The Prayers in Rossford

Changing ideas

Part one

Will stumbled into Dena and Milo on his way down the hall.

“You all right?” Milo put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

“No. I mean yes. I mean… Have you seen Layla? She was supposed to be in Latin class.”

“Well, she might have skipped,” Dena said. “Remember the year she wrote Mr. Shulte and told him she couldn’t be in biology because she was having—and I quote—her time of the month?”

Will said, “Actually no, I don’t.”

“Layla did that?” Milo said. Then, “Of course she did.”

“Well…” Will began, “I gotta find her. Bye guys.”

Will went down the hall as if, should he travel long enough, eventually he would summon her. He summoned Brendan who was coming out of his advanced chemistry class, blond hair sticking up and his goggles hanging from his neck.

“You’re looking for Layla,” he stated.

“How’d you know?”

Brendan shrugged.

“She went to campus,” he told Will. “You know, Loretto. She said she’ll be back for lunch.”

She was there at lunch, like Brendan said. Layla Lawden came in from the other end of the cafeteria, nearing her friends.

Will got up and came toward her.

“Layla, we need to talk.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I guess we should talk right now. No point in being suspenseful.”

“What are you talking about?” Will said. “I went to your house, and your mom said you weren’t there, and I should know why. And I don’t know why.”

Layla gave him a look that made him wonder what his friends behind him were looking like. Were they cringing too? Layla took a breath.

“You told me that your education was the most important thing and that if we survived we survived. If it was meant to be it would be. I can’t say you aren’t right, William Klasko, but I think you worked too hard to get me, to suddenly decide that what we have is that light of a thing.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Layla—”

“There isn’t any other way to mean it, Will. I get it. I understand it.”

“I’m just saying romance… I mean, we’ve got to go to school. We’ve got to build a life, and then that’s where you build the romance from. If we think that… we’re the most important thing, us staying together… we’ll get it all wrong.”

Will had stopped talking, because he could see that Layla was becoming more and more upset, that quiet upset, and Layla said:

“If that’s the way you feel, Will, then you are welcome to go through life like that. But you won’t go through it with me.”

She walked past him.

“And by the way,” she added, “You’ve got it all wrong already.”

Kevin Bills, Rick Jarred, Ryan Boss and Aidan Michealson were sitting at lunch when the topic of conversation turned to Layla Lawden.

“I heard she’s single again.”

“She’s fucking hot.”

“But she was with Will for the last year.”

“That’s a waste,” Ryan said. “Something that hot should not be strapped to a Klasko.”

“Well,” Aidan pointed out, “she isn’t.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with Klasko…”

“No.”

“But Layla… Well…”

“Layla’s Layla.”

“She’s one classy girl.”

“So are you going to make a run for her?” Mark said. “Did you call dibs on her, or is it open season?”

Rick Jarred, who was bigger than the rest of them, and sporting an attempt at a goatee said, “I don’t know that she would appreciate anyone calling dibs on her.”

There were some girls who inspired conversations like, “I’d have a piece of that.” Or, “I’d hit that shit” or, “I’d like to take a little ride on that.” Layla Renae Lawden was not one of them.

“I’ll take first dibs,” Mark said.

“Sit down,” Aidan told him. “She’s already had one white boy. Let her try something else.”

Mark looked at him.

“I’m Puerto Rican,” Aidan said.

“Well,” said Jarred, “if we can’t tell, neither can she.”

“I,” Mark said, taking his straw out of his juice box and twirling it, “am going to make a valiant try for the hand of the lovely Layla.”

Aidan shook his head and stabbed a French fry with a spork.

“Not talking like that, you won’t.”

Layla shut her locker and stifled a scream.

“Did I startle you?”

“Yes, Mark,” she said to the boy who was smiling foolishly down at her. “A little bit.”

“Well, it’s just that…. Do you like basketball?”

“I guess,” Layla said, distractedly, hooking her bag over her shoulder. Then, “What?”

“I really like basketball,” Mark said. “And I wanted to know if you liked it too.”

“I’m really…. Okay,” Layla said, “with basketball.”

“That’s great,” Mark smiled foolishly. “That is awesome.”

“All right,” Layla said, looking at him. “Well, I’ve… gotta get to class. You have a good day.”

“You too,” Mark said, still wearing the foolish grin.

When Layla entered the classroom with Dena, her best friend said, “You can’t just not look at Will. I mean, you have to be civil.”

“Well, I can’t smile at him either. I broke up with him. Because I disapprove of him, and—ugh.” Layla rose from her seat and looked down at a smashed box of chocolates.

“What the—?”

Dena picked up the box, opened it and said, “Here. You got a note. I’m going to get a caramel cluster.”

Layla read it: “Sweets for the sweets.”

“Yeah, that’s some original shit, isn’t it,” Dena muttered.

“Well,” she passed the box back to her friend, “Seems like the word is out. You’re on the market again.”

“I am Jewish now. My mother was, so that makes me one too, I guess,” Melanie said. “When I was a little girl we went to church. My father was Lutheran. Me and my sisters—”

“You have sisters.”

“Three,” she told Tara. “We went to Christian school. We went to church all the time. By the time I was eighteen I had figured out that I was an atheist. Religion was a crutch. Religion was something people made up to feel better about themselves. Incidentally, I still think it is.”

“I was never an atheist,” Tara said. “I was never… a good Christian or anything. But I never thought I was an atheist.”

“Atheists are boring,” Melanie said. “There’s no poetry in atheism. When you start talking about God, that’s poetry. Religion is the language of poetry. The moment you put God away you put away… the soul of your vocabulary. You can’t even say the word soul. You can’t even have wonder. You try for it, but…” Melanie shrugged.

“My stepkids, when I was married—to another atheists—were forbidden to read The Chronicles of Narnia. We had to read Philip Pullman.”

“The Golden Compass.”

Melanie nodded, “Which was good. Sort of, during book one. But it got kind of old after book two and then didn’t make any sense at book three. He said he wanted to write “a myth for the Enlightenment.” This was the man who said he didn’t like Narnia because all of the kids died. He said, and I know because my ex had me listen to this, the lesson should have been that now that Narnia had taught these kids, they were to live in the world as productive members of society. Productive members of society. What kind of story is that? It’s just…. Morality. I became an atheist to get away from moralizing, but all it is is moralizing and ‘teaching lessons.’”

Tara said, “Well then how did you get from there, to the synagogue?”

“Like this. It was The Festival of Human Light—”

“The what?”

“It’s like Atheist Christmas.”

“Is it as bad as it sounds?”

Melanie touched Tara’s hand and grinned. “When you’re an atheist, everything is as bad as it sounds. It’s worse than being an Evangelical. You’re always trying to prove why you’ve found the light. And the light is: that there is no light.

“So, anyway, I was at the Feast of Human Life hearing a lecture about evolution—stop laughing, it’s not funny. Okay, it is. And Bob had just left me. So anyway, a friend said, ‘This is really what it’s all about. Isn’t it?’ And I just looked at him and I thought: ‘No. It’s not. Why the fuck am I here?’

“I was still in Chicago at the time. I walked out of the convention hall where we were, went to the parking lot, got in the car and just drove until I saw a synagogue. I remember, I wasn’t thinking about belief or… unbelief or anything. It was the first night of Chanukah, and it was dark already, and folks were crossing the street, going into that big old building. And the lights were shining from it. And I just thought of… the light. I thought to myself, the Festival of Human Light! I wanted it. I just parked and put aside all my questions. I knew I didn’t have to make any… sort of decision. I could just go in and enjoy it. So I did.

“I can imagine this must all be very boring.”

“No, it’s not boring at all,” Tara said. “I want to know what happens next. What happened next?”

“I… I went inside. I began to read books. On being Jewish. Almost as soon as I went to synagogue I had all of these feelings. One, for me it was so much more real than church. It was so much more where I should have been. But then, in certain ways it was, truthfully, even more boring than church. And there were things I disliked about it. I always had problems with organized religion, with being cliquey and clannish. But here it was all over again. Racial pride, every time I heard about Chanukah it was more bitching about Christmas or Christians and I just decided I had to make it personal, make my own religion. But the moment I decided that was the moment I knew I had a religion.”

Tara sat back. “Do you mind if I don’t have religion? I don’t mind it. I just never… You sound like you stumbled into it.”

“I did,” Melanie said. “And you can’t make yourself stumble into something.”