“But doesn’t your religion tell you that everyone is important? I mean, that bum obviously didn’t believe in Jesus and you still gave him a sandwich.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to date him!” Lauren kind of rolled her eyes at me all adorable and then sipped her peppermint mocha.

God, I loved her so much at that moment, mostly because she had just implied that she’d consider dating me—that my dating a girl was actually a possibility.

“Leave it to me to fall in love with a Jesus freak,” I said, and then laughed to make it seem as though I was only being playful and kidding.

“You don’t even know me,” she said.

“But I’d like to.”

She sighed and looked out the window.

Then we just sort of sipped our mochas and watched people pass outside for fifteen minutes or so.

Afterward, we walked to the train station together and then sat side by side on the ride back to Jersey. Our elbows were touching through our coats and that gave me an embarrassing hard-on, which would have been a problem if it were summer and I had no coat to hide under.

I could sort of tell that she was feeling something too, regardless of whether she wanted to or not.

When we got off the train she made the Bacall cat face again and said, “It was nice having coffee with you. Maybe God will change your heart and we can continue our talk about Jesus. And then who knows?”

She said that in this really flirty way that made me even harder than I already was. My hands were in my peacoat pockets and I was sort of holding the stupid hard-on to my abdomen like a loaded and cocked catapult. I couldn’t have spoken if you paid me so I just nodded.

“I’ll be praying for you,” Lauren said, and then waved good-bye by bending the tops of her right-hand fingers three times, just like a little kid would. She spun around and then walked away from me.

I kept thinking she was trying to trick me again—using her sexuality like female teachers do, flirting to control you. That she was nothing but a trap. But I had to know what it was like to kiss her. I just did. I didn’t want to fake being interested in Christianity again, because I was so tired of faking it with everyone else in my life. So I decided to think long and hard about the possibility of god, since that was all Lauren wanted to discuss. I thought up a list of questions and I asked her a new one at the train station three times a week.

Why would god allow the Holocaust to happen?

If god made everything, why did he invent sin to trick us and then hold our sins against us?

Why are there so many religions in the world if god created the world and wants us to be Christian?

Why does god allow people to fight wars over him?

What if you were born in a different culture and never even heard of Jesus Christ—would god send you to hell for not being Christian? And if so, do you believe that’s fair?

Why are men always the leaders in your church? Aren’t women capable of leading too? Isn’t such a patriarchal system sexist in this day and age?

Why do so many babies die?

Why are there so many poor people in the world?

Did Jesus visit any other planets in distant unknown universes?

Stuff like that.

The next time we saw each other it was a warm spring afternoon and she was wearing these shorts with pockets on the sides and I couldn’t stop looking at her creamy thighs, which were perfect. In front of the subway station, she was all smiles and said, “HELLO, LEONARD! I’ve been praying for you! God’s given me a special peace regarding our friendship. I know it will be for a reason.”

But the more questions I asked throughout the summer, the quieter and less enthusiastic she got, and the less I enjoyed studying her various exposed body parts.

It was like she thought I was beating her down with my words when all I really wanted to do—besides look at her wonderful body—was understand and have an honest conversation.

Lauren never really answered my questions, unfortunately. She just quoted Bible verses and repeated things her father had told her, but I got the sense that she didn’t really believe the things she was saying so much as she was clinging to those answers because she didn’t have any other answers and maybe having the wrong answers was better than having no answers.

I don’t really know, but the more questions I asked, the more she started to hate me—I could tell—which was just so so depressing.[48] She also started to notice that I was checking her out, which got kind of awkward, especially when she started wearing these really baggy longer shorts, which ruined the view and sent me a pretty clear message.

The last time I saw her was maybe a week ago. When I walked up to her at the train station, she frowned and said, “If you want answers to your questions, you’re going to have to speak with my father. He says your questions are dangerous and should be answered by a church elder.”

That depressed the hell out of me.[49]

“Listen,” I said as several sad briefcase-toting suits flocked by in a depressing, emotionless rush. “No more questions. I realize that maybe you and I are incompatible. I’m not going to harass you anymore, but can I ask you just one favor?”

“It depends,” she said, looking me in the eyes in this way that could have been flirting or could have been leave me alone. It was hard to tell. “What do you want?”

“Will you keep praying for me?”

Her eyes got wide for a second—like she was really excited that I asked her to do that—but then her eyes shrunk into little black peas, and she said, “Don’t make fun of me, okay?”

“What?”

“After listening to all of your weird, endless questions, I don’t think you really believe in prayer, Leonard.” Her voice was harsh, and reminded me of Linda’s when she’s “reached the end of her rope”[50] with me, like she’s always saying.

“I’m going through some rough stuff I haven’t told anyone about and it would really help if I thought you were praying for me,” I said. “You can even lie if you want, but if you’d just say you’d continue to pray for me, I think I might be able to make it through this bad stuff, because at least I’d know one person was pulling for me in her own special way.”

Lauren looked at me like she thought I might be tricking her, but then—without making the femme-fatale cat face—she said, “Okay. I’ll pray for you. Every day. And I don’t lie. Ever.”

I smiled and walked away quickly before she could change her mind or say anything else that would convince me of her insincerity.

Thinking about Lauren praying for me every day helped a lot at first; it really did.

But then after a few days, it stopped working—I know because I started to feel like I really wanted to kill Asher Beal again—which made me wonder if she had quit praying, and then as my desire to kill amplified, I convinced myself she definitely had.

TWENTY-THREE

Just like I’d hoped, after school today, when I arrive at our town’s subway station, I find Lauren handing out tracts, or rather holding the tracts out to everyone who passes by and doesn’t say a word to her or even give her a glance.

I wonder what crazy bit of propaganda she’s peddling today and what scary pictures are inside—hell flames and bloody saviors and all sorts of Christian gore.

I didn’t come here to mess with Lauren’s head or argue with her about religion or logic or ask for favors or anything else.

I just came to say good-bye.

Lauren’s cut her hair into bangs that hang out under the home-knit beret-type hat she’s got on. A little curtain of blond shields her forehead. The hat’s so homely and old-ladyish that it makes me crush on[51] Lauren again so much—even if she did stop praying for me.

It’s like she’s not even aware that she’s so horribly out of fashion. She’s not wearing the hat in any ironic way, like some of the black-nail-polish girls in my high school would. And Lauren’s also got on this off-white jacket that goes down to her knees and from far away makes her look like she’s wearing a robe—like the stereotypical angel a child would draw.

God, she looks perfect.

And no one is paying her any attention but me.

Since I’ve been watching her, I’d say at least thirty people have passed and she’s extended her mitten-clutched pamphlet to every single one and yet no one has even glanced at her.

I still think the idea of god is bullshit, obviously, but I have to tell you, the one thing I admire about Lauren is that she’s not out here because she wants to be right or righteous or make people feel bad about what they already believe; she’s not really interested in arguing with anyone or anything like that—and I’ll admit that maybe subconsciously she needs to prove that her ideas are more important than the ideas of others, but she also really worries that everyone is literally going to burn in hell forever and ever and she doesn’t want that to happen to anyone at all. It’s like she’s living in a fairy tale and she’s desperately trying to keep the big bad wolf from devouring us or blowing down our houses. I love her for at least caring about strangers—for at least trying to save people, even if the threat she perceives isn’t real.

When I approach her, she doesn’t see me at first.

“Excuse me, miss,” I say, trying to do Bogart again. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me how to make Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior, would you? Because I’ve been—”

“Stop making fun of me, please, Leonard,” she says as five suits pass by her outstretched hand without taking a tract.

“How many people have you saved today?” I ask just to make conversation.

“Why is there no hair hanging down from inside that hat?” she says, which makes me smile, because she noticed I cut it off.

“Got in a fight with some scissors. Have you been praying for me like you said you would?”

“Every day,” she says in a way that makes me believe her.

It’s depressing, because if she is telling the truth—considering what I’m about to do—it means prayer doesn’t work after all.

“You know, I saw this show on TV and it was all about how maybe aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago and gave humans information that we weren’t yet ready to fathom—like space travel—and so we maybe made religion out of those ideas, like metaphors to explain what the aliens had told us. Jesus ascending into the heavens. Promising to return again. That sounds like space travel, right?”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, they suggested that prayer was a form of trying to communicate with these aliens. And they said that Indians wore feathers and kings wore crowns as antennas, sort of.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just because I want to do something nice before I kill Asher Beal and off myself, I say, “Well, the important thing is that they kept discussing the universality of prayer all over the world and even used scientific instruments to measure the energy that many people praying together creates, suggesting that prayer can be scientifically detected, that it actually changes our surroundings by manipulating electrons or something, and maybe it even helps—regardless of whether we’re really communicating with someone, be it a god or aliens or even if we are just meditating. Praying helps, or at least that’s what the show suggested. The power of prayer may be real.”

“It IS real,” she says, and starts to turn red. She really looks pissed off. “God hears all of our prayers. Prayer is very powerful.”

“I know. I know,” I say, realizing that she has no idea what I’m talking about and, worse yet, she won’t allow herself to even consider what I’m saying, because it would ruin the illusions she has to cling to if she is to get through her six mandatory weekly unsuccessful hours of trying to convert subway riders to Christianity.

“Can I ask you a question, Lauren?”

She doesn’t answer, but manages to get this mom-looking woman to take a tract. Lauren says “Jesus loves you” to the woman.

“Forget about all the aliens stuff, okay? What I really want to know before I go and never see you again is this—”

“Where are you going?”

I don’t want to tell her that I’m going to kill Asher Beal and myself because it will make her worry about me ending up in hell—which is a real place to her—so I say, “I don’t know why I said that. I’m just being stupid, but I wanted to ask you—”

She says “Jesus loves you” to another stranger.

“Do you think that maybe if I were a Christian—like maybe if I were born into a family like yours and was homeschooled and forced to believe that—”

“I’m not forced to believe anything. I believe of my own free will.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But the point I’m trying to make is that if I were more like you, if I believed in god like you do, do you think that maybe you and I could have dated and maybe gotten married and had babies and lived a happily-ever-after sort of life?”

She looks at me like she’s trying to make a decision, and then she says, “You could have that sort of life if you ask God for it. If you give your life to God, He will provide for you in marvelous ways. He promises us that. If He takes care of the sparrows, how much more will He take care of us?”

There are a million arguments I could use against her right now, because not everyone who believes in god gets to live in suburbia and have first-world problems like Baback says, and if believing in god could really solve all of my problems and make me feel better, I would definitely do that pronto—everyone would, right?

But I’m not really interested in debunking her theology right now. I’m much more interested in the fact that Lauren’s never been kissed and that I might die without kissing her.

“Just pretend I’m a Christian like you. For argument’s sake. Theoretically. Could we have ended up married and living a regular life? Like maybe in an alternate universe?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

She looks really confused and like she might actually run away from me, so I drop it and say, “I bought you a present,” and start to open my backpack.

“Why did you buy me a present?”

“This may seem weird, but I feel like god told me to buy you this present.” I’m completely lying, but I manage to say it with a serious old-school Hollywood face and I can tell she buys it, mostly because she wants to buy it. “He spoke to me. Told me you had been praying hard. And so he wanted me to give you a sign today.”

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