A few weeks before I got saved, my friend Candy took my hands in hers, looked in my eyes and proclaimed ecstatically: “the end is coming!” She twirled away down the sidewalk, her arms and blonde hair swinging out around her. She danced joyfully as I stood, open-mouthed, watching her go.

I’d been told to expect “the end” by others, but the versions of paradise that were supposed to come after the varying cataclysmic events differed. Before Candy told me about eternal salvation, basking in sunlight and happiness with Jesus Christ himself, Todd had told me about Shangri-la.

It was a real place, but also a state of mind, he’d said, and it would be ushered in by armageddon as prophesied in the lyrics of the collected musical works of the Insane Clown Posse. Todd was down with the clown, and for him it didn’t just mean drinking Faygo and painting his face black and white. Though he’d never call it a religion, he had faith in ICP.

Todd had also been telling me for a while that he wanted to die. This was part of being a juggalo, he said. To me he seemed less suicidal than eager to reach the fabled Shangri-la, a place he imagined would be much more fun and accepting than Jamestown, North Carolina, where we were haltingly growing up.

At the time, I didn’t understand mental illness. I wasn’t self-aware enough to realize that the environment I’d grown up in was informed by mental illness, or that I’d been exhibiting signs of it myself for years. So when Todd talked about how everything was terrible, how he hated his family and his life and found solace in thinking about death, and talked about it obsessively, I didn’t understand why and I took him at his word: this was part of being down with the clown.

And, frankly, when we had our many late-night chats, over AOL Instant Messenger and sometimes in person, but always at night and never with other friends, I didn’t spend much time thinking about the reasons he felt the way he did. I was preoccupied with — and, let’s be honest, petrified by — his hopeful descriptions of what occurs after we take our last breaths.

“I’m only not unhappy when I’m asleep, and being dead is like being asleep, but forever. I can’t wait until I can have that,” he’d said, dreamily over AIM one day, his cow avatar grinning at me absurdly.

I was worried about him, but I was also immensely distracted by the image he painted, the reality he claimed to understand. While he went on about the slights experienced at the hands of girls who turned him down or his “evil” mother who yelled and took things away, I found myself struck cold by the idea that I would experience death, and I began to obsess about it, using his template as a guide. I knew it wasn’t gospel, but the prospect that he might be wrong and that there might not be an answer to “what is it like?” felt even worse.

Meanwhile, Todd seemed to need me. In my mind at the time, it really was me that he needed. Not a counselor, not a psychiatrist, me. He’d told me as much. I was the only one he could talk to and not need to act “punk,” an image he’d worked hard to cultivate in defiance of…something. His father had left, his mother worked a lot and they didn’t get along. He was angry. I didn’t understand, but I felt pulled to be there for him. In the essence of teenage emotionalism, friendship and “being there” seemed like the best antidote for everything.

So I was there. Every night around 8 p.m. I signed onto AIM, and sometimes after a few hours he would walk the few blocks to my house and we’d continue in person, less candidly but with more urgency, whispering so as not to wake my parents. Often after he left or we signed off, as I tried to sleep I felt the physical jolt of my realization — one day I would die, and not only that, but I’d be dead. I’d be asleep, forever, and forever was real, and there was nothing I could do about it. And the same thing would happen to everyone else, and some people were OK with that, and some couldn’t wait.

My parents noticed my increasing anxiety, and I began to fear my conversations with Todd, but I felt that I needed to save him. Save him from both his desire to die, and his fetishization of death. I felt I really had nothing to offer him, until I met Candy.

I went to a high school for the so-called smart kids, on a college campus. We were a motley bunch of students from schools all over the county, many with the socialization issues that you might typically associate with “smart kids.”

Candy never seemed to fit that mold. She was loud in a way I wished I had the courage to be. She was thin and beautiful in a strange, striking way and had long, curly, white-blonde hair. She was obsessed with duct tape, tie-dye, and Jesus. She was Christian with a capital C and all of the Bible camp T-shirts and lanyards and bookmarks that came with it, and she took one edict especially seriously: she was born to “witness,” to tell others about the importance of accepting Jesus as their savior.

One of the first times we spoke, during the first week of school, she asked enthusiastically if I would be open to it, her huge eyes both inviting and terrifying as she looked over her shoulder at me in our humid math classroom.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before that I might find the answers that both Todd and I needed in religion. But now it seemed so obvious, and I wasn’t about to pass up what seemed to be a much more direct line to God than I’d find if I went back to receive communion at the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I’d been brought up Catholic, which for my family meant observing important holidays and traditions like Communion and Confirmation, but not much else. Now I was panicking nearly every night about my eternity.

The morning I got saved, the church van made a pit stop at Krispy Kreme. I’d never had a Krispy Kreme donut before — I grew up with Dunkin’ Donuts — and licking the flaky glaze off my fingers in the back of this van with an excited youth group in matching T-shirts felt like part of my initiation.

We were headed to the Harvest, a name that didn’t raise as many red flags to me at the time as it does in retrospect. It was a mega church event and music festival at a nearby coliseum, and Candy had invited me along, suggesting that I could meet other new believers and make my transformation to Jesus Freak official.

The event felt like any other concert at first, a few Christian rock bands playing and singing their hearts out on a big stage. But after an hour, the amps turned off and the lights went down, and a pastor took the stage to announce that it was time to be saved.

A part of me was skeptical, but I was so tired of being afraid. High on the music and the feeling that I might be on the cusp of discovering a divine truth that would free me from my anxiety — and my friend from his fixation with death — I found myself carefully making my way down the concrete steps to the growing mass of old and new believers gathering on the floor as the sound of recorded gospel rock began to swell.

My hands shaking, I looked back at Candy, sitting upright in her seat and looking electrified by the energy in the room. I caught her eye and she grinned and gave me a thumbs up. The pastor shouted from the stage into a microphone: “For where two or three have gathered in my name, I am there in their midst. Matthew 18:20. Come, give your life to God!”

I made my way down the stairs in a haze. When I got to the bottom, I noticed a familiar face to my left and was amazed to see a family friend. Dizzy with expectation, I took it as a sign. She took my hand, as if this had been the plan all along, and asked me if I was ready. I wasn’t sure what I was consenting to exactly, but I felt more sure of this than I had of anything for months.

“Make this one statement, make it with truth from your heart, and you will be saved!” the pastor boomed from the stage.

One sentence?, I thought. That’s all it takes?

“This is such a beautiful moment, you will remember this for the rest of your life,” the family friend beamed at me and squeezed my hands.

A phrase flashed up on the screens above the stage and thousands of people chanted in unison:

I believe that Jesus is Lord. I believe that he died for my sins, God raised him from the dead, and he will come again.

As I spoke the words, I began to cry, full of adrenaline and hope, but at the same time somehow numb. I waited for a sign, a feeling, a confirmation. Everyone around me seemed enraptured. My friend hugged me and behind her I saw Candy rushing down the stairs. She pressed a New Believer’s Bible into my shaking hand and assured me that I’d done it, I was now a Christian, I’d been saved.

I felt triumphant, but doubt nagged at me. It felt too easy, too superficial, to say a few words in the presence of a few thousand believers and, ostensibly, God. But I was on a mission, I was desperate for relief from my fear, and to help my friend. So I threw myself into it. I read the Bible. I prayed, all the time. I asked God to help me make sense of things, to protect me, and to protect Todd and bring him peace.

When he would come to me to vent or looking for advice I had no business giving, I would look in the handy index in the back of my New Believer’s Bible and find a corresponding verse. The Bible seemed to have an answer for everything. I wrote down verses for him on slips of paper:

Suicide and self-harm: 1:Corinthians: 6:19–20 “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

Depression: Deuteronomy 31:8 “The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

I consumed myself with this task, explaining why he should enjoy life, follow God instead of ICP, and repent his sins. He gradually began to come around. He wasn’t interested in church, but with every verse he seemed to gain new hope, and I felt useful. I pushed away my doubts, believing that in my work with Todd — my own “witnessing” — I was living Jesus’ word, and I would be rewarded.

After a while, the nightly conversations stopped. Todd got a new girlfriend, and spent more time with her and with his friends, lighting things on fire and smoking weed, than talking with me about his worries. But buoyed by what seemed to be a success with him, I turned my focus to myself. Instead of anti-suicide verses, I searched for guidance on anxiety and on the afterlife. I listened as Candy relayed lessons from her youth pastor in the lounge at school. She explained her frizzy hair as a tribute to god’s perfect work on her natural body, and her ear piercing as a sacrifice of pain in his name.

I read Revelations, triggering a new slew of panic attacks that I assuaged with fervent praying and colorful displays of faith: I bought a rainbow-colored WWJD bracelet. I painted “Jesus Is Love” on my backpack straps with white-out. My friends and my boyfriend mocked me.

Then Candy left school. One day she was there, lecturing me not to give my heart to my boyfriend at the expense of fully loving god, and the next rumors spread that she’d been sent to a nearby military academy.

With her gone, I turned to the small group of other Jesus Freaks that had assembled at the school and started going to a new church, but my panic attacks only got worse, especially after my new pastor told me that my fear of death made me un-Christian. Next came therapy, where I was asked if I heard voices (no) and given a prescription for antidepressants. The pills made me feel calmer for a few weeks, but ultimately did little to help. I didn’t feel depressed; I felt desperate. Lost, unmoored, afraid, and desperate for the salvation I’d been promised, that I’d worked so hard to earn.

I gradually stopped going to church, finding it more of a trigger than a salve. I drifted apart from my Jesus Freak friends. Many nights, I found myself staring at the computer, eyes raw and body tired from panicking and lack of sleep, my AIM buddy list stretched along the right side of my screen, willing Todd to sign on and give me the virtual shoulder that I’d so often given him.

One night, the familiar “bloop” sounded, and his window popped up.

“I just want to thank you,” he said. “You saved my life.”