Purity Night

The following is an exclusive, unpublished excerpt from the novel Soulmates: A Metaphysical Love Story.

“What in the godforsaken hell is a purity night?”

Audrey laughed, her hand to her mouth to avoid spitting out her food.

She and Ty had just been talking about where she learned to make this particular late-night snack—strawberries, dipped in sour cream, and rolled in brown sugar. When she told them it was at one of her church’s annual purity nights, Ty looked at her like she was speaking another language. She forgot sometimes how different her best friend’s childhood was from her own.

“Oh god,” she said, swallowing. “I haven’t told you about purity nights yet?”

Ty adjusted an imaginary pair of glasses and pretended to ready a clipboard to take notes. They often compared listening to Audrey’s stories of growing up in the Evangelical church to conducting anthropological fieldwork on a cult. She couldn’t blame them. From an outsider perspective, the tradition did seem quite extreme.

“A purity night,” she explained, “is basically a night dedicated to telling teenagers why Jesus doesn’t want them to have sex.”

Ty’s eyes narrowed in apprehension. “Go on.”

“Boys and girls get separated--because, you know… the temptation.” She whispered the words conspiratorially, and Ty chuckled. “I don’t know much about what the boys did, but I heard most of it was spent watching movies and eating junk food. Aside from a long talk about the evils of pornography, it was basically a fun sleepover.”

Ty put down their imaginary clipboard and shook their head in disapproval, already seeing where this was going. “And what did the girls do, weld their own chastity belts?”

Audrey snorted. “Not exactly, but almost.”

She wiped the crumbs of brown sugar off her hands and thought for a moment. “Let’s see, every couple of years the girls made ‘wish lists’ for their future husbands. It was like this very special list of all the attributes we wanted our future husbands to have, and they even gave us fancy stationery to write them on. The idea was that God would bring us our ideal husband in his own divine timing, and the list served as confirmation that our potential beau was the one.”

“Oh my god, please tell me you remember your list.”

“Oh, I remember in painful detail,” Audrey said. “Tall. Handsome. Christian. Not a drinker.”

Ty scoffed at the open bottle of whiskey sitting beside them.

“A virgin.” Ty nearly choked on a laugh at that one, likely thinking about the number of men Audrey had brought home in the last month.

“Oh, and a fan of the San Francisco Giants.”

“Baseball? I have never seen you watch baseball.”

“And you never will,” Audrey laughed. “But I was thirteen, and my dad watched baseball, so I thought I was some kind of superfan. Daddy’s girl and all that.” She waved her hand, trying to dismiss the way her heart constricted remembering her once-tender relationship with her father.

“So at thirteen, you were supposed to know what you wanted in a husband? That has huge cult vibes, Audrey.” Ty said it tenderly, putting their hand on Audrey’s knee as they did as if to soften the blow.

“I know,” Audrey said. “But that’s not even the half of it.”

Audrey proceeded to tell Ty every embarrassing detail she could remember about purity night. She enthusiastically acted out Jane Thompson’s favorite annual contribution to the event, where she glued a piece of pink construction paper to a blue one, and after a few minutes, tore them apart. The bits of pink and blue that stuck to each paper were meant to be a metaphor for the pieces of yourself you give away to your sexual partner. This loss of oneself was always characterized as being particularly meaningful for girls.

“You can’t play in the mud with white gloves and expect the gloves not to get dirty,” Audrey said, quoting Jane’s favorite line. The gloves being the girls’ pure, virgin bodies (and souls); the mud being the stain of pre-marital sex.

Jane was one of the younger moms in the congregation, a beautiful blonde woman with four blonde children and a husband with dark hair and eyes—a fact she proudly proclaimed was on her own list as a young girl. She wanted a husband who was “tall, dark, handsome, and a virgin,” and she loved telling the story about how God miraculously fulfilled this extensive set of requirements when he led her to her Karl. And beyond that, she discovered many things about him she loved, but never knew she wanted until they were already married.

“Who knew I’d love living with a neat freak?” she’d say, her voice filled with awe. Proof of divine will, indeed.

Audrey continued. “And it all culminated in the end of the night, when our youth pastor’s wife initiated a group confession.”

Ty’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no.”

Audrey nodded. “Oh, yes. Any of the girls who had already had premarital sex were invited to confess their sins in front of the whole group as a sort of negative example. It usually involved a lot of crying, and laying on of hands to pray. Only after all that did we get to eat snacks and watch a movie in our pajamas. Thus,” she gestured to the food in front of them, “the strawberries.”

Ty finished the drink in their glass and removed their imaginary glasses for effect. “What a wild ride, Audrey. Top notch stuff.”

Audrey laughed. “If only Pastor Max and his wife Melissa could see me now,” she said, gesturing to the half-smoked marijuana pipe on the coffee table by the bottle of whiskey and an open package of Oreos.

Ty moved closer to Audrey, moving the strawberries and their fixings to scooch right up next to her, then laid their head on her shoulder.

“They couldn’t handle you in all your glory,” they said. “It was in their best interest to keep you small.”

Audrey took Ty’s hand in hers and squeezed.

“I’ve never once felt small with you.”