I was seventeen when the Holy Spirit called me to the high mission of saving Liz. This was not something that I took lightly. She was the first atheist our little Christian high school had ever seen as far as I knew, and rumors followed her like gnats on horse shit.  The most common one was that she’d been kicked out of her Catholic all-girls boarding school for making out with the other girls on her rugby team behind the bleachers. I didn’t care. I knew my mission and I was not backing down. She was Sicilian with olive skin, short hair, and even shorter plaid skirts. On Wednesdays we always had to wear our hideous blue plaid uniform skirts to chapel because it wasn’t right for girls to worship god in pants. Liz always came with hers hemmed up to the soft curve of her butt cheeks so they would send her home to change and she wouldn’t have to go to chapel.

It was around that time that the sight of her started making my heart jump around inside my white polo uniform shirt and my stomach tie up in strange unfamiliar knots, and that is how I knew that I had been called… guided by the holy spirit to the mission of ensuring Liz’s salvation. I left my old circle of friends who ran a “Lambs of God” Bible study during lunch on Thursdays, and ventured out into the world of Liz. She taught me how to sing Your Body Is a Wonderland back before hardly anyone had even heard of John Mayer, and also all about the advantages of driving under the influence of marijuana compared to alcohol. She never convinced me to try either, because my school had done a fine job of teaching me that there was only one quicker way to lose your salvation than drinking and doing drugs and that was sex, but I believed what she told me about driving under the influence for a long time after that. I believed just about everything she told me that year.

I started spending nights at her house, to advance the cause of Christ of course, and she started fixing my hair for me and spraying me with her perfume before we went out. God, I loved how she smelled. At night, she couldn’t fall asleep unless I told her a story, so I’d stay up watching for her breathing to grow slow and heavy as I told her some variation of the story of us.  Her bedroom was lined in Absolute adds and mine was filled with Bible verses and I could not imagine a more perfect union. She was raw and dark and angry and she didn’t believe anything they taught us in Bible class, so instead we sat in the back row and I tickled the soft skin of her arm because it was her favorite. And also because I believed that if she couldn’t hear the love of God, then the next best thing was for me to show it to her. Or at least that’s how I justified it to myself anyway. One day our Bible teacher made us stop because she said it wasn’t right for two women to touch like that, and I didn’t understand but I also didn’t argue because I wouldn’t start arguing with Bible teachers for at least five more years after that.

Our physics teacher was from Zimbabwe and didn’t speak much English yet, so every day we would tell him we had some sort of meeting or appointment and he would let us leave class early. We’d sneak into the girl’s bathroom and sit on the floor under a painting of the Fruits of the Spirit and talk until the bell rang. One day she told me that she felt like she was walking around with a huge hole in her heart, and I wanted to tell her that sometimes, I felt that way too. But I didn’t because I knew that good Christians were always supposed to have it all together. Besides, they had taught me how to respond to this very thing in Bible class, so I parroted back the answer they had given me and told her that it was a God-shaped hole, and only He could fill it. Secretly, though, I think I believed that I could too.

I never did learn anything about physics that year, except that every action has an equal but opposite reaction. A little while after that, they started teaching us that Catholic families like Liz’s weren’t really Christians and wouldn’t go to heaven and that’s when I stopped listening. I didn’t know a lot about theology back then, but I already knew enough to know better than that.

By then, my Spirit-led mission was really getting complicated because I couldn’t remember exactly what I was trying to save Liz from anymore. That was also about the time that the fighting started between us. This went on for months until our English teacher, who was also the school’s 100% unlicensed, untrained “counselor,” decided to intervene. He locked us in his tiny office and left us there, telling us he wouldn’t let us out until we worked it out. I don’t remember much of what we said except that I was crying and she was not, and that at the end she told me: “This isn’t going to work. I can’t give you want you want from me, because in two months when I graduate I am going to leave this place and I am not ever going to look back, and you aren’t ready for that yet. Do you understand me?”

I nodded that I did but really I didn’t, because I couldn’t figure out what it was she thought I wanted from her. I decided she must have meant that I wanted her to love Jesus, and I didn’t realize until much later that she had probably understood long before I did that what I really wanted from her didn’t have anything to do with Jesus.

I saw her only once after graduation. She’d gone to Wellesley and I’d gone on to yet another private Christian school, but I drove the three hours home as soon as I heard that she was back home. Wellesley had kicked her out for trying to slit her wrists one day after class, and although this didn’t scare me, the way it made me feel to see her again certainly did. We met for coffee and made small talk while we both tried to pretend that we weren’t terrified. She called once more after that, to say that she was doing better and had been trying to help out a friend who was sad, and that it had reminded her of me. I knew enough by then to be grateful that that was the way she remembered my misguided high school mission.

The next time I tried to call her the number had been disconnected and a few weeks later our English teacher told me that Liz had joined the marines and was driving Humvees in Iraq. I think he loved her too, though I am pretty sure neither of us realized it at the time. That was at least four years ago so I don’t think she could still be deployed out there, but a few months ago I saw a movie about a woman soldier who had her hand blown off while driving a Humvee in Iraq and it made me cry anyway. I’ve come out since then, and finally learned to tell the difference between falling in love with a woman and being called by Jesus to convert someone. I don’t really even believe in the later anymore, or at least not the part about converting someone to believe the same things I do. But I still wear the same kind of perfume that Liz used to share with me back in high school, and every time someone tells me that they like the way it smells, I tell them thank you and I remember that before it was mine, it was hers.