White Wasteland by Jeff Kirkham (best color ebook reader .txt) 📕

seemed, they sprawled, languid across the back seat of the Jeep, hormones and emotions retreating and the implications of what they’d done dawning.

He drove her home. She walked to her front door alone.

The next morning at church, they barely looked at one another across the congregation. The impending doom of the reckoning compressed her chest and robbed her of breath. In Young Women’s class, she wanted to crawl under her chair and hide.

She was no longer a virgin—a loss that the prophet, President Kimball, had said was worse than death. She knew very little about the ways of conception but she knew enough to know that pregnancy might be in her future, with all its attendant humiliation.

She asked a few non-member friends in sidelong questions, and gathered that she could buy a test from the drug store to settle the question of pregnancy. She drove to the other side of the town to buy the test. She peed on the indicator right there in the drugstore bathroom. Blessedly, it came out negative.

More-daunting hurdles remained. Pete refused to answer her calls. When his father—the bishop—picked up the phone, she strained to hear any indication that he might know about their sin. Would Pete confess to his father? Would it be better for her if she confessed first?

At last, she confronted Pete at school, and he brushed her off like nothing had happened. Their joking repartee in seminary class evaporated, and he began sitting across the room by another girl.

During all her time as a young woman in the Church, it had been drilled into her that any sexual sin should be confessed to the bishop, but Pete treated both her and their sin like they didn’t exist.

Over a month later, the guilt overwhelmed Jacquelyn, and she called the ward executive secretary to schedule an appointment with the bishop. The dark day came and Jacquelyn wore her most-modest church dress, with a high collar and itchy lace sleeves.

The interview played out briny and anticlimactic. The Bishop asked her for specifics, but never asked her with whom she had sinned. Aside from reading assignments, return appointments and orders for her to refrain from taking the sacrament or praying in church, no further action was taken. She’d been wild with worry that they would excommunicate her from the Church; a potential outcome from sins of morality. But she hadn’t been excommunicated—in fact, very little had come of it. She moved on as though her sin had been forgiven.

After three follow-up appointments with the bishop, she returned to full fellowship in the Church and her senior year went on without any blowback other than Pete’s continued disregard. Her parents never found out.

Sometime after Christmas, she received wonderful news: she’d been accepted into Brigham Young University with a partial scholarship.

Her grades and her extracurriculars in high school had been exceptional. Even so, the scholarship had been a delightful surprise. Her mom and dad were ecstatic.

As her senior year ended, and as she ticked off the requirements necessary for matriculation into the premier LDS university, she scheduled another appointment with her bishop for the perfunctory “worthiness interview” required by BYU.

As the bishop worked his way down the list of questions from a fat, white notebook, she sensed an edge to his questions. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was holding back anger. She suddenly worried that Pete might have confessed to his father. She felt that old snake, sin and dread, rising from the dust.

The Bishop arrived at the fateful question and pointedly looked her in the eyes, “Have you violated the law of chastity?”

She sputtered, not sure how to answer. “I have repented like you told me. So, no I haven’t violated it. I repented. I’ve been worthy ever since.”

“That was this year, Jackie,” he pointed out. “I’m not comfortable clearing you for BYU attendance if you’ve recently committed serious sin.”

“But, Bishop, I’ve already been accepted.”

“I understand, but they accepted you without knowing that you had history,” he said, his tone darkening. “This is precisely why they ask bishops to conduct worthiness interviews: to make sure that only those who are committed to church standards attend. You need more time to prove your self-control. Your worthiness. Maybe another year.”

“But my scholarship. They won’t offer it again,” she cried.

The bishop handed her a tissue. “I’m sorry, Jackie, but this is my duty as an Elder of Israel.”

She fled the bishop’s office undone, driving home behind a curtain of tears and locking herself in her room for the rest of the evening.

Eventually, she was forced to explain the entire affair to her parents; the Third Act of her Humiliation. Thankfully, her mom and dad greeted the disappointment with impeccable love and grace. Jacquelyn never asked them how they explained the suddenly-revoked college acceptance to their friends. No doubt, it’d been painful for her mom and dad as well.

In a rush, she applied to the University of Utah, which had been happy to accept a young lady with strong grades, extracurriculars and test scores. As fall semester began, she attended her LDS congregation at the university just a handful of times. Part of her wondered if news of her sin had followed her there, too.

Eventually, during her senior year in college, she met Tom, who like her, was a lapsed member of the Mormon church. They lived together for a year while he finished a technical certification as a CNC machinist. Not once during that year of “living in sin” with Tom did she consider the question of sexual morality. Any concern for church standards and the law of chastity drifted away in the intellectual wind of a dozen modern psychology classes. After that, she rarely thought about herself as that seventeen year old girl, sitting across a cheap desk from a pallid, dewlapped bishop.

Yet, here she sat, decades later, called upon by circumstances to serve as a young man’s “bishop.” He cried and wrestled with his failures to live up to the Mormon rules. By serving