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I just look at her.
“Oh.”
I get the sense I’m going to hear that from her a lot.
Oh.
“How did you find out your cult wasn’t – that what you’d been taught was – how? How did you find out?”
“When the leaders killed my sister, and the police came to take my parents off to prison.”
“WHAT?”
It feels so cold and clinical to tell the story. Devoid of emotion, it comes out like I’m reciting a storyline from a television show. I haven’t relayed it in years, but now is as good a time as any to explain it all to someone fresh.
Someone who needs to hear it.
“I spent four years in Gaia. We moved in with them. My parents sold our house and gave all their money to Gaia. Dad found a way to work remotely, and his paychecks went to Gaia. He and Mom gave up all their retirement money. Sold my grandmother’s little cottage on a lake in northeast Ohio, where we’re from.”
“They told you all of this?”
“No. I researched it after the fact. I was a kid. All I knew was we moved into Gaia and got a tiny little falling apart cabin to live in. I didn’t have to go to school anymore. My sister was eleven. We were so excited. Freedom, we thought.” I have to bite my lip to avoid saying that word again in a very different way.
Freedom.
“You said she died. How?”
“They starved her to death.” If I keep my eyes on the road and push the accelerator, maintaining a steady 75 miles per hour, we’ll arrive in just thirty-seven minutes. No choppers are in the sky. My phone hasn’t lit up with a notification. Telling my ghost stories doesn’t haunt anyone but me, and I can take it.
“Starved? Why? Was the cult that poor?”
A rush of sugar, the taste of home-baked oatmeal-raisin cookies, makes my mouth water. “They had plenty. I had plenty. When they closed down the cult, most of the kids were average weight. Lots of adults were, too. The leaders were overweight. Not fat. Just… a little extra.”
“Why would anyone starve a child?”
“Why would anyone take a twelve-year-old girl away from her parents and lie to them, saying she’s the embodiment of a centuries-old prophecy?”
“But – but…” Her voice trails off, brow low with thought.
“They did what they did to Mira because they wanted to control everyone. Everything. Mira was the type to ask questions. Be curious. Notice patterns. Pay attention to when something didn’t add up. She was insanely smart and so stubborn. Not in an argumentative way. In an open, deeply beautiful way. She was the person who asked why the windows had to be shut during mandatory lessons. Why we couldn’t ride our bikes off the compound. Why Grandma and Grandpa cried at the gate and weren’t allowed to come in and see us. And over time, they tried to punish her persistence out of her.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yeah. It is. But they won. Dead girls can’t poke holes in your mythology anymore.”
At the wordmythology, she gives a little shiver, blinking rapidly.
“Why didn’t your parents stop them?”
“Because they believed everything the leaders told them. They were told that Mira was out of sync with the synergy of oneness that is Gaia. She had too much energy. It needed to be drained from her to find her true essence.”
“How does that connect to food?”
“It doesn’t. They used food to weaken her.”
“You were just a boy.”
Chills run down my spine at her words.
