Excerpt.

A block away, a feminine voice called me from behind. "Hey, you!"

I turned and the girl from earlier stood before me. She wore tight black jeans and a black hoodie over a crimson shirt. Her clothes matched her hair, I noticed. "Give me your hand," she said.

"What?" I responded. She took my hand anyway and inspected it.

"The burn isn't too bad. It should clear up in a few days. You know you're not supposed to handle dry ice without gloves, right?"

"Gloves would have killed the effect. Besides, the pain helped sell it."

The girl nodded, her deep brown eyes keeping contact with mine. "Paul deserved that; although I doubt you knew that. Were you really just trying to freak out the Christian kids?"

"Only as a last resort. I was really looking for information, but my experiences with the faithful haven't always been pleasant. I figured an ace up my sleeve might by be in order."

"Or dry ice in your pocket? You should take that out, by the way. Crystals are forming."
I looked down, and sure enough, moisture condensed into ice particles on the leather. "Good call."

I pulled the paper sack out of my pocket and looked for a garbage can to stash it. The girl of black and red pointed to a puddle of mud. "Dump the ice in here. We'll dump the wrapping later."

I did as told and we watched for a minute as the dry ice sublimated from solid to gas with no intermediate step. The vapor rose like a sudden fog. "I guess there was something of the spirit of perverseness in my plan," I said.

"Just so long as you don't own a black cat named Pluto, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of perversity."

"Not what I thought to hear from that lot, back there. Aren't they going to shun you for coming after me?"

"Some of them already do, Paul especially. Look, I want to talk to you. I'll let you buy me a cup of coffee at the café below your office."

That stopped me. "You know who I am?"

"I know a lot. Come, buy me coffee."

She remained silent for the four blocks to my office. We stepped into Reel Shadows. I ordered an iced mocha for myself, while the girl opted for a steaming cup of house blend with three sugars and just enough cream to turn the coffee into a swirl of light and dark. We sat in the bricked patio area between the sidewalk and the café, surrounded by tall concrete support columns. One table over, Justine, a tall, curvaceous woman with onyx hair and vine tattoos encircling her forearms dangled a cigarette from her lips and expounded on the genius of Gatsby to the rest of her urban bohemian court. She pointedly ignored me. We went out twice before she introduced me to her boyfriend, a limp wrist artiste with a horsy face and a few camera lenses. Then she tried to get a temporary restraining order, swearing that my coming to work each day constituted stalking her. Her actions could have lost me everything. Fortunately, the judge, who had handled quite a few stalking cases in her time, all but ripped Justine a new one for wasting the court's time and for denigrating the millions of women each year who were in actual fear for their lives.

I focused, instead, on my young companion. I pegged her as nineteen or twenty. "So," I finally said. "You know me from where?"

"Couple of answers to that. I've seen you around. I'm a student at State, and you've hardly left there, have you? Also, my sister was Natasha Medici."

I nodded my head. Natasha Medici was my year at State. We'd been in a couple general ed classes together. I even asked her out twice. She was the South Bay Slasher's first victim. I had arrived early for a 9AM lecture with my friends Seth and Jason, and found Natasha at the bottom of the auditorium, stripped and gutted and pinned to the table like a frog waiting for dissection. This girl couldn't have been out of middle school at the time. "I'm so sorry," I said.
"I remember when you and your friends caught the guy. I so wanted to thank you, but my mom wouldn't hear of it. She wanted to stick her head in the sand, so she started digging in with beer bottles and bongs," she said. "I'm Anastasia, by the way, to rhyme with a throat exam." She repeated her name, so I could catch the ah sounds throughout.

I sipped at the mocha. There wasn't enough sugar and it had a bitter undercurrent. "Is that when you found religion, with you sister?" I asked.

"No, that's when I found my mom's beer and her stash. By the time I was in high school, I was smoking anything I could get. Getting high seemed the best way to dull the pain."

"And did it?"

"No, of course not."

"And does religion dull the pain?"

"Yes."

"See, that's what I don't get," I said, sensing my high horse waiting for me to mount. "I'm no stranger to loss and the pain that comes with it. It's always been my understanding, though, that pain needs to be worked through and dealt with. We need to fill the holes ourselves, and not hope for some holy placebo to patch over them with sunshine and prayers. Faith born out of despair seems like another easy solution, like drugs and drinking and sex and video games, just another escape from dealing."

Anastasia nodded and sipped at her house blend. An off-white film of house blend coated her upper lip. She licked it slowly with the tip of her tongue. "What did you want to know about Haven?"

"I'm mostly interested in Steve Rodgers."

"Steve's a good guy. He's severely messed up, to be sure, but a good guy nonetheless. He's certainly stretching the definition of youth for youth club, but he's mostly harmless and helps maintain our LAN."

"Remember, forty is the cut off for youthful indiscretions. Steve's got more than a full decade of youth left."

Anastasia chuckled before continuing. "Steve's even donated equipment, cables, hubs, routers, whenever his company upgrades, and they apparently upgrade often."

"And the fact that he's gay?"

"Actually, I'd call him painfully asexual. He's obviously attracted to men, but as far as I can tell, he's been living a monk-like existence. As for your question, attitudes vary. You know Paulie's position. Luke's sexuality is best described as confused, and so he and Steve get along well -- nothing sexual, just mutual appreciation of each other's agony. The majority take the hate the sin love the sinner route. Most of them go to Sanguine Cross twice a week for services and prayer groups."

"And you don't?"

"Don't let it out, but I've been secretly attending services at the UU church downtown. And before you ask, yes I'm a born again. I think of myself as a non-denominational born again Christian, and yes I feel his holy light inside me, but the importance of non-denomination is that I'm not following any specific church. The Unitarians accept that of me. It's hard for me to find acceptance anywhere."

I noticed Justine at the other table, gesticulating wildly while making sidewise glances at me. "And at Haven?"

Anastasia snorted. "They tolerate me because I helped found the place. I think the lot of them needs to get laid, Paulie especially. Although, I don't even think he knows what sex really is. Don't know that he even masturbates."

I gave a start and almost spit out my coffee. "And you, I take it, have had sex?"

"I hope so, for my son's sake."

"Sure it wasn't an immaculate conception?"

"Nothing done in the back of a Hyundai can be called immaculate. You said earlier that faith born out of despair was suspect. When I was seventeen, I was at bottom. You know the stories: people hit bottom and they either die or bounce back. I hit bottom and stayed there. I was failing out of school, high all the time, about to bury my mother who had wrapped her car around a tree on Highway 17, and I was sleeping with anyone who could keep me high and numb. When I was at bottom there was no light of Jesus. The only thing filling me was Dexter Warburton, my thirty-six year old dealer and eventual baby daddy. When I got pregnant, my grandma, with whom I was living until I was eighteen, forced me to keep clean, and I hated her for it. I hated her, I hated Dexter, who had split, I hated myself, and most of all I hated the parasite growing in my belly, making me fat and disgusting.

"But a funny thing happened. When my Anthony was born and I held him for the first time, I knew there was a God and that he loved me. You said faith born out of despair was but a patch, a salve, and not a cure. What about faith born out of miracle? I said my grandma forced me to stay clean. That doesn't mean she succeeded. When I was blessed with a healthy, happy, baby boy, I knew a miracle had occurred, despite my best efforts. The pain was still there, but suddenly I had reason to go on. Yes, I found God, but I also found the resolve to get my GED, take classes at Ohlone College, and transfer here to State for a degree in chemistry, which, by the way, is how I knew about your little trick. I found the resolve to get clean, to stay clean, to find work, and give my son the life my mother didn't give me."

I nodded and sipped again at my mocha, this time savoring the sweet despite the bitter. "Fair enough," I said.

"You don't sound convinced," she said.

"Much loss and few miracles leave me agnostic about God's benevolence. Don't know that I'm capable of being convinced. I do like hearing other perspectives, though. Keeps me from being the narrow-minded douche I'm wont to be. I think of God as more a force for order in the universe. Order does not necessarily mean good. And churches, don't get me started on churches and their quests to further impose that order, to the exclusion of those who don't fit into their narrow definitions of righteous. I have no problem with people using faith as a warm blanket. It's when they bring that faith down as a hammer that I get angry, and veer close to a reactionary atheism."

"May I ask what happened to make you so angry?"

I considered this woman, this girl who grew up too fast in the drowning wake of grief, tossed against the reefs, and battered by a sea of troubles, and yet managed to crawl out with a sense of hope and understanding not found in those twice her age. A sense of envy crept over me.

"When I was thirteen, I had a friend. Her home life was much as you described yours. Mother drank more mornings than not, with boyfriends jumping in and out of her bed. Home meals came in cardboard containers wrapped in foil and had little cups of refried beans that crusted in the oven. It was no surprise that See was kind of a chaotic teen."

"And you loved her," Anastasia said.

"Still do, in my own way. At thirteen, though, love stops being simple and starts tangling with things like hormones and self worth. I was devoted, certainly. She only wanted friendship. Took me a while to understand what that meant, but eventually I got over myself enough to be what she needed."

"What about what you needed?"

"You're amazingly perceptive for -- what, twenty? My needs weren't important, or so I told myself. I had a couple self-esteem issues. In any case, See craved attention, and when a neighbor of hers, a twenty year old high school drop out named John, started paying attention to her, she was at first flattered. He started inviting her over to his house to play video games, something she never had in her house, and eventually he wanted to play other games. He got her pregnant. She came to me for help. I went to my priest and was told that if she terminated the pregnancy, she'd be committing a grievous sin, condemning her soul. By helping her, I too was committing sin, but being a good catholic, I could confess and be absolved. It seemed unfair to me, and as someone with an overdeveloped sense of fairness, I decided that God was no friend of mine. I stopped attending church soon after."

"It's not an easy choice to make. I was in the clinic waiting room when I decided I couldn't go through with it, and not even because I wanted to keep the baby, but because I was afraid my grandma would kick me out onto the street."

"You don't think it's a sin?"

"Yes, it is. But so is raising a child in a loveless home, abandoning it to the wolves, so to speak."

"And since then, life has been one loss after another."

"That girl, Tiffany," Anastasia said, nodding. "The newspapers said you were forced to watch."
It was my turn to nod. Not for the first time, I wondered why my scars were coming back to haunt me. "Tiffany, and then my dad a little later."

Anastasia reached across the table and placed her hand over mine. Her forearm peeked out from the sleeve of her hoodie, and I could see an old ladder of thin scars. In addition to all she told me, Anastasia had been a cutter. She folded her fingers into mine and turned her wrist over, showing the deeper, parallel cut. I rolled up my sleeve, revealing the beginning of the keloidal twist. "Looks like we both wear our scars under our sleeves," I said.

Anastasia gripped my hand tighter, digging her nails into my palm. "You're a broken man, Jesse."

"I am. And were I anyone else, I'd give you a line about needing a good woman to put me back together."

"I'm guessing you need to do that yourself."

"You guess correctly."

Letting go of my hand, Anastasia drained the rest of her coffee and set the cup on the table. "I need to get back to my son, but I want to see you again."

"See me, how?"

"Here, for coffee, next week. You said something about God and order that intrigued me. I want to explore that with you. You said you like to hear new perspectives. So do I. I want to share."

"Fair enough," I said. "I'd like that."

"I'll warn you now. If you ask to sleep with me, I'll say no."

Slightly shocked at her directness, but mildly appreciative as well, I smiled and said, "Fair enough, as well. To tell the truth, I'm not in a place in life where I want to be called daddy, either figuratively or literally."

"I'm glad we understand each other," she said. We exchanged cell phone numbers and she stood.
When she turned, her dark hair whipped around her in a quick snap. Her tight jeans hugged a form of slight but pleasing curves and I found myself needing to shift in my seat. "One thing," I said.

Anastasia turned, and noticed, in profile, the scythe arc of her nose before it sloped down. "Yeah?"

"You never said you couldn't ask me."

She smiled, showing the beginnings of laugh lines around her eyes. "I'm glad we understand each other."