The Leftovers

HEROES’ DAY

IT WAS A GOOD DAY for a parade, sunny and unseasonably warm, the sky a Sunday school cartoon of heaven. Not too long ago, people would have felt the need to make a nervous crack about weather like this—Hey, they’d say, maybe this global warming isn’t such a bad thing after all! — but these days no one bothered much about the hole in the ozone layer or the pathos of a world without polar bears. It seemed almost funny in retrospect, all that energy wasted fretting about something so remote and uncertain, an ecological disaster that might or might not come to pass somewhere way off in the distant future, long after you and your children and your children’s children had lived out your allotted time on earth and gone to wherever it was you went when it was all over.

Despite the anxiety that had dogged him all morning, Mayor Kevin Garvey found himself gripped by an unexpected mood of nostalgia as he walked down Washington Boulevard toward the high school parking lot, where the marchers had been told to assemble. It was half an hour before showtime, the floats lined up and ready to roll, the marching band girding itself for battle, peppering the air with a discordant overture of bleats and toots and halfhearted drumrolls. Kevin had been born and raised in Mapleton, and he couldn’t help thinking about Fourth of July parades back when everything still made sense, half the town lined up along Main Street while the other half — Little Leaguers, scouts of both genders, gimpy Veterans of Foreign Wars trailed by the Ladies Auxiliary — strode down the middle of the road, waving to the spectators as if surprised to see them there, as if this were some kind of kooky coincidence rather than a national holiday. In Kevin’s memory, at least, it all seemed impossibly loud and hectic and innocent — fire trucks, tubas, Irish step dancers, baton twirlers in sequined costumes, one year even a squadron of fez-bedecked Shriners scooting around in those hilarious midget cars. Afterward there were softball games and cookouts, a sequence of comforting rituals culminating in the big fireworks display over Fielding Lake, hundreds of rapt faces turned skyward, oohing and wowing at the sizzling pinwheels and slow-blooming starbursts that lit up the darkness, reminding everyone of who they were and where they belonged and why it was all good.

Today’s event — the first annual Departed Heroes’ Day of Remembrance and Reflection, to be precise — wasn’t going to be anything like that. Kevin could sense the somber mood as soon as he arrived at the high school, the invisible haze of stale grief and chronic bewilderment thickening the air, causing people to talk more softly and move more tentatively than they normally would at a big outdoor gathering. On the other hand, he was both surprised and gratified by the turnout, given the cool reception the parade had received when it was first proposed. Some critics thought the timing was wrong (“Too soon!” they’d insisted), while others suggested that a secular commemoration of October 14th was wrongheaded and possibly blasphemous. These objections had faded over time, either because the organizers had done a good job winning over the skeptics, or because people just generally liked a parade, regardless of the occasion. In any case, so many Mapletonians had volunteered to march that Kevin wondered if there’d be anyone left to cheer them on from the sidelines as they made their way down Main Street to Greenway Park.

He hesitated for a moment just inside the line of police barricades, marshaling his strength for what he knew would be a long and difficult day. Everywhere he looked he saw broken people and fresh reminders of suffering. He waved to Martha Reeder, the once-chatty lady who worked the stamp window at the Post Office; she smiled sadly, turning to give him a better look at the homemade sign she was holding. It featured a poster-sized photograph of her three-year-old granddaughter, a serious child with curly hair and slightly crooked eyeglasses. ASHLEY, it said, MY LITTLE ANGEL. Standing beside her was Stan Washburn — a retired cop and former Pop Warner coach of Kevin’s — a squat, no-neck guy whose T-shirt, stretched tight over an impressive beer gut, invited anyone who cared to ASK ME ABOUT MY BROTHER. Kevin felt a sudden powerful urge to flee, to run home and spend the afternoon lifting weights or raking leaves — anything solitary and mindless would do — but it passed quickly, like a hiccup or a shameful sexual fantasy.

Expelling a soft dutiful sigh, he waded into the crowd, shaking hands and calling out names, doing his best impersonation of a small-town politician. An ex — Mapleton High football star and prominent local businessman — he’d inherited and expanded his family’s chain of supermarket-sized liquor stores, tripling the revenue during his fifteen-year tenure — Kevin was a popular and highly visible figure around town, but the idea of running for office had never crossed his mind. Then, just last year, out of the blue, he was presented with a petition signed by two hundred fellow citizens, many of whom he knew well: “We, the undersigned, are desperate for leadership in these dark times. Will you help us take back our town?” Touched by this appeal and feeling a bit lost himself — he’d sold the business for a small fortune a few months earlier, and still hadn’t figured out what to do next — he accepted the mayoral nomination of a newly formed political entity called the Hopeful Party.

Kevin won the election in a landslide, unseating Rick Malvern, the three-term incumbent who’d lost the confidence of the voters after attempting to burn down his own house in an act of what he called “ritual purification.” It didn’t work — the fire department insisted on extinguishing the blaze over his bitter objections — and these days Rick was living in a tent in his front yard, the charred remains of his five-bedroom Victorian hulking in the background. Every now and then, when Kevin went running in the early morning, he would happen upon his former rival just as he was emerging from the tent — one time bare-chested and clad only in striped boxers — and the two men would exchange an awkward greeting on the otherwise silent street, a Yo or a Hey or a What’s up? just to show there were no hard feelings.

As much as he disliked the flesh-pressing, backslapping aspect of his new job, Kevin felt an obligation to make himself accessible to his constituents, even the cranks and malcontents who inevitably came out of the woodwork at public events. The first to accost him in the parking lot was Ralph Sorrento, a surly plumber from Sycamore Road, who bulled his way through a cluster of sad-looking women in identical pink T-shirts and planted himself directly in Kevin’s path.

“Mr. Mayor,” he drawled, smirking as though there were something inherently ridiculous about the title. “I was hoping I’d run into you. You never answer my e-mails.”

“Morning, Ralph.”

Sorrento folded his arms across his chest and studied Kevin with an unsettling combination of amusement and disdain. He was a big, thick-bodied man with a buzz cut and a bristly goatee, dressed in grease-stained cargo pants and a thermal-lined hoodie. Even at this hour — it was not yet eleven — Kevin could smell beer on his breath and see that he was looking for trouble.

“Just so we’re clear,” Sorrento announced in an unnaturally loud voice. “I’m not paying that fucking money.”

The money in question was a hundred-dollar fine he’d been assessed for shooting at a pack of stray dogs that had wandered into his yard. A beagle had been killed on the spot, but a shepherd-lab mix had hobbled away with a bullet in its hind leg, dripping a three-block trail of blood before collapsing on the sidewalk not far from the Little Sprouts Academy on Oak Street. Normally the police didn’t get too exercised about a shot dog — it happened with depressing regularity — but a handful of the Sprouts had witnessed the animal’s agony, and the complaints of their parents and guardians had led to Sorrento’s prosecution.

“Watch your language,” Kevin warned him, uncomfortably aware of the heads turning in their direction.

Sorrento jabbed an index finger into Kevin’s rib cage. “I’m sick of those mutts crapping on my lawn.”

“Nobody likes the dogs,” Kevin conceded. “But next time call Animal Control, okay?”

“Animal Control.” Sorrento repeated the words with a contemptuous chuckle. Again he jabbed at Kevin’s sternum, fingertip digging into bone. “They don’t do shit.”

“They’re understaffed.” Kevin forced a polite smile. “They’re doing the best they can in a bad situation. We all are. I’m sure you understand that.”

As if to indicate that he did understand, Sorrento eased the pressure on Kevin’s breastbone. He leaned in close, his breath sour, his voice low and intimate.

“Do me a favor, okay? You tell the cops if they want my money, they’re gonna have to come and get it. Tell ’em I’ll be waiting for ’em with my sawed-off shotgun.”

He grinned, trying to look like a badass, but Kevin could see the pain in his eyes, the glassy, pleading look behind the bluster. If he remembered correctly, Sorrento had lost a daughter, a chubby girl, maybe nine or ten. Tiffany or Britney, a name like that.

“I’ll pass it along.” Kevin patted him gently on the shoulder. “Now, why don’t you go home and get some rest.”

Sorrento slapped at Kevin’s hand.

“Don’t fucking touch me.”

“Sorry.”

“Just tell ’em what I told you, okay?”

Kevin promised he would, then hurried off, trying to ignore the lump of dread that had suddenly materialized in his gut. Unlike some of the neighboring towns, Mapleton had never experienced a suicide by cop, but Kevin sensed that Ralph Sorrento was at least fantasizing about the idea. His plan didn’t seem especially inspired — the cops had bigger things to worry about than an unpaid fine for animal cruelty — but there were all sorts of ways to provoke a confrontation if you really had your heart set on it. He’d have to tell the chief, make sure the patrol officers knew what they were dealing with.

Distracted by these thoughts, Kevin didn’t realize he was heading straight for the Reverend Matt Jamison, formerly of the Zion Bible Church, until it was too late to make an evasive maneuver. All he could do was raise both hands in a futile attempt to fend off the gossip rag the Reverend was thrusting in his face.

“Take it,” the Reverend said. “There’s stuff in here that’ll knock your socks off.”

Seeing no graceful way out, Kevin reluctantly took possession of a newsletter that went by the emphatic but unwieldy title “OCTOBER 14TH WAS NOT THE RAPTURE!!!” The front page featured a photograph of Dr. Hillary Edgers, a beloved pediatrician who’d disappeared three years earlier, along with eighty-seven other local residents and untold millions of people throughout the world. DOCTOR’S BISEXUAL COLLEGE YEARS EXPOSED! the headline proclaimed. A boxed quote in the article below read, “‘We totally thought she was gay,’ former roommate reveals.”

Kevin had known and admired Dr. Edgers, whose twin sons were the same age as his daughter. She’d volunteered two evenings a week at a free clinic for poor kids in the city, and gave lectures to the PTA on subjects like “The Long-Term Effects of Concussions in Young Athletes” and “How to Recognize an Eating Disorder.” People buttonholed her all the time at the soccer field and the supermarket, fishing for free medical advice, but she never seemed resentful about it, or even mildly impatient.

“Jesus, Matt. Is this necessary?”

Reverend Jamison seemed mystified by the question. He was a trim, sandy-haired man of about forty, but his face had gone slack and pouchy in the past couple of years, as if he were aging on an accelerated schedule.

“These people weren’t heroes. We have to stop treating them like they were. I mean, this whole parade—”

“The woman had kids. They don’t need to be reading about who she slept with in college.”

“But it’s the truth. We can’t hide from the truth.”

Kevin knew it was useless to argue. By all accounts, Matt Jamison used to be a decent guy, but he’d lost his bearings. Like a lot of devout Christians, he’d been deeply traumatized by the Sudden Departure, tormented by the fear that Judgment Day had come and gone, and he’d been found lacking. While some people in his position had responded with redoubled piety, the Reverend had moved in the opposite direction, taking up the cause of Rapture Denial with a vengeance, dedicating his life to proving that the people who’d slipped their earthly chains on October 14th were neither good Christians nor even especially virtuous individuals. In the process, he’d become a dogged investigative journalist and a complete pain in the ass.

“All right,” Kevin muttered, folding the newsletter and jamming it into his back pocket. “I’ll give it a look.”

THEY STARTED moving at a few minutes after eleven. A police motorcade led the way, followed by a small armada of floats representing a variety of civic and commercial organizations, mostly old standbys like the Greater Mapleton Chamber of Commerce, the local chapter of D.A.R.E., and the Senior Citizens’ Club. A couple featured live demonstrations: Students from the Alice Herlihy Institute of Dance performed a cautious jitterbug on a makeshift stage while a chorus line of karate kids from the Devlin Brothers School of Martial Arts threw flurries of punches and kicks at the air, grunting in ferocious unison. To a casual observer it would have all seemed familiar, not much different from any other parade that had crawled through town in the last fifty years. Only the final vehicle in the sequence would have given pause, a flatbed truck draped in black bunting, not a soul on board, its emptiness stark and self-explanatory.

As mayor, Kevin got to ride in one of two honorary convertibles that trailed the memorial float, a little Mazda driven by Pete Thorne, his friend and former neighbor. They were in second position, ten yards behind a Fiat Spider carrying the Grand Marshall, a pretty but fragile-looking woman named Nora Durst who’d lost her entire family on October 14th — husband and two young kids — in what was widely considered to be the worst tragedy in all of Mapleton. Nora had reportedly suffered a minor panic attack earlier in the day, claiming she felt dizzy and nauseous and needed to go home, but she’d gotten through the crisis with the help of her sister and a volunteer grief counselor on hand in the event of just such an emergency. She seemed fine now, sitting almost regally in the backseat of the Spider, turning from side to side and wanly raising her hand to acknowledge sporadic bursts of applause from spectators who’d assembled along the route.

“Not a bad turnout!” Kevin remarked in a loud voice. “I didn’t expect this many people!”

“What?” Pete bellowed over his shoulder.

“Forget it!” Kevin shouted back, realizing it was hopeless to try to make himself heard over the band. The horn section was plastered to his bumper, playing an exuberant version of “Hawaii Five-O” that had gone on for so long he was beginning to wonder if it was the only song they knew. Impatient with the funereal pace, the musicians kept surging forward, briefly overtaking his car, and then falling abruptly back, no doubt wreaking havoc on the solemn procession bringing up the rear. Kevin twisted in his seat, trying to see past the musicians to the marchers behind them, but his view was blocked by a thicket of maroon uniforms, serious young faces with inflated cheeks, and brass instruments flashing molten gold in the sunlight.

Back there, he thought, that was the real parade, the one no one had ever seen before, hundreds of ordinary people walking in small groups, some holding signs, others wearing T-shirts bearing the image of a friend or family member who’d been taken away. He’d seen these people in the parking lot, shortly after they’d broken into their platoons, and the sight of them — the incomprehensible sum of their sadness — had left him shaken, barely able to read the names on their banners: the Orphans of October 14th, the Grieving Spouses’ Coalition, Mothers and Fathers of Departed Children, Bereft Siblings Network, Mapleton Remembers Its Friends and Neighbors, Survivors of Myrtle Avenue, Students of Shirley De Santos, We Miss Bud Phipps, and on and on. A few mainstream religious organizations were participating, too — Our Lady of Sorrows, Temple Beth-El, and St. James Presbyterian had all sent contingents — but they’d been stuck way in the back, almost an afterthought, right in front of the emergency vehicles.

MAPLETON CENTER was packed with well-wishers, the street strewn with flowers, many of which had been crushed by truck tires and would soon be trampled underfoot. A fair number of the spectators were high school kids, but Kevin’s daughter, Jill, and her best friend, Aimee, weren’t among them. The girls had been sleeping soundly when he left the house — as usual, they’d stayed out way too late — and Kevin didn’t have the heart to wake them, or the fortitude to deal with Aimee, who insisted on sleeping in panties and flimsy little tank tops that made it hard for him to know where to look. He’d called home twice in the past half hour, hoping the ringer would roust them, but the girls hadn’t picked up.

He and Jill had been arguing about the parade for weeks now, in the exasperated, half-serious way they conducted all the important business in their lives. He’d encouraged her to march in honor of her Departed friend, Jen, but she remained unmoved.

“Guess what, Dad? Jen doesn’t care if I march or not.”

“How do you know that?”

“She’s gone. She doesn’t give a shit about anything.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “But what if she’s still here and we just can’t see her?”

Jill seemed amused by this possibility. “That would suck. She’s probably waving her arms around all day, trying to get our attention.” Jill scanned the kitchen, as if searching for her friend. She spoke in a loud voice, suitable for addressing a half-deaf grandparent. “Jen, if you’re in here, I’m sorry I’m ignoring you. It would help if you could clear your throat or something.”

Kevin withheld his protest. Jill knew he didn’t like it when she joked about the missing, but telling her for the hundredth time wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

“Honey,” he said quietly, “the parade is for us, not for them.”

She stared at him with a look she’d recently perfected — total incomprehension softened by the slightest hint of womanly forbearance. It would have been even cuter if she still had some hair and wasn’t wearing all that eyeliner.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Why does this matter so much to you?”

If Kevin could have supplied a good answer for this question, he would’ve happily done so. But the truth was, he really didn’t know why it mattered so much, why he didn’t just give up on the parade the way he’d given up on everything else they’d fought about in the past year: the curfew, the head-shaving, the wisdom of spending so much time with Aimee, partying on school nights. Jill was seventeen; he understood that, in some irrevocable way, she’d drifted out of his orbit and would do what she wanted when she wanted, regardless of his wishes.

All the same, though, Kevin really wanted her to be part of the parade, to demonstrate in some small way that she still recognized the claims of family and community, still loved and respected her father and would do what she could to make him happy. She understood the situation with perfect clarity — he knew she did — but for some reason couldn’t bring herself to cooperate. It hurt him, of course, but any anger he felt toward his daughter was always accompanied by an automatic apology, a private acknowledgment of everything she’d been through, and how little he’d been able to help her.

Jill was an Eyewitness, and he didn’t need a psychologist to tell him that it was something she’d struggle with for the rest of her life. She and Jen had been hanging out together on October 14th, two giggly young girls sitting side by side on a couch, eating pretzels and watching YouTube videos on a laptop. Then, in the time it takes to click a mouse, one of them is gone, and the other is screaming. And people keep disappearing on her in the months and years that follow, if not quite so dramatically. Her older brother leaves for college and never comes home. Her mother moves out of the house, takes a vow of silence. Only her father remains, a bewildered man who tries to help but never manages to say the right thing. How can he when he’s just as lost and clueless as she is?

It didn’t surprise Kevin that Jill was angry or rebellious or depressed. She had every right to be all those things and more. The only thing that surprised him was that she was still around, still sharing a house with him when she could just as easily have run off with the Barefoot People or hopped on a Greyhound Bus to parts unknown. Lots of kids had. She looked different, of course, bald and haunted, like she wanted total strangers to understand exactly how bad she felt. But sometimes when she smiled, Kevin got the feeling that her essential self was still alive in there, still mysteriously intact in spite of everything. It was this other Jill — the one she never really got a chance to become — that he’d been hoping to find at the breakfast table this morning, not the real one he knew too well, the girl curled up on the bed after coming home too drunk or high to bother scrubbing off last night’s makeup.

He thought about phoning again as they approached Lovell Terrace, the exclusive cul-de-sac where he and his family had moved five years earlier, in an era that now seemed as distant and unreal as the Jazz Age. As much as he wanted to hear Jill’s voice, though, his own sense of decorum held him back. He just didn’t think it would look right, the mayor chatting on his cell phone in the middle of a parade. Besides, what would he say?

Hi, honey, I’m driving past our street, but I don’t see you …

EVEN BEFORE he lost his wife to them, Kevin had developed a grudging sense of respect for the Guilty Remnant. Two years ago, when they’d first appeared on his radar screen, he’d mistaken them for a harmless Rapture cult, a group of separatist fanatics who wanted nothing more than to be left alone to grieve and meditate in peace until the Second Coming, or whatever it was they were waiting for (he still wasn’t clear about their theology and wasn’t sure they were, either). It even made a certain kind of sense to him that heartbroken people like Rosalie Sussman would find it comforting to join their ranks, to withdraw from the world and take a vow of silence.

At the time, the G.R. seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere, a spontaneous local reaction to an unprecedented tragedy. It took him a while to realize that similar groups were forming all over the country, linking themselves into a loose national network, each affiliate following the same basic guidelines — white clothes and cigarettes and two-person surveillance teams — but governing itself without much in the way of organized oversight or outside interference.

Despite its monastic appearance, the Mapleton Chapter quickly revealed itself to be an ambitious and disciplined organization with a taste for civil disobedience and political theater. Not only did they refuse to pay taxes or utilities, but also they flouted a host of local ordinances at their Ginkgo Street compound, packing dozens of people into homes built for a single family, defying court orders and foreclosure notices, building barricades to keep out the authorities. A series of confrontations ensued, one of which resulted in the shooting death of a G.R. member who threw rocks at police officers trying to execute a search warrant. Sympathy for the Guilty Remnant had spiked in the wake of the botched raid, leading to the resignation of the Chief of Police and a severe loss of support for then Mayor Malvern, both of whom had authorized the operation.

Since taking office, Kevin had done his best to dial down the tension between the cult and the town, negotiating a series of agreements that allowed the G.R. to live more or less as it pleased, in exchange for nominal tax payments and guarantees of access for police and emergency vehicles in certain clearly defined situations. The truce seemed to be holding, but the G.R. remained an annoying wild card, popping up at odd intervals to sow confusion and anxiety among law-abiding citizens. This year, on the first day of school, several white-clad adults had staged a sit-in at Kingman Elementary School, occupying a second-grade classroom for an entire morning. A few weeks later, another group of them had wandered onto the high school football field in the middle of a game, lying down on the turf until they were forcibly removed by angry players and spectators.

FOR MONTHS now, local officials had been wondering what the G.R. would do to disrupt Heroes’ Day. Kevin had sat through two planning meetings at which the subject was discussed in detail, and had reviewed a number of likely scenarios. All day he’d been waiting for them to make their move, feeling an odd combination of dread and curiosity, as if the party wouldn’t really be complete until they’d crashed it.

But the parade had come and gone without them, and the memorial service was nearing its close. Kevin had laid a wreath at the foot of the Monument to the Departed at Greenway Park, a creepy bronze sculpture produced by one of the high school art teachers. It was supposed to show a baby floating out of the arms of its astonished mother, ascending toward heaven, but something had misfired. Kevin was no art critic, but it always looked to him like the baby was falling instead of rising, and the mother might not be able to catch it.

After the benediction by Father Gonzalez, there was a moment of silence to commemorate the third anniversary of the Sudden Departure, followed by the pealing of church bells. Nora Durst’s keynote address was the last item on the program. Kevin was seated on the makeshift stage with a few other dignitaries, and he felt a little anxious as she stepped up to the podium. He knew from experience how daunting it could be to deliver a speech, how much skill and confidence it took to command the attention of a crowd even half the size of this one.

But he quickly realized that his worries were misplaced. A hush came over the spectators as Nora cleared her throat and shuffled through her note cards. She had suffered — she was the Woman Who Had Lost Everything — and her suffering gave her authority. She didn’t have to earn anyone’s attention or respect.

On top of that, Nora turned out to be a natural. She spoke slowly and clearly — it was Oratory 101, but a surprising number of speakers missed that day — with just enough in the way of stumbles and hesitations to keep everything from seeming a bit too polished. It helped that she was an attractive woman, tall and well-proportioned, with a soft but emphatic voice. Like most of her audience, she was casually dressed, and Kevin found himself staring a little too avidly at the elaborate stitching on the back pocket of her jeans, which fit with a snugness one rarely encountered at official government functions. She had, he noticed, a surprisingly youthful body for a thirty-five-year-old woman who’d given birth to two kids. Lost two kids, he reminded himself, forcing himself to keep his chin up and focus on something more appropriate. The last thing he wanted to see on the cover of The Mapleton Messenger was a full-color photograph of the mayor ogling a grieving mother’s butt.

Nora began by saying that she’d originally conceived of her speech as a celebration of the single best day of her life. The day in question had occurred just a couple of months before October 14th, during a vacation her family had taken at the Jersey Shore. Nothing special had happened, nor had she fully grasped the extent of her happiness at the time. That realization didn’t strike until later, after her husband and children were gone and she’d had more than enough sleepless nights in which to take the measure of all that she’d lost.

It was, she said, a lovely late-summer day, warm and breezy, but not so bright that you had to think constantly about sunscreen. Sometime in the morning, her kids — Jeremy was six, Erin four; it was as old as they’d ever get — started making a sand castle, and they went about their labor with the solemn enthusiasm that children sometimes bring to the most inconsequential tasks. Nora and her husband, Doug, sat on a blanket nearby, holding hands, watching these serious little workers run to the water’s edge, fill their plastic buckets with wet sand, and then come trudging back, their toothpick arms straining against the heavy loads. The kids weren’t smiling, but their faces glowed with joyful purpose. The fortress they built was surprisingly large and elaborate; it kept them occupied for hours.

“We had our video camera,” she said. “But for some reason we didn’t think to turn it on. I’m glad in a way. Because if we had a video of that day, I’d just watch it all the time. I’d waste away in front of the television, rewinding it over and over.”

Somehow, though, thinking about that day made her remember another day, a terrible Saturday the previous March when the entire family was laid low by a stomach bug. It seemed like every time you turned around, someone else was throwing up, and not always in a toilet. The house stunk, the kids were wailing, and the dog kept whimpering to be let outside. Nora couldn’t get out of bed — she was feverish, drifting in and out of delirium — and Doug was no better. There was a brief period in the afternoon when she thought she might be dying. When she shared this fear with her husband, he simply nodded and said, “Okay.” They were so sick they didn’t even have the sense to pick up the phone and call for help. At one point in the evening, when Erin was lying between them, her hair crusty with dried vomit, Jeremy wandered in and pointed tearfully at his foot. Woody pooped in the kitchen, he said. Woody pooped and I stepped in it.

“It was hell,” Nora said. “That was what we kept telling each other. This is truly hell.”

They got through it, of course. A few days later, everyone was healthy again, and the house was more or less in order. But from then on, they referred to the Family Puke-A-Thon as the low point in their lives, the debacle that put everything else in perspective. If the basement flooded, or Nora got a parking ticket, or Doug lost a client, they were always able to remind themselves that things could have been worse.

“Well, we’d say, at least it’s not as bad as that time we all got so sick.”

It was around this point in Nora’s speech that the Guilty Remnant finally made their appearance, emerging en masse from the small patch of woods flanking the west side of the park. There were maybe twenty of them, dressed in white, moving slowly in the direction of the gathering. At first they seemed like a disorganized mob, but as they walked they began to form a horizontal line, a configuration that reminded Kevin of a search party. Each person was carrying a piece of posterboard emblazoned with a single black letter, and when they got to within shouting distance of the stage, they stopped and raised their squares overhead. Together, the jagged row of letters spelled the words STOP WASTING YOUR BREATH.

An angry murmur arose from the crowd, which didn’t appreciate the interruption or the sentiment. Nearly the entire police force was present at the ceremony, and after a moment of uncertainty, several officers began moving toward the interlopers. Chief Rogers was onstage, and just as Kevin rose to consult him about the wisdom of provoking a confrontation, Nora addressed the officers.

“Please,” she said. “Leave them alone. They’re not hurting anyone.”

The cops hesitated, then checked their advance after receiving a signal from the Chief. From where he sat, Kevin had a clear view of the protesters, so he knew by then that his wife was among them. Kevin hadn’t seen Laurie for a couple of months, and he was struck by how much weight she’d lost, as if she’d disappeared into a fitness center instead of a Rapture cult. Her hair was grayer than he’d ever seen it — the G.R. wasn’t big on personal grooming — but on the whole, she looked strangely youthful. Maybe it was the cigarette in her mouth — Laurie had been a smoker in the early days of their relationship — but the woman who stood before him, the letter N raised high above her head, reminded him more of the fun-loving girl he’d known in college than the heavyhearted, thick-waisted woman who’d walked out on him six months ago. Despite the circumstances, he felt an undeniable pang of desire for her, an actual and highly ironic stirring in his groin.

“I’m not greedy,” Nora went on, picking up the thread of her speech. “I’m not asking for that perfect day at the beach. Just give me that horrible Saturday, all four of us sick and miserable, but alive, and together. Right now that sounds like heaven to me.” For the first time since she’d begun speaking, her voice cracked with emotion. “God bless us, the ones who are here and the ones who aren’t. We’ve all been through so much.”

Kevin attempted to make eye contact with Laurie throughout the sustained, somewhat defiant applause that followed, but she refused even to glance in his direction. He tried to convince himself that she was doing this against her will — she was, after all, flanked by two large bearded men, one of whom looked a little like Neil Felton, the guy who used to own the gourmet pizza place in the town center. It would have been comforting to think that she’d been instructed by her superiors not to fall into temptation by communicating, even silently, with her husband, but he knew in his heart that this wasn’t the case. She could’ve looked at him if she’d wanted to, could’ve at least acknowledged the existence of the man she’d promised to spend her life with. She just didn’t want to.

Thinking about it afterward, he wondered why he hadn’t climbed down from the stage, walked over there, and said, Hey, it’s been a while. You look good. I miss you. There was nothing stopping him. And yet he just sat there, doing absolutely nothing, until the people in white lowered their letters, turned around, and drifted back into the woods.

A WHOLE CLASS OF JILLS

JILL GARVEY KNEW HOW EASY it was to romanticize the missing, to pretend that they were better than they really were, somehow superior to the losers who’d been left behind. She’d seen this up close in the weeks after October 14th, when all sorts of people — adults, mostly, but some kids, too — said all kinds of crazy stuff to her about Jen Sussman, who was really nobody special, just a regular person, maybe a little prettier than most girls their age, but definitely not an angel who was too good for this world.

God wanted her company, they’d say. He missed her blue eyes and beautiful smile.

They meant well, Jill understood that. Because she was a so-called Eyewitness, the only other person in the room when Jen departed, people often treated her with creepy tenderness — it was as if she were a grieving relative, as if she and Jen had become sisters after the fact — and an odd sort of respect. No one listened when she tried to explain that she hadn’t actually witnessed anything and was really just as clueless as they were. She’d been watching YouTube at the crucial moment, this sad but hilarious video of a little kid punching himself in the head and pretending like it didn’t hurt. She must have watched it three or four times in a row, and when she finally looked up, Jen was gone. A long time passed before Jill realized she wasn’t in the bathroom.

You poor thing, they’d insist. This must be so hard on you, losing your best friend like that.

That was the other thing nobody wanted to hear, which was that she and Jen weren’t best friends anymore, if they ever had been, which she doubted, even though they’d used the phrase for years without giving it a second thought: my best friend, Jen; my best friend, Jill. It was their mothers who were best friends, not them. The girls just tagged along because they had no choice (in that sense they really were like sisters). They carpooled to school, slept at each other’s houses, went on combined family vacations, and spent countless hours in front of the TV and computer screens, killing time while their mothers drank tea or wine at the kitchen table.

Their makeshift alliance was surprisingly durable, lasting all the way from pre-K to the middle of the eighth grade, when Jen underwent a sudden and mysterious transfiguration. One day she had a new body — at least that’s the way it seemed to Jill — the next day new clothes, and the day after that new friends, a clique of pretty and popular girls led by Hillary Beardon, whom Jen had previously claimed to despise. When Jill asked her why she’d want to hang out with people she herself had accused of being shallow and obnoxious, Jen just smiled and said they were actually pretty nice when you got to know them.

She wasn’t mean about it. She never lied to Jill, never mocked her behind her back. It was like she just drifted slowly away, into a different, more exclusive orbit. She made a token effort to include Jill in her new life, inviting her (most likely on instructions from her mother) on a day trip to Julia Horowitz’s beach house, but all that really did was make the gulf between them more obvious than it had been before. Jill felt like a foreigner the whole afternoon, a pale and mousy interloper in her hopeless one-piece bathing suit, watching in silent bewilderment as the pretty girls admired one another’s bikinis, compared spray-on tans, and texted boys on candy-colored phones. The thing that amazed her most was how comfortable Jen looked in that strange context, how seamlessly she’d merged with the others.

“I know it’s hard,” her mother told her. “But she’s branching out and maybe you should, too.”

That summer — the last one before the disaster — felt like it would never end. Jill was too old for camp, too young to work, and too shy to pick up the phone and call anyone. She spent way too much time on Facebook, studying pictures of Jen and her new friends, wondering if they were all as happy as they looked. They’d taken to calling themselves the Classy Bitches, and almost every photo had that nickname in the heading: Classy Bitches Chillin’; Classy Bitches Slumber Party; Hey CB what ru drinking? She kept a close eye on Jen’s status, tracking the ups and downs of her budding romance with Sam Pardo, one of the cutest guys in their class.

Jen is holding hands with Sam and watching a movie.

Jen is THE BEST KISS EVER!!!

Jen is the longest two weeks of my life.

Jen is … WHATEVER.

Jen is Guys Suck!

Jen is All Is Forgiven (and then some).

Jill tried to hate her, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. What was the point? Jen was where she wanted to be, with people she liked, doing things that made her happy. How could you hate someone for that? You just had to figure out a way to get all that for yourself.

By the time September finally rolled around, she felt like the worst was over. High school was a clean slate, the past wiped away, the future yet to be written. Whenever she and Jen passed in the hall, they just said hi and left it at that. Every now and then, Jill would look at her and think, We’re different people now.

The fact that they were together on October 14th was pure coincidence. Jill’s mother had bought some yarn for Mrs. Sussman — the two moms were big on knitting that fall — and Jill happened to be in the car when she decided to drop it off. Out of old habit, Jill ended up in the basement with Jen, the two of them chatting awkwardly about their new teachers, then turning on the computer when they ran out of things to say. Jen had a phone number scribbled on the back of her hand — Jill noticed it when she pressed the power switch, and wondered whose it was — and chipped pink polish on her nails. The screen saver on her laptop was a picture of the two of them, Jill and Jen, taken a couple of years earlier during a snowstorm. They were all bundled up, red-cheeked and grinning, both of them with braces on their teeth, pointing proudly at a snowman, a lovingly constructed fellow with a carrot nose and borrowed scarf. Even then, with Jen sitting right beside her, not yet an angel, it felt like ancient history, a relic from a lost civilization.

IT WASN’T until her mother joined the G.R. that Jill began to understand for herself how absence could warp the mind, make you exaggerate the virtues and minimize the defects of the missing individual. It wasn’t the same, of course: Her mother wasn’t gone gone, not like Jen, but it didn’t seem to matter.

They’d had a complicated, slightly oppressive relationship — a little closer than was good for either of them — and Jill had often wished for a little distance between them, some room to maneuver on her own.

Wait’ll I get to college, she used to think. It’ll be such a relief not to have her breathing down my neck all the time.

But that was the natural order of things — you grew up, you moved out. What wasn’t natural was your mother walking out on you, moving across town to live in a group house with a bunch of religious nuts, cutting off all communication with her family.

For a long time after she left, Jill found herself overwhelmed by a childlike hunger for her mother’s presence. She missed everything about the woman, even the stuff that used to drive her crazy — her off-key singing, her insistence that whole-wheat pasta tasted just as good as the regular kind, her inability to follow the storyline of even the simplest TV show (Wait a second, is that the same guy as before, or someone else?). Spasms of wild longing would strike her out of nowhere, leaving her dazed and weepy, prone to sullen fits of anger that inevitably got turned against her father, which was totally unfair, since he wasn’t the one who’d abandoned her. In an effort to fend off these attacks, Jill made a list of her mother’s faults and pulled it out whenever she felt herself getting sentimental:

Weird, high-pitched totally fake laugh

Crappy taste in music

Judgmental

Wouldn’t say hi if she met me on the street

Ugly sunglasses

Obsessed with Jen

Uses words like hoopla and rigamarole in conversation

Nags Dad about cholesterol

Flabby arm Jello

Loves God more than her own family

It actually worked a little, or maybe she just got used to the situation. In any case, she eventually stopped crying herself to sleep, stopped writing long, desperate letters asking her mother to please come home, stopped blaming herself for things she couldn’t control.

It was her decision, she learned to remind herself. No one made her go.

THESE DAYS, the only time Jill consistently missed her mother was first thing in the morning, when she was still half-asleep, unreconciled to the new day. It just didn’t feel right, coming down for breakfast and not finding her at the table in her fuzzy gray robe, no one to hug her and whisper, Hey, sleepyhead, in a voice full of amusement and commiseration. Jill had a hard time waking up, and her mother had given her the space to make a slow and grumpy transition into consciousness, without a whole lot of chitchat or unnecessary drama. If she wanted to eat, that was fine; if not, that was no problem, either.

Her father tried to pick up the slack — she had to give him that — but they just weren’t on the same wavelength. He was more the up-and-at-’em type; no matter what time she got out of bed, he was always perky and freshly showered, looking up from the morning paper — amazingly, he still read the morning paper — with a slightly reproachful expression, as if she were late for an appointment.

“Well, well,” he said. “Look who’s here. I was wondering when you were gonna put in an appearance.”

“Hey,” she muttered, uncomfortably aware of herself as the object of parental scrutiny. He eyeballed her like this every morning, trying to figure out what she’d been up to the night before.

“Bit of a hangover?” he inquired, sounding more curious than disapproving.

“Not really.” She’d only had a couple of beers at Dmitri’s house, maybe a toke or two off a joint that made the rounds at the end of the night, but there was no point in going into detail. “Just didn’t get enough sleep.”

“Huh,” he grunted, not bothering to hide his skepticism. “Why don’t you stay home tonight? We can watch a movie or something.”

Pretending not to hear him, Jill shuffled over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a mug of the dark roast they’d recently started buying. It was a double-edged act of revenge against her mother, who hadn’t allowed Jill to drink coffee in the house, not even the lame breakfast blend she thought was so delicious.

“I can make you an omelette,” he offered. “Or you can just have some cereal.”

She sat down, shuddering at the thought of her father’s big sweaty omelettes, orange cheese oozing from the fold.

“Not hungry.”

“You have to eat something.”

She let that pass, taking a big gulp of black coffee. It was better that way, muddy and harsh, more of a shock to the system. Her father’s eyes strayed to the clock above the sink.

“Aimee up?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s seven-fifteen.”

“There’s no rush. We’re both free first period.”

He nodded and turned back to his paper, the way he did every morning after she told him the same lie. She was never quite sure if he believed her or just didn’t care. She got the same distracted vibe from a lot of the adults in her life — cops, teachers, her friends’ parents, Derek at the frozen yogurt store, even her driving instructor. It was frustrating, in a way, because you never really knew if you were being humored or actually getting away with something.

“Any news on Holy Wayne?” Jill had been following the story of the cult leader’s arrest with great interest, grimly amused by the sordid details included in the articles, but also embarrassed on behalf of her brother, who’d cast his lot with a man who turned out to be a charlatan and a pig.

“Not today,” he said. “I guess they used up all the good stuff.”

“I wonder what Tom will do.”

They’d been speculating about this for the past few days but hadn’t gotten too far. It was hard to imagine what Tom might be thinking when they didn’t know where he was, what he was doing, or even if he was still involved with the Healing Hug Movement.

“I don’t know. He’s probably pretty—”

They stopped talking when Aimee walked into the kitchen. Jill was relieved to see that her friend was wearing pajama bottoms — it wasn’t always the case — though the relative modesty of this morning’s outfit was undercut by a cleavage-baring camisole. Aimee opened the refrigerator and peered into it for a long time, tilting her head as if something fascinating was going on in there. Then she pulled out a carton of eggs and turned toward the table, her face soft and sleepy, her hair a glorious mess.

“Mr. Garvey,” she said, “any chance you could whip up one of those yummy omelettes?”

AS USUAL, they took the long way to school, ducking behind the Safeway to smoke a quick joint — Aimee did her best not to set foot inside Mapleton High without some sort of buzz going — then heading across Reservoir Road to see if anyone interesting happened to be hanging out at Dunkin’ Donuts. The answer, not surprisingly, turned out to be no — unless you thought old men gnawing on crullers qualified as interesting — but the moment they poked their heads in, Jill was overcome by a wicked sugar craving.

“You mind?” she asked, glancing sheepishly toward the counter. “I didn’t have any breakfast.”

“I don’t mind. It’s not my fat ass.”

“Hey.” Jill swatted her in the arm. “My ass isn’t fat.”

“Not yet,” Aimee told her. “Have a few more donuts.”

Unable to decide between the glazed and the jelly, Jill split the difference and ordered both. She would’ve been perfectly happy to eat on the run, but Aimee insisted on getting a table.

“What’s the hurry?” she asked.

Jill checked the time on her cell phone. “I don’t wanna be late for second period.”

“I have gym,” Aimee said. “I don’t care if I miss that.”

“I have a Chem test. Which I’m probably gonna fail.”

“You always say that, and you always get As.”

“Not this time,” Jill said. She’d skipped too many classes in the past few weeks, and had been stoned for too many of the ones she’d managed to attend. Some subjects mixed okay with weed, but Chemistry wasn’t one of them. You get high and start thinking about electrons, and you can end up a long way from where you’re supposed to be. “This time I’m screwed.”

“Who cares? It’s just a stupid test.”

I do, Jill wanted to say, but she wasn’t sure if she meant it. She used to care — used to care a lot — and hadn’t quite gotten used to the feeling of not caring, though she was doing her best.

“You know what my mom told me?” Aimee said. “She said that when she was in high school, girls could get out of gym just for having their period. She said there was this one teacher, this Neanderthal football coach, and she told him every class that she had cramps, and he always said, Okay, go sit in the bleachers. The guy never even noticed.”

Jill laughed, even though she’d heard the story before. It was one of the few things she knew about Aimee’s mother, besides the fact that she was an alcoholic who’d disappeared on October 14th, leaving her teenage daughter alone with a stepfather she didn’t like or trust.

“You want a bite?” Jill held out her jelly donut. “It’s really good.”

“That’s okay. I’m stuffed. I can’t believe I ate that whole omelette.”

“Don’t blame me.” Jill licked a tiny jewel of jelly off the tip of her thumb. “I tried to warn you.”

Aimee’s expression turned serious, even a bit stern.

“You shouldn’t make fun of your father. He’s a really nice guy.”

“I know.”

“And he’s not even a bad cook.”

Jill didn’t argue. Compared to her mother, her father was a terrible cook, but Aimee had no way of knowing that.

“He tries,” she said.

She scarfed down her glazed donut in three quick bites — it was so airy inside, almost like there was nothing beneath the sugary coating — then gathered up her trash.

“Ugh,” she said, dreading the prospect of the test she was about to take. “I guess we better go.”

Aimee studied her for a moment. She glanced at the display case behind the counter — tiers of donuts arrayed in their metal baskets, iced and sprinkled and powdered and plain and full of sweet surprises — and then back at Jill. A mischievous smile broke slowly across her face.

“You know what?” she said. “I think I will have something to eat. Maybe some coffee, too. You want coffee?”

“We don’t have time.”

“Sure we do.”

“What about my test?”

“What about it?”

Before Jill could reply, Aimee was out of her seat, moving toward the counter, her jeans so tight and her stride so liquid that everyone in the place turned to stare.

I have to go, Jill thought.

A feeling of unreality came over her just then, a sudden awareness of being trapped in a bad dream, that panicky sense of helplessness, as if she possessed no will of her own.

But this was no dream. All she had to do was stand up and start walking. And yet she remained frozen in her pink plastic seat, smiling foolishly as Aimee turned and mouthed the word Sorry, though it was clear from the look on her face that she wasn’t sorry at all.

Bitch, Jill thought. She wants me to fail.

AT MOMENTS like this — and there were more of them than she would have liked to admit — Jill wondered what she was doing, how she’d allowed herself to get so tangled up with someone as selfish and irresponsible as Aimee. It wasn’t healthy.

And it had happened so quickly. They’d only gotten to know each other a few months ago, at the beginning of summer, two girls working side by side in a failing frozen yogurt store, chatting during the slow times, some of which lasted for hours.

They were wary of each other at first, conscious of their membership in different tribes — Aimee sexy and reckless, her life a cluttered saga of bad decisions and emotional melodrama; Jill straitlaced and reliable, an A student and model teenage citizen. I wish I had a whole class of Jills, more than one teacher had written in the comments box on her report card. No one had ever written that about Aimee.

As the summer wore on, they began to relax into what felt like a genuine friendship, a connection that made their differences seem increasingly trivial. For all her social and sexual confidence, Aimee turned out to be surprisingly fragile, quick to tears and violent bouts of self-loathing; she required a lot of cheering up. Jill was better at hiding her sadness, but Aimee had a way of coaxing it out of her, getting her to open up about things she hadn’t discussed with anyone else — her bitterness toward her mother, her trouble communicating with her father, the feeling that she’d been cheated, that the world she’d been raised to live in no longer existed.

Aimee took Jill under her wing, bringing her to parties after work, introducing her to what she’d been missing. Jill was intimidated at first — everybody she met seemed a little older and a little cooler than she was, even though most of them were her own age — but she quickly overcame her shyness. She got drunk for the first time, smoked weed, stayed up till dawn talking to people she used to ignore in the hallway, people she’d written off as losers and burnouts. One night, on a dare, she took off her clothes and jumped into Mark Sollers’s pool. When she climbed out a few minutes later, naked and dripping in front of her new friends, she felt like a different person, like her former self had been washed away.

If her mother had been home, none of it would have happened, not because her mother would’ve stopped her, but because Jill would’ve stopped herself. Her father tried to intervene, but he seemed to have lost faith in his authority. He grounded her once in late July, after finding her passed out on the front lawn, but she ignored the punishment and he never mentioned it again.

Nor did he complain when Aimee started sleeping over, even though Jill hadn’t consulted him before inviting her. By the time he finally got around to asking what was up, Aimee was already a fixture in the house, sleeping in Tom’s old bedroom, adding her own peculiar requests to the family shopping lists, the kind of stuff that would have given her mother a heart attack — Pop-Tarts, Hot Pockets, ramen noodles. Jill told the truth, which was that Aimee needed a break from her stepfather, who sometimes “bothered” her when he came home drunk. He hadn’t touched her yet, but he watched her all the time and said creepy things that made it hard for her to fall asleep.

“She shouldn’t live there,” Jill told him. “It’s not a good situation.”

“Okay,” her father said. “Fair enough.”

The last two weeks of August were especially giddy, as if both girls sensed an expiration date on the fun and wanted to drink every drop while they still could. One morning, Jill came down from the shower, complaining about how much she hated her hair. It was always so dry and lifeless, nothing like Aimee’s, which was soft and radiant and never looked bad, not even when she’d just rolled out of bed in the morning.

“Cut it off,” Aimee told her.

“What?”

Aimee nodded, her face full of certainty.

“Just get rid of it. You’ll look better without it.”

Jill didn’t hesitate. She went upstairs, hacked away at her dull tresses with a pair of sewing scissors, then finished the job with the electric clippers her father kept under the bathroom sink. It was exhilarating to feel the past falling away in clumps, to watch a new face emerge, her eyes big and fierce, her mouth softer and prettier than it used to be.

“Holy shit,” Aimee said. “That is fucking awesome.”

Three days later Jill had sex for the first time, with a college guy she barely knew, after a drunken spin-the-bottle marathon at Jessica Marinetti’s house.

“I never did it with a bald girl,” he confided while they were still in the middle of the act.

“Really?” she said, not bothering to inform him that she’d never done it at all. “Is it okay?”

“It’s nice,” he told her, nuzzling her scalp with the tip of his nose. “Feels like sandpaper.”

She didn’t start to feel self-conscious until school started and she saw the way her old friends and teachers looked at her when she walked down the hall with Aimee, the mix of pity and loathing in their eyes. She knew what they were thinking — that she’d been led astray, that the bad girl had corrupted the good one — and wanted to tell them that they were wrong. She was no victim. All Aimee had done was show her a new way of being herself, a way that made as much sense right now as the old way had before.

Don’t blame her, Jill thought. I made the choice.

She was grateful to Aimee, she really was, and glad she’d been able to help her out with a place to stay when she needed it. Even so, all this togetherness was starting to get to her, the two of them living like sisters, sharing clothes and meals and secrets, partying together every night and then starting up again in the morning. This month they even got their periods at the same time, which was kind of freaky. What she needed was a breather, a little time to catch up on schoolwork, hang out with her dad, maybe go through some of the college material that kept arriving in the mail every day. Just a day or two to get her bearings, because sometimes she had a little trouble locating the boundary between the two of them, the place where Aimee left off and Jill began.

THEY WERE only a few blocks from school when the Prius pulled up silently beside them. It was one of those things that never used to happen to Jill but happened all the time now that she was hanging out with Aimee. The passenger window slid down, releasing a cloud of pot-scented reggae into the chilly November morning.

“Hey, ladies,” Scott Frost called out. “What’s up?”

“Not much,” Aimee replied. Her voice changed color when she talked to guys — it sounded deeper to Jill, infused with a teasing lilt that made even the most banal statements seem vaguely intriguing. “What’s up with you?”

Adam Frost leaned in from the driver’s seat, his head staggered a few inches behind his brother’s, creating a kind of mini — Mount Rushmore effect. The Frost twins were famously handsome — identical dreadlocked slackers with square jaws, sleepy eyes, and the lithe bodies of the athletes they might have been if they hadn’t been wasted all the time. Jill was pretty sure they’d graduated the year before, but she still saw them a lot in school, mostly in the art room, though they never seemed to do any art. They just sat around like retired guys, observing the young strivers with an air of benevolent amusement. The drawing teacher, Ms. Coomey, seemed to enjoy their company, chatting and laughing with them while her students worked independently. She was around fifty, married, and overweight, but a rumor had nonetheless spread through the school that she and the Frost brothers sometimes got it on in the supply closet during her free periods.

“Hop in,” Adam called out. He had a row of piercings in his right eyebrow, which was the main way people distinguished him from Scott. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“We have to go to school,” Jill muttered, speaking more to Aimee than the twins.

“Fuck that,” said Scott. “Come hang out at our house, it’ll be fun.”

“What kind of fun?” Aimee inquired.

“We have a Ping-Pong table.”

“And some Vicodin,” Adam added.

“Now you’re talking.” Aimee turned to Jill with a hopeful smile. “Whaddaya think?”

“I don’t know.” Jill felt the heat of embarrassment spreading across her face. “I’ve been missing a lot of school lately.”

“Me too,” Aimee said. “One more day’s not gonna matter.”

It was a reasonable point. Jill glanced at the twins, who were nodding in unison to “Buffalo Soldier,” sending out a subliminal message of encouragement.

“I don’t know,” she said again.

Aimee released a pointed sigh, but Jill remained motionless. She couldn’t understand what was holding her back. The Chemistry test was already under way. The rest of the day would just be a footnote to her failure.

“Whatever.” Aimee opened the door and climbed into the backseat, staring at Jill the whole time. “You coming?”

“That’s okay,” Jill told her. “You guys go ahead.”

“You sure?” Scott asked as Aimee shut the door. He seemed genuinely disappointed.

Jill nodded and Scott’s window hummed shut, slowly obscuring his beautiful face. The sealed-up Prius didn’t move for a second or two, and neither did Jill. A sharp feeling of regret took hold of her as she stared at the tinted glass.

“Wait!” she called out.

Her voice sounded loud in her own ears, almost desperate, but they must not have heard her, because the car lurched into motion just as she was reaching for the door, and moved noiselessly down the street without her.

SHE WAS still high when she got to school, but not in the giggly way that made most mornings with Aimee feel like a goofy adventure, the two of them pretending to be spies or cracking up at things that weren’t even funny, which somehow made them laugh even harder. Today’s buzz felt heavy and sad, just a weird bad mood.

Technically, she was supposed to sign herself in at the main office, but that was one of those regulations nobody paid much attention to anymore, a holdover from a more orderly and obedient time. Jill had only been in high school for five weeks before the Sudden Departure, but she still had a vivid memory of what it was like back then, the teachers serious and demanding, the kids focused and motivated, full of energy. Almost everybody played an instrument or went out for a sport. Nobody smoked in the bathroom; you could get suspended for making out in the hall. People walked faster in those days — at least that’s how she remembered it — and they always seemed to know exactly where they were going.

Jill opened her locker and grabbed her copy of Our Town, which she hadn’t even started, despite the fact that they’d been discussing it in English for the past three weeks. There were still ten minutes to go before the end of second period, and she would have been happy to plop down on the floor and at least skim the first few pages, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate, not with Jett Oristaglio, Mapleton High’s wandering troubadour, sitting directly across from her, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing “Fire and Rain” for the thousandth time. That song just gave her the creeps.

She thought about ducking into the library, but there wasn’t enough time to get anything done, so she figured she’d just head upstairs to English. On the way, she took a quick detour past Mr. Skandarian’s room, where her classmates were finishing up the Chem test.

She wasn’t sure what possessed her to look inside. The last thing she wanted was for Mr. S. to see her and realize that she wasn’t sick. That would totally blow any chance she had of getting him to let her take a makeup test. Luckily, he was filling in a Sudoku when she peeked through the window, completely absorbed in the little boxes.

It must have been a hard test. Albert Chin was finished, of course — he was messing with his iPhone to kill time — and Greg Wilcox had gone to sleep, but everybody else was still working, doing the kind of stuff you do when you’re trying to think and the clock is running out — lips were being bitten; hair was being wound around fingers; legs were bouncing up and down. Katie Brennan was scratching at her arm like she had a skin disease, and Pete Rodriguez kept tapping himself in the forehead with the eraser end of his pencil.

She only stood there for a minute or two, but even so, you might have expected someone to look up and see her, maybe smile or throw a quick wave. That’s what usually happened when somebody peered into a classroom during a test. But everybody just kept working or sleeping or spacing out. It was as if Jill no longer existed, as if all that remained of her was an empty desk in the second row, a memorial to the girl who used to sit there.

SPECIAL SOMEONE

TOM GARVEY DIDN’T HAVE TO ask why the girl was standing on his doorstep, suitcase in hand. For weeks now, he’d felt the hope leaving his body in a slow leak — it was a little like going broke — and now it was gone. He was emotionally bankrupt. The girl smiled wryly, as if she could read his thoughts.

“You Tom?”

He nodded. She handed him an envelope with his name written across the front.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re my new babysitter.”

He’d seen her before, but never up close, and she was even more beautiful than he’d realized — a tiny Asian girl, sixteen at most, with impossibly black hair and a perfect teardrop of a face. Christine, he remembered, the fourth bride. She let him stare for a while, then got tired of it.

“Here,” she said, pulling out her iPhone. “Why don’t you just take a picture?”

Two days later, the FBI and Oregon State Police arrested Mr. Gilchrest in what the TV news insisted on calling a “surprise early-morning raid,” even though it was no surprise to anyone, least of all Mr. Gilchrest himself. Ever since Anna Ford’s betrayal, he’d been warning his followers of dark times ahead, trying to convince them it was all for the best.

“Whatsoever happens to me,” he’d written in his last e-mail, “do not despair. It happens for a reason.”

Though he’d expected the arrest, Tom was taken aback by the severity of the charges — multiple counts of second-and third-degree rape and sodomy, as well as tax evasion and illegal transportation of a minor across state lines — and offended by the obvious pleasure the newscasters took in what they called “the spectacular downfall of the self-styled messiah,” the “shocking allegations” that left his “saintly reputation in tatters” and “fast-growing youth movement in disarray.” They kept showing the same unflattering video clip of a handcuffed Mr. Gilchrest being escorted into the courthouse in rumpled silk pajamas, his hair flattened on one side of his head, as if he’d just been hauled out of bed. The scroll bar at the bottom of the screen read: HOLY WAYNE? HOLY S**T! DISGRACED CULT LEADER BUSTED ON SEX RAP. FACES UP TO 75 YEARS IN PRISON.

There were four of them watching — Tom and Christine, and Tom’s housemates, Max and Luis. Tom didn’t know either of the guys very well — they’d just been rotated in from Chicago to assist him at the San Francisco Healing Hug Center — but from what he could tell, their reactions to the news were completely in character: sensitive Luis weeping softly, hotheaded Max shouting obscenities at the screen, insisting Mr. Gilchrest had been framed. For her part, Christine seemed oddly unruffled by the coverage, as if everything were unfolding according to plan. The only thing that bothered her was her husband’s pajamas.

“I told him not to wear those,” she said. “They make him look like Hugh Hefner.”

She got a little more animated when Anna Ford’s milkmaid face appeared on the screen. Anna was spiritual bride number six, and the only non-Asian girl in the bunch. She’d disappeared from the Ranch in late August, only to turn up a couple of weeks later on 60 Minutes, where she told the world about the harem of underaged girls who catered to Holy Wayne’s every need. She claimed to have been fourteen years old at the time of her marriage, a desperate runaway who’d been befriended by two nice guys at the Minneapolis bus station, given food and shelter, and then transported to the Gilchrest Ranch in southern Oregon. She must have made a good impression on the middle-aged Prophet; three days after her arrival, he slipped a ring on her finger and took her to bed.

“He’s not a messiah,” she said, in what became the defining sound bite of the scandal. “He’s just a dirty old man.”

“And you’re Judas,” Christine told the television. “Judas with a big fat ass.”

IT WAS all in ruins, everything Tom had worked for and hoped for over the past two and a half years, but for some reason he didn’t feel as heartbroken as he’d expected to. There was a definite sense of relief beneath the pain, the knowledge that the thing you’d been dreading had finally come to pass, that you no longer had to live in fear of it. Of course, there was a whole slew of new problems to worry about, but there would be time to deal with them later on.

He’d given his bed to Christine, so he stayed in the living room after everyone called it a night. Before turning off the lamp, he took out the picture of his Special Someone — Verbecki with the sparkler — and pondered it for a few seconds. For the first time since he could remember, he didn’t whisper his old friend’s name, nor did he make his nightly plea for the missing to return. What was the point? He felt like he’d just woken up from a sleep that had lasted way too long, and could no longer remember the dream that had detained him.

They’re gone, he thought. I’ve got to let them go.

THREE YEARS ago, when he first arrived at college, Tom had been just like everybody else — a normal American kid, a B+ student who wanted to major in business, pledge a cool frat, drink a ton of beer, and hook up with as many reasonably hot girls as possible. He’d felt homesick for the first couple of days, nostalgic for the familiar streets and buildings of Mapleton, his parents and sister, and all his old buddies, scattered to institutions of higher learning across the country, but he knew the sadness was temporary, and even kind of healthy. It bothered him when he met other freshmen who spoke about their hometowns, and sometimes even their families, with casual disdain, as if they’d spent the first eighteen years of their lives in prison and had finally busted out.

The Saturday after classes began, he got drunk and went to a football game with a big gang from his floor, his face painted half orange and half blue. All the students were concentrated in one section of the domed stadium, roaring and chanting like a single organism. It was exhilarating to melt into the crowd like that, to feel his identity dissolving into something bigger and more powerful. The Orange won, and that night, at a frat kegger, he met a girl whose face was painted the same as his, went home with her, and discovered that college life exceeded his highest expectations. He could still vividly remember the feeling of walking home from her dorm as the sun came up, his shoes untied, his socks and boxers missing in action, the spontaneous high five he exchanged with a guy who staggered past him on the quad like a mirror image, the smack of their palms echoing triumphantly in the early-morning silence.

A month later, it was all over. School was canceled on October 15th; they were given seven days to pack up their stuff and vacate the campus. That final week existed in his memory as a blur of baffled farewells — the dorms slowly emptying, the muffled sound of someone crying behind a closed door, the soft curses people uttered as they pocketed their phones. There were a few desperate parties, one of which ended in a sickening brawl, and a hastily arranged memorial service in the Dome, at which the Chancellor solemnly recited the names of the university’s victims of what people had just begun to call the Sudden Departure. The roll call included Tom’s Psych instructor and a girl from his English class who’d overdosed on sleeping pills after learning of the disappearance of her identical twin.

He hadn’t done anything wrong, but he remembered feeling a weird sense of shame — of personal failure — returning home so soon after he’d left, almost as if he’d flunked out or gotten expelled for disciplinary reasons. But there was comfort as well, the reassurance of returning to his family, finding them all present and accounted for, though his sister had apparently had a pretty close call. Tom asked her about Jen Sussman a couple of times, but she refused to talk, either because it was too upsetting — that was his mother’s theory — or because she was just sick of the whole subject.

“What do you want me to say?” she’d snapped at him. “She just fucking vaporized, okay?”

They hunkered down for a couple of weeks, just the four of them, watching DVDs and playing board games, anything to distract themselves from the hysterical monotony of the TV news — the obsessive repetition of the same few basic facts, the ever-rising tally of the missing, interview upon interview with traumatized eyewitnesses, who said things like He was standing right next to me…, or I just turned around for a second…, before their voices trailed off into embarrassed little chuckles. The coverage felt different from that of September 11th, when the networks had shown the burning towers over and over. October 14th was more amorphous, harder to pin down: There were massive highway pileups, some train wrecks, numerous small-plane and helicopter crashes — luckily, no big passenger jets went down in the United States, though several had to be landed by terrified copilots, and one by a flight attendant who’d become a folk hero for a little while, one bright spot in a sea of darkness — but the media was never able to settle upon a single visual image to evoke the catastrophe. There also weren’t any bad guys to hate, which made everything that much harder to get into focus.

Depending upon your viewing habits, you could listen to experts debating the validity of conflicting religious and scientific explanations for what was either a miracle or a tragedy, or watch an endless series of gauzy montages celebrating the lives of departed celebrities — John Mellencamp and Jennifer Lopez, Shaq and Adam Sandler, Miss Texas and Greta Van Susteren, Vladimir Putin and the Pope. There were so many different levels of fame, and they all kept getting mixed together — the nerdy guy in the Verizon ads and the retired Supreme Court Justice, the Latin American tyrant and the quarterback who’d never fulfilled his potential, the witty political consultant and that chick who’d been dissed on The Bachelor. According to the Food Network, the small world of superstar chefs had been disproportionately hard hit.

Tom didn’t mind being home at first. It made sense, at a time like that, for people to stick close to their loved ones. There was an almost unbearable tension in the air, a mood of anxious waiting, though no one seemed to know whether they were waiting for a logical explanation or a second wave of disappearances. It was as if the whole world had paused to take a deep breath and steel itself for whatever was going to happen next.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

As the weeks limped by, the sense of immediate crisis began to dissipate. People got restless hiding out in their houses, marinating in ominous speculation. Tom started heading out after dinner, joining a bunch of his high school friends at the Canteen, a dive bar in Stonewood Heights that wasn’t particularly diligent about ferreting out fake IDs. Every night was like a combination Homecoming Weekend and Irish wake, all sorts of unlikely people milling around, buying rounds and trading stories about absent friends and acquaintances. Three members of their graduating class were among the missing, not to mention Mr. Ed Hackney, their universally despised vice principal, and a janitor everybody called Marbles.

Nearly every time Tom set foot in the Canteen, a new piece got added to the mosaic of loss, usually in the form of some obscure person he hadn’t thought about for years: Dave Keegan’s Jamaican housekeeper, Yvonne; Mr. Boundy, a junior high substitute teacher whose bad breath was the stuff of legend; Giuseppe, the crazy Italian guy who used to own Mario’s Pizza Plus before the surly Albanian dude took over. One night in early December, Matt Testa sidled up while Tom was playing darts with Paul Erdmann.

“Hey,” he said, in that grim voice people used when discussing October 14th. “Remember Jon Verbecki?”

Tom tossed his dart a little harder than he’d meant to. It sailed high and wide, almost missing the board altogether.

“What about him?”

Testa shrugged in a way that made his reply unnecessary.

“Gone.”

Paul stepped up to the tape mark on the floor. Squinting like a jeweler, he zipped his dart right into the middle of the board, just an inch or so above the bullseye and a little to the left.

“Who’s gone?”

“This was before your time,” Testa explained. “Verbecki moved away the summer after sixth grade. To New Hampshire.”

“I knew him all the way back in preschool,” Tom said. “We used to have playdates. I think we went to Six Flags once. He was a nice kid.”

Matt nodded respectfully. “His cousin knows my cousin. That’s how I found out.”

“Where was he?” Tom asked. This was the obligatory question. It seemed important, though it was hard to say why. No matter where the person was when it happened, the location always struck him as eerie and poignant.

“At the gym. On one of the ellipticals.”

“Shit.” Tom shook his head, imagining a suddenly empty exercise machine, the handles and pedals still moving as if of their own accord, Verbecki’s final statement. “It’s hard to picture him at the gym.”

“I know.” Testa frowned, as if something didn’t add up. “He was kind of a pussy, right?”

“Not really,” Tom said. “I think he was just a little sensitive or something. His mother used to have to cut the labels out of his clothes so they wouldn’t drive him crazy. I remember in preschool he used to take his shirt off all the time because he said it itched him too much. The teachers kept telling him it was inappropriate, but he didn’t care.”

“That’s right.” Testa grinned. It was all coming back to him. “I slept over his house once. He went to bed with all the lights on, and this one Beatles song playing over and over. ‘Paperback Writer’ or some shit.”

“‘Julia,’” Tom said. “That was his magic song.”

“His what?” Paul fired off his last dart. It landed with an emphatic thunk, just below the bullseye.

“That’s what he called it,” Tom explained. “If ‘Julia’ wasn’t playing, he couldn’t go to sleep.”

“Whatever.” Testa didn’t appreciate the interruption. “He tried sleeping at my house a bunch of times, but it never worked. He’d roll out his sleeping bag, change into pj’s, brush his teeth, the whole nine yards. But then, just when we were about to go to bed, he’d lose it. His bottom lip would get all quivery and he’d be like, Dude, don’t be mad, but I gotta call my mom.”

Paul glanced over his shoulder as he extracted his darts from the board.

“Why’d they move?”

“Fuck if I know,” Testa said. “His dad probably got a new job or something. It was a long time ago. You know how it is — you swear you’re gonna keep in touch, and you do for a little while, and then you never see the guy again.” He turned to Tom. “You even remember what he looked like?”

“Kinda.” Tom closed his eyes, trying to picture Verbecki. “Sorta pudgy, blond hair with bangs. Really big teeth.”

Paul laughed. “Big teeth?”

“Beavery,” Tom explained. “He probably got braces right after he moved.”

Testa raised his beer bottle.

“Verbecki,” he said.

Tom and Paul clinked their bottles against his.

“Verbecki,” they repeated.

That was how they did it. You talked about the person, you drank a toast, and then you moved on. Enough people had disappeared that you couldn’t afford to get hung up on a single individual.

For some reason, though, Tom couldn’t get Jon Verbecki out of his mind. When he got home that night, he went up to the attic and looked through several boxes of old photographs, faded prints from the days before his parents owned a digital camera, back when they used to have to ship the film off to a mail-order lab for processing. His mother had been bugging him for years to get the pictures scanned, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.

Verbecki appeared in a number of photos. There he was at a school Activities Day, balancing an egg on a teaspoon. One Halloween, he was a lobster among superheroes and didn’t look too happy about it. He and Tom had been T-ball teammates; they sat beneath a tree, grinning with almost competitive intensity, wearing identical red hats and shirts that said SHARKS. He looked more or less as Tom remembered — blond and toothy, in any case, if not quite as pudgy.

One picture made a special impression. It was a close-up, taken at night, when they were six or seven years old. It must have been around the Fourth of July, because Verbecki had a lit sparkler in his hand, an overexposed cloud of fire that looked almost like cotton candy. It would have seemed festive, except that he was staring fearfully into the camera, like he didn’t think it was a very good idea, holding a sizzling metal wand so close to his face.

Tom wasn’t sure why he found the picture so intriguing, but he decided not to put it back in the box with the others. He brought it downstairs and spent a long time studying it before he fell asleep. It almost seemed like Verbecki was sending a secret message from the past, asking a question only Tom could answer.

IT WAS right around this time that Tom received a letter from the university informing him that classes would resume on February 1st. Attendance, the letter stressed, would not be mandatory. Any student who wished to opt out of this “Special Spring Session” could do so without suffering any financial or academic penalty.

“Our goal,” the Chancellor explained, “is to continue operating on a scaled-down basis during this time of widespread uncertainty, to perform our vital missions of teaching and research without exerting undue pressure on those members of our community who are unprepared to return at the present moment.”

Tom wasn’t surprised by this announcement. Many of his friends had received similar notifications from their own schools in recent days. It was part of a nationwide effort to “Jump-Start America” that had been announced by the President a couple of weeks earlier. The economy had gone into a tailspin after October 14th, with the stock market plunging and consumer spending falling off a cliff. Worried experts were predicting “a chain reaction economic meltdown” if something wasn’t done to halt the downward spiral.

“It’s been nearly two months since we suffered a terrible and unexpected blow,” the President said in his prime-time address to the nation. “Our shock and grief, while enormous, can no longer be an excuse for pessimism or paralysis. We need to reopen our schools, return to our offices and factories and farms, and begin the process of reclaiming our lives. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick, but we need to start now. Each and every one of us has a duty to stand up and do our part to get this country moving again.”

Tom wanted to do his part, but he honestly didn’t know if he was ready to go back to school. He asked his parents, but their opinions only mirrored the split in his own thinking. His mother thought he should stay home, maybe take some classes at community college, and then return to Syracuse in September, by which time everything would presumably be a lot clearer.

“We still don’t know what’s going on,” she told him. “I’d be a lot more comfortable if you were here with us.”

“I think you should go back,” his father said. “What’s the point of hanging around here doing nothing?”

“It’s not safe,” his mother insisted. “What if something happens?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just as safe there as it is here.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.

“Look,” his father said. “All I know is that if he stays here, he’s just gonna keep going out and getting drunk with his buddies every night.” He turned to Tom. “Am I wrong?”

Tom gave a shrug of nondenial. He knew he’d been drinking way too much and was beginning to wonder if he needed some kind of professional help. But there was no way to talk about his drinking without talking about Verbecki, and that was a subject he really didn’t feel like discussing with anyone.

“You think he’s gonna drink any less in college?” his mother asked. Tom found it both troubling and interesting to listen to his parents discuss him in the third person, as if he weren’t actually there.

“He’ll have to,” his father said. “He won’t be able to get drunk every night and keep up with his work.”

His mother started to say something, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. She looked at Tom, holding his gaze for a few seconds, making a silent plea for his support.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty confused.”

In the end, his decision was influenced less by his parents than his friends. One by one over the next few days, they told him that they would be heading back to their respective schools for second semester — Paul to FIU, Matt to Gettysburg, Jason to U. of Delaware. Without his buddies around, the idea of staying home lost a lot of its appeal.

His mother reacted stoically when he informed her of his decision. His father gave him a congratulatory slap on the shoulder.

“You’ll be fine,” he said.

The drive to Syracuse felt a lot longer in January than it had in September, and not just because of the intermittent snow squalls that blew across the highway in swirling gusts, turning the other vehicles into ghostly shadows. The mood in the car was oppressive. Tom couldn’t think of much to say, and his parents were barely speaking to each other. That was how it had been since he’d come home — his mother gloomy and withdrawn, brooding about Jen Sussman and the meaning of what had happened; his father impatient, grimly cheerful, a little too insistent that the worst was over and they needed to just get on with their lives. If nothing else, he thought, it would be a relief to get away from them.

His parents didn’t stay long after dropping him off. There was a big storm coming, and they wanted to get on the road before it hit. His mother handed him an envelope before leaving the dorm.

“It’s a bus ticket.” She hugged him with a tenacity that was almost alarming. “Just in case you change your mind.”

“I love you,” he whispered.

His father’s hug was quick, almost perfunctory, as if they’d be seeing each other again in a day or two.

“Have fun,” he said. “You only get one shot at college.”

DURING THE Special Spring Session, Tom pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Joining a frat was something he’d wanted to do for so long — in his mind, it was synonymous with college itself — that the process was well under way before he was able to admit that it no longer mattered to him in the least. When he tried to project himself into the future, to envision the life that awaited him at ATO — the big house on Walnut Place, the wild parties and nutty pranks, the late-night bull sessions with brothers who would go on to be his lifelong friends and allies — it all seemed hazy and unreal to him, images from a movie he’d seen a long time ago and whose plot he could no longer remember.

He could’ve withdrawn, of course, maybe rushed again in the fall when he felt better, but he decided to tough it out. He told himself that he didn’t want to bail out on Tyler Rucci, his floormate and pledge brother, but in his heart he knew that the stakes were higher than that. He’d pretty much stopped going to classes by the end of February — he was finding it impossible to concentrate on academics — so the pledge process was all he had left, his only real link to normal college life. Without it, he would’ve become one of those lost souls you saw all over campus that winter, pale, vampiry kids who slept all day and drifted from the dorm to the student center to Marshall Street at night, habitually checking their phones for a message that never seemed to come.

Another benefit of pledging was that it gave him something to talk about with his parents, who called almost every day to check up on him. He wasn’t a particularly good liar, so it helped to be able to say, We went on a scavenger hunt, or We had to cook breakfast in bed for the older brothers, and then serve it to them in flowery aprons, and to have details at the ready to back up these claims. It was a lot harder when his mother grilled him about his schoolwork, and he was forced to improvise about essays and exams and the brutal problem sets in Statistics.

“What’d you get on that paper?” she’d ask.

“Which paper?”

“Poli Sci. The one we talked about.”

“Oh, that one. Another B+.”

“So he liked the thesis?”

“He didn’t really say.”

“Why don’t you e-mail me the essay? I’d like to read it.”

“You don’t need to read it, Mom.”

“I’d like to.” She paused. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

Tom always insisted everything was fine — he was busy, making friends, keeping up a solid B average. Even when discussing the frat, he made sure to emphasize the positive, focusing on things like the weekday study groups and the all-night intra-frat karaoke blowout, while avoiding any mention of Chip Gleason, the only active ATO brother who’d gone missing on October 14th.

Chip loomed large around the frat house. There was a framed portrait of him in the main party room, and a scholarship fund dedicated to his memory. The pledges had been required to memorize all sorts of personal information about him: his birthday, the names of his family members, his top-ten movies and bands, and the complete list of all the girls he’d hooked up with in his sadly abbreviated life. That was the hard part — there were thirty-seven girlfriends in all, starting with Tina Wong in junior high and ending with Stacy Greenglass, the buxom Alpha Chi who’d been in bed with him on October 14th — riding him reverse cowgirl-style, if legend were to be believed — and who had to be hospitalized for several days as a result of the severe emotional trauma brought on by his sudden midcoitus departure. Some of the brothers told this story as if it were a funny anecdote, a tribute to the studliness of their beloved friend, but all Tom could think of was how awful it must have been for Stacy, the kind of thing you’d never recover from.

One night at a Tri Delt mixer, though, Tyler Rucci pointed out a hot sorority girl on the dance floor, grinding with a varsity lacrosse player. She was tanned and wearing an incredibly tight dress, leaning forward as she moved her ass in slow circles against her partner’s crotch.

“You know who that is?”

“Who?”

“Stacy Greenglass.”

Tom watched her dance for a long time — she looked happy, running her hands over her breasts and then down over her hips and thighs, making porn star faces for the benefit of her friends — trying to figure out what she knew that he didn’t. He was willing to accept the possibility that Chip hadn’t meant much to her. Maybe he was just a one-time hookup, or a casual friend with benefits. But still, he was a real person, someone who played an active and reasonably important part in her life. And yet here she was, just a few months after he’d disappeared, dancing at a party as though he’d never even existed.

It wasn’t that Tom disapproved. Far from it. He just couldn’t figure out how it was possible that Stacy could get over Chip while he remained haunted by Verbecki, a kid he hadn’t seen for years and probably wouldn’t have even recognized if they’d bumped into each other on October 13th.

But that was how it was. He thought about Verbecki all the time. If anything, his obsession had deepened since he’d returned to school. He carried that stupid picture — Little Kid with Sparkler — everywhere he went and looked at it dozens of times a day, chanting his old friend’s name in his head as though it were some kind of mantra: Verbecki, Verbecki, Verbecki. It was the reason he was flunking out, the reason he was lying to his parents, the reason he no longer painted his face blue and orange and screamed his head off at the Dome, the reason he could no longer imagine his own future.

Where the hell did you go, Verbecki?

A BIG part of the pledge process was getting to know the Older Brothers, convincing them that you were a good fit with ATO. There were poker nights and pizza lunches and marathon drinking games, a series of interviews masquerading as social events. Tom thought he was doing a decent job of hiding his obsession, impersonating a normal, well-adjusted freshman — the guy he should have been — until he was approached one night in the TV room by Trevor Hubbard, a.k.a. Hubbs, a junior who was the frat’s resident bohemian/intellectual. Tom was leaning against a wall, pretending to be interested in a Wii bowling match between two of his pledge brothers, when Hubbs suddenly appeared at his side.

“This is fucked,” he said in a low voice, nodding at the wide-screen Sony, the virtual ball knocking down the virtual pins, Josh Freidecker flipping a celebratory double bird at Mike Ishima. “All this fraternity bullshit. I don’t know how anybody stands it.”

Tom grunted ambiguously, not sure if this was a ploy designed to catch him in an act of disloyalty. Hubbs hardly seemed the type to play that sort of game, though.

“Come here,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

Tom followed him into the empty hallway. It was a weeknight, still pretty early, not much going on in the house.

“You feeling okay?” Hubbs asked him.

“Me?” Tom said. “I’m fine.”

Hubbs regarded him with a certain skeptical amusement. He was a small, wiry guy — an accomplished rock climber — with scraggly facial hair and a sour expression that was more a default mode than a reflection of his actual mood.

“You’re not depressed?”

“I don’t know.” Tom gave an evasive shrug. “A little, maybe.”

“And you really want to join this frat, live here with all these douchebags?”

“I guess. I mean, I thought I did. Everything’s just kinda fucked up right now. It’s hard to know what I want.”

“I hear you.” Hubbs nodded appreciatively. “I used to be pretty happy here myself. Most of the brothers are pretty cool.” He glanced left and right, then lowered his voice to a near whisper. “The only one I didn’t like was Chip. He was the biggest asshole in the whole house.”

Tom nodded cautiously, trying not to look too surprised. He’d only ever heard people say nice things about Chip Gleason — great guy, good athlete, six-pack abs, ladies’ man, natural leader.

“He kept a hidden camera in his bedroom,” Hubbs said. “Used to tape the girls he fucked, then show the videos down in the TV room. One girl was so humiliated she had to leave school. Good old Chip didn’t care. Far as he was concerned, she was just a stupid whore who got what she deserved.”

“That sucks.” Tom was tempted to ask the girl’s name — it must have been among those he’d memorized — but decided to let it pass.

Hubbs stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. There was a smoke detector up there, red light glowing.

“Like I said, Chip was a dick. I should be happy he’s gone, you know?” Hubbs’s eyes locked on Tom’s. They were wide and frightened, full of a desperation Tom had no trouble recognizing, since he saw it all the time in the bathroom mirror. “But I dream about that fucker every night. I’m always trying to find him. I’ll be running through a maze, screaming his name, or tiptoeing through a forest, looking behind every tree. It’s got to the point I don’t even want to go to sleep anymore. Sometimes I write him letters, you know, just telling him what’s going on around here. Last weekend, I got so hammered, I tried to get his name tattooed on my forehead. The tattoo guy wouldn’t do it — that’s the only reason I’m not walking around with Chip Fucking Gleason written on my face.” Hubbs looked at Tom. It almost felt like he was pleading. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

Tom nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

Hubbs’s face relaxed a little. “There’s this guy I’ve been reading about on the Web. He’s speaking at a church in Rochester on Saturday afternoon. I think he might be able to help us.”

“He’s a preacher?”

“Just a guy. He lost his son in October.”

Tom gave a sympathetic groan, but it didn’t mean anything. He was just being polite.

“We should go,” Hubbs said.

Tom was flattered by the invitation, but also a little scared. He had the feeling that Hubbs was a little unhinged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Saturday’s the hot dog — eating contest. The pledges are supposed to cook.”

Hubbs looked at Tom in amazement.

“A hot dog — eating contest? Are you fucking kidding me?”

TOM STILL marveled at the humble circumstances of his first encounter with Mr. Gilchrest. Later he would see the man speak in front of adoring crowds, but on that frigid March Saturday, no more than twenty people had gathered in an overheated church basement, small puddles of melted snow spreading out from each pair of shoes on the linoleum floor. Over time, the Holy Wayne movement would come to be associated primarily with young people, but that afternoon, the audience was mostly middle-aged or older. Tom felt out of place among them, as if he and Hubbs had wandered by mistake into a retirement planning seminar.

Of course, the man they’d come to see wasn’t famous yet. He was still, as Hubbs had said, “just a guy,” a grieving father who spoke to anyone who would listen, wherever they would have him — not just in houses of worship, but in senior centers, VFW halls, and private homes. Even the host of the event — a tall, slightly stooped, youngish man who introduced himself as Reverend Kaminsky — seemed a bit fuzzy about who Mr. Gilchrest was and what he was doing there.

“Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth installment of our Saturday lecture series, ‘The Sudden Departure from a Christian Perspective.’ Our guest speaker today, Wayne Gilchrest, hails from just down the road in Brookdale and comes highly recommended by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Finch.” The Reverend paused, in case anyone wanted to applaud for his esteemed colleague. “When I asked Mr. Gilchrest to provide a title for his lecture so I could list it on our website, he told me it was a work in progress. So I’m just as curious as all of you to hear what he has to say.”

People who only knew Mr. Gilchrest in his later, more charismatic incarnation wouldn’t have recognized the man who rose from a chair in the front row and turned to face the meager crowd. Holy Wayne’s future uniform consisted of jeans and T-shirts and studded leather wristbands — one reporter dubbed him the “Bruce Springsteen of cult leaders”—but back then he favored more formal attire, on that day an ill-fitting funeral suit that seemed to have been borrowed from a smaller, less powerful man. It looked uncomfortably tight across the chest and shoulders.

“Thank you, Reverend. And thanks, everybody, for coming out.” Mr. Gilchrest spoke in a gruff voice that radiated masculine authority. Later, Tom would learn that he drove a delivery van for UPS, but if he’d had to guess that afternoon, he would’ve pegged him for a police officer or high school football coach. He glanced at his host, frowning an insincere apology. “I guess I didn’t realize that I was supposed to be speaking from a Christian perspective. I’m really not sure what my perspective is.”

He began by passing out a flyer, one of those missing person notices you saw all over the place after October 14th, on telephone poles and supermarket corkboards. This one featured a color photograph of a skinny kid standing on a diving board, hugging himself against the cold. Beneath his crossed arms, his ribs were clearly visible; his legs jutted like sticks from billowy trunks that looked like they would have fit a grown man. He was smiling but his eyes seemed troubled; you got the feeling he didn’t relish the prospect of plunging into the dark water. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? The caption identified him as Henry Gilchrest, age eight. It included an address and phone number, along with an urgent plea for anyone who may have seen a child resembling Henry to contact his parents immediately. PLEASE!!! WE ARE DESPERATE FOR INFORMATION REGARDING HIS WHEREABOUTS.

“This is my son.” Mr. Gilchrest stared fondly at the flyer, almost as if he’d forgotten where he was. “I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it’s not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he’d fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you’ll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive.”

Tom glanced at Hubbs, curious to know if this was what they’d come for, a blue-collar guy reminiscing about his departed son. Hubbs just shrugged and turned back to Mr. Gilchrest.

“You can’t really tell from the picture, but Henry was a little small for his age. He was a good athlete, though. Lotta quickness. Good reflexes and hand-eye coordination. Soccer and baseball were his games. I tried to get him interested in basketball, but he didn’t go for it, maybe because of the height thing. We took him skiing a couple of times, but he wasn’t crazy about that, either. We didn’t push too hard. We figured he’d let us know when he was ready to try again. You know what I’m saying, right? Seemed like there was time enough for everything.”

In school, Tom couldn’t sit still for lectures. After the first few minutes, the professor’s words blurred into a meaningless drone, a sluggish river of pretentious phrases. He got jittery and lost his focus, becoming intensely and unhelpfully conscious of his physical self — twitchy legs, dry mouth, grumbly digestive organs. No matter how he arranged himself on his chair, the posture always struck him as awkward and uncomfortable. For some reason, though, Mr. Gilchrest had the opposite effect on him. Tom felt calm and lucid as he listened, almost bodiless. Settling back into his chair, he had a sudden bewildering vision of the hot dog — eating contest he’d blown off at the frat house, big guys cramming their faces full of meat and bread, cheeks bulging, their eyes full of fear and disgust.

“Henry was smart, too,” Mr. Gilchrest continued, “and I’m not just saying that. I’m a pretty good chess player and I’m telling you, he could give me a run for my money by the time he was seven. You should have seen the look on his face when he played. He got real serious, like you could see the wheels turning in his head. Sometimes I made boneheaded moves to keep him in the game, but that just ticked him off. He’d be like, Come on, Dad. You did that on purpose. He didn’t want to be patronized, but he didn’t want to lose, either.”

Tom smiled, remembering a similar father-son dynamic from his own childhood, a weird mixture of competition and encouragement, worship and resentment. He felt a brief stab of tenderness, but the sensation was muffled somehow, as if his father were an old friend with whom he’d fallen out of touch.

Mr. Gilchrest pondered the flyer again. When he looked up, his face seemed naked, utterly defenseless. He took a deep breath, as if he were preparing to go underwater.

“I’m not gonna say much about what it was like after he left. To tell the truth, I barely remember those days. It’s a blessing, I think, like the traumatic amnesia people get after a car accident or major surgery. I can tell you one thing, though. I was awful to my wife in those first few weeks. Not that there was anything I could’ve done to make her feel better — there was no such thing as feeling better back then. But what I did, I made things worse. She needed me, and I couldn’t say a kind word, couldn’t even look at her sometimes. I started sleeping on the couch, sneaking out in the middle of the night and driving around for hours without telling her where I was going or when I’d be back. If she called, I wouldn’t answer my phone.

“I guess in some way I blamed her. Not for what happened to Henry — I knew that was nobody’s fault. I just … I didn’t mention this before, but Henry was an only child. We wanted to have more, but my wife had a cancer scare when he was two, and the doctors recommended a hysterectomy. Seemed like a no-brainer at the time.

“After we lost Henry, I kind of got obsessed with the idea that we needed to have another kid. Not to replace him — I’m not crazy like that — but just to start over, you know? I had it in my head that that was the only way we could live again, but it was impossible, because of her, because she was physically incapable of bearing me another child.

“I decided that I would leave her. Not right away, but in a few months, when she was stronger and people wouldn’t judge me so harshly. It was a secret I had, and it made me feel guilty, and somehow I blamed her for that, too. It was a feedback loop, and it just kept getting worse. But then, one night, my son came to me in a dream. You know how sometimes you see people in dreams, and it’s not really them, but somehow it is them? Well, this wasn’t like that. This was my son, clear as day, and he said, Why are you hurting my mother? I denied it, but he just shook his head, like he was disappointed in me. You need to help her.

“I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it had been weeks since I’d touched my wife. Not just sexually — I mean I literally hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t stroked her hair or squeezed her hand or patted her on the back. And she was crying all the time.” Mr. Gilchrest’s voice cracked with emotion. He wiped the back of his hand almost angrily across his mouth and nose. “So the next morning I got up and gave her a hug. I put my arms around her and told her I loved her and didn’t blame her for anything, and it was almost like saying it made it true. And then something else came into my mind. I don’t know where it came from. I said, Give me your pain. I can take it.” He paused, looking at his audience with an almost apologetic expression. “This is the part that’s hard to explain. Those words were barely out of my mouth when I felt a weird jolt in my stomach. My wife let out a gasp and went limp in my arms. And I knew right then, as clearly as I’d ever known anything, that an enormous amount of pain had been transferred from her body into mine.

“I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you. I’m just telling you what happened. I’m not saying I fixed her or cured her, or anything like that. To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn’t hurt me at all.”

A change seemed to come over Mr. Gilchrest. He stood up straighter and placed his hand over his heart.

“That was the day I learned who I am,” he declared. “I’m a sponge for pain. I just soak it up and it makes me stronger.”

The smile that spread across his face was so joyful and self-assured he seemed almost like a different person.

“I don’t care if you believe me. All I ask is that you give me a chance. I know you’re all hurting. You wouldn’t be here on a Saturday afternoon if you weren’t. I want you to let me hug you and take away your pain.” He turned to Reverend Kaminsky. “You first.”

The minister was clearly reluctant, but he was the host and couldn’t see any polite way out. He rose from his chair and approached Mr. Gilchrest, casting a skeptical sidelong glance at the audience on the way, letting them know he was just being a good sport.

“Tell me,” Mr. Gilchrest said. “Is there a special someone you’ve been missing? A person whose absence seems especially troubling to you? Anyone at all. Doesn’t have to be a close friend or member of your family.”

Reverend Kaminsky seemed surprised by the question. After a brief hesitation he said, “Eva Washington. She was a classmate of mine in divinity school. I didn’t know her that well, but…”

“Eva Washington.” Mr. Gilchrest stepped forward, the sleeves of his suit jacket creeping toward his elbows as he spread his arms. “You miss Eva.”

At first it seemed like an unremarkable social hug, the kind people exchange all the time. But then, with startling abruptness, Reverend Kaminsky’s knees buckled and Mr. Gilchrest grunted, almost as if he’d been punched in the gut. His face tightened into a grimace, then relaxed.

“Wow,” he said. “That was a lot.”

The two men held each other for a long time. When they separated, the Reverend was sobbing, one hand clamped over his mouth. Mr. Gilchrest turned to the audience.

“Single file,” he said. “I have time for everybody.”

Nothing happened for a moment or two. But then a heavyset woman in the third row stood up and made her way to the front. Before long, all but a few members of the audience had left their seats.

“No pressure,” Mr. Gilchrest assured the holdouts. “I’m here when you’re ready.”

Tom and Hubbs were near the end of the line, so they were familiar with the process by the time their turns arrived. Hubbs went first. He told Mr. Gilchrest about Chip Gleason, and Mr. Gilchrest repeated Chip’s name before pulling Hubbs against his chest in a strong, almost paternal embrace.

“It’s okay,” Mr. Gilchrest told him. “I’m right here.”

Several seconds passed before Hubbs let out a yelp and Mr. Gilchrest staggered backward, his eyes widening with alarm. Tom thought they were about to crash onto the floor like wrestlers, but somehow they managed to remain upright, performing a precarious dance until they regained their balance. Mr. Gilchrest laughed and said, “Easy, partner,” patting Hubbs gently on the back before letting him go. Hubbs looked wobbly and dazed as he returned to his seat.

Mr. Gilchrest smiled as Tom stepped forward. Up close his eyes seemed brighter than Tom had expected, as if he were glowing from within.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Tom Garvey.”

“Who’s your special someone, Tom?”

“Jon Verbecki. This kid I used to know.”

“Jon Verbecki. You miss Jon.”

Mr. Gilchrest opened his arms. Tom stepped forward, into his strong embrace. Mr. Gilchrest’s torso felt broad and sturdy, but also soft, unexpectedly yielding. Tom felt something loosen inside of him.

“Give it here,” Mr. Gilchrest whispered in his ear. “It doesn’t hurt me.”

Later, in the car, neither Tom nor Hubbs had much to say about what they’d felt in the church basement. They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.

SHORTLY AFTER midterms, Tom received a flurry of increasingly agitated voice, text, and e-mail messages from his parents, imploring him to contact them immediately. From what he could gather, the university had sent them some sort of formal warning that he was in danger of failing all his classes.

He didn’t respond for a few days, hoping the delay would give them time to cool off, but their attempts to reach him only grew more frantic and aggressive. Finally, unnerved by their threats to alert the campus police, cancel his credit card, and cut off his cell phone service, he gave in and called them back.

“What the hell’s going on up there?” his father demanded.

“We’re worried about you,” his mother cut in, speaking on a separate handset. “Your English teacher hasn’t seen you in weeks. And you didn’t even take your Poli Sci exam, the one you said you got a B on.”

Tom winced. It was embarrassing to be caught in a lie, especially one so big and stupid. Unfortunately, all he could think to do was lie again.

“That was my bad. I overslept. I was too embarrassed to tell you.”

“That’s not gonna cut it,” his father said. “You know how much it costs for one semester of college?”

Tom was surprised by the question, and a bit relieved. His parents had money. It was a lot easier to apologize for wasting some of it than to explain what he’d been doing for the past two months.

“I know it’s expensive, Dad. I really don’t take it for granted.”

“That’s not the issue,” his mother said. “We’re happy to pay for your college. But something’s wrong with you. I can hear it in your voice. We should never have let you go back there.”

“I’m fine,” Tom insisted. “It’s just that the frat stuff’s been taking up way more of my time than I thought it would. Hell Week’s the end of this month, and then everything’ll get back to normal. If I work hard, I’m pretty sure I can pass all my classes.”

He heard an odd silence at the other end of the connection, as if each of his parents was waiting for the other one to speak.

“Honey,” his mother said softly. “It’s too late for that.”

AT THE frat house that night, Tom told Hubbs that he was withdrawing from school. His parents were coming on Saturday to take him home. They had his whole life figured out — a full-time job at his father’s warehouse, and two sessions a week with a therapist who specialized in young adults with grief disorders.

“Apparently I have a grief disorder.”

“Welcome to the club,” Hubbs told him.

Tom hadn’t mentioned it to his parents, but he’d already seen a psychologist at the University Health Service, a mustachioed Middle Eastern guy with watery eyes who’d informed him that his obsession with Verbecki was just a defense mechanism, and a common one at that, a smoke screen to distract him from more serious questions and troubling emotions. This theory made no sense to Tom — what good was a defense mechanism if it fucked up your whole life? What the hell was it defending you from?

“Damn,” said Hubbs. “What are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t go back home. Not right now.”

Hubbs looked worried. The two of them had grown closer in the past couple of weeks, bonding over their shared fascination with Mr. Gilchrest. They’d attended two more of his lectures, each with an audience double the size of the previous one. The most recent had been at Keuka College, and it had been thrilling to see the way he connected with a young audience. The hugging session lasted almost two hours; when it was over, he was dripping wet, barely able to stand, a fighter who’d gone the distance.

“I have some friends who live off campus,” Hubbs told him. “If you want, you can probably crash there for a few days.”

Tom packed his things, drained his bank account, and slipped out of the dorm on Friday night. When his parents showed up the next day, all they found were some books, a disconnected printer, and an unmade bed, along with a letter in which Tom told them a little about Mr. Gilchrest and apologized for letting them down. He told them that he would be traveling for a while, and promised to keep in touch via e-mail.

“I’m sorry,” he wrote. “This is a really confusing time for me. But there are some things I need to figure out on my own, and I hope you’ll respect my decision.”

HE STAYED with Hubbs’s buddies through the end of the semester, then sublet their apartment when they headed home for summer vacation. Hubbs moved in with him; they got hired as detailers at a car dealership and did volunteer work for Mr. Gilchrest in their spare time, passing out leaflets, setting up folding chairs, collecting addresses for an e-mail list, whatever he needed.

That summer things really started to take off. Someone posted a clip of Mr. Gilchrest on YouTube — it was tagged I AM A SPONGE FOR YOUR PAIN — and it went viral. The crowds at his lectures grew bigger, the invitations to speak more frequent. By September, he was renting a mothballed Episcopal church in Rochester, holding marathon Hugfests every Saturday and Sunday morning. Tom and Hubbs sometimes manned the merch table in the lobby, selling lecture DVDs, T-shirts — the most popular one said GIVE IT TO ME on the front, and I CAN TAKE IT on the back — and a self-published paperback memoir entitled A Father’s Love.

Mr. Gilchrest traveled a lot that fall — it was the first anniversary of the Sudden Departure — giving lectures all over the country. Tom and Hubbs were among the volunteers who drove him to and from the airport, getting to know him as a person, gradually earning his trust. When the organization began expanding that spring, Mr. Gilchrest asked the two of them to run the Boston chapter, organizing and promoting a multi-campus speaking tour and doing whatever else they saw fit to increase awareness among the local college population of what he’d begun calling the Healing Hug Movement. It was exhilarating to be given so much responsibility, to have gotten in on the ground floor of a phenomenon that had taken off so unexpectedly — like working at an Internet start-up back in the day, Tom thought — but also a little dizzying, everything growing so quickly, shooting off in so many different directions at once.

During that first summer in Boston, Tom and Hubbs began hearing disturbing rumors from people they knew back at the Rochester headquarters. Mr. Gilchrest was changing, they said, letting the fame go to his head. He’d bought a fancy car, started wearing different clothes, and was paying a little too much attention to the adoring young women and teenage girls who lined up to hug him. He’d apparently begun calling himself “Holy Wayne” and hinting about some sort of special relationship with God. On a couple of occasions, he had referred to Jesus as his brother.

When he arrived in September to give his first lecture to a packed house at Northeastern, Tom could see that it was true. Mr. Gilchrest was a new man. The heartbroken father in the shabby suit was gone, replaced by a rock star in sunglasses and a tight black T-shirt. When he greeted Tom and Hubbs there was an imperious coolness in his voice, as if they were simply hired help, rather than devoted followers. He instructed them to give backstage passes to any cute girls who seemed promising, “especially if they’re Chinese or Indian or like that.” Onstage, he didn’t just offer hugs and sympathy; he spoke of accepting a God-given mission to fix the world, to somehow undo the damage caused by the Sudden Departure. The details remained vague, he explained, not because he was holding out, but because he himself didn’t know them all yet. They were coming to him piecemeal, in a series of visionary dreams.

“Stay tuned,” he told the audience. “You’ll be the first to know. The world is depending on us.”

Hubbs was troubled by what he saw that night. He thought Mr. Gilchrest had gotten drunk on his own Kool-Aid, that he’d morphed from an inspirational figure to the CEO of a messianic Cult of Personality (it wasn’t the last time Tom would hear this accusation). After a few days of soul-searching, Hubbs told Tom that he was done, that while he loved Mr. Gilchrest, he couldn’t in good conscience continue to serve Holy Wayne. He said he would be leaving Boston, heading back to his family on Long Island. Tom tried to talk to him out of it, but Hubbs was beyond persuasion.

“Something bad’s gonna happen,” he said. “I can feel it.”

IT TOOK a whole year for Hubbs to be proven right, and during that time, Tom remained a loyal follower and valued employee of the Healing Hug Movement, helping to launch new field offices in Chapel Hill and Columbus before landing a plum job at the San Francisco Center, training new teachers to run Special Someone Meditation Workshops. Tom loved the city and enjoyed meeting a batch of new students every month. He had a few affairs — the novice teachers were mostly women — but not nearly as many as he could have. He was a different person now, more self-contained and contemplative, a far cry from the frat boy with the painted face, out to get laid by any means necessary.

On paper, the movement was thriving — membership was growing steadily, money was pouring in, the media was paying attention — but Mr. Gilchrest’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. He was arrested in Philadelphia after being found in a hotel room with a fifteen-year-old girl. The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence — the girl insisted that they were “just talking”—but Mr. Gilchrest’s reputation suffered a serious blow. Several of his college lectures were canceled, and for a while, Holy Wayne became a punch line on late-night TV, the most recent incarnation of that age-old scoundrel, the Horny Man of God.

Stung by the ridicule, Mr. Gilchrest abandoned his headquarters in Upstate New York and moved to a ranch in a remote part of southern Oregon, far from prying eyes. Tom had visited only once, in mid-June, to take part in a gala three-day celebration of what would have been Henry Gilchrest’s eleventh birthday. The accommodations weren’t much — the hundred or so guests had to sleep in tents and share a few nasty Porta-Johns — but it was an honor just to be invited, a sign of membership in the inner circle of the organization.

For the most part, Tom liked what he saw — big weathered house, swimming pool, working farm, stables. Only two things bothered him: the contingent of gun-toting security guards patrolling the grounds — there had supposedly been some death threats against Holy Wayne — and the inexplicable presence of six hot teenage girls, five of them Asian, who were living in the main house with Mr. Gilchrest and his wife, Tori. The girls — they were jokingly referred to as the “Cheerleading Squad”—spent their days sunning themselves beside the pool while Tori Gilchrest power-walked by herself around the outskirts of the property, breathing forcefully through her nose while performing an elaborate series of arm exercises with light dumbbells.

Tom didn’t think she looked too happy, but on the final night of the party, Tori was the one who stepped up to the microphone on the outdoor stage and introduced the girls as Mr. Gilchrest’s “spiritual brides.” She admitted that it was an unconventional arrangement, but she wanted the community to know that her husband had asked for — and received — her blessing for each and every one of these new marriages. The girls — they were standing behind her, smiling nervously in their pretty dresses — were all sweet and modest and surprisingly mature for their ages, not to mention completely adorable. As everyone knew, she herself could no longer bear children, and this was a problem, because God had recently revealed to Holy Wayne that it was his destiny to father a child who would repair the broken world. One of these girls — Iris or Cindy or Mei or Christine or Lam or Anna — would be the mother of this miracle child, but only time would tell which one. Mrs. Gilchrest concluded by saying that the love between her and Holy Wayne remained as strong and vibrant as it had been on their wedding day. She assured everyone that they continued to live together very happily as husband and wife, partners and best friends forever.

“Whatever my husband does,” she said, “I support him a hundred and ten percent and I hope you will, too!”

There was a roar from the crowd as Mr. Gilchrest bounded up the steps and made his way across the stage to present his wife with a bouquet of roses.

“Isn’t she the greatest?” he asked. “Am I the luckiest guy in the world or what?”

The spiritual brides began to applaud as Mr. Gilchrest kissed his legal wife, and the crowd followed suit. Tom did his best to clap along with everyone else, but his hands felt huge and leaden, so heavy he could barely pry them apart.

CHRISTINE SAID she was bored, trapped in the house all day like a prisoner, so Tom took her for a whirlwind tour of the city. He was glad for an excuse to get away from the office. It was like a funeral in there — no seminars in session, nothing to do except sit around with Max and Luis, answering e-mails and the occasional phone call, parroting the talking points they’d been given by headquarters: The charges are bogus; Holy Wayne is innocent until proven guilty; an organization is bigger than one man; our faith remains unshakable.

It was a classic San Francisco day, cool and bright, milky morning fog surrendering reluctantly to a clear blue sky. They did the usual stuff — cable car and Fisherman’s Wharf, Coit Tower and North Beach, Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park — Tom playing the role of jovial guide, Christine chuckling at his lame jokes, grunting politely at his half-remembered facts and recycled anecdotes, just as happy as he was to think about something besides Mr. Gilchrest for a while.

He was surprised at how well they were getting along. Back at the house, she’d been a bit of a problem, a little too interested in pulling rank, reminding everyone of her exalted status within the organization. Nothing was good enough — the futon was lumpy, the bathroom was gross, the food tasted weird. But the fresh air brought out a previously concealed sweetness in her, a bouncy teenage energy that had been hidden beneath the regal attitude. She dragged him into vintage clothing stores, apologized to homeless guys for her lack of spare change, and stopped every couple of blocks to gaze down at the bay and pronounce it awesome.

Christine kept moving in and out of focus on him. Yes, she was a visiting dignitary — Mr. Gilchrest’s wife or whatever — but she was also just a kid, younger than his own sister and a lot less worldly, a small-town Ohio girl, who, until she ran away from home, had never been to a city bigger than Cleveland. But not really like his sister, either, because people didn’t stop and stare at Jill when she walked down the street, tripped up by her unearthly beauty, trying to figure out if she was famous, if they’d seen her on TV or something. He wasn’t sure how to treat Christine, if he should think of himself as a personal assistant or a surrogate big brother, or maybe just a helpful friend, a caring, slightly older guy showing her around an unfamiliar metropolis.

“I had a nice day,” she told him over a late-afternoon snack at Elmore’s, a café on Cole Street that was full of Barefoot People, hippies with bullseyes painted on their foreheads. The Bay Area was their spiritual homeland. “It’s good to be out of the house.”

“Anytime,” he said. “I’m happy to do it.”

“Sooo.” Her voice was low, slightly flirtatious, as if she suspected him of withholding good news. “Have you heard anything?”

“About what?”

“You know. When he’s getting out. When I can go back.”

“Back where?”

“To the Ranch. I really miss it.”

Tom wasn’t sure what to tell her. She’d seen the same TV reports he had. She knew that Mr. Gilchrest had been denied bail, and that the authorities were playing hardball, seizing the organization’s assets, arresting several top and midlevel people, squeezing them for damaging information. The FBI and State Police made no secret of the fact that they were actively searching for the underage girls Mr. Gilchrest claimed to have married — not because they’d done anything wrong, but because they were victims of a serious crime, endangered minors in need of medical care and psychological counseling.

“Christine,” he said, “you can’t go back there.”

“I have to,” she told him. “It’s where I live.”

“They’ll make you testify.”

“No, they won’t.” She sounded defiant, but he could see the doubt in her eyes. “Wayne said everything would be okay. He’s got really good lawyers.”

“He’s in big trouble, Christine.”

“They can’t put him in jail,” she insisted. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

Tom didn’t argue; there was no point. When Christine spoke again, her voice was small and frightened.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “Who’s gonna take care of me?”

“You can stay with us for as long as you want.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

This didn’t seem like the right time to tell her that he didn’t have any money, either. He and Max and Luis were technically volunteers, donating their time to the Healing Hug Movement in exchange for room and board and a paltry stipend. The only cash in his pocket had come from the envelope Christine had handed him when she’d arrived, two hundred dollars in twenties, the most money he’d seen in a long time.

“What about your family?” he asked. “Is that a possibility?”

“My family?” The idea seemed funny to her. “I can’t go back to my family. Not like this.”

“Like what?”

She tucked her chin, examining the front of her yellow T-shirt, as if searching for a stain. She had narrow shoulders and very small breasts, hardly there at all.

“Didn’t they tell you?” She ran her palm over her flat belly, smoothing the wrinkles from her shirt.

“Tell me what?”

When she looked up, her eyes were shining.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. He could hear the pride in her voice, a dreamy sense of wonder. “I’m the One.”