The Good Lie by Robin Brande Read Free Book Online Page A

half hour or so, when certain songs came on, they had
to stop whatever they were doing and rock out and try to get the patrons to
dance with them.  Other than the few geezers who tried to take advantage of
Posie’s short short uniform, it was a pretty fun job.
    Posie showed me the article about
Angela Peligro and her new client.
    There were never any photos to go
with the stories.  “What do you think she looks like?”
    “Who, Angela?” Posie said.  “I don’t
know, tall probably.  Really severe—like an ex-nun.  I bet she used to be a
nun.  She’s got the right amount of grit.”
    That little piece of speculation
out of the way, I scanned the article.
    Angela’s client was thirty now. 
When she was fifteen, five priests visiting her parish from Mexico decided to
spend their holiday raping her.
    I couldn’t picture it.  How did they
do it?  Did they hike up their priestly robes and make the sign of the Cross
and tell her this was the will of the Lord?  Or did they just grunt and slobber
like any other rapist off the street?
    The woman thought about killing
herself, the article said, because she had had a strict Catholic upbringing and
knew God wanted her to remain a virgin until she was married.  But she realized
suicide was a worse sin, and so she couldn’t do it.  And of course she couldn’t
even consider an abortion.  So she lived with the shame of her pregnancy and
the face of the child who reminded her every hour of the priests who had stolen
her life.
    It was so unfair.  She didn’t ask
for that to happen.  You have one chance to give your virginity away—only one—and
they took it from her.  What did she have left to give?
    And that’s when it occurred to me. 
I swallowed the rest of my chimichanga and thought it through a little bit more
before I posed it to Posie.
    “Do you think that girl was still a
virgin?” I asked.  “Afterward?  I mean, was she still a virgin in God’s eyes? 
It isn’t fair that she wouldn’t be.”
    Posie paused mid-bite.  She laid
down her taco and concentrated on the question.
    “I think physically, no,” she said
at last, “but morally, yes.  It wasn’t her choice—she didn’t give it away.”
    “But she has a child now.  Every
man will know she’s been used at least once.  No one will believe she’s a
virgin.”
    Posie grumbled.  “Awful.”
    “And all those boys who were
molested,” I continued.  “Are they still virgins?”
    Posie shook her head, the rage
rising in her eyes.  “Those boys are ruined.  But you’re right—they can’t be
penalized.  They’re still virgins.  They’ve never had sex.”
    “Do you think they’ll be gay now?”
I wondered.  “Do they really have a choice?”
    “I think they’ll be the opposite of
gay,” Posie answered.  “I don’t see how they’ll ever let a man near them once
they’re old enough to fight him off.”
    Round about the topic we went, in
through its worm holes, up along the borders and through the muck of it until
we felt dirty and diseased just knowing everything we did.
    But out of it we reached a
conclusion, and I think it’s a good one.  It’s the only one that makes sense if
you believe in God.
    There’s a purity we all have, that
we’re born with, down here in the core of us where nothing has touched us yet
and we are ignorant of evil and we are what God made us, His children, bright
and pure and immune to the world’s disease.  And no one can take that away from
us.  We have to give it away.  And until we do we’re still pure in God’s
eyes.  I believe that.  I do.
    Think about it this way:  In the
Garden of Eden, there was a tree called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil.  That was the one God warned Adam and Eve not to eat.  He was trying to
protect us all.
    But they ate.  And their eyes were
opened, and they saw that they were naked and that there was evil in the world,
and ever since then we can’t help but see the worst of what