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Chapter 33 - Cat & Barbie Part 2: AKA, The Tree

Barbie's Pov

As Cat completely broke down, I took a step back and collected my thoughts. I had gone way over the edge, to the point I was preaching myself. It was very strange. I had left that life, that mindset, all of that behind years ago and for the most part had forgotten it. But it just came back with a vengeance.

We were at a delicate point and I need to retain control of the situation. I also needed to stay on the attack.

Kneeling down in front of her, I softened my voice and dropped my Alabama Accent. "Cat, faith is like a tool. Kind of like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build a house or a tree fort or maybe a hundred other useful things. But you also use hammer to bash someone's skull in. It's all in how it gets used. You follow me?"

She had stopped wailing but, Cat did nod yes.

"Well when you enter a church, to some degree you put your faith in their hands. You trust the priest, rabbi or whomever stands in front of the congregation to properly guide you to be a better Christian or whatnot. But that same priest or rabbi or minister can misuse your faith. In Boston there was priest named Geoghan, he used his position as a member of the clergy to gain access to youth he molested. People trusted him, trusted that he as man of God would do the right thing. He misused their trust, he abused their faith. Jim Jones did the same thing, he took those people's faith and used it against them. Both Geoghan and Jones were demented, sick people, we put our clergy on pedestals sometimes. We start to view them in the same light as we do God or Jesus. But unlike God or Jesus, these men and women are all too human. They are subject to the same human weaknesses that everyone has been, the have the same faults, the same desires, same weaknesses. You've put Reverend Mike on a pedestal; that can and has been some cases, be a very fatal mistake. As evidenced by the pictures on the floor in front of you."

"He's a good person! He has to be! He speaks the word of God!" Cat cried back in a shaky and very uncertain voice.

"If he's a good man, then why does he teach you to hate. Why does he tell you to not speak with your family? Why does he tell you to hate the government? Why does he tell you that people not in the church can be trusted? Remember the good book - Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD. That's Leviticus 19:18. And to me that verse has the most important word in the bible and that's love. If you boil Jesus's message down to a single word, it's love. Love thyself, love thy family, love thy neighbor. Don't even forget the message of the good Samaritan, that guy had the crap beaten out of him and who helped him, did the priest who came along, help him?"

I looked to Cat for the answer and she said in a soft voice. "No, he walked by."

"Did the Levite help him?"

"No, he also walked by."

"Who helped the man who had been beaten, robbed and left to die by bandits?"

"The Samaritan did."

"Yes and they were considered the enemy, but this man, this enemy who knew not the beaten man, helped him. Saw him not as a enemy, but a brother. Tell me honestly Cat, if I a lesbian were beaten and left to die on the sidewalk and Reverend Mike came by, would he help me?"

Cat put up her shaking hand to her chin and rubbed it as she searched for an answer. After several moments of thought, she said. "He despises all who lay with others of the same sex, he wants them all to be cleansed from this earth."

"So the answer is No then, he like the priest and the Levite would walk by and leave me to die. I'm not asking him to accept me because I like women, I only would ask that he accept me as a human being and show some human compassion. That's what Jesus asks his followers to do, show love, show compassion. It that is indeed Jesus's message, then why would Reverend Mike pass me by. Why does he tell you to not call your parents or your brother? He worries about you, your brother that is. Tori tells me that he cleans and dusts your room every week making sure it's nice for when you come back to visit.

"My brother does that? But Rev Mike tells me..." Said Cat as yet more tears fell.

"If Jesus's message is love, then why does Reverend Mike tell you to not to love."

"They are unclean! They are the wicked. They shun the message of God and will be cast out." Came the prompt reply as her programming started to return.

"Your family, your friends miss you, they worry about you, and they still love you. It hurts them to know you no longer love them."

"I stil..." She began to say before suddenly stopping herself.

I hit her again with the same question. "If Jesus message is love then why does Reverend Mike tell you to not to love."

No longer crying, she answered the same as last time, but took longer to answer.

I kept pressing it, alternately talking about the concepts of love, understanding and forgiveness and her families and friends love for her. I then would contrast them with the hateful message of Reverend Mike. That one question I would keep asking her over and over. As I went on, she took increasingly longer and longer to answer.

After half an hour she couldn't answer it at all, as her mouth opened and closed several times, but no words emerged.

She kept searching for an answer, but this time she seemed to be doing it in vain.

I said earlier, debating Cat was like debating a computer and now I've seemed to given the computer a question it couldn't answer. She can't reconcile Rev Mike's message of hate with her love for her family and the teachings of Jesus. She seemed to just keep thinking about it, trying to resolve it, as she quietly mumbled to herself.

If you ask a computer to calculate Pi to the last digit, the computer will just keep going until someone stops it or it eventually breaks down. That's because Pi has no last digit, it just goes on forever. So the question, what is the last digit of pi, has no answer and thus can't be resolved. Likewise Cat, was trying to trying to resolve something that can't be resolved.

After about 10 minutes of letting her suffer I walked to the cooler, extracted two sandwiches, a juice pouch, a soda and a bag of bible and walked back over to Cat.

"Here, eat something, I have a ham and cheese sandwich, a small bag of Bibble and a juice pouch. Give your head a rest."

Cat looked down at the food I lay in front of her cautiously for a moment and began to eat. I then sat next to her doing the same.

"On my wall at home." I said after I took a bite of my sandwich, " I only have one picture of anything from back home. Do you know what it is?"

"No."

"It's a picture of a huge, old sycamore tree, than hangs on my bedroom wall. It's just a picture of a tree taken on a spring day, nothing else. This particular tree is located up behind my hometown, up in the hills at the edge of the forest."

Cat scratched her head. "Why just a tree?"

"In high school, my best friend Kelly, well were more than that, we were in love."

I watched her expression change to a brief scowl as I said it. She however said nothing.

"That tree was our special place, we would spend hours just sitting there with each other. I'd read and she'd listen to music, with her head in lap or we'd just hold hands. Nowhere else were we happier. It wasn't even about sex as we never made love there. It was odd, but we felt that it would spoil the magic of the place. It was just about being with the person you loved. I told her I loved her for the first time under that tree and she said the same to me. For a time it was my favorite spot on earth. When people ask me what means to be a lesbian, I think of that spot. Even though she broke my heart and she's married to someone else, with two children, I still believe in what that place means. Just being with and being happy with the person you love. That's why I have a picture of a tree on my wall."

Cat promptly got up and in a rather chaotic fashion ranted some of Rev Mike's anti-gay teachings, but at the same time she looked horribly conflicted.

As she continued, her rant, something caught my attention.

"…It's so wrong, even when I told Elise about how I…It's just wrong, the bible says so."

"Cat, who's Elise and what did you tell her?"

As if I'd hit a switch, she suddenly got extremely nervous and looked more conflicted and confused as ever. She kept pacing back and forth, rubbing her hands as her anxiety became readily apparent

Getting up, I placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. "Just sit down, you can tell me. It's ok. Please tell me."

Like a broken record, Cat just said the same thing over and over. "I can't…I can't….I can't….I can't…."

I eased her back down, sat next to her and in comforting voice said. "Cat, John 8:32, Then you will know the truth and the truth will make you free."

Tears falling again, Cat began to speak. "Elise was a friend from class, a religious friend, she belonged to Reverend Mike's church and would occasionally invite me to go, but I didn't. I was with her one night and we were talking about relationships. I'm not sure why, but I told her that I think I found women attractive too. After that she really started to pressure me into joining her church. After that, when we'd go out to eat or to the mall, her friends from the church would then always happen to show up and join us. They'd talk to me about God and started to pressure me to join. The invited me to the camp they had for two weeks, all expenses paid. I went, they…they wouldn't let me sleep, they kept talking me about Reverend mike….I was so scared…at least until Rev Mike came…..then I listened to him and realized that I needed to get rid of my dirty sinning thoughts….he showed me the way….or is it the way…I don't know anymore…I'm dirty for thinking those things…..I'm dirty….."

Those bastards. It all makes sense now. Cat admits she thinks she's bisexual to Elise, a church member, who's a friend of hers. Cat's unsure of her sexuality, alone in a strange town with few friends and no family, and a bit childlike, so they see her as perfect candidate for correction, by religious conversion. Elise, gets her church friends to suddenly show up where ever they went to put additional pressure on her. Finally she gives in, goes to the churches camp, where' she's brainwashed. Utterly fucking diabolical.

Looking her straight in the eye, I said. "Cat, you're not dirty. You're a good person. Tori and Jade have told me how good you are. They are your real friends, not this Elise, she took advantage of you."

"But Tori is a….."

"And so is Jade. Tori and Jade, they're not dating right now, but soon will. They care for each other, alot. Do you know what your friend Beck did to Jade. Do you really know?"

"No."

"Horrible things, terrible things. He messed with her mind, like the church did to you. He's in jail and Tori helped her. Jade helped Tori by exposing that record producer for what he was, a horrible person. This today….what they're doing….their doing it because they love you. They want to help you, be the Cat you used to be again."

Now she was more confused and conflicted as ever. "They still care about me?"

"Yes, they're taking you to a woman who's going to talk to you. Help you. You'll stay with them for a day or so and help you feel better again. "

"Tori helping me…I was mean to her, how could…..I" Cat just seemed to crumble at this point and in an unexpected move, put her arms around me.

"I don't know what to do. He's in my head. I hear him telling me, I'm bad, they're bad. Tell me what to do."

I put my arms around her and pulled her close as she cried into my shoulder. Poor thing, I feel so bad for her. She's so scared and confused. From what I've heard, she used to be such a sweet thing. I wanted to do more to help her, so maybe I could meet that sweet girl, but all I could do now is comfort her.

"Just close your eyes and relax, Barbie is taking care now."

She wept silently until she finally fell asleep and remained so the rest of the ride. Never once did she let go of me. After feeling terrible about mentally breaking her, I felt like I'd made up for it, by comforting her. Is it horrible for me to notice she smells like strawberries? Must be the shampoo she uses; I like strawberries.

Finally I could tell by the bouncing of the van, we had gotten off the highway and were just about to reach our destination. A few minutes later I could feel the van come to a halt.

I nudged Cat gently. "We're here."

"Where?"

"A hotel in New York City. You'll be staying with a woman who will help you. Your parents paid for this woman to help you."

"I'm scared."

"Everything will be alright, I promise. I'll even call you when you're better."

"Thank you." Cat said weakly as I could hear the back of the van being opened up. I then switched off the light, the radio and stood with Cat, who once again clung to me.

As soon as the door opened, Cat and I stepped out onto the pavement, were I could see Tori and Jade. It was rather humorous, the nearly identical looks of utter bafflement on their faces.

I stepped up to Andrea, the deprogrammer, she had short dark hair and appeared to be in her 40's, but yet had a rather kind face.

"Hello, you must be Andrea, I'm Barbie."

Andrea shook my hand and turned to Cat. "Hello Barbie, is this Cat?"

"Yes. I can't say she's deprogrammed, not by a longshot, but I've managed to loosen her up for you. She's mega confused at the moment."

I then turned to Cat myself, the look of fear and confusion in her eyes, made me not want to part with her.

"Ok, this is Andrea. You can go with her now. She's got a nice room in the hotel where she's going to spend some time talking with you. It's ok."

Reluctantly Cat let go of me, walked up to Andrea and said a meek hello.

Andrea gave Cat a warm smile. "Hello Cat, why don't you come with me? We're going to spend some time talking. I've even got some clothes for you to change into."

Cat nodded and as Andrea led her off, she turned to me. "Call me, please?"

I told you I would, stop worrying. Now go." I said reassuringly.

As Andrea led Cat off, I shut the back of the van and then turned to Jade and Tori. They were just standing there slack jawed, as if I'd just walked on water or something.

"You two look stupid with your mouths hanging open. Please tell me you worked it out, cause if you didn't, I'm too damn tried to do anything about it."

The events of the day, the last 4 hours especially, left me drained, both physically and mentally. At the same time however, I was pretty damn proud of what I'd accomplished.

"We're…we're fine." Tori managed to speak first.

"What happened?" sputtered Jade.

"All I'll say is, I'm that good. You two sooooo owe me a threesome and believe me, I do plan to collect. But for now, I just want to drop you two clowns off, go home and go to sleep."

The girls soon joined me in the van as I drove them back home. They seemed rather tired themselves. Nobody said a word as we drove home.

"Next time, we break a law, let's do it in town, shall we." I quipped, as I pulled up to the curb in front of Tori's apartment building.

Tori then smiled and kissed me on the cheek, which earned me a semi-jealous glare from Jade. Gotta love how Jade is getting jealous again.

"Thanks Barbie, I can't thank you enough."

"You're welcome."

Jade then leaned over and quickly shook my hand. She's still very wary of being touched by anyone else but Tori. "Thanks Barbie."

"Welcome."

I watched them get out and as I drove off, I shouted. "NOW GO AND FUCK! THAT'S AN ORDER!"

An hour later, I had retrieved all my junk from the back of the van, dropped it off, returned home and was in bed.

Lying there, I found myself starring at the picture of the old sycamore Tree back home. Sure I have a fun and exciting life, spend time with lots of ladies and I really enjoy it. But someday, I'd just like to find someone to simply sit under a tree with.

As I turned off the light to go to bed, I found myself idly thinking. "I wonder if Cat likes sitting under trees."

So that's what happened in the back of the van during the drive. Next chapter, we'll bring Jade and Tori back to find out what's going to happen next. Jori is coming soon, I promise.

I've said a lot about religion in the last few chapters and I'll say this one last thing. Much like Barbie, I think people's faith can be terribly misused. People blind us and sometimes we blind ourselves to what's going on right in front of us. It's happened before and I'm sure will happen again.

But what's in store for Barbie and Cat? Time will tell….