Despite having every conceivable social privilege at high school, Becky wasn’t just day-tripping in Crossroads, wasn’t just slumming—he had to grant her that. She was giving it a real go, being open about her feelings, exercising honesty and confrontation, if perhaps falling short with the unconditional love. She was in the initial phase of Crossroads fervor. He himself had advanced through this phase so rapidly that by the time of the group’s first weekend retreat, in October, at a lakeside Christian conference center in Wisconsin, he’d felt a kind of nostalgic pity for the fellow sophomore, Larry Cottrell, who solemnly approached him with a broken rock. Frost by the lake had cracked the pebbles there, and some inner-circler had been inspired to give somebody one half of a pebble and keep the other, as a symbol of their being two halves of one whole, and this had quickly become a thing. Perry, who didn’t know Cottrell well, was touched to receive a half pebble from him, followed by a hug, but not for the intended reason. What touched him was Cottrell’s na?veté. Perry knew it was a game and Cottrell didn’t yet. He might have been similarly touched by Becky’s fervor if he could only figure out why she, the undisputed queen of her senior class, had deigned to join Crossroads in the first place.
He was on the verge of asking her why—confronting her—when she launched into the most extraordinary diatribe.
“The barrier,” she said, “is that I don’t actually believe you’re a good person. Do you have any idea how crazy it’s been for me to be in Crossroads? The first night I was here, do you know what people kept telling me? How great my younger brother is. Emotionally open, easy to relate to, incredibly supportive. And I’m thinking, are we talking about the same person? I actually wondered if I’d been a bad sister. Like, maybe I never took the time to get to know the real you. Maybe I was too self-involved to notice how emotionally open you are. But you know what? I don’t think that’s it. I think I’ve been exactly the sister you wanted me to be. Have I ever said a word to Dad or Mom about what everybody else knows about you? I could have. I could have said, Hey, Dad, are you aware that Perry’s the biggest pothead at Lifton Central? Are you aware he hasn’t made it through a day unstoned all year? That he goes up to the third floor after you’re in bed and uses drugs? That his friends are all junior alcoholics and everybody in the high school knows it? I’ve protected you, Perry. And all you do is sneer at me. You sneer at all of us.”
“Not true,” he said. “In fact, I think each one of you is a better person than I am. I mean—‘sneer’？ Really? You think I sneer at Jay?”
“Judson is like your pet. That’s exactly the way you treat him. You use him when you need him and you ignore him when you don’t. You use your friends, you use their drugs, you use their houses. And, I swear to God, you’re using Crossroads, too. You’re smart enough to get away with it, but I can see what you’re doing. That first Sunday, when people were telling me how great you are, I thought I was crazy. But you know who else agrees with me? Rick Ambrose.”
Although the linoleum floor was cold, the closet felt overwarm to Perry, short on oxygen, bathyspheric.
“He thinks you’re trouble,” Becky said relentlessly. “That’s what he told me.”
Perry’s mind started down the road of imagining the circumstances under which she’d heard this from Ambrose but stopped and turned back. It was as if he’d been born dispossessed, by his sister. No sooner had he found a game he could play well, a place where he was valued for his skill at playing it, an adult whom he could actually admire, than his sister came along and overnight turned Ambrose against him, claimed Ambrose for herself.
“So it isn’t that you don’t like me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “That’s not the barrier. The barrier is that you hate me.”
“No. It’s that—”
“I don’t hate you.”
“I don’t even know you well enough to have a feeling about you. I don’t think anybody really knows you. I think the people who think they do are wrong. And boy are you good at using them. Have you ever once in your life done something for another person that cost you something? All I’ve ever seen from you is selfishness and self-involvement and selfish pleasure.”
He slumped forward and surrendered to tears, hoping they might soften her toward him, elicit a redemptive hug. But they did not. He struggled to think of a thing he’d ever done to harm her, a thing more visible than the occasionally unkind thoughts he had about her, to explain her hatred. Unable to think of one thing, he was forced to conclude that she hated him on principle, because he was an evil, selfish worm, and that she was testifying now merely to redress the abstract injustice of his being praised by other people.