Jessie couldn’t look her in the eye as she asked her next question.
“What happened?”
Karen half-giggled.
“I did lose my virginity, which was pretty awesome, despite everything that happened later. We did some standard retreat stuff—trust falls, rock climbing with harnesses, that kind of thing. We also had a lot of small group discussions, often on the beach, by fire pits, late at night. I had a few seemingly legitimate personal breakthroughs in those discussions. Truth be told, if it had ended there, the event would have been a success, something I looked back on with fondness.”
“But it didn’t end there,” Jessie prompted.
“No. There was also the sleep deprivation, which I didn’t even notice at first. There were just so many interesting conversations to be had. And there was the food deprivation.”
“They didn’t feed you?” Jessie asked, aghast.
“No, they fed us. But it was always in individual portions, which were slightly smaller than you needed to stay at full strength. And when you asked if you could have more, they seemed disappointed in you. They’d talk about providing enough sustenance for a healthy person and if I needed more, perhaps I should ask myself if I was working towards achieving better health. They pointed to this bony, haggard looking girl named Inara and said that she consumed fewer than a thousand calories a day but still ran marathons and was on the Council of Harmony and Potential, or COHP, which was the leadership team. I have no idea if the marathon stuff was true. Looking back, it seems ridiculous. But in that moment, she became my physical aspiration. I wanted to look like her, to be her.”
“Jesus,” Jessie muttered. Her own youth had been an endless series of traumas but even she had never been brainwashed into wishing herself to be a walking skeleton.
“And all that was before Sterling Shepherd arrived at the retreat,” Karen said. “Up until that point everyone had been talking about his arrival as if it was the second coming. They all referred to him as ‘The Shepherd.’”
Another officer, a young guy from Narcotics, came outside and wandered over near them. He leaned against the large tree, only feet from them, seemingly oblivious to their presence. Jessie had no reason to suspect he was an Eleventh Realm spy but she wasn’t surprised and didn’t object when Karen motioned for them to move over to the far, unoccupied corner of the courtyard.
“Sorry for the paranoia,” she said when they got there. “I’ve just been burned too many times not to be cautious.”
“I understand,” Jessie said, at least trying to. “You were talking about Sterling Shepherd arriving at the retreat.”
Right,” she said, picking up where she had left off. “He showed up at the beach on that Saturday afternoon and people freaked out. They didn’t just treat him as some sort of guru. He was almost like a god to them. But I didn’t get it. He was about thirty but he was dressed in a Pixies t-shirt, cut-off jeans shorts, and flip flops. He had shaggy brown hair and a few days’ worth of stubble. He didn’t look like the prophet for a new generation or the leader of some movement to me. He looked like a stoner or a surfer or both.”
“But…,” Jessie said, certain there was one.
“But then he started talking,” Karen replied. “He was magnetic but in this really casual way. He told everyone to call him Shep, which no one did. He talked about the degradation of society being a reflection of the degradation of the soul. He explained that we were trapped by a conventional social order that prevented us from achieving our full potential. He preached that sacrifice and love were two sides of the same coin and that we could only achieve enlightenment and find real truth through spiritual and, sometimes, even physical pain. It was a sermon and it went on for over two hours. A few people fainted, were dragged off along the sand to get some water, then crawled back to hear more. I felt like a door to a whole new world had been unlocked for me.”
“A world where you have to sacrifice to prove your love and endure pain to learn the truth?” Jessie asked skeptically.
Karen gave her a bittersweet smile.
“Those are the questions I should have been asking but didn’t.”
“But you eventually did or you wouldn’t be sitting here,” Jessie noted.
“I might not have been if not for one thing,” Karen told her.
“What?”
“They overplayed their hand with me, though I didn’t know it at the time,” she said. “But later, it turned out that what they thought was their greatest advantage ended up being what set me free.”
“I have to hear about this,” Jessie insisted.
“Okay, so on the last day, Sunday, a few hours before Derek and I were set come back to L.A., he said I had been selected for a special honor. It turned out that I was going to have a TS—.”
“A Truth Session?” Jessie reconfirmed.
“Right,” Karen said. “Derek was my partner, and the special honor was that our TC—our Truth Catalyst—was Sterling Shepherd himself.”
“Impressive,” Jessie said mockingly.
“It was actually hugely intimidating. Remember, I’d never been a part of any of this or ever had a TS before. So they started in with the questions. Tell us about your most embarrassing moment from childhood. Share the biggest lie you ever told. Reveal your most shameful moment. The problem was that I didn’t have much to offer. Derek was talking about stealing money from his little sister’s piggy bank and robbing liquor stores and pressuring an old girlfriend to get an abortion. But I had led a pretty boring, ‘good girl’ life. I couldn’t think of much at all. I mean, I was telling them about running out of biology crying when we had to dissect a fetal pig.”
“I suspect that didn’t cut it for them,” Jessie mused.
“Not even close. But they kept pushing. So I gave them other stuff that I was embarrassed about but hardly seemed worthy.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” Jessie guessed.
“Nope,” Karen said. “And they kept pushing and I was so tired and so hungry and I just wanted go home at that point so I made something up.”
“What did you say?”
“I came up with a variation on Derek’s piggy bank story,” Karen told her. “I figured they were looking for something illegal, no matter how minor. So I said I stole some of my little brother’s paper route money and used it to buy makeup at the mall.”
“Not true though?”
“I don’t even have a little brother. I’m an only child. And my parents didn’t allow me to wear makeup unless I bought it with one of them present. But it got me out of there.”
“So you quit when you got back?” Jessie asked.
“I wish I could say that I did. Once I had a little distance from the retreat, the TS faded. What stuck with me was Sterling Shepherd’s charisma and, frankly, the constant buzz I had going from regular sex with Derek. After the first semester, I moved out of the dorm and into his apartment. I stopped hanging out with my school friends and spent all my time with Realmers.”
“So why did you decide to leave?” Jessie asked. “What happened?”
“Spring Break happened.”