We all smell clean, like laundry soap and skin, as we climb out of the minivans into Zion National Park, our designated parents waiting. Red rock. Sand everywhere. Sweat starts to push through the clean smell almost immediately, something sour underneath it. The pull wagons come down hard onto the dirt. We do it together, or pretend to. The better machines stay behind. The dress I’m wearing belonged to my older sister, before that my mother, and before her my grandmother. Pink cotton layered with a pale blue apron, long sleeves already itching where the sweat gathers at the wrists. The boys can roll up their sleeves. We can’t.

The hem drags through the river crossings and dries stiff with grit against my ankles. Hair in two tight French braids. In the first photos they post online I look put together, smiling, front and center. By evening I’m at the back of the carriage pulling my portion of the weight.

People said Trek was supposed to feel like rebirth. Before we left the church leaders warned us repeatedly about modesty and endurance. They told us pioneers crossed the plains pregnant, starving, barefoot, carrying children through rivers. Every suffering we experienced would only ever be symbolic. We were instructed to think about sacrifice constantly. About gratitude. About pioneers who died correctly. Later, after the fire is lit, the smell turns slightly rotten. They burn dried cow shit to cook. It holds the heat. Meat and potatoes sit in it and take it on. Nobody else seems to mind. They eat easily. I can’t make myself do it. I leave for the tents where all our belongings are packed into personal tubs. Mine has a pillow sewn onto the lid so it can double as a stool. Dresses. Socks. A Bible with my name engraved in silver. At the very bottom, wrapped carefully in clothes, I have Uncrustables. I packed them tightly so nobody would see. They warned us not to bring food. Said animals would smell it and tear into the tents. I open the plastic anyway. The bread is soft and cold. The jelly sticks to the roof of my mouth. I crouch over the tub eating quickly, something tearing through something else. For a second my stomach goes quiet. For a second I feel new.

While trekking they sometimes assign you a malady for realism. A small card slipped into your hand telling you what’s wrong with you because sometimes life deals you something and you keep it. You could be born a cripple or cursed with a bad knee. My dad said that in his day you could even be deaf or blind, which sounded ideal to me. The sicker you were, the less you had to do. If you were really lucky you were dead already, laid flat in the wagon while everyone else pulled. I wanted that. My trek parents were Mormon YouTubers. Jayce and Rachel. Both permanently cheerful in a way that suggested a camera might appear at any second. They filmed everything until the church confiscated the equipment. I wanted to see the footage afterward, to watch myself back and understand what I looked like inside of it. The whole thing was a performance. These are your sisters. You take care of them. The walking isn’t pointless, it’s meant to teach you something, and when you arrive somewhere you sit down and listen to what that lesson was supposed to be. At night people bore testimonies through tears while flashlights passed across their faces. Girls cried openly about gratitude and eternal families and Heavenly Father. Someone sang hymns softly while coyotes screamed somewhere outside the camp. Everything sounded emotional because everyone was dehydrated. Sometimes I’d get bursts of energy and run ahead, pulling the wagon myself almost frantically until my body gave out again. The backs of my heels blistered open and hardened over. I don’t get blisters anymore. Now I do chemical foot peels, cold lotions that loosen the skin until it falls away in sheets.

My first period happened on Trek. I felt sick before I understood what was happening, sharp nausea moving through me while we walked. The only thing I could compare it to was the time I dropped a can of root beer on my toe and left bloody footprints through the house without noticing. When we finally stopped, the porta-potties were already full. Someone had set up a projector and people were gathering to watch a movie. I went to bed instead. At the end of the trip I bled through my dress onto the chair at the first Dairy Queen I had ever been to, holding a chocolate Blizzard while everyone congratulated us for persisting. My feet were ruined. I had barely eaten for two weeks. My parents had spent the entire trip speaking in slightly elevated voices, cheerful and performative, hosting a family vlog nobody had asked for. When I got home everyone kept telling me I looked pretty. I had lost weight. The compliments arrived immediately and from everyone. Aunts. Cousins. Church people. My body suddenly made sense to them. My parents brushed my teeth for me until I was six. My dad had perfect teeth. My mother didn’t have any of hers left. We went through constant health phases that changed the emotional atmosphere of the house entirely. Keto. Weight Watchers. Gluten free. Protein shakes. Turmeric shots. We didn’t have much money then, but we had systems. The systems changed every few months but the emotional structure stayed exactly the same. Excitement first. Then purification. Then guilt when nobody maintained it correctly. Cupboards emptied overnight. New powders and supplements appeared beside the sink. Certain foods became morally charged. Bread was lazy. Sugar meant failure. Fruit was suspicious because nobody really understood how much sugar it contained.

After leaving private Christian school for homeschooling I was enrolled in a place called Brain Balance. Every morning I crossed the parking lot toward a building with a giant indoor playset visible through the front windows. The theory was that people were either right-brained or left-brained and the weaker side had to be activated manually. They tested you. Ranked you. Hung your photo on the wall beside your level. Their theory was that I couldn’t learn in a state of agitation. I had to be physically exhausted first. Sit-ups. Push-ups. Hanging upside down. Then reading exercises while wearing thick glasses and headphones. A man’s voice repeated instructions slowly into my ears, telling me to open the other side of my brain. Without a school uniform I started dressing myself. Feather clips. Layered tank tops. Dreamcatcher earrings from gas stations. The program never made me less dyslexic. My mother liked systems that promised transformation. She liked categories. Purity.

Optimization. She liked the idea that the body could be corrected if you approached it properly. Later, after she left Mormonism, the logic stayed exactly the same and simply transferred elsewhere. Manifestation. Healing frequencies. Mud therapy. The body wants to obey the mind, she said. When my older sister broke her foot dancing, my mother accused her of wanting attention. When my younger sister’s face swelled from strawberries, it became evidence of imbalance. Illness in our family was never random. It always meant something.

For a while my mother became obsessed with aura photography. She said certain colours indicated emotional contamination. She bought charts explaining spiritual frequencies and taped them to the fridge beside grocery lists.

My mother’s walk-in closet is the size of my current apartment living room. One wall entirely shoes. Another dresses organized by colour. She taught me how to sort things correctly when I was little. Find the matching shoe. Fold the shirts properly. Present clean surfaces. When my parents left town, the fastest way to receive affection was to clean. My dad likes telling a story about the first time he was proud of me. We were camping and I emptied the trash without being asked, replacing the liner afterward. Other parents listening to the story would laugh and complain that their own children never remembered the final step, but my father always emphasized the replacement bag itself. I was thinking ahead. Building for the future. I organized my mother’s closet obsessively when I was younger, colour coding everything until it looked like a department store display. She loved clothes. Recognition. Expensive fabrics that other women would notice immediately. Once she tried throwing away a pair of white Victoria’s Secret heels she had worn only once on her wedding night. I rescued them from the trash and kept them hidden in my room for years. Cleaning in our house was never neutral. It was emotional proof. A perfectly folded blanket could repair tension temporarily. Vacuuming before guests arrived became a performance of moral worth.