Sex on the Moon Read Free Page A

freshman year of high school. A shy, nerdy kid like him had had no business going after the pretty, popular redhead—but for some reason, she had fallen for him as well. In a normal part of the world, they would have been high school sweethearts, boyfriend and girlfriend—whatever label meant holding hands in homeroom and stealing kisses beneath the bleachers at football games. In the utterly Mormon enclave where Thad had grown up, things didn’t work quite that way.
    Thad’s father had forbidden him to have a girlfriend; so Thad and Sonya had concocted a charade. For three years, Thad had pretended to go on dates with all of Sonya’s friends so it would seem he had light and wholesome relationships. He had broken free from his shyness out of necessity—first as a ruse, and then for real. And without that shyness holding him back, he had given in to the impulse to do what felt natural—no matter how wrong his religion had told him it was.
    The first time had been intense, tentative, explosive, and more than a little terrifying. In the back of Sonya’s father’s car, exposed skin sticking to the vinyl seats, condensation forming across the fogged-up back window, their bodies arching while their minds raced to stay ahead of their Mormon guilt.
    From then on, Thad and Sonya had lived in fear. Thad believed that to his fiercely religious father, what he and Sonya had done—it was an explicit sin. Keeping the secret and the guilt pushed deeply away had been excruciatingly hard, but somehow Thad had made it to the day he had left for what was supposed to be his two-year mission—the rite of passage for every nineteen-year-old Mormon boy.
    First, Thad had been sent to the MTC—the Mission Training Center—located in Provo, Utah. Dressed in the standard uniform—white button-down shirt, dark pants, sometimes a suit—Thad had found himself cut off from the rest of the world, relearning how to talk, to dress, to walk, to think—while sleeping eight teenagers to a room in a dormitory filled with bunk beds.
    Almost immediately, Thad had begun to feel that he was unworthy—that the secret he was keeping was really a lie, to his family, to the church, and to God. But a little after two in the morning his third night at the MTC, he had been lying in his bunk staring at the ceiling, listening to the breathing of seven other teenagers away from their families for the first time in their lives—when suddenly a kid on the bunk directly across from him had broken the nightly silence.
    “Guys, you awake? I’ve got something I gotta tell you, but you’ve got to promise you’ll never tell anybody else …”
    And with that, the kid had suddenly begun a confession. Just like Thad, this kid had had sex with his girlfriend before coming to the MTC. Technically, Thad and the other kids in the bunk beds were supposed to be shocked; instead, another kid began talking—and suddenly he, too, was making the same confession. He had had sex with his girlfriend as well.
    By the end of that night, every kid in that room had confessed to having sex. And for the first night in years, Thad slept without guilt. The next morning, he began to wonder if the sin of premarital sex was really as unforgivable as he had thought. Maybe, like the kid in the MTC dorm, it was something he simply needed to confess.
    Before he lost the nerve, he had decided to go through with it—making an appointment with his mission president. Meeting in the man’s stark office, Thad told the man about Sonya and the sin they had committed. He had truly believed he’d get sympathy at the very least, and a path to the penance he needed.
    But the penance wasn’t offered; instead, the president had immediately called together the church quorum necessary to kick Thad off his mission—effectively, branding him a sinner in front of the entire Mormon world. The very words the man used would reverberate in Thad’s mind the rest of his life.
    “You are no longer worthy to