The Servants of Love United Church was just a plain white building in the middle of a cornfield. No stained glass windows. No steeple. You could tell just looking at them that they didn't have an organ. I wondered if they had air conditioning. Hell, I kind of wondered if they believed in indoor plumbing.
Whatever. I needed a room. I would join whatever cult I had to join to get a free room.
Up until the day before I thought I had a room, thanks to my girlfriend.
Well, now my ex-girlfriend. Mindy Muffintop.
Well, technically Mindy MacIntoff, but I liked my version better, and she used to be able to take a joke.
Let's be clear, I wasn't just dating her for free housing. I'm an asshole, but I'm not that kind of asshole. No, there was more: despite my teasing, she had the most perfect body I'd ever seen all of in person. Perfectly wavy hair with perfect rich-girl highlights. Perfectly lips, perfect skin, perfect tummy. And perfect breasts. Seriously perfect. I guess I'm supposed to tell you her bra size here, but I'm afraid I never learned it. All I can tell you is, the whole situation belonged on the cover of a very expensive magazine, down to the perfectly trimmed patch of hair just above her pussy.
Still, on top of all those fine qualities, she also had rich parents who owned real estate near campus. By senior year, she'd talked them into just straight-up giving us a house to ourselves, rent-free. She got an allowance, too. Naturally, I quit my job to focus on classes. She seemed to have the whole situation figured out for both of us.
Then, at about midnight on Saturday, I was lying next to her, still catching my breath, enjoying the smell of sex in the air and trailing my fingers across her belly.
"That tickles," she said, and swatted me away. "Don't I keep telling you that?"
Sure, she kept telling me that. She was fun to tease, though. But I pulled my hand back and just ran my eyes over her instead. It never got old. She was just so fucking perfect.
"You look so pleased with yourself," she said.
And I said "Well, sure. Didn't I just show you a pretty good time?"
That's when the whole thing went off the rails. As it turned out, I had not shown her a pretty good time. Despite the sweating and grinding and moaning and so on, I had left her in a state of great frustration.
Now, readers, as I sit here writing this, I am older and wiser. But I asked what, at the time, seemed like a pretty reasonable question: "How was I supposed to know?"
She scoffed and shook her head as she stole the covers back from me to wrap around herself.
"You're supposed to pay the slightest bit of attention to someone other than yourself, Nick. You're supposed to give a shit. I can't teach you to care about other people's needs."
Belatedly, I realized we were fighting about more than one orgasm.
I will admit that I did not react to this as politely as I could have. There was some yelling, and then some crying, and by the ass crack of Sunday morning I was homeless.
"I promise I can change," I said, honest-to-god down on one knee. I figured it would make a nice effect, kneeling. She just looked disgusted. "Who cares. Go do your spiritual fucking growth with someone else."
Whatever. Growth was overrated. Instead, I called Josh, who's way better at getting free shit than me.
I wasn't even looking for a permanent place yet. I just wanted to spend a few nights on the nasty-ass couch at his nasty-ass co-op house. But Josh is a man with serious skills, and so he set an entire plan into action.
At about 6 AM, he showed up with a car he borrowed, a cheap suit, a disposable razor, and McDonald's breakfast for two. "Get in," he said, "We're going to church."
"You are not getting me in there," I said.
"No, seriously, this is perfect timing. You can change on the road."
"Fine. Not paying for this shit, though."
All summer, Josh had been scheming to get out of his nasty-ass co-op house, which -- among its many flaws -- was directly under the one bridge in town. If he left his window open in the summer, people threw Coke cans through it. In winter, lumps of filthy road slush pounded against it. One time he opened it to smoke and a slush bomb hit the girl he'd been fucking right between the ass cheeks. He was getting desperate to move.
He had no money for a decent place. But he did have a total lack of shame, pride, or dignity.
That's where Servants of Love came in. I guess you probably don't have these guys in your state. As far as I know they just had this one little church a few hours outside town. But at Upper Central South Dakota State they were legendary. They dressed kinda the same -- like they were the backup dancers in a musical about boring white people -- and they showed up in groups to preach and give out pamphlets. Normal so far.
But then sometimes they'd just randomly buy someone dinner. Always someone who needed it, too. It was like they just knew. Or they'd dig your car out, or mow your lawn, or help you with your homework. Always exactly the right thing at the right time. I knew a guy who said he pissed himself drunk once and a Servie showed up with clean underwear.
And every year, a few Servie families kind of adopt a student. If you really need to get out of the dorm, and you're feeling desperate, and you don't mind living with Christian weirdos in a tiny town two hours from campus, you show up on Sunday before Fall semester and try your luck.
We're not even sure why they do it. Nobody can really make sense of their pamphlets. The sermons are really, truly, utterly incomprehensible. But apparently the Servants of Love United Church is just really, really into... service. Like the name says. Freely given. No strings. To all humankind or whatever. Probably more than humankind. Probably if aliens showed up the Servies would buy them coffee too just to see what happened.
Josh and I drove for two hours, past corn, and then more corn, and then less corn again. The sun rose. I shaved, slugged back bad coffee and hash browns, and tried to impersonate someone who'd gotten sleep. At 7:50 AM, we arrived at church.
I dawdled outside for a moment. It was a lazy-feeling morning. It was still August, and the morning air was already warm. Cicadas were droning in the fields. Then I took a deep breath and followed Josh inside.
Inside, the place was bursting with energy. Every single seat was full. The pews were packed, and the aisle was crammed so full of folding chairs I couldn't even walk into it. I could see Josh, who'd scored a seat up front, and a dozen or so other State students, all of us glancing around nervously.
The rest must have been church members. You could tell by looking somehow. They definitely weren't Amish or anything like that. They didn't exactly have a dress code either. But you could still tell they went together. They just looked... wholesome. Extremely, thoroughly, uniformly wholesome. Like they'd all been ordered from the same catalog. It was like they were all going to Disney World with the same church group right after the service, and they'd all gotten the same packing list, and some of them had already put on their matching T-shirts.
Before I could make a move, one particularly wholesome-looking family -- mom, dad, son, daughter -- turned and grinned and waved and politely scootched on over. It was going to be crowded -- five people in a four-person pew. And the pew was as plain as the building: hard wood, no padding. And we were all sweating. But sure, I sat down.
And only then did I realize the most uncomfortable thing about the situation: the young woman I was going to spend the next hour sitting next to.
This might have been a church, but she was wearing shorts! -- wholesome shorts, Disney World shorts, but shorts nonetheless. Which meant I noticed as soon as I sat down that she had some seriously thick thighs.
After another split-second, my peripheral vision gave me another update. I saw out of the corner of my eye that she had a chest to match: big, round, and ample, giving even her wholesome modestly-cut t-shirt something to stretch across. Maybe this wasn't magazine perfection, but she was girl-next-door hot.
