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that happened to be white. After a while, he began to realize he was being watched. The buildings around him were shabbier than the ones he’d left, marked with paint and dotted with splinters. The stoops were full of men and teenage boys, out on the watch no matter how cold it was. His flesh started to crawl.
    In spite of the way his family lived, their roots were in the middle, not the working, class—and they looked it. One of John’s grandfathers had been an engineer. The other had been a teacher. John himself was growing into a body that was almost stereotypically “bookish.” He was thin and tall and delicate, and if they’d had the money for it he’d have been wearing glasses. The boys around him now, even the boys his own age, were altogether different. They were bulked up in the shoulders and thighs. They had a lot of energy. They were watching him and he didn’t think they liked what they saw.
    He knew he was going to have to do something when he started to be afraid. When he was afraid he couldn’t think, and thinking was all he had. Being afraid was what had gotten him into this mess to begin with.
    He didn’t know where he was, so he didn’t know where to go. He didn’t want to turn around. That would only make the boys think they’d gotten to him, which was a bad idea. He kept looking for a side street to turn into. All the side streets were narrow and dark. The street he was on at least had Christmas decorations.
    He had gone two blocks when he saw the church. Unlike the buildings around it, it had a lawn, two small squares of snow on either side of a narrow concrete walk. He was surprised to see its doors were open. His father had been baptized Catholic and his mother had once been devout, but it had been years since either of them had seen the inside of a church. They’d certainly never taken him to one. He stopped at the edge of the walk and tried to see through the peaked double doors to whatever was inside, but all he got was the impression of tiny flickering lights. Candles, he thought, and then: at least it would be warm.
    He went up the walk, then up the steps, then into what seemed to be a vestibule. He didn’t know what to call the parts of a church. There was another set of double doors inside and he went through those, too. The ceiling seemed to lift off above his head like a rocket ship. The building seemed to stretch all the way to California. It was the biggest room he had ever seen, and for a while that was all he was able to take in. Height, width, breadth: it was a room for multitudes or giants.
    Then he began to calm down—he thought of it as his brain beginning to thaw out—and he started to notice what was around him. The flickering lights were a bank of candles in front of a tall statue of a woman in blue-and-white robes. He thought she must be the Virgin Mary. In the back where he was were tall curtained boxes with panels between each set of curtains and crosses embossed on the panels. He had no idea what those were. He counted pews and came up with twenty-six on each side.
    At the front, on the other side of the altar from the statue of the Virgin, there was a small curtained cabinet with a light hanging over it, a candle burning in a little red jar. It fascinated him. He went up the aisle toward it, ignoring the pictures that had been placed at intervals along the walls. They were all pictures of Jesus Christ in terrible agony: carrying his cross; falling on stones; bleeding. It hurt him to look at them.
    He got to the rail that divided the pews from the things at the front—the statue, the altar, the candles, the little curtained cabinet—and stopped. He told himself he wasn’t allowed to go any farther. The truth was, he didn’t want to. It was scary up there. There was a crucifix on the wall behind the altar, a dozen times larger than life size, made out of stone, and carved with every detail. His eyes kept going back and forth between it and the little red light.