Matteo laughs. “You went missing for, like, an hour—Mom and Dad were pulling their hair out.”
Missing isn’t the word for it, though. You don’t go missing in a museum—you just get temporarily absorbed by the walls. She remembers moving through the crowds of the Vatican, until she found herself standing in the middle of the Sistine Chapel, gazing up toward Michelangelo’s masterpiece, which covered the walls and ceiling. And there in the center was the divine link between heaven and earth. So close was Adam’s hand to the hand of God, both straining to touch each other, but the impossible weight of gravity kept Adam from truly touching the heavens.
She stood there, looking up, forgetting that she was supposed to be hiding, for who could hide in a place that was all about revealed mystery? And that’s exactly where her family found her; amid hundreds of tourists, staring up at the greatest work of art ever created by the hand of man—humanity’s grandest attempt to touch perfection.
She was only six, but even then, the images of the chapel spoke to her, although she had no idea what they said. All she knew was that she herself was just like this beautiful place, and if someone could go inside her, they would see glorious frescoes painted on the walls of her soul.
The van arrives ten minutes early and waits out front. There’s a brightly painted logo on the van’s side that reads wood hollow harvest camp! a place for teens!
Miracolina goes to her room to get her suitcase—a small one filled with just a few sets of tithing whites and some basic necessities. Now her parents cry and cry, begging again for her forgiveness. This time, however, it just angers her.
“If tithing makes you feel guilty, that’s not my problem,” she tells them, “because I’m at peace with it. Please have enough respect for me to be at peace with it too.”
It doesn’t help matters. It just makes their tears flow in a steadier stream.
“The only reason you’re at peace with it,” her father tells her, “is because we made you feel that way. It’s our fault. It’s all our fault.”
Miracolina looks at them and shrugs. “So change your mind, then,” she suggests. “Break your pact with God and don’t tithe me.”
They look back at her like she’s giving them a glorious gift, a reprieve from hell. Even Matteo is hopeful.
“Yes, that’s what we’ll do!” her mother says. “We haven’t signed the final papers yet. We can still change our minds!”
“Fine,” says Miracolina. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Yes,” says her father with intense relief. “Yes, we’re sure.”
“Positive?”
“Yes.”
“Good, now you can be guilt free.” Miracolina picks up her suitcase. “But regardless of what you choose, I’m going anyway. That’s my choice.”
Then she hugs her mother, father, and brother and leaves without looking back—without even saying good-bye, because good-byes imply an end, and more than anything else in this life, Miracolina Roselli wants to believe that her tithing is a beginning.
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It’s a three-hour drive to Wood Hollow Harvest Camp. The van is all plush leather seats and pop music pumped through expensive speakers. The driver is a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, a big smile, and just enough of a gut to be jolly. Santa Claus in training.
“Excited for your big day?” Chauffeur-Claus asks as they drive away from Miracolina’s home and family. “Did you have a big tithing party?”
“Yes, and no,” she says. “I’m excited, but no party.”
“Aww . . . that’s too bad. Why not?”
“Because tithing shouldn’t be about me.”
“Oh,” is all Chauffeur-Claus can say to that. Miracolina’s response is the perfect conversation killer, which is fine. The last thing she wants is to recap her life for this man, no matter how jolly he is.
“There are drinks in the cooler,” he tells her. “Help yourself.” And then he leaves her alone.
Twenty minutes into the drive, instead of turning onto the interstate, they enter a gated community.
“One more pickup this afternoon,” Chauffeur-Claus tells her. “Tuesdays are lean, so it’s just this stop. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
They stop at a house that’s at least three times larger than her own, where a boy in white waits out front with his family. She does not watch as he says his good-byes. She looks out of the other window, giving them their privacy. Finally Chauffeur-Claus opens the door, and in comes a boy with straight dark hair, perfectly trimmed, bright blue eyes, and skin as pale as bone china—as if he had been kept out of the sun all his life to keep his skin pure as a baby’s bottom for his tithing.
“Hi,” he says shyly. His tithing whites are shiny satin and trimmed in fine gold brocade. This boy’s parents spared no expense. Miracolina’s tithing whites, on the other hand, are simple raw silk, unbleached so their whiteness won’t be so blinding that it draws attention to itself. Compared to hers, this boy’s whites are like a neon advertisement.
The seats in the van aren’t in rows—they all face center, to encourage camaraderie. The boy sits across from Miracolina, thinks for a moment, then reaches across the gap, offering his hand for her to shake. “I’m Timothy,” he says. She shakes his hand. It’s clammy and cold, like the way your hands get before a school play.
“My name’s Miracolina.”
“Wow, that’s a mouthful!” Then he chuckles, probably mad at himself for saying it. “Do people call you Mira, or Lina, or something to shorten it?”
“It’s Miracolina,” she tells him. “And no one shortens it.”
“Okay, well, pleased to meet you, Miracolina.”
The van starts up, and Timothy waves good-bye to his large family still outside, and although they wave to him as well, it’s clear that they can’t even see him through the dark glass. The van pulls out and begins to wind out of the neighborhood. Even before they leave the gate, Timothy begins to look uncomfortable, like he’s got a stomachache, but Miracolina knows if his stomach bothers him, it’s just a symptom of something else. This boy has not found peace with his tithing yet. Or if he had, he lost it the moment the van door closed, cutting the umbilical to his old life. As insulted as she is by his lavish whites and exclusive neighborhood, Miracolina begins to feel sorry for him. His fear hangs in the air around them like a web full of black widows. No one should journey to their tithing in terror.
“So, the ride is like three hours, or something?” Timothy asks, his voice shaky.
“Yes,” says Chauffeur-Claus brightly. “There’s an entertainment system with hundreds of preprogrammed movies to pass the time. Help yourselves!”
“Yeah, okay, sure,” says Timothy. “Maybe later, though.”
For a few minutes, he seems lost in his own thoughts. Then he turns to Miracolina again.
“They say tithes get treated really well at harvest camp. You think it’s true? They say it’s lots of fun, and we’re with tons of other kids just like us.” He clears his throat. “They say we even get to choose the day when we . . . when we . . . well, you know . . .”
Miracolina smiles at him warmly. Usually tithes like Timothy go to harvest camp in a limo—but she knows why Timothy didn’t, without having to ask. He didn’t want to make the journey alone. Well, if fate has brought them together on this momentous day, she will be the friend he needs.
“I’m sure harvest camp will be just the experience you want it to be,” she tells him, “and when you choose your date, you’ll choose it because you’re ready. That’s why they let us choose. So it’s our decision, no one else’s.”
Timothy looks into her with those piercing perfect eyes. “You’re not scared at all, are you?”
She chooses to answer his question with another question. “Have you ever been on an airplane?” she asks him.
“Huh?” Timothy is thrown by the change of subject. “Yeah, a bunch of times.”
“Were you scared the first time you flew?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“But you went anyway. Why?”
Timothy shrugs. “I wanted to get where I was going, and my parents were with me and said it would be okay.”
“Well,” says Miracolina, “there you go.”
Timothy looks at her, blinking with a kind of innocence Miracolina doesn’t think she ever had. “So then, you’re not scared?”
She sighs. “Yes, I’m scared,” she admits. “Very scared. But when you trust that it will all be okay, you can enjoy the fear. You can use it to help you instead of letting it hurt you.”
“Oh, I get it,” says Timothy. “It’s like a scary movie, you know? You can have fun with it because you know it’s not real no matter how scared it makes you.” Then he thinks about it a bit more. “But getting unwound is real. It’s not like we’re going to walk out of the theater and go home. It’s not like I’m going to get off a plane and be in Disneyland.”
“Tell you what,” Miracolina says, before Timothy can drag himself back into his pit of spider-filled despair. “Let’s watch one of those scary movies and get it all out of our systems before we get to harvest camp.”
Timothy nods obediently. “Yeah, sure, okay.”
But as she scrolls through all the preprogrammed movies, none of them are scary. They’re all family films and comedies.
“It’s okay,” says Timothy. “To tell you the truth, I don’t like scary movies anyway.”
In a few minutes, they’re on the interstate making good time. Timothy contents himself with video games to keep his mind from going to dark places, and Miracolina puts in her earphones, listening to her own eclectic mix of music, rather than the van’s vapid pop tunes. There are 2,129 songs in her iChip, and she’s determined to listen to as many as she can before the day she enters the divided state.
About two hours and thirty songs later, the van exits the interstate and turns down a scenic road winding through dense woods. “Just half an hour now,” Chauffeur-Claus tells them. “We made good time!”
Then, as they come around a bend, he slams on the brakes, and the van screeches to a halt.
