Or maybe it was that student, Skip, who’d had so much trouble with the Training Routines the previous week, he’d enrolled in the Success rough Communication course but, after just two nights, hadn’t returned.

So what Jessica was referring to might mean that I had not been absolutely vigilant as I checked a student’s understanding of one of Hubbard’s policy letters. A Course Supervisor does not teach she oversees the study going on in the course room-study that is entirely of materials written by Hubbard-making sure students understand what they are reading. My post at the Center was as a Course Supervisor. I nodded, a little dazed, wondering what I might have done wrong. You need to be firmer in the course room.” She took her place on the other side of the desk and, folding her hands on its glossy surface, said, “Sands. I perched on the edge of a chair, swallowed, and swallowed again. Nevertheless, ever since the previous night-when, as I’d been finishing up my duties in the Center’s course room, Jessica had stopped in to request this meeting-I’d been anxious. Through the Church’s hermetic seal (especially hermetic in 1987, pre-Internet), whispers and speculation made their way: someone who’d done something wrong-“gone out-ethics”-had been chained for days to a toilet in a brig or forced to live in something like a gulag, eating rice and beans and doing menial labor, but these rumors had nothing to do with my own experience. I found them reasonable, kind, ethical, straightforward, and sane. This was generally true of the Scientologists I’d come to know in my five years in the Church.

Ron Hubbard’s religious technology, yet even as she ensured that the mission (she called it a “Center,” choosing, with purpose, a less religiously charged word) adhered to his policies, she was never dictatorial. She wore simple, elegant clothes, black and tan and linen. As head of a Scientology mission-the “mission holder”-she would refer to them often. Of course Jessica kept these books close to hand. Another bookcase held the equally large set of “admin” volumes, bound in green, which contained everything Hubbard had ever written about how to found and run an organization. A bookcase behind Jessica’s desk held the entire set, bound in red leather, with an inch-and-a-half gap where this one had been removed. Ron Hubbard had written regarding auditing, Scientology’s form of counseling. It was one of a dozen volumes that contained, in chronological order, all the policy letters and bulletins that L.

On her desk lay a large red book embossed with gold letters. Her lovely face revealing nothing about the purpose or mood of our meeting, Jessica ushered me into her office and closed the door.

Flunk. Start. by Sands Hall