UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

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.

o 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?”