And now my mother had realized that tying lanyards at Shibley Day Camp on Long Island was somehow immoral as well. Nor could I simply stay at home in Taos, where we had settled as hippies in the late 1960s and currently lived on a small farm, and hang out with my high school friends. I would have to go to an Assemblies of God Bible camp. Located on an abandoned Army base in the desert an hour south of Albuquerque, the camp operated only two weeks a summer and kids from churches all over the state went to it. I was experienced enough with church gatherings by then to know that the program would be more like a revivalist tent meeting than a traditional summer camp: we might play sports and make a few crafts, but mostly we would pray, read the Bible and have our souls pulped into submission by some red-faced, hollering preacher.

The week the youth group was going from my church, I managed to be in New York with my girlfriend, Liz, visiting my grandparents. I had hoped that would get me off the hook, but no; my mother thought I needed the spiritual edification, especially after being in New York. She decreed that I would simply have to go the second week, by myself. My church youth group was small, only nine to ten kids at any given time, and most of them were younger than I. Still, going to camp with kids I knew would have been a lot less painful than going alone: I was awkward at games and never made friends easily. Peter got pressed into driving me down.

Peter was eighteen and a freshman at the University of San Diego, a private Catholic college with a good football team and a reputation for turning out highly successful MBAs. As a child, he’d been tormented by our often brutal step-father for being pudgy and fat-cheeked, but in his late teens, he’d shot up to 6’2” and lost the fat by lifting weights. Although a trace of roundness in his cheeks and chin kept him from being classically handsome, a mop of brown curls, brown eyes, and the devilish quirk of his eyebrows made him irresistible to women. His best trait by far, and the most astonishing to me, was his ability to walk into a new situation and instantly turn everyone he met into friends and allies. In high school, he was President of the Senior Class and Prom King, played varsity football, led a pack of wild skiers in Ski Club and, escaping by a few years the ban that would end my career on the stage, took the lead roles in the drama department’s annual productions. I usually had one or two good friends at a time, whereas he had dozens. Everyone in Taos—Anglo and Hispanic alike—knew him. At the local movie theaters, clerks unclipped the red velvet rope across the entrance so that he and anyone with him could slip through without paying admission; at Baskin Robbins, they gave him free ice cream cones. He once had to appear before a local judge because he’d been given a hundred dollar ticket for driving eighty miles per hour in a thirty mile zone, as well as for evading arrest, because the cop had followed him for four miles before Peter realized he was there and pulled over. Peter was anxious about the effect the ticket would have on his record and his insurance rates, but he needn’t have worried. When he walked into the courtroom, the judge called out a jolly, “Heyyy, Pedro, what are you doing here?” The fine was cut to fifty dollars and the offense, mysteriously, never appeared on Peter’s record. As his bumbling, graceless, introverted little sister, I was often jealous of his easy way with people.

For the trip to camp, Peter and I drove the '72 Oldsmobile Cutlass which my mother had bought for me when I got my license that spring. Because distances were so great and there was no public transportation, most teenagers in Taos had cars or motorcycles and in this, at least, I was no exception. Peter had his own car, a '69 Camero that he’d tricked out in every way possible, but he wanted to try mine out. The Cutlass was painted light metallic green with a dark green racing stripe down the center; it had a V-8 engine and was very fast. My mother was glad that it had cruise control; she thought this meant that some mechanism prevented the car from going over a certain speed, no matter how fast the driver wanted to go—little did she know.

Past Albuquerque, the highway ran in a long straight line through a flat sagebrush-dotted plain. The Cutlass didn’t have air-conditioning or a cassette deck, so we rolled down the windows and tuned the radio to an FM rock station, cranked to its highest volume. The road was empty, shimmering in the noonday heat: no cars, no billboards, no cops that we could see. Whether on skis or in a car, Peter loved speed. He shot me a wicked smile and then pressed his foot down on the gas pedal. The Cutlass jumped forward: 65, 70, 75. My stomach clutched, but I didn’t care—I was on the open road with my big brother. The sagebrush compressed into a single green-gray band of bush. Mile markers whizzed by, and my long hair snapped against my cheeks and neck with stinging force. I looked at Peter and then at the speedometer: 90, 95. But even with the wind shrieking through it, the car hardly shook.

Peter grinned at me and laughed, his familiar raspy, deep-in-the-throat heh-heh-heh. I grinned back, elated even though my knuckles were turning white where they were gripping the armrest. He was magnificent, my brother. Once, after a beloved dog killed a chicken in our neighbor’s yard, my mother, grieved by what she had to do, strung the dead bird around its neck as a lesson—the substance of which was “learn or die”—and left it there, malodorous and dripping, for the whole afternoon. The fear my church inspired, with its lists of rules and volatile damnation-promising God, weighed on my chest like that bloody bird. But Peter just shrugged, paying lip service when expedient and doing as he pleased the rest of the time. Being sent to camp was almost worth it for this moment in the car with him. I wished we could just go on and on at breakneck speed, turn west at the next intersection and keep driving until we reached California and the ocean.

“Roxanne” by the Police came on the radio. The Police and U2 were Peter’s favorites. More my mother’s daughter than I wanted to admit, I didn’t even own a stereo, but because Synchronicity was one of the albums that Peter played over and over before he left for college, “Roxanne” fell within my repertoire. Peter twisted his lips sideways in a palsied imitation of a torchsong singer and, with the wind shredding our voices into confetti, we belted out the chorus: “Roxxxxxxanne….”

The needle on the speedometer was edging close to 100 now. Lightening flashes of static struck the song, zapping whole lines. Peter fiddled with the dial, but couldn’t get it back. He punched the buttons on the radio once, twice, and then, to my relief, gave up, putting both hands back on the wheel. The wind and the roar of the engine surged into the silence. The car started to vibrate. The armrest under my fingers felt as if it were about to jolt loose. Terror got the better of me.

“Peter,” I said, and then louder, so he could hear me over the swooshing wind. “Peter!”

Peter shrugged, still grinning, and slowed down to 65, almost a crawl. My exhilaration evaporated. We would be there soon.

I rolled up my window and stared out at the miles of brown dirt and stunted sage. Even the mountains, that ever-encircling ring on the New Mexican horizon, were too far away to be more than a vague purple smear.

Peter slowed down, then swerved abruptly off the highway and onto a dirt driveway. We came to a stop in a cloud of tan dust.

“Nice place,” he said.

I must have expected some miracle: a spring gushing forth from bone dry soil, an oasis of sweet grass and aspens—or at least a stand of juniper. But there was not a single tree in sight. A few small evergreen shrubs and some dusty red geraniums grew under the slatted-glass windows of the concrete bunker that turned out to be the cafeteria. There wasn’t even a pool. Only the chapel on the far side of the bunker was air-conditioned. The campers’ “cabins” consisted of concrete outbuildings that had been outfitted with wooden bunk beds. And that was it, the whole camp. The ground between the buildings was packed dirt. The only space for recreation was another circle of dirt with a volleyball net on one side and a softball diamond marked with chalk on the other. Because I couldn’t catch or throw or even manage to connect the bat with the ball, I hated softball, but even if I liked it, playing here could only be a torment. There was no dugout for shade, and the afternoon heat hovered between ninety-eight and a hundred degrees.

“Well, have fun,” Peter said, demonically shooting up his eyebrows and bugging out his eyes.

“Don’t wreck my car on the way home,” I said.

I stood next to my backpack as he drove away, fighting an urge to run after him, screaming, Don’t leave me here, Peter, don’t leave me here. When the green shimmer of the car finally merged with the orange glow of the horizon, I dragged myself inside the cabin to claim a bunk. It was all I could do to move my legs.

Evidence of the girls who had arrived before me was everywhere: the beds were piled with duffel bags that sprouted pastel tee shirts and matching socks, an array of little rayon dresses and swishy skirts and more than one plush pastel teddy bear. In the bathroom, the counter under the mirror was strewn with lipsticks and lip glosses, mascara wands, cakes of blush, enormous hair dryers, curling irons, bobby pins and colored hair ribbons. Two bunks in the corner near the window were empty, and I chose the bottom one. I stuffed my small backpack under the bed, and lay down on the thin mattress, wondering how long it would be before I had to tell anyone that I was there.

Soon enough, the other girls started to wander in. We exchanged polite “hellos,” and then hardly spoke to each other again. I watched them though, surreptitiously. There were seven in my cabin: pert suburban girls from well-established Assemblies churches in Albuquerque or Las Cruces who had been coming to this camp for as long as it had been in existence. They were thrilled to be back, not so much for the spiritual uplift as the chance to be away from their parents and to see each other and their camp boyfriends. Every morning before breakfast, they would spend no less than an hour and a half drying their hair, curling each strand, applying makeup and trying on one outfit after another. Three to four times a day, they’d return to reapply, recurl or change their clothes. I was dismal by comparison. My backpack contained a few tee shirts, old shorts, two cotton skirts, a sundress my mother had made for me, and three books. I didn’t own a hair dryer, much less a curling iron. As soon as the air dried my hair, I pulled it back into a ponytail. Neither I nor any of my Taos friends wore makeup, and the boys we knew would have been shocked if we had spent hours remaking our faces for their sakes. Was this, I wondered, a city girl thing? Or was it, as I suspected even then, a glimpse of the small world my denomination offered to its women—a world in which the greatest priorities for girls were to learn to play the piano and find a husband. I wasn’t sure; but I didn’t make any effort to get to know them or vice versa, and I didn’t envy their camaraderie. With my nose buried in The Mill on the Floss, all I wanted was to block out their chatter and giggling.

I ate alone and sat alone in the chapel during services. I was almost grateful that there were so many services; at least I didn’t have to worry about socializing. The week was a dark blur of prayer sessions, altar calls, and sermons pounded emphatically into the blond wood pulpit. I was too sullen to pay much attention, but one sermon forced its way through my defenses. It was about a young man who had grown up in The Assemblies of God. The Lord had given him a great gift: the gift of music. For a while, he used that gift for the glorification of God, singing in church, and playing gospel songs on his guitar. Then, sitting in the back of a chapel very much like this one, he had hardened his heart. He turned away from God. He fell into sin and traveled the wide road of decadence. His rebellion, as rebellion against God always did, led to Death, and its corollary, eternal Darkness. The young man’s name, the preacher said, his voice sighing with sorrow, was Elvis Aaron Presley.

That made an impression on me, but not the impression, I suspect, the preacher wanted. I thought of my brother, rocketing down the highway in my Cutlass, without me. I thought of Elvis Presley, whose abandoned gyrations and raw honey voice even I knew. And then I thought of those girls, whose lives seemed to depend on how perfectly they curled their hair. Lucky for Elvis, I thought.

He had escaped.