Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult Read Online Free Page A

with my mom for allowing us to live such a dysfunctional life. My mom explained sweetly that she didn’t believe in divorce but she might consider separation. I think she talked it over with her pastor, and since her six children were all in school now, she got a job and eventually bought a house in the town of Lancaster. She separated legally from Dad, but it only meant we didn’t move so much.
    He still came around drunk.
    Lancaster County, known as Amish country, was removed from the massive social upheaval sweeping the nation at the time. People in Lancaster were content. Many of them were Mennonites, and the ones who were not lived rather well with the traditional lifestyle encouraged by Amish and Mennonite philosophy, with little exposure to modern life.
    However, even Lancaster would not escape the unrest that infected American youth like a plague.
    I was among the first to catch it, or perhaps my unrest was just waiting to express itself. I had thought it was my family’s unusual gypsy lifestyle that was preventing me from feeling like one of the crowd among my peers. However, now that I had lived in one place for more than a year, and still felt like an outsider, I began to wonder.
    I always made good grades, but I could not find a niche. In addition, *** missing text *** it.
    I was beginning to be known as a rebel. Popular girls were wearing miniskirts at that time, and I thought it was more practical to wear pants. I remember being sent to the principal’s office.
    “Miriam, you are a smart girl. You will probably get some good scholarships to college, if you don’t cause any trouble. Now you know the rules—girls cannot wear pants.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “Well, that’s the rule.”
    “I know, but why was that rule made? I mean, don’t you know that the boys spend half their time trying to look up the girls’ dresses? And I believe some of the teachers do, too. With hemlines six inches above the knee, do you think it is a good rule to require girls to wear dresses?” The principal was a sincere man.
    “No,” he answered,“perhaps it is not a sensible rule anymore, but until it changes, you must obey.”
    “I believe I must protest it. If the rule is ever to change, sir, someone has to challenge it.” I protested by wearing my unfashionable farmer jeans to school, and the principal suspended me for three days. That was the rule. But I continued to wear pants, and he never suspended me again.
    I have always suspected that the real reason I wore pants was because I could not afford to dress fashionably. Wearing dresses or skirts meant having a different outfit every day. With jeans, I only had to change my shirts. However, the very next year the rule was changed. Girls could wear pants. By then I had discovered that thrift stores held a wonderful variety of lovely old dresses for literally nickels and dimes. For five dollars I could buy a wardrobe that lasted for months and was one-of-a-kind. I was especially fond of the 1940s-style silk dresses and anything with lace or bead work. I became a hippie before I knew what it was to be one.
    Since the hippies had not yet come onto the scene in Lancaster, I had only one good friend until my junior year. She was a Jewish girl who was extremely intelligent, and though we came from completely different backgrounds, we had similar interests. I would ride my bike over to her upper-class neighborhood in my thrift store clothes and spend the evenings discussing existential thought. We remained in contact throughout high school.
    By the time I was in eleventh grade, a group of hippies started to form at my school. They dressed like me, or I dressed like them— I’m not sure which—and other people lumped me in with them. Teachers knew that if I did not agree with a viewpoint, I would discuss it publicly. I had also taken to hitchhiking around town, since my brief tenure as a driver had resulted in the wreck of my longawaited car. Most of all, I began smoking