Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock(34)

Thinking about Lauren praying for me every day helped a lot at first; it really did.

But then after a few days, it stopped working—I know because I started to feel like I really wanted to kill Asher Beal again—which made me wonder if she had quit praying, and then as my desire to kill amplified, I convinced myself she definitely had.





TWENTY-THREE


Just like I’d hoped, after school today, when I arrive at our town’s subway station, I find Lauren handing out tracts, or rather holding the tracts out to everyone who passes by and doesn’t say a word to her or even give her a glance.

I wonder what crazy bit of propaganda she’s peddling today and what scary pictures are inside—hell flames and bloody saviors and all sorts of Christian gore.

I didn’t come here to mess with Lauren’s head or argue with her about religion or logic or ask for favors or anything else.

I just came to say good-bye.

Lauren’s cut her hair into bangs that hang out under the home-knit beret-type hat she’s got on. A little curtain of blond shields her forehead. The hat’s so homely and old-ladyish that it makes me crush on52 Lauren again so much—even if she did stop praying for me.

It’s like she’s not even aware that she’s so horribly out of fashion. She’s not wearing the hat in any ironic way, like some of the black-nail-polish girls in my high school would. And Lauren’s also got on this off-white jacket that goes down to her knees and from far away makes her look like she’s wearing a robe—like the stereotypical angel a child would draw.

God, she looks perfect.

And no one is paying her any attention but me.

Since I’ve been watching her, I’d say at least thirty people have passed and she’s extended her mitten-clutched pamphlet to every single one and yet no one has even glanced at her.

I still think the idea of god is bullshit, obviously, but I have to tell you, the one thing I admire about Lauren is that she’s not out here because she wants to be right or righteous or make people feel bad about what they already believe; she’s not really interested in arguing with anyone or anything like that—and I’ll admit that maybe subconsciously she needs to prove that her ideas are more important than the ideas of others, but she also really worries that everyone is literally going to burn in hell forever and ever and she doesn’t want that to happen to anyone at all. It’s like she’s living in a fairy tale and she’s desperately trying to keep the big bad wolf from devouring us or blowing down our houses. I love her for at least caring about strangers—for at least trying to save people, even if the threat she perceives isn’t real.

When I approach her, she doesn’t see me at first.

“Excuse me, miss,” I say, trying to do Bogart again. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me how to make Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior, would you? Because I’ve been—”

“Stop making fun of me, please, Leonard,” she says as five suits pass by her outstretched hand without taking a tract.

“How many people have you saved today?” I ask just to make conversation.

“Why is there no hair hanging down from inside that hat?” she says, which makes me smile, because she noticed I cut it off.

“Got in a fight with some scissors. Have you been praying for me like you said you would?”

“Every day,” she says in a way that makes me believe her.

It’s depressing, because if she is telling the truth—considering what I’m about to do—it means prayer doesn’t work after all.

“You know, I saw this show on TV and it was all about how maybe aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago and gave humans information that we weren’t yet ready to fathom—like space travel—and so we maybe made religion out of those ideas, like metaphors to explain what the aliens had told us. Jesus ascending into the heavens. Promising to return again. That sounds like space travel, right?”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, they suggested that prayer was a form of trying to communicate with these aliens. And they said that Indians wore feathers and kings wore crowns as antennas, sort of.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just because I want to do something nice before I kill Asher Beal and off myself, I say, “Well, the important thing is that they kept discussing the universality of prayer all over the world and even used scientific instruments to measure the energy that many people praying together creates, suggesting that prayer can be scientifically detected, that it actually changes our surroundings by manipulating electrons or something, and maybe it even helps—regardless of whether we’re really communicating with someone, be it a god or aliens or even if we are just meditating. Praying helps, or at least that’s what the show suggested. The power of prayer may be real.”

“It IS real,” she says, and starts to turn red. She really looks pissed off. “God hears all of our prayers. Prayer is very powerful.”

“I know. I know,” I say, realizing that she has no idea what I’m talking about and, worse yet, she won’t allow herself to even consider what I’m saying, because it would ruin the illusions she has to cling to if she is to get through her six mandatory weekly unsuccessful hours of trying to convert subway riders to Christianity.