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 on52 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.”
Her lips are parted just a little. She doesn’t wear any makeup ever, so she looks natural right now, which I love.
Her breath is slipping in and out of her like a soul yo-yo.
I hand her the little pink box.
“I don’t know that I can accept a present from you, Leonard,” she says, but she’s also staring at the box like she really wants to know what’s inside.
“It’s from god,” I say. “So it’s okay.”
She sucks her lips in between her teeth and then her mittens come off and she’s unwrapping the paper, which makes me so so so happy.
Lauren lifts off the lid and pulls out the silver cross on the silver chain.
“I know how much you love Christianity, so I found this on the Internet. It’s simple enough to go with your style, but—”