for my own mother. Dad’s main fault was that he was weak and didn’t know how to stand up to Lillian.
My father married her five years after my mother died. Religion hadn’t even been a small part of our lives until Lillian came into the picture. She convinced my father to pull me out of public school so that she could homeschool me. She felt that being around public school children would have a negative impact on me because they came from families that hadn’t yet accepted Christ. Sheltering me was her way of making sure I was taught everything the way she wanted without outside influences. She’d teach us that life was about living in fear of God and that the Bible was meant to be taken literally. We had very little interaction with other children unless they came from strict Christian families. I had to get very creative, often sneaking away to hang out with the “regular” kids in the middle of the night or during detours taken on the way to run an errand for Stepmommy Dearest. My father went along with everything Lillian wanted. He was lost after losing my mother—his one true love—and fell easily into my stepmother’s web.
Dad and Lillian had three sons together, my younger brothers, Luke, Isaiah and John. They were the spitting images of their mother, blond clones of each other that resembled the Children of the Corn. On the other hand, with my black hair, dark blue eyes and high cheekbones, I looked exactly like a male version of my dead hippie mother, Rose. I stuck out like a sore thumb and never felt a bond with my brothers.
Feeling like I owed it to my father, I pretended to go along with all of Lillian’s rules. By all appearances, that made me the perfect Christian boy. In reality, behind closed doors, I was the antithesis of that. Lillian always taught me I could go to hell just for having inappropriate thoughts. She didn’t realize that very warning was what convinced me to act out in secret. If merely having impure thoughts would guarantee me a ticket to hell, I might as well have been gaining the satisfaction that came from acting on them.
A light knock on the door prompted me to shove the sketch I’d been working on under the bed.
Lillian pushed her way into my room. “Sevin, we have guests, and I’d like you to meet them. Do something with that hair please, put a clean shirt on and come downstairs.” She slammed the door shut.
I was in no mood to put on an act right now for her guests. Grabbing the sketch from under the bed, I took my sweet time finishing what I was working on before heading down.
With small circular strokes, I carefully shaded in the nipples of the breasts I’d drawn. This would be one of dozens of nudes I had stashed away in a box hidden inside a hole in the wall I’d drilled into the back of my closet. It seemed like I’d been drawing naked women since the beginning of time, but I knew the exact moment it started. In fact, a shrink would have a field day with it.
One day when I was thirteen, I’d been left alone in the house, which was a rarity. I’d decided to start rummaging through my father’s things to try to find something of my mother’s. I was desperately looking for pictures or any memento. I was fairly certain Lillian had either hidden all traces of Rose or had her things destroyed. To Lillian, my mother—a non-religious free spirit—was a sinner who deserved no respect.
Searching my father’s office, I’d come up empty-handed with the exception of one small box that was hidden inside a larger one. The outside box was the packaging of a Craftsman drill and was clearly meant to deter people from snooping.
Inside the smaller box was some jewelry and a nude sketch of a woman with a small waist, large hips and perfectly round breasts. Lillian would have blown a gasket if she knew my father had it. It took me a few seconds to confirm that the woman was my mother. The thing is, it should have grossed me out, but knowing that my father was keeping it in secret made me happy. I assumed he’d been the artist.
That night in my room, I started to draw my first female body. I wasn’t in any way trying to recreate the naked