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talk to anyone anymore, still falling under the Decent belief that self-negation equaled wisdom, that silence equaled knowledge, that disengagement somehow meant love. Her fingers had ridges on them from all the times she’d wrapped the wire around them.
    I turned back to Janna and saw that she, too, was watching Mary Catherine. She often did, and it always made her sad.
    “I still want to say something to her,” she told me now. “Isn’t that stupid?”
    “It’s not stupid,” I said. Mandy, Jimmy, and the others were preoccupied with talking about the election, so Janna and I could have our own conversation in the crowd.
    “Even today. We’re all talking about community. And there she is, at the other end of the room, and we might as well speak different languages. Last year she would have been right here with us. She would have been happy, Duncan. I know it.”
    “Look, Janna—you tried,” I reminded her.
    “I know. I tried, and I prayed, and I tried some more and prayed some more. But then I realized: In order for us to be so far apart, she must have been praying in the opposite direction. How do you do that, Duncan? Pray to have someone out of your life. Pray for a friendship to be over. There are times—oh, never mind.”
    “What?”
    “It’s dumb.”
    “C’mon,” I said.
    Janna scrunched up her nose. “Fine. There are times I think of us all and I wish we were back in second grade. Not really that young. But I wish it felt like second grade. I’m not saying everyone was friends back then. But we all got along. There were groups, but they didn’t really divide. At the end of the day, your class was your class, and you felt like you were a part of it. You had your friends and you had the other kids, but you didn’t really hate anyone longer than a couple of hours. Everybody got a birthday card. In second grade, we were all in it together. Now we’re all apart.”
    She kept watching Mary Catherine as she said this. Mary Catherine, I was sure, didn’t even look up.
    I remembered being friends with Jesse Marin in second grade, going over to his house and acting like ultraheroes, playing games for hours that seemed endless until the abrupt time came for me to go home. I was sure I got into fights in second grade, but I couldn’t remember a single one. Unlike now, when all I could see were the conflicts I had with people. When I looked at Mary Catherine, I saw her wall of silence. When I passed Jesse in the hall, I felt all the bad things he thought about me and all the bad things I thought back about him.
    But then I would be with Janna, and it seemed better. Because, really, Janna and I never felt like we were meant to be friends. I wasn’t really a part of her crowd, and I didn’t really have my own crowd for her to be a part of. She still dotted her i’s with full circles and felt genuinely thankful for every sunny day. I believed more in dark clouds, in sharp dots, in needing proof in order to feel trust. The fact that I was gay and Jewish wasn’t a problem for her—she was a true embracer, and wouldn’t have thought to qualify that with any categories. But there were moments when I had to admit that I wasn’t sure I could embrace as widely. My grudges could be too fierce for that. Even if I never did anything but hold them inside of me.
    I was Jewish, but I wasn’t sure about God. I believed in the long line—the lineage—of being Jewish. I believed in lighting candles on Shabbat when I was home, in celebrating Rosh Hashanah with apples and honey for a sweet new year, in fasting on Yom Kippur and reflecting upon the things I’d done and the things I needed to do better. I believed in our history as outsiders, and the strength it took to overcome attack after attack after attack. But did this history lead me to faith? I wasn’t sure.
    The Reign of Fear was dying as I was growing up. But there must have been some ashes that I breathed in, some remnants that would not be washed