Mama told me that the Baptism is the most important part of girlhood, because it’s when we stop being girls. I was twelve, still tucked snowdrops into my bonnet. My body shapeless, my prayers humble, I thought it was good to be a girl of God. Moonlight spilled through the curtains when my sisters woke me.

Fall leaves lily-padded the water. The girls hung rosaries around their necks and braided each other’s hair, and I imagined their braids as eels. Delilah held my hand to the lake and I kneeled in the grass with Mama as the girls kneeled in the water, pointed prayer hands to the sky and bowed until they submerged. Mama said my sisters were ready to be mothers, so they needed to be cleansed, to float like babies in utero. I was quiet, but I smiled, because one day I would be a mother. But the Baptism, as I understand now, was a prayer to the water as it stung your lungs, as it embalmed you in your womanhood.

I was still a girl when Josiah joined our Church. He was a year older and, though nobody told me, I knew that I would be his wife. I didn’t like the idea because he hadn’t been born here. He grew up near the ocean until his father nearly drowned while night swimming. God saved him, Mama said, so he listened, packed his family into his truck and now they lived here. Josiah was an outsider, but Mama promised he would believe in our God. When I thought of the outside I thought of bubbly pop music, artificial sweeteners and perfectly curved magazine models. Sometimes outsiders lived with us for a summer and sometimes they left overnight. Sometimes my brothers went outside to leave Revelation pamphlets at diners, disguised as hundred-dollar bills. Sometimes my sisters saved girls at job centers and abortion clinics, offering bread and Genesis. They told me about cities with more skyscrapers than trees. I didn’t like the idea of walking on asphalt.

It was rare for a family to join us. Josiah sat in the back pew with his baby sister on his lap and slept in a caravan left behind by a California couple. I didn’t understand why we would marry when he could just leave. But I saw him pray to chickens as he harvested their eggs, to the oak tree before swinging the axe. He was baby-faced but would grow into Godliness, Mama said. And on the last day of Fall, at sunset, we circled the lake where Josiah’s father plunged him into the water. In and out, three times. I thought of him immersed, water blending with face, a new layer of skin. Curls clung to his forehead when he emerged. He clutched his chest, gasping, and we rejoiced. Josiah was now a Godly man. Mama told me he was cleansed, and this meant he’d stay. But he looked scared.

#

I bled for the first time that winter. In the kitchen, as I learned to knead dough, pain wrapped through my abdomen. It clawed my back from the inside, and I ran to the bathroom, my thighs sticky. I tried to clean myself, my fingers slick with blood. I’m dying, I thought. I haven’t been a good enough girl, so now I’m dying. I called for Mama but Delilah found me. She kissed my forehead, dabbed blood off my thighs and stuck padding in my underwear.

“Breathe,” she said, and guided my hand to her belly—a small, perfect curve. “You’re almost a woman; I thought then, that a woman was to bleed. Delilah massaged my belly with lavender oil. She said it’d soothe the pain and I liked it because it smelled like her. “God loves you. Trust Him.” Delilah combed my hair with her fingers and, though we didn’t share a Mama, she smiled at me like we did. She’d been a good girl, so now she’d be a good mother. I wanted to be like her.

I left to pray and found Josiah in the hall. We hadn’t talked—only sat silent in our church corners while our fathers convened after services. I got to really look at him now: his curls were the color of flax seeds, and freckles peppered his cheeks like the spots on trout my brothers caught. I remembered the lake water dripping from his chin.

“Are you okay?” He asked.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. He held a plush of a black and white fish.

“An orca,” he explained. “It’s for my sister.”

“An orca,” I repeated, and he smiled.

“My favorite animal.”

Whenever I had watched Josiah before, he always looked lost. Once, during a service on Revelation, I peeked behind my shoulder. His hands covered his sister’s ears. I wondered if he recognized the Godliness growing into his reflection. I wondered if he hated it. He never laughed with the men, dusted pews to avoid fishing trips, didn’t speak unless spoken to. Then I asked about the orcas, and his face lit up.

“Nobody here asks me anything,” he said. We walked the fields, and he talked.

Orcas are called killer whales, but they’re dolphins. We collected eggs and he cleaned the yolky mess when I dropped one. My mom used to take me to see orcas. I’d sit in her lap and watch them dance. He helped me fold linen dresses. Orcas live in pods with multiple families and generations. Sometimes they develop their own dialects. They’re like people in that way, that need for connection. We organized Bibles and hymn books, knowing nobody would thank us for it. Every attack on humans has been in captivity. I felt more comfortable with him than with my own sisters. I wanted to ask if we’d marry, but Josiah’s father walked our way, and Josiah stopped talking. He looked scared again.

#

Two weeks later, Mama woke me before sunrise. She braided my hair and hung the rosary around my neck. Two sisters joined us. Neither held my hand. I almost asked why the men never joined us, but I was still a girl and that meant being quiet. Clouds chalked over the moon. Birds murmured when we reached the lake. The sky was deep, lucid—the blue I dreamed the ocean to be. I remembered the lake being smaller, and I had to go in alone. The sisters warned me not to go too far.

Cold pinched my ankles when I stepped into the water. I kneeled and I prayed—not to God, but to my body—and I bowed until I was submerged. Underwater, time slowed. I thought of girlhood, the flowy linen dresses, the bonnets and the snowdrops. I thought of the others before me, emerging as women. I thought of Josiah, up there on dry land, and I wondered if he knew what was happening to me. I imagined my girlhood dissolving like sugar in water, nibbled off me by minnows. No one had told me how long to stay under. Then I gasped into the blue hour. I shivered, Mama smiled, and I smiled back—but not for the reason Mama wished. How could she possibly understand? I felt neither girl nor woman.

Nobody spoke until the sisters asked how I breathed for so long. “I don’t know,” I said, but in truth I hadn’t thought about breathing. The sisters’ thoughts and faces blurred as they talked on. What I saw instead was an orca dancing. She dives, glides, twirls above the ocean. She shimmers above the sun, pirouettes between waves. She smiles, she gnashes my body between her teeth.

#

After that, Josiah was always nearby. I baked perfectly curved bread as he delivered trout to the kitchen. I helped babies finish jigsaws of Noah’s Ark as he hauled firewood indoors. Our Bible studies collided. We sat in the chapel while January winter wheezed rainstorms and read Jeremiah together, and I had nightmares of waves engulfing Babylon. He asked me what I wanted my life to be. I didn’t understand. I wanted to be a mother, didn’t I?

“I want to be a marine biologist,” he said. “I miss orcas. But I want to see them in their natural habitat, see their relationship with the ocean.” He smiled. But I thought that was what he wanted before, when he lived outside. I thought he wanted me to be his wife. Didn’t he? But he never talked to me like a betrothed, didn’t ask if our babies would have his freckles or my tooth gap. He was the only boy I’d ever talked to alone, and I liked how his masculinity sharpened his jaw, how his hands were bigger than mine. We were to marry in summer, but he never spoke of it. 

Winter melted into Spring. He asked me to go to the lake. It felt like a sin, but nobody said we weren’t allowed, and we never asked. He wanted to teach me how to swim.

“You have to trust the water,” he said. “It doesn’t want to drown you.”

He beckoned me into the water and, beneath the hazy sky, we floated. We held hands in silky silence. He gazed up at the deep blue, and I stared at him. Sometimes, his Adam’s apple bobbed as if a guppy were stuck in his throat. I didn’t understand my obsession with his body. I just stared at the wings of his shoulder blades while he dipped in and out of water. I never wanted to touch skin. I just wanted to float like him—my chest exposed, flat. He never taught me to swim, too much touch, we’d notice my curves and breasts hidden under linen. I wanted to stay shapeless. So, we floated. We were soft, we were watercolors blending. I knew it was a sin, but I wanted to look like him. I understood, then, what it meant to want.

In April, I woke to screams. Delilah in the bed, sobbing. “It hurts, it burns.” The sisters circled the bed and I couldn’t see her face. I wanted to smile at her the way a mother would, I wanted to massage her belly with lavender oil. I thought the blood on the sheets was a good thing, because it was womanhood. The sisters held hands, sung prayers I hadn’t learned, ignored me when I asked if Delilah was okay. She had a fishbowl belly, but small. Her grip hurt. I sat in the bathroom, dabbed blood off my thighs. Part of me wanted to go back to the women, part of me wanted to float in the lake until I was water. I crept to the kitchen, filled a bottle with raw milk. I stood, I waited, I watched the sun burn the sky. Screams engulfed the house. That night, Delilah never stopped crying. I waited for the baby to cry, too.

#

Josiah told me he wanted to leave. He hadn’t told me before, but I knew. I was the only person he talked to and he was the only person I listened to. It was summer, we would marry soon. He asked to speak under the peach trees.

“We need permission to leave,” I said.

“That hasn’t stopped us going to the lake.”

“I don’t know what’s out there.”

“And I’m not happy here.” He bit into a peach. I wanted to clean the juice from his lips, just to feel his stubble. “You’re not happy here.”

“I am happy,” I lied. It was another sin, but I couldn’t tell him how I stood before the mirror with scissors threatening my braids. How I wanted to cut them at the lake, watch them eel between algae. How I felt phantasmal, amorphous, like I’d snaked my way into the image of a girl.

We walked along the fence. “I remember watching the orcas dance,” he said. “But every time, their tank looked smaller.” He handed me the peach, and I bit into his bite. “Every time I walk around here, it gets smaller.”

“The sisters need me,” I lied.

“But you’re allowed to want things, like how I want to study orcas. You must want something, right?”

I couldn’t tell him how I’d wanted to dab the blood off Delilah’s newborn. How I’d wanted to bottle-feed it and pretend it was mine and pretend that felt right. I didn’t want to be a mother—I just wanted to hold a girl who tucked snowdrops into her bonnet, to hold her hand to the surface of the lake, to help her chop the oak tree and build her a home. I couldn’t tell him how, before, I’d wanted to trust. How I’d wanted to drink lake water and pray I swallowed a tadpole of my girlhood. How, now, I wished to wear slacks instead of dresses. To reflect Godliness, not fear it. How I ached for my chest to be flat like a flowerbed. To braid boyhood into myself.  To trust myself, my wants. I couldn’t tell him, or anyone, that I prayed for it.

I smiled, climbed over the fence, and beckoned Josiah to join. “I want to cut my hair,” I told him.

#

Outside, summer glazed tarmac. We walked along the road until we found buildings. There was no city. Mountains skylined the town. Josiah had stolen a wad of cash from his father. He’d planned for this.

“I’d always wanted to leave,” he confessed, eyes on the ground. “I thought that was selfish of me, but I just couldn’t stay.”

“Then why didn’t you leave sooner?”

He looked at me. “I was waiting for you.”

He bought me slacks and a dress shirt from a thrift store and I didn’t even have to ask. I changed behind a dumpster. In a diner, we ordered lemonade. The fizz prickled my tongue. Pop music bubbled between booths. A suncatcher kaleidoscoped light onto our table, hands, Josiah’s face. I’d never known that manliness could shimmer softness, but when Josiah smiled it was golden. I almost asked where we’d go next, but I knew he didn’t know. We had no plans, only wants.

The sky was pink, fleshy like sunburn. Josiah bought candy from a gas station and I stole scissors from a craft store. We walked like we knew where we were going. We walked until we found a community pool. Closed for the day, we climbed the fence. Fences weren’t barriers anymore, question marks instead of periods. I tried the candy, blue raspberry. It hurt my teeth and I liked it. Josiah said, I can’t wait for you to see moonlight slinked between ocean waves. I said, I can’t wait to see myself in my reflection. I never told Josiah, but I didn’t have to. I think he understood—the want to be something more, the pain of being jig sawed into the wrong space, wrong body. Haloed under a streetlight, we sat and Josiah braided my hair. I chopped the braids off. They sunk to the pool floor. With no mirror, I gazed into the water. In the wobbly reflection, all I saw was a boy.

Josiah glided back and forth in the water like a pond skater. I slid in, fully clothed, closed my eyes and dipped under. I let the water engulf me, and it felt soft. I let it ribbon through my short hair, and I knew I couldn’t go home. I knew then that I’d have to make my body my home. I would build it myself. I was pure like a new-born and had no idea where to go next. There was something holy, in that terror.

*