knew something. That wasn't the real test. Right there, with the I'm sweaty message, that wasn't the real test. It did show something, though. Chance liked me. The real test was if he still liked me after he saw all the embarrassing footage of me in my house, which Brandon would for sure show him.

I remembered something else about the guy Chance was friends with, Adam, the guy with the chromosome song. There was a day back in junior high, when it was the end of the year and we were all signing yearbooks in the gym. Todd and I exchanged yearbooks. Except, neither of us could sign each other's because neither of us had a pen. Todd forgot that we had exchanged yearbooks, and went off to get more people to sign. He gave it to Adam. I came after him, and took my yearbook back. When I looked at my yearbook, I saw that Adam had written, “You are a boy.”

But this was my yearbook. I imagined that these words were somehow prophetic. This happened on purpose. I was like a boy in a girl's body. I mean, not sexuality wise, but mentally. That's why I did things to make fun of girls, like make a video outside the school with my sister and Matthew, pretending to be a teenage girl afraid of sex.

A while ago, my cover photo was a picture of a girl, that said, “She may look clean, BUT.. AIDS... Gonorrhea... Syphillis...”

I wanted another picture like that, that made fun of girls, as my cover photo. I could do another STD one. But, I didn't want people to think that I was trying to hint that I had an STD, because I didn't. I googled, “pictures that make fun of girls.” I searched for images. There was one particular one I just looked at, and immediately made my cover photo without even really reading it or thinking about it. I didn't actually read it and comprehend what it said until I already had it as my cover photo. When I did so, I burst out laughing. It read: “Girls with fake hair, fake eyelashes, fake nails, and fake purses wonder why they can't find a real man.” The reason it was funny was because it was like I was making fun of my sister, who had fake all those things.

Brandon laughed at me. “Yeah, Rachel! You didn't realize that?” he was laughing at me because I made that my cover photo before even realizing why I was doing it.

I looked down at the chat window where I had been talking to Chance. I saw the green dot, meaning he was online. For some reason this bothered me that he was online.

“Chance.” Brandon said to him. “Go offline for a bit. Rachel sees you online and that bothers her.”

Immediately after that thought went through my head, the green dot disappeared. Chance had gone offline, as if in response to what I had heard in my head.

I laughed. And joked with Brandon in my head, “I have this problem where I think the whole world revolves around me!” Like I expected that Chance would stop going online himself and be completely immersed in this second coming/bugged house/Rachel Zuhl world.

It was morning, and it was time to go to the gym. I hadn't been going as frequently, now that so much was going on inside my head, but my mom asked me if I wanted to go to tai chi with her. I sat, and asked Brandon if I should go, inside my head.

I didn't receive an audible response, but what I did find was that I started involuntarily running after my mom out the door. So the answer must have been yes.

At the gym, I didn't go into tai chi. I wandered into the weight area and started doing bicep curls. I was worried that weight training would somehow sap my spiritual energy, and make me less psychic. I had never heard anywhere that this was true but now that I was here I was wondering if there were little things about psychic abilities no one told you. Like, no one had told me that tai chi made you psychic. Boy, that was a great surprise.

Speaking of tai chi...

I looked into the room where classes were held and saw that they had finished with the warm up exercises and were on to the actual routine. Suddenly, involuntarily, I ran in there and started doing it with them.

However, I wasn't actually doing it correctly. Sure, I was making all the moves right. But I wasn't feeling the energy. I wasn't feeling the chi. And that's what made a difference in your spiritual energy and psychic abilities. I was going through the motions, but I wasn't really feeling it.

I had two appointments today, one with my naturopath and one with my psychiatrist. Beforehand, my mom and I ate lunch at Subway. I walked around outside before we ate, and felt the beauty of my spiritual/mental state. It was truly glorious, the way I felt. I listened to the song Annie You Save Me. I had been listening to it on repeat constantly for the past week.

There were lots of things that I called soul grooves. A soul groove was a term I made up to describe a conscious experience. It is the feeling of a drop of water hitting an ocean, and the sound of it echoing, a sound that gets slower and slower at such a pace that it rocks your soul. I used to have a lot of these when I was younger, and now I was experiencing it a lot again. Like I was experiencing the pureness of Christ consciousness.

In this state, I could feel emotions in terms of vibrations. When I heard negative comments in my mind directed at me, I could feel the vibrations behind these comments. They had an unharmonious energy that was painful. Positive comments directed at me were a glorious vibration that felt like beautiful music.

I remembered back to a few months ago, when I had had more delusions. I remembered the horrible delusion I had had about Brandon's little sister. Everything happens for a reason. I could do no wrong. No, what I had thought about Brandon's little sister wasn't actually true. But what I imagined was, Brandon's little sister had found out that a girl had delusions about him, and she used to make fun of me for it. She had made fun of me for my weakness, the topic for me that was sensitive. So in response, I made fun of her about something that was a sensitive topic for her. She had been extremely insecure about how heavy she had looked at this particular time.

Normally, I would be worried about what Brandon would think about me having such a horrible delusion about his little sister, and her weight. I would have been worried that he would be pissed at me. But hey, delusions are delusions. They just happen. Obviously Brandon wasn't mad at me, or he would have said something.

Back inside Subway, I stood in line and ordered my sandwich. When we got to the cashier and they asked me if I wanted a drink, I ordered coffee. They didn't serve coffee in the afternoon. I sighed, and was very frustrated about this. Reluctantly I ordered a diet coke. I was worried that the aspartame wasn't good for me.

Afterwards, we went to the naturopath, where they hooked up the electrodes to my head and did some more neurofeedback. Neurofeedback is meant to correct brain waves. You will sometimes feel a difference, but not always. This time, I felt an enormous difference. I felt the part of my brain, of my conscious thought processes, that obsessively think about things like my ability to give head, straighten up and mature and let go of such stupid thoughts. It was like it was the brain damage that was causing me to think stupid thoughts all the time. Now, it was corrected and my thoughts were on a higher vibration.

“Do you have any questions?” the naturopath asked me.

YES. Something spoke up inside my brain. This was not Brandon, this came from somewhere else.

“Well?”

I focused and tried to figure out what it wanted me to ask. My thoughts flashed back to Subway. “Diet coke. Is it bad for you?”

“Yes. Aspartame is very bad for you.” Then he started going on about aspartame.

Before we left, I was pacing energetically through the halls while I waited for my mom to finish buying supplements. A woman passed me in the hall, she looked at me and I felt negative energy from her directed at me.

I ran back the other way towards the direction she had gone in. I stood outside the door, narrowed my eyes and peered in at her, waiting for her to see me. The search for the ugly soul. Was she the ugly soul? I knew she wasn't, that was Nick, but it was a symbolic action. She turned around and saw me looking at her, but just looked back in the other direction and didn't give me a funny look or anything, like she didn't think it was weird that I was looking at her like this.

Next we had to go to my psychiatrist. The reason I was excited about this was because my psychiatrist could read auras. He would look at my aura, and see the harmonious state I was in, and surely he would realize something wonderful was going on!

I paced all around the psychiatrist's office while we were waiting. There was a problem. I was starting to lose my harmonious, good mood. HAPPY ENERGY PEOPLE! People were not sending me good energy! I wondered if this was on purpose. Like, now that everyone knew so much about me, they hated me, even though I was the second coming of Christ. Happy energy people. Happy energy people! I knew that my personal energy state was linked to the energy that other people were sending me.

I was called into see my psychiatrist, and sat down.

“Read my aura.” And I sat there and relaxed, feeling broken, tired, used up.

“Oh, man. Your aura... it's gray and really scattered.”

Don't lose your cool. Work with this. “So what are we going to do?”

“The decreased dose of Invega isn't working... your mom says you've been manic.”

“So, do we want more drugs, or less drugs? We could increase the Invega again... Or hey, I know! I could go off Adderall!” Which was a crazy, crazy thing for me to suggest.

“Well, sure, if that's what you want... We'll keep the other meds the same and no more Adderall!”

“Yes!” Involuntarily, I jumped up and high-fived the doctor. Afterwards, Brandon laughed about this.

I was excited about this move. A move that I would never usually be excited about. I told my mom, and she was disappointed. Disappointed that we hadn't increased my Invega again.

That's how my mom was. She wanted to keep me drugged, drugged, drugged.

I came home that night, back to the bugged house like always. I could feel people gathered behind the screens. New people would find out that Brandon bugged my house, and be shocked. Like shit, Brandon sees me naked. Brandon would say, “Yes! We saw her in her unmentionables!” I laughed at this. Brandon was making a reference to the time I came back to Innercept from a home visit, and my mother had bought me new underwear, and they always search your bag. I told the staff member who searched my bag to be careful, I got some new 'unmentionables.' The thing was, I hadn't called my underwear this since I had been home in Oregon, especially not since Brandon had bugged the house, in fact the thought hadn't even occurred to me. Which meant that Brandon could go back through and probe my memories with his mind, and certain things stuck out. Brandon knew almost everything there was to know about me, potentially. He could know, if he probed long enough. However, he did not know everything. He did not have the time to examine every single thought that had ever occurred to me.

I was sitting on my bed like always, when suddenly I felt an outpouring of energy come from somewhere, presumably the people who were watching me through hidden cameras. They were all using their minds to put thoughts into my mind. The thoughts I received were in reference to Crystal. They said: “Cute little itty bitty sweet young soul! Sweet young soul! Sweet young soul! Sweet young soul!” That last line kept repeating, until it caught on in my own mind.

At first I was confused why these thoughts started coming into my head. They were obviously not my own, rather someone trying to influence my thoughts. The whole “young soul” was a reference to something. A while ago, years and years ago, when I thought about people in terms of how old their souls were, I had thought that Crystal must have been a young soul. So this was a reference to that. But the connotation was kind of like, “Why would you be so hard on such a little baby soul? Forgive her, she's just a baby! You wouldn't be so hard on a baby!”

The thing that confused me was that, now that I was Christian, I no longer believed in past lives or soul age. So I was confused why I was suddenly being told that Crystal was a sweet young soul.

However, that was beside the point. I still had the problem where I would think on repeat. All this time, through everything that I had gone through, ever since I had done Weird Zombie Girl, the whole Weird Zombie Girl thing played in the back of my mind constantly. “Yeah, I smirked at you. YOU WERE LOOKING AT ME FUNNY!” And I screamed the last part in my head at her. Over and over and over again.

But this whole “sweet young soul” thing I was hearing, I began to realize, was to replace this thought process. And it repeated in my head until I started saying it myself. So now I was walking around the house, whispering to myself: “She's a very sweet young soul. Very sweet young soul. She's a very sweet young soul!” And in my mind, and my being, something started to quiet down. With the old, nasty thought process, I was losing energy. It was using up my energy, thinking nasty thoughts all the time about Crystal. I was using my energy to send nastiness to Crystal. With this new, loving thought process, that stopped happening. And I immediately began to feel immensely better. With my old thought process, not only had it been potentially causing harm to Crystal, but it had been draining on me too. My energy now felt fuller, more complete, grander, healed.

I wasn't sure if the purpose of this was for my sake or Crystal's sake, or for both of our sake.

Then, a whole bunch of stuff started to come to me.

Crystal never hated me. I remembered how ridiculous Crystal sounded when she had written on my facebook wall, telling me about how she loathed me. The reason she sounded so ridiculous was because she wasn't being truthful. She had been shocked that I had taken her seriously when she sounded so ridiculous. It wasn't Crystal who had misread what I meant, It had been me, misreading what she meant.

Someone had taken a picture of me when I was passed out naked, and Crystal had seen it. I imagined that there was something distinctive and attractive about my naked body and my bone structure, something I was unaware of. I had no idea what it was. But Crystal, who I knew was bisexual, had seen it and she actually had a crush on me.

Brandon said to me, “That's why you know Weird Zombie Girl swings both ways!” One of my friends was asking me questions about Weird Zombie Girl on one of my facebook pages, and I had told her that she swings both ways. In real life, I had learned that Crystal swinged both ways when I was doing internet stalking, and I had found profiles on some website for both Brandon and Crystal. They had been looking for another couple to hook up with. There, Crystal had described herself as being bisexual. On facebook she said she was straight.

Sometimes, when you like someone, you act like you don't like them, but you are really weird about it. All the other girls on the fifth floor hated me. So when Crystal wrote on my facebook wall, she was just echoing the opinion of the other girls. She had wanted to add me, but didn't want to be ostracized by the other girls on the fifth floor for having me as a friend.

I remembered things that I had heard that Crystal had said.

“Oh my God, I can't believe she added me!”

“How can you NOT hate her?”

Oh right, I hate her! How can you NOT hate her?

All the other girls on the fifth floor had been making fun of me. They made fun of me and my crummy dye job, not knowing that it was actually what guys prefer.

The term “sweet young soul” was reminiscent of “sweet young thing.” Sweet young thing was a reference to a young attractive girl, and had sexual connotations to it. Therefore, “sweet young soul” had sexual connotations to it also. Crystal had sexual feelings toward me, according to what I was imagining, so it was as if this was also commenting on her as a sexual being.

It actually hadn't been Crystal who put puke in front of my door. I could do no wrong. No, even I could do wrong. And out of everything, this is the one place where I had been wrong, despite being so sure of myself. Crystal had not put the puke in front of my door. It was the other girls on the fifth floor. Crystal had been really bummed that in retaliation for that, I had stolen her sign, which she had worked so hard on.

I began referring to Crystal as the “fifth floor Jesus,” because she took the rap for what the other girls on her floor had done. I imagined myself surrounded by a crowd of people, describing Crystal. “She's the fifth floor Jesus, and a very sweet young soul!”

When Brandon and Crystal first met, the thing they had originally bonded over was the fact that they both had a crush on me. That was one of the reasons Brandon bugged my house, because I had basically given him permission to do anything, and this is what he did.

However, back when they found out I had misconstrued ideas, for a while they didn't like me anymore and were laughing at me. Crystal had been laughing at me because of my strange belief in the supernatural, in things like negative energy clearings. However, recently, I had psychically attacked Crystal, without meaning to, with my own negative thoughts. As a result, Crystal had had to get a negative energy clearing herself. Which was why they did the “sweet young soul” thing to get me to stop sending all that negative energy to Crystal. Give it a rest! “Crystal wants you to add her as a friend,” Brandon said. Crystal was there right now, with everyone, whoever happened to be there, watching me on camera.

So I went over to her page and sent her a friend request.

I was mad that she didn't accept right away. I thought maybe she wasn't at her computer right now. But as the days wore on, she still didn't accept, and I wondered if I was receiving all this psychic stuff correctly.

Maybe, that wasn't really what was going on. Maybe she wasn't there, maybe she didn't know anything about this. Maybe what was really going on was that I had been psychically attacking her, and she might remember that the day whatever symptoms she may have been experiencing lifted was the same day I sent her another friend request on Facebook.

However, this was all just speculation. At any rate, it was great to feel my own spiritual energy lift.

Previously, Brandon had made me shake my butt at random places around the house, which indicated that there was a camera there. However, it hadn't happened while I was near the shower.

“I did put a camera in Rachel's shower.” Brandon told Chance. “But I didn't want her to know.”

Yeah, I heard that. But it was okay.

“Rachel, why don't you take a shower?” There was something weird about my body. I got a towel, took off my clothes, and got in the shower. I sat down on the floor, turned the heat up high and focused it on me. I smiled and laughed. People were watching me. I was keenly aware of this, that I was on display, and all I could do was laugh, paralyzed, too self-conscious to move. But I continued my shower anyway. I washed my hair, then got out of the shower.

“Rachel, why don't you put on some makeup, to show people how you put on makeup.” I didn't want people to know my makeup secrets. But when Brandon told me to do something, there was something almost involuntary that made me do it.

I went downstairs, where I was still on camera. My dad was watching TV in the family room. I went in there. And then I started going off about medication. The evil in my life that was the pills my parents forced me to take. I had realized that it had been the Depakote that had led to my high anxiety, the feelings of humiliation all the time. Now that I was off Depakote, I was much more relaxed. A drug I had taken previously, which I had started very shortly after I had originally been diagnosed, had that same side effect. It was during the late summer of 2006 when I had started feeling embarrassed all the time. I had taken Lamictal for awhile, and then been switched to Depakote. Now that I was off both of them, I didn't have that side effect anymore. I was angry that I had spent so long needlessly feeling uncomfortable and stressing out about things that didn't matter. It had probably taken years off my life.

My dad responded that he was skeptical of my assessment of the side effects of these meds. Lamictal and Depakote don't have any of the same side effects.

I responded that they are in the same class of drugs, they are used to treat the same condition, it is quite possible that they have some of the same side effects, and that is what I noticed.

My dad looked it up, pointed out that none of the top five side effects of Lamictal were the same as the top side effects of Depakote, and vice versa.

“The medications each have tons of potential side effects. There are side effects that aren't listed in the pamphlets.”

To which my dad replied, “All of a medication's potential side effects are listed in the pamphlets.”

We argued for a long time, and my dad got sick of arguing. So I went upstairs.

Chance and Brandon were watching me. Chance said something to Brandon, I couldn't hear what it was.

“Rachel. Chance has a question. Were you masturbating in 8th grade, before you went on Adderall?” Brandon communicated to me.

“Hmm. Well, no I wasn't. I didn't masturbate at all towards the end of 8th grade.”

“Well yeah! You had to go on Adderall because you weren't touching yourself at night!”

HUH?!?

So, like always, I began to realize what was going on. When Brandon videotaped me, he could see me sleep. It had happened a couple times where I wake up touching myself. Not like masturbating, but scratching myself down there, or touching my boob. I imagined that this was only the tip of the iceberg, I did this all the time. Brandon had it on camera. It was a side effect of the Adderall.

Sure, parents and doctors give their kids Adderall, thinking it is harmless. But is it? Is it really? What would they do if they knew that an unlisted, unreported side effect was that it makes you touch yourself at night?

I imagined that there was this girl. Her parents had her on a whole bunch of medications, thinking they were for the better, thinking they were harmless. There was this video of this girl, and how she sleeps at night, due to the medications (somehow everyone was certain that this was due to the medications). This was an ugly, ugly, ugly video. And this video had to go on YouTube, to reveal this ugliness to the world.

This girl was me, of course. But the way it was in my head, it wasn't clear that this was me. Because it was planned a long time ago, before I even existed. I was living out this plan.

I imagined the girl holding the videotape, and saying to her dad: “So, you don't think there are any unlisted side effects of the medications?”

“That's why we sent you bad energy at the doctor's office. So you would be taken off Adderall! You did exactly what we were hoping you would do,” Brandon told me.

I was angry. I was steaming pissed. Not because of the video, or the house bugging, or any of that. I was pissed at my dad. And the fact that he told me, that he had the nerve to believe himself, that there were not any unlisted side effects of medications. That every possible side effect anyone could ever experience from a medication would be listed in the brochure.

I got so pissed that I woke up my mom and screamed at her. It was the middle of the night now, and she was sound asleep, and I just waltzed straight into her room, turned on her light and yelled at her about what my dad had said. First, I considered doing that to my dad. But I knew he had work the next day, which was why I left him alone.

My mom was mad, and in my mind, Brandon told me to stop. Go back to your room.

I sighed and apologized and left my mom to try and go back to sleep.

“Rachel, that was stupid. Your mom was having a really nice dream. You know she has trouble getting to sleep.”

“You're right, I'm sorry.”

“We forgive you, Jesus!” That came in loud and clear, much clearer than most things that Brandon told me. I laughed and gave a big thumbs up, to indicate how clearly that had come through.

That was a separate thing we were trying to sort out. Which thoughts I received belonged to me, and which belonged to Brandon. Because I had this problem where I would attribute thoughts to coming from Brandon when they really came from myself.

There was a lot of focus on me at this present moment. I had a problem: I had no privacy, and I had to fart.

“You guys, give me some space, I have to fart.”

Then I let out this really tiny fart.

“That was dainty.”

“Wait. I just heard 'that was dainty.' Was that you, or was that me?”

“That was you!” I was embarrassed, than Brandon laughed. “That was funny!”

My sister came over. She came over to my parent's house once a week, for dinner.

As we talked in my bedroom, I told her one thought that had crossed my mind. We had given my parents funny names, Beev and Feether Meeke. We didn't call them mom and dad anymore, we hadn't for a long time. The reason we gave them funny names was because we lost respect for them.

“Of course that was the reason. I knew that was the reason.” my sister replied.

So we talked about it, and decided to sit down with my parents and have a talk with them, outlining every mistake they had made in their parenting. I took notes so we could remember what to talk about.

“Now, Rachel and her sister are going to give her parents parenting lessons. This should be good,” Brandon said.

“The shoving of the Ritalin down our throats, the crappy food, letting Ted stay here, Innercept, anything else?”

We thought on this.

“Tickling. I had nightmares about tickling!”

Brandon whispered in my ear: “Really Rachel? Nightmares?”

“Yes!” I turned my head away so Kristen couldn't see me mouth “yes.”

We came up with a bunch of other things, and went downstairs and ate dinner. Kristen almost didn't want to do it.

“It's just going to start an argument.”

“Let's do it.” This was going to be a big event for me in front of the cameras. We went into the family room.

We went over all the things we had listed. It of course, did start an argument.

I talked about the time when we were at the old house and Feether Meeke was tickling me. I was screaming in pain as part of his watch caught on the skin of my arm and ripped it off, leaving a huge, bloody gash. I got up and acted this out, this tickling, the gash, the blood, oh God the blood! I jumped around screaming and animated with my hands the blood bursting from the wound. I got exceptionally animated. I laughed afterwards, than heard Brandon and Chance laughing at this, took a step back from my family and laughed really hard with them.

Whenever I heard Brandon and Chance laughing I would do this. Take a step back, and laugh extra, extra hard.

“Rachel, that was pretty interesting. Do that again,” my mom said.

So I acted out the tickling and gaping wound again.

“Now, do your impression of the guy from Innercept who would talk with the aliens.”

I held up both hands, curled the middle three fingers in while jerking around my thumbs and pinky, then rapidly blinked both my eyes, but not at the same time. There was a guy at Innercept who used to do this. He would do this randomly and out of the blue, and the only explanation I ever got for it was that he was communing with aliens. I realized that the rapid eye movements was kind of like Tweek on South Park. Everything fit together in some sort of way.

All this acting made me feel like I was on stage, even though I was just in my own home. I knew that when I was taking theatre class in Idaho, I had never been a very good actor. Now I was in my own home, and I was comfortable, and I could let loose.

“Okay, enough of that,” my sister said. “What about the time I was leaving with a guy, who was honestly just a friend, and Feether Meeke runs out, and yells in front of him 'Kristen, how many guys are you going to sleep with?'”

“I'm sure I never said that. Kristen's doesn't remember it correctly,” my dad said.

I used my mind to probe his. “You're the one who doesn't remember it correctly. You don't even remember this incident.”

“No, but I know I wouldn't have said that.”

Later, when I asked my dad about this, he said he would have said something, “to make her seem more attractive.”

I thought about how my parents treat my sister like she's a slut, and me like I'm this little angel kid who would never do that kind of thing.

There was a lot of heated arguing, a lot of theatrical acting on my part. My mom tried to tell us we were just being bullies. We were just trying to beat them up for not being perfect.

“No. I'm trying to tell you that you guys aren't good at parenting, and have no business still being parents. You're problem is that you are addicted to parenting! Eighteen years of parenting me wasn't enough, you had to get a guardianship over me! You should go to Parenting Anonymous! Because right now, I'm paying for your mistakes!”

There it was again. That theme. The kids paying for the parents' mistakes.

Trip Like Jesus: Part 13(Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, 18+)

“Rachel.” Brandon spoke to me. “While you were at Innercept, there was this guy you used to sleep with. You think that he was a virgin before he slept with you. The thing is, you told me you don't like sex. So what gives? Were you just trying to take his virginity? Because that's not nice, Rachel.”

I heard this, and flopped down on the bed exasperated. “Remember the song? Fear of a Blank Planet, Porcupine Tree? Come on, people! That's why the song says sex is kind of fun!” I flung my arms out. In my head, I could see myself, as if through a camera, with my arms flung out. All the time I got images in my mind of that, what I must look like on camera.

I was sitting on my bed, when I felt energy that indicated that Brandon was trying to tell me something. I stopped, cleared my mind, and waited for the transmission of thoughts.

“Rachel, look up the lyrics to that song you like so much again, Porcupine Tree, Fear of a Blank Planet.”

“Okay.” I opened a new browser window and found a page that listed the lyrics.

“Here are some other things about the song you haven't noticed.” He directed my attention to the very beginning of the song:

Sunlight coming through the haze

No gaps in the blind

To let it inside

The bed is unmade

Some music still plays

Brandon directed my attention over to the blinds on my windows: no gaps in the blinds. He directed my attention down to the bed: the bed is unmade. He reminded me of times when I would sit and play music on my computer: some music still plays.

“It's your bedroom. Now, look down at the end of the song.”

Bipolar disorder

Can't deal with the boredom

Bipolar disorder! I hadn't even noticed before that it said that! And this was already my song, because of the lyrics.

“And a few more things.”

And shoplifting is getting so last year's thing.

“Rachel. I think it's really stupid how you say you've never shoplifted.”

What? When have I ever shoplifted? I sat for several minutes and racked my brain, trying to remember a time when I did something that would be considered shoplifting. I even looked up the definition of shoplifting to confirm that I fully understood what the word meant. After sitting there, I came up with nothing. Absolutely nothing. When had I done something that would be considered shoplifting?

Brandon let me ponder this for awhile before stepping in. “I'm not saying you ever have, I'm just saying I think that's stupid.” I knew why Brandon was saying this. He had been watching me in my own house. I stole from my parents. I was back to stealing Ritalin pills on occasion, and I would steal money. Brandon spoke again. “And when you were wandering the mall a week ago, you were acting so funny that the store owners thought you were shoplifting. One more thing. Look at this part.”

My friend says he wants to die

He's in a band

They sound like Pearl Jam

The clothes are all black

The music is crap

He focused my attention on the last line: the music is crap.

“Rachel, you listen to this song and you think that I'd like it. I don't. The music is crap.”

I listened to this, then nodded and gave a thumbs up to indicate that the information he was trying to communicate to me had come through clearly. I was slightly embarrassed. Because he knew what I had been thinking. Brandon noticed this, and decided to lighten the mood a little bit, while embarrassing me again at the same time.

“I liked it when you were dancing to the Mother Fucker song. Yeah! The Mother Fucker song!” He was referring to the song Bad Motherfucker by Biting Elbows.

I blushed. Yeah, I had been dancing to this song a month ago when I downloaded it.

I sat there, silently, thoughtlessly, holding on to this connection with Brandon.

Then I started singing. “They cut him up and put him up in a Dandy!” I sang this small piece of lyrics a couple times, trying to get the melody and expression just right.

Back when I was in the seventh grade, I had this recurring nightmare about this song. This was the only lyrics that I remembered from the song. It was about a man, who someone killed and cut his body up into pieces, put the pieces in a garbage bag and hung it from a tree, and it was an advertisement for the garbage bag. “Dandy” was supposed to be a brand of garbage bag.

I was at a girl scout camp out event when I first had the dream. I woke up in the middle of the night outside in the tent with this song in my head. I thought about this song, and it made my heart pound. It scared the shit out of me. I sat and sang an NSync song in my head to try and make it go away. Eventually it did and I went back to sleep. A couple months later I woke up again at my own house with this song in my head again. It happened one time after that, too.

I didn't even understand the song from my dream when I had it. Now it was crystal clear. It was clearly morbid. But it was making fun of commercialism, of consumerism, purchasing your own death with a brand name label. With those little jingles they had for songs on the TV.

I imagined God. None of this was supposed to happen. Life on Earth wasn't supposed to last for this many thousands of years. If only he hadn't made that mistake with the first coming of Jesus. Now, it had come to the weirdest thing ever: humans recklessly destroying the environment to make physical products, and humans being fueled to purchase these products with catchy jingles and happy brand names. If you thought about it, it was actually pretty bizarre, and even a bit humorous, but it was also morbid. Which is why the jingle in my dream was so morbid.

I had mentioned to Leah one time something about that one campout and a scary song. She misunderstood and thought I was referring to a camp song we sang, which was something about shooting pigeons. Honestly, you'd have to be pretty wimpy for the song she was referring to to actually scare you. I tried to correct her and tell her that wasn't the song I was talking about, it was a song in my own dream, but by that point she had stopped listening. I imagined that later, Leah remembered this and thought I was stupid for being scared by that song, when that wasn't even the song I was referring to.

I started making fun of Leah. I had gone to her wedding. I heard the story about when Leah and her now husband first met, Leah called home and told her parents excitedly that she had met a guy who knew more about computers than she did!

“Woah! I didn't know Leah knew that much about computers!”

I kept thinking that over and over again and laughing. It was actually kind of mean because I don't know, maybe she did know a lot about computers. But I told Brandon about a time in the seventh grade, when a girl was talking about how she had turned in a paper to a teacher she hated in Arabic. Leah had said, “well she could have turned it back, just scan it in and change the font.” You can't just scan something in and change the font! It's in a completely different format!

Brandon tried to calm me down. “Come on! She was in the seventh grade!”

“I knew that in the seventh grade!”

I started picking up on something else. Brandon was talking about how I used the internet differently than other people. Like, a trick that apparently some people didn't know, according to Brandon, was what to do when you hear a song you like on the radio and you don't know what it is. What I always did was, listened to the song, and commit a very small portion of the lyrics, just one phrase, it could be the smallest phrase, to memory. Then, later, when I am at a computer, I google it in quotation marks along with the word “lyrics.” You will come up with the lyrics to the song along with the artist and name of the song.

“I think you guys are really stupid for not knowing that!” I kept repeating this over and over again. It was a defensive mechanism because people had been getting on my case about stuff.

After awhile, Brandon finally said, “Rachel, some people did know that.” So I shut up.

I imagined Leah and Lily coming in. Different people from my high school were finding out about this. I could feel the shocked reaction as they found out that Brandon had bugged my house.

“We went over to Rachel's house one time, and played the Sims on her computer. She had all these skins of the Sims in sexy, revealing outfits. We imagined that Rachel just plays the Sims all day, and masturbates to it.”

Brandon laughed. “No, Rachel does not do that. She does not even play the Sims all that much, ever, she did for awhile but not anymore, not since Sophomore year. She took the fall for me there, I'm the one who sits around and watches her, I sit at my computer, watching the screens... and I masturbate to it.”

I had been putting something off. I was supposed to send that message to Chance.

I had worked it out in my mind. I would say, “I'm sweaty.” He would say something. I didn't know what. And then, no matter what he said, I would say, “lasagna pan.”

I started thinking. My train of thought went something like this: there was this other girl whom Chance had liked back in the 8th grade. In the 8th grade, that girl had had a boyfriend. When my sister was looking at my yearbook, she pointed out this girl's boyfriend and she thought he was hot. One time, I had been in the car with my mom in my sister in this one parking lot in Lake Oswego, and I had seen the girl Chance liked, who was dating the guy my sister thought was hot, and I pointed her out to my sister.

I remembered that parking lot. Back in the 8th grade, I had had a dream about that parking lot. The dream was something about the parking lot, Chance, and beer cans. Now, back in the 8th grade, I was obsessed with dream interpretation. At the time, I had racked my brain trying to understand the significance of beer cans. But beer cans meant nothing to me. I had no emotional associations with beer cans. And this made this very difficult. I remember stressing out for a long time, wondering what the fuck this dream meant.

Well, that was then, this was now. I had had no emotional associations with beer cans back then. But I did now. I remembered the beer can incident in college, and how it had brought on a feeling of foreboding. Foreboding. And Chance.

And the reason was because I was about to write this message to Chance, and he didn't really know anything about any of this. Not that I was delusional. But that Chance and Brandon weren't sitting there together, watching me. The stuff with Chance had been fake. It was just Brandon.

But that didn't mean I didn't have to send this message. Nope, I still absolutely had to do that.

Chance had been watching me on facebook. That's why he had climbed my ladder a whole bunch in the past couple of days. He was watching me. He liked me. Now, I was testing him, to see how he responds to this. If he doesn't react in a negative fashion to my random facebook message, “I'm sweaty,” and then “lasagna pan,” that means Chance passed the test. Then I would direct him to look up Brandon.

But if he did respond negatively, that would be some bad business. See the whole test, was whether he chooses me, despite a really weird message, therefore choosing God, because I was Jesus, or if he chooses to go against God, like Adam and Eve went against God in the Garden of Eden. Humans, with their free will, have to choose God. In the Garden of Eden, they did not. That's why in order to overcome this, we had to choose Jesus, by accepting Him into our hearts and being saved.

It was like how humans chose to crucify Jesus, despite Jesus being perfect. Of course, now it was the opposite. Chance had to choose me, despite me not being perfect, and sending him a really weird message.

Oh God, this was horrible! I really had to do this?

“Rachel. Don't worry about it. I'm psychic. I can see him. He likes you. Even if you send him a really weird message, he's still going to like you!”

Yeah, but I had my doubts. I wasn't so sure about this. I slept on it. I wandered around the neighborhood. I had a groove going, inside of myself. I was getting ready. I began to forget that I was still on camera.

The thing I knew was that up until this, everything had been scripted. Everything that had happened had been planned, and the outcome had been determined beforehand. This was the one thing where the outcome wasn't determined beforehand. Chance had free will. God was not going to mess with his free will right here, or else it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be Chance choosing God, it would be God choosing God and that meant nothing. If Chance chooses God, and he chooses me, I would have the opportunity to save the entire world. But if he didn't choose God, Chance would go to hell. But more importantly, I would also go to hell, because it would cause me to doubt myself, and when I doubted myself, I went to hell. And I was Jesus. And if Jesus goes to hell, everyone went to hell. Everyone who had ever lived, even if they were saved and in heaven now, they could not stay there. All of humanity would be engulfed in the fiery pit of despair.

The whole world rested in Chance's hands right here. But Brandon kept reassuring me, he would choose me.

“Chance knows a lot about scripture.” Brandon told me.

I was getting ready to do it. I wanted to remind Chance of scripture. I had been talking about scripture a little bit on facebook. I wrote: “Do we really have free will? Does it say so in scripture?” I wrote that to help Chance get on the right track with his thinking.

Then suddenly, one morning, I was suddenly in a whole bunch of pain. But it was fake pain. It wasn't really pain. It was astral pain. But it was real enough to make me uncomfortable. “RACHEL. JUST DO IT. JUST DO IT. JUST SEND THE MESSAGE!”

Ahhhh!! Okay! Okay! Okay!

So I did it. I just did it. I went over to Chance's profile, clicked send message, wrote “I'm sweaty,” and then clicked send. I had done it.

After I did it, I was conflicted. That was so weird, what I had just done. What a weird message. Chance was still offline. Should I do something else? Should I say something else? I thought about writing something immediately after, but Brandon told me not to. I was testing him.

I went over to my profile, and changed my cover photo to the picture of friendly Jesus from the movie Dogma.

But Brandon spoke to me again. “Rachel, no hints. You're testing him. He can't know you're Jesus!”

Because if I had had that as my cover photo, that's totally what Chance would have immediately assumed. That I was Jesus.

I went offline. And when I did so, I completely put it out of my mind. I completely forgot that I had just finally sent Chance that message.