I don’t volunteer this information to many people, but I was once an altar server. It was a choice I made not out of faith or a sense of obligation, but rather through the strange logic one might expect from a fourteen-year-old. Around then, I was beginning to recognize on a sub- or near-conscious level that I had feelings toward my male classmates that I shouldn’t have been having. And so, the worst fears of my Irish Catholic family had been realized: One of their children had been turned gay by some combination of Hollywood values, political correctness, and community appreciation for the arts. I’m glib about it all now, but back then it was a grave situation—albeit, one whose existence I was unwilling to acknowledge. Being gay wasn’t an option. And to my adolescent mind, perhaps becoming an altar server would straighten me out, which as an adult I realize now was misguided on many fronts.
That’s how I found myself slouched in a church pew one afternoon at the start of eighth grade. Two other students sat beside me—Abbie Podznak and Randy McGrath. Both a year behind me. I didn’t know Abbie very well, but what I knew about her I didn’t like. She was a known overachiever. I even heard a rumor she once helped repaint the cafeteria at a run-down Catholic school on the West Side. It wasn’t for extra credit or anything.
Randy, I knew from football—my only non-scholastic commitment. Although he was a year younger than me, he was taller and broader. He could have easily passed for an eighth grader. We weren’t close friends by any means, but we got along. Years earlier, I used to join the other boys in teasing him about his astonishingly red hair. But on the cusp of high school, with his hair darkened to a more subdued auburn, that felt like centuries ago.
Father Nair strode in from the side entrance of the church. When he came to a halt in front of our pew, he put his hands on his waist and gave the three of us a disappointed once-over.
“The others are late,” he said.
As one of the newer priests at our parish, Father Nair had the responsibility of training altar servers. He did not seem to relish the opportunity. At the time, I don’t think I appreciated how difficult it must have been for him as the only South Asian immigrant at an alarmingly white parish. But my eight years of Catholic education had prioritized obedience and piety over frivolous things like empathy and compassion.
“The others?” Abbie said.
“There are only three of you. There must be more.”
He made us wait another ten minutes before it dawned on him that the others weren’t coming. By his heavy breathing, I could tell he was going to be more worked up than usual.
“Very well,” he said. “If you will follow me to the altar, we can begin.”
We shadowed him up the polished steps and listened as he drew our attention to the different features of the altar—among them, the blinding gold Tabernacle and the reliquary, which was screened off by bronze latticework and, according to parish legend, housed the collarbone of St. Athanasius. He pointed to one final thing before we made our way to the sacristy. It was a crimson vase that hung from a gold chain on the wall. Inside, a small flame burned faintly.
“That is the Eternal Flame,” he said. “It represents Christ’s new and everlasting covenant. It must never be extinguished.”
We drifted over to the sacristy. Once inside, Father Nair tore through the long wooden drawers of the vestment cabinet. I had never seen it up close before. It was an impressive piece of woodwork that contained all of the priestly finery to be worn for the major celebrations and minor feast days that dotted the liturgical calendar year. Father Nair dug two books out of a drawer beneath the hanging robes. He handed Abbie one of the books and Randy the other one.
“There are only two manuals,” he said.
I glanced at the beat-up paperback in Randy’s hand. The cover read Your Guide to Astonishing Success as an Altar Server. It looked to be two hundred or so pages. I hadn’t realized there would be reading involved. I said a silent prayer to the patron saint of illustrations.
“This manual will provide you with all the necessary information. I need two of you to serve tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning? Father Nair, there’s no way I can read this whole book tonight,” Abbie said. “The volleyball tryouts are tonight—”
Father cut her off with a hand gesture and turned his gaze to us. “You two then. Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock.” His eyes flashed, daring us to contradict him.
“But I don’t have a book,” I said.
“Haven’t you ever done an assignment with a classmate before? Tonight, you can go over to this boy’s house—what is your name, boy?”
“R-Randy.”
“Yes,” the priest continued. “The two of you can study the book together. Tomorrow morning, you will serve Mass. Is that so hard whatever your name is?”
I shook my head.
“Every year,” Father Nair said, gesturing with his bony, ringed fingers, “you children have more excuses. More sports. More clubs. Where have you set aside time for the Lord in your busy schedule? At which hour of the day do you set aside time, even just a moment, to contemplate the sacrifice of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? His sacrifice for your sins—”
He continued to shout at us for several minutes before he let us go. His hands acted out every fanatical word. His rigid fingers seemed to strangle the air in front of him. That night I dreamed of being gripped at the neck by two disembodied hands.
❦
I hadn’t anticipated Randy being there. Had I known, I probably would have chosen a different vocation to distract me from That-Thing-About-Me-That-Totally-Wasn’t-a-Thing.
It all started during preseason when Coach slotted me in as a running back. He shoved a green binder in my hand and told me to learn the routes. Two months later, I was still mixing up slants and sweeps and flat routes. My teammates had begun placing bets on how many times I would get reamed out at practice. One day, Coach put Randy in at quarterback, subbing for Nick Esposito who was nursing three bruised ribs from our first practice game. I lined up behind Randy in the halfback position and listened as he barked out the count, which was when I found myself distracted by his ass. I didn’t realize I had missed the toss until the ball hit me in the facemask. Coach made me run laps until I threw up.
Unbeknownst to him, Randy had introduced me to my sexual conundrum and was, more or less, the embodiment of everything I had been running away from.
❦
We decided to wait until after dinner to crack open the server’s manual. To my horror, I realized that Mrs. McGrath was planning to cook bratwurst in a pot of boiling water. As an Irish family, I figured they would at least understand the virtues of using beer to cook them. Apparently not. When she crossed the kitchen to put a block of frozen peas in the microwave, I had a momentary urge to intervene with the bratwurst before it was too late.
Things only got worse when she swung open the refrigerator door and informed us that they were out of mustard. None of this fazed Randy. The moment we sat down, he shoveled food into his mouth like a child who’d been locked in the cellar for six months. He finished in less than two minutes, then looked at my plate, which was only half-empty, and said, “You done?”
I told him I was full. He began to get up from the table when he seemed to remember something and sat back down. He looked at his mom and said, “May I be excused?”
That made an impression on me: one second, seeing Randy attack a plate of food like a force of nature, and the next, politely asking his mother’s permission to leave the table. He had become strangely interesting. And the feeling it triggered inside me was inescapable. Following Randy upstairs to his room, watching him sit at his desk scribbling aimlessly in an opened book, I understood—for the first time in my life—what it meant to desire someone.
❦
The early light shone faintly through the rose window of the basilica. Randy and I sat along a marble bench behind the pulpit as Father Nair said Mass. Beforehand, he presented us with white ceremonial vestments, and we pulled them over our school uniforms. I noticed that the stiff fabric along the collar was stained yellow by years of neck grease.
I scanned the empty pews of the church and wondered to myself why they even bothered to schedule Mass this early. My gaze drifted up to a stained-glass rendering of St. Stephen, knee-deep in a pile of rocks. I knew from religion class that this window told the story of the very first Christian stoned to death. For years, he was my favorite saint. That was before I learned about St. Lucia, who had her eyes gouged out.
Randy nudged me with his knee and whispered, “He wants you to hold the Lectionary for him.”
I pushed myself off the bench and moved as solemnly as possible to the gilded pedestal where the book was cradled. The Lectionary was a musty, oversized Bible for the priest to read from. When I came to a halt before Father Nair, I realized I didn’t know what the reading was. He beamed down at me and whispered, “Matthew, chapter 5, verse 27.” I sensed malice in his smile. I shifted the weight of the book onto my knee and riffled through the pages to the correct verse. After the reading, I returned the Lectionary to its pedestal and hurried back across the altar. Underneath my vestment, I could feel perspiration beading onto my powder-blue uniform shirt.
At the end of the service, Randy and I tailed Father Nair into the sacristy, holding the leftover Communion gifts. Despite the sparse attendance, Father Nair had filled the crystal bowl to the brim with Communion wafers. Only six had been consumed. We halted in front of an olive-green vault where the special items for Mass were stored. Father Nair seized the wine and water cruets from Randy, depositing them on one of the vault’s metal shelves.
“What about all of these?” I said, shaking the bowl of wafers in my hand.
They have been blessed. They are Christ’s body.”
“So, we need to save them for tomorrow?” I offered.
“They must be eaten.” He turned away from the vault and stared us down. “By you.”
“But we’re almost late for second period,” Randy said.
Father Nair folded his hands and grinned at him. “Maybe next time you’ll help your friend remember the reading.”
After he left the room, we spent several minutes trying to wolf down stale Communion wafers. They were so dry and chalky that we filled the Communion chalice with water to sip between swallows. Second period had started by the time we decided we couldn’t eat any more. We split the remaining wafers between us and stuffed them in our pockets, promising to eat them later.
Much later, my cousin told me most priests stored leftover wafers in the Tabernacle. Randy and I had just been introduced to Father Nair’s unique brand of punishment.
❦
At practice that afternoon, Coach pulled me aside and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was taken aback. It wasn’t the sort of question I expected from my football coach. All I could think to say was that I didn’t know.
“Haven’t you ever thought about it before? C’mon, just say the first thing that comes into your head.”
“A football player.”
“What would you say the odds are of you becoming a pro football player?”
“I don’t know. Pretty good?”
Coach laughed. “You’ve got four routes to remember. You can’t even do that. Your heart’s not really in this.”
I think he was waiting for me to disagree, but I didn’t. He removed his cap and rubbed his bald head. “Listen, maybe you’re good at math or something.”
“My teacher said I could scrape a C if I just applied myself.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You’re a funny kid.”
I knew what was happening. I was being cut from the team. Coach was trying to do the decent thing by helping me find other interests. But in reality, my only other interests were TV and video games. I genuinely did care about being on the team—football was the one sport that would have me. Every year, I tried out for the basketball team and got cut. The only reason I put myself through it was because every other boy in my class tried out.
It dawned on me, as I walked my bike home, that getting cut from football was the most shameful thing that had ever happened to me. On a team that hardly had enough players to cover each position, I was deemed unnecessary. Since I started playing, I had twice as many friends as I’d ever had. We were a family. But now, I was being disowned. No more post-game barbeques. No more bus rides to the suburbs for away games—the whole team hollering out verses from hip-hop songs.
But all I was thinking about was Randy. Would he think less of me now that I had been cut? Would he still want to be my friend?
❦
Mass that Sunday was the first reunion of all three rookie altar servers: Abbie, Randy, and myself. The service required three servers rather than two, as it was the most important service of the week. Thankfully, there were no slip-ups during the service—even though, five minutes before we marched down the center aisle of the church, Father Nair made Abbie cry when he told her that girls had no business being altar servers. She wiped away the tears with her oversized vestment sleeve. When she walked down the aisle, candle in hand, I’m sure that all the parishioners could see how red her eyes were. It was as if the priest was rooting for her to fail.
Had that been the only Father Nair-related incident of the day, we could have considered ourselves lucky. Sadly, it was not. After Mass, we handed in the altar server manuals and hung up our vestments. Father Nair flipped through one of the manuals. I was trying to flatten out the permanent wrinkles in my vestment when Randy put his hand on my shoulder.
“I heard about what happened at practice,” he said. He wore a pained smile on his face. I could tell he didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s cool. I wasn’t feeling it anyway.”
The words were barely out of my mouth when Father Nair barked, “Who did this?”
He held the server manual in front of him like an overripe trash bag, his face puckered with disgust. On the opened page, I could see the rough sketch of a penis. It was urinating onto the face of an altar server pictured on the page. It wasn’t my handiwork. But Father Nair insisted that it was. He accused me of not being as serious as the others. I glanced over at them. Abbie’s hair was a jumbled mess from having pulled her vestment over her head. The poor girl was too terrified to even fix her hair. Randy didn’t want anything to do with the confrontation; he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“It’s an old book. Anyone could have done it,” I said.
Father Nair gestured to a sun-faded portrait of Mary that hung on the wall. “Look at her,” he said. “You would tell a lie in front of the Blessed Virgin?”
“It wasn’t me.”
His eyes flashed me a warning not to say another word. Then he glared at Randy and Abbie. “Why are you two still here?”
They nearly tripped over each other trying to escape the sacristy. When they were gone, Father Nair opened the manual again. The annoyance on his face seemed to gradually give way to a look of distress.
“You have a sick mind.”
He wasn’t wrong. At least as far as the Church was concerned, my mind was a toxic dump of impure thoughts. And if the priest had seen my schoolbooks, he would have known that I was, like most boys my age, a practiced hand at doodling penises. It just so happened that this particular drawing was the work of some other perverted mind.
“The silverware in the rectory needs polishing. That will be your penance,” Father Nair said. Before leaving the sacristy, he made a point of throwing the defiled manual into the trash bin.
❦
The rectory smelled like musty furniture. The same musty furniture smell that my grandmother’s living room had. As I sat there on the floor polishing silver, it dawned on me that, despite Father Nair’s growing interest in ruining my life, I was beginning to enjoy my time as an altar server. It was a far better fit for me than football. Morning Mass had become the thing in my life I looked forward to most. Randy and I were scheduled to serve every Tuesday and Thursday, which provided me with more than enough opportunities to admire him out of the corner of my eye and accidentally brush my leg against his. For that, I was willing to suffer any number of punishments handed down by Father Nair.
Down the hall from where I was sitting, I could hear the voices of two men. Moments earlier, the rectory was so deathly quiet that focusing on my task had been easy, but now I found myself distracted. One of the men was Father Nair—his impassioned voice seemed to carry even when he whispered. It sounded like he was giving confession. At the time, this was a ridiculous idea to me; I had never thought about a priest confessing before and wondered who exactly would be hearing it. I inched my way down the hallway, stopping just short of the room’s opened door. It took all the courage I had left to peek inside to see who was listening. Sitting a foot away from Father Nair was the pastor, looking thoughtful and tapping his knee almost, it seemed, to the rhythm of the younger priest’s confession.
“I don’t understand it,” Father Nair was saying. “These people have everything. God has given them everything. They have beautiful houses, expensive cars and healthy children. Yet they behave as though God had nothing to do with it. As if it were all their own doing.”
“Our parishioners are very generous,” the pastor said. “We receive more donations than any other parish in the area.”
“Yes, they donate their money. But what about their time? A church is a community. These people arrive on Sunday, hand in their donation envelopes, and go home. Have they no commitment to service? Growing up in Cochin, I had nothing. My neighbors had nothing. All we had was the Church. And the people working for the Church were devoted to the community. Even though we had nothing, we were rich in spirit.”
“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.”
“It’s the people in this parish, they bring out the worst in me,” Father Nair said. “There’s hatred in my heart.”
“I didn’t realize you were so unhappy. I’m sure we could arrange a transfer to a less affluent parish.”
“No, of course not. I would never consider—”
“We wouldn’t have any trouble finding a replacement. This parish is very well regarded.”
“I was only speaking my mind,” Father Nair said. “Of course, I am honored to be a part of this parish.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before the pastor spoke. “You touched on the subject of charity. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt for you to be a little more charitable in the opinions you have of others.”
Their conversation continued, but I lost interest and sidled back to the dining room to finish polishing. For just a moment during their conversation, I had let myself get excited about the prospect of Father Nair being transferred. But my intuition told me he wasn’t going anywhere.
❦
The next morning, I convinced my mother I was sick and stayed home from school. I spent most of the day in bed bouncing a tennis ball off the wall. I couldn’t remember ever feeling as weird as I did that morning. It was true that a lot of things had happened over the past week, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was only one cause for my current state of mind. It wasn’t Father Nair or getting kicked off the football team. I couldn’t even say it was Randy or the way he made me feel. It was something larger than all that. I forced myself to stop thinking for a while and just listened to the hollow pop of the tennis ball as it bounced off the wall. I caught the ball and examined its fuzzy, yellow contours. Something was shifting inside of me. Call it my perspective. Call it my sense of self. I had entered into altar-serverdom with the not-quite-conscious goal of straightening myself out, but the exact opposite had happened. I was growing closer and closer to a person that my faith told me it was wrong to care for. If there was a God—and I wasn’t a hundred percent on that—the dude was either taunting me or telling me it was OK to be myself. I had never been more confused, or seen my life more clearly.
Around three o’clock, I heard the doorbell and went to answer it. On the other side of the door was Randy. School had just let out, and in the ten minutes since, his blue uniform shirt had come untucked and his shoes had been swapped for a pair of Nikes.
“Father Nair needs us to do a funeral service on Wednesday,” he said.
“All right.”
I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. He just shifted his backpack from one shoulder to the other. “OK, see you later,” he said and turned to leave.
“Wait—”
I didn’t want him to go. I asked him if he wanted to hang out for a while and play video games. When he shrugged and said he didn’t have anything else to do until football practice, I struggled to hide how pleased I was. The whole time, I thought of ways to ask questions about him without seeming overly interested in the answers.
“Why did you decide to become an altar server?” I asked.
“My mom said that service work looks good on high school applications.”
I pointed out that high school was almost two years away for him. A year ago, when I was in seventh grade, going to high school seemed as far away as getting a job or buying a house, but Randy said he was hoping to get accepted to an elite college prep school nearby.
“At least my mom is hoping for that,” he said. “I don’t know what I want yet. Most of my friends are probably going to St. Joe’s.”
St. Joseph High School for Boys was where most of the football players and other unexceptional male students went. St. Joe’s was where I would be going. I felt a pang of resentment. Why hadn’t my parents pushed me to attend a college prep school? But then I thought about all the extra work involved and felt marginally better about my situation.
I noticed a serious look on his face.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you something—”
Of course, it would be at that very moment—the moment when Randy was about to open up to me—that Wes, my dutiful younger brother, came crashing through the door with the homework he had collected from my teachers while I was out sick. I whipped a shoe at his head and told him to scram. Red-faced, he slammed my books on the floor and stormed out. I apologized to Randy and asked him what he was about to tell me before the interruption.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m gonna be late for practice if I stay any longer.”
But afterward, all I could think about was what he wanted to say. It sounded like a confession. For some reason, a very specific memory entered my mind: In the sacristy the day after I was cut from the team, he consoled me. A pained smile on his face and a reassuring hand on my shoulder. Was it possible that—no, I couldn’t even finish the thought. That thought, which was something I wanted more than anything, couldn’t be allowed to invade my mind. I wouldn’t let myself be consumed by the possibility, even.
❦
The next morning, I arrived at the basilica early. From the transept, I could already hear Randy shuffling around in the sacristy. When I entered the room, I was greeted by the sight of Randy tipping a bottle of altar wine into his mouth.
He nearly spat the wine out. “I didn’t expect you here this early. I just wanted to see what it tasted like.”
I edged closer to him until we were standing an arm’s length apart. “So, what does it taste like?”
He stood beside the room’s metal vault, frozen, with the wine bottle still in hand. I grabbed the bottle by the neck and took a long pull. At first, he gaped at me like I was some sort of hallucination, but then his mouth curled into a smile and he laughed. He reached into the open vault and grabbed a sleeve of Communion wafers. He balanced a wafer on his thumb and attempted to flip it into his mouth. I laughed so hard I almost sneezed wine. A look of solemnity appeared on his face, and he lifted a wafer into the air, doing his best Father Nair impression.
“The body of Christ,” he said.
I cupped my hands like a good Catholic, and he dropped the wafer into them. I held the wafer up and repeated back to him, “The body of Christ.” He cupped his hands just like I had a moment ago. Impulsively, I told him to close his eyes and stick his tongue out instead—like the old women at Mass who knelt before the altar, waiting for Father Nair to deposit a wafer. He laughed and did as I instructed. But instead of copying Father Nair, I placed the wafer on the tip of my tongue and kissed it into his mouth. At first, he didn’t do anything, his brow creased in confusion. Then, his eyes shot open. He pushed me away and spat the wafer onto the floor. I can only describe the look on his face as one of betrayal. As if I had tricked him. Not just into letting me kiss him, but into believing that I wanted to be his friend when, in reality, I wanted something else. Something grotesque. He started arranging the candles and Communion gifts for Mass. He couldn’t even look at me. Maybe he was hoping that, if he didn’t look at me, he wouldn’t have to deal with what just happened.
My head throbbed. I could tell by how overheated I was that my face had become flush with embarrassment. I played through the potential consequences of what I had done. Randy, my only remaining friend, was never going to speak to me again. What if he told the whole football team that I kissed him? What if he told Father Nair or the principal? Would I be expelled? I thought back on our conversation the day before when Randy had said he needed to tell me something. I wondered how I could have been so wrong. And how, after today, I would never know what it was he wanted to say.
The whole service, I sat there on the marble altar pew revisiting, again and again, the kiss I had stolen from him.
❦
Thursday morning was my next scheduled service. I awoke with a nervous stomachache at the horror of seeing Randy so soon after the incident. I considered calling in sick again but figured my mother wouldn’t go for it after calling me out earlier that week. I would just have to suck it up. When I arrived at the church, I found—to my surprise—Abbie folding linens at the vesting table.
“Randy has a test first period and he couldn’t miss it,” she said.
I should have been relieved. The awkward post-kiss encounter with Randy had been temporarily delayed. So, why then did I feel so let down?
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
Abbie looked slightly panicked at the sound of swearing inside the church as if God might send the rafters crashing down upon us. She regained her composure and said, “What is?”
“Father Nair said that if you have a test first period your teacher is supposed to reschedule it for you.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t tell Father Nair. He called me last night to ask if I would cover for him.” She stopped folding and looked at me. “Does it matter?”
Her question upset me. I didn’t like the insinuation. Not that she was likely insinuating anything at all. Before I knew it, I launched into a tirade about how unfairly people were treating me. I’m ashamed of it now, especially when I think about the embarrassing irony of bullying some innocent girl because of the way other people were treating me.
“Why does everyone act like I’m the one with the problem?” I said by way of conclusion.
Somehow, despite all the invective I had just unloaded on her, Abbie managed to say, “I don’t think you have a problem.”
“It’s like everybody thinks there’s something wrong with me.”
“Did you and Randy get into a fight or something?”
“Sort of—”
She asked what happened and, for some reason, I told her. I don’t know why I thought she would understand; she was a girl who went to Catholic school, after all. Boys kissing boys wasn’t exactly on the list of approved activities. But I suppose I needed to confess. Not an admission of guilt, but rather a much-needed release of negative energy. Soon, I was telling her everything. Not just the kiss. Everything that led up to it, and the way my stomach roiled whenever Randy looked at me. I felt relief at hearing out loud the things I had been turning over in my head for weeks. Regardless of how Abbie reacted to it, I was transformed by the admission.
Mercifully, after I had spilled every last detail, a sympathetic smile crept onto her face, and I knew that we were friends.
❦
Randy had managed to wriggle his way out of one service, but there was no way Father Nair would let him off the hook for a Sunday Mass. It was always the most important service of the week, and he needed all three of us. In typical fashion, I was last to arrive. Randy was pulling his vestment on over his clothes when I walked into the sacristy. We made eye contact briefly, which caused his face to turn nearly as red as his hair. But from that moment until Father Nair uttered the closing benediction, Randy didn’t look at me once. I had never felt so ashamed in my life. What I wanted, more than anything, was a chance to go back and change what had happened between us. Not to undo what I had done, but rather to change Randy into someone who desired me as much as I desired him. Because for the first time in my short life, I had opened myself to someone who didn’t feel the same way about me. It felt like my world was ending.
In time, I would come to see how unremarkable it was. It would prove to be among the least hurtful ways someone would reject me in my life.
Once the parishioners were gone, I began extinguishing the candles around the altar while Abbie and Randy returned the gifts to the vault. I was anxious to leave. Had I not been in such a hurry, I would’ve remembered not to blow out the candle inside the crimson vase.
“You weren’t supposed to do that,” Abbie said, fear palpable in her voice. “That’s the Eternal Flame.”
I told her it wasn’t a big deal. I scanned the altar for the long brass lighter we used to light the tapers. Randy just stood there, eyes wide with panic. When Abbie realized what I was searching for, she grabbed the lighter off the Tabernacle’s stone ledge and handed it to me.
“And you’re supposed to use the snuffer when you extinguish the candles,” she said.
“I know that!”
I tipped the lighter into the crimson vase and pulled the switch. That was the position Father Nair found me in when he returned from greeting parishioners in the vestibule. His expression shifted from confusion to fury. He reached me in two strides and grabbed me by the vestment. The brass lighter dropped from my hand. The sound it made against the marble floor echoed ominously through the church.
“Do you think this is a game?” he said.
“Father Nair—” Randy moved a step closer to us. He cleared his throat and said, “He didn’t blow it out. I did.”
The priest’s grip on my vestment loosened. He stared across the altar at Randy, his brow furrowed in disbelief. For my part, I couldn’t figure out what possessed Randy to take the fall. We hadn’t spoken since the kiss. When we passed each other in the hall, he didn’t even look at me. Father Nair lumbered over to where Randy was and pointed an angry finger in his face.
“You are undeserving of Christ’s covenant.” He turned and eyed me. “All of you. Humanity is undeserving of His sacrifice. But He has saved us, nonetheless. That candle—” he pointed to the unlit vase, “—is not a candle. It is Christ’s promise to us.”
Abbie started crying. Father Nair didn’t notice. He turned his attention back to Randy.
“Return your vestment to the sacristy. I won’t schedule you for any further services if that’s what you prefer.”
From his tone, there didn’t seem to be much choice in the matter. Randy was changed and out the door before I could fully take in what had happened. I wandered over to the sacristy and put my vestment away with the other garments. Then it hit me: Randy and I would never again be in the same room together. Before graduation, I might pass him in the hall between classes, but that was it. I was going to spend the rest of my life not knowing him. I remember thinking what an immeasurably long time the rest of one’s life was. I hastened out the side entrance of the church, hoping it wasn’t too late to catch up with him. I didn’t know what I would say, but I couldn’t just let him leave. I needed to know why. He was halfway across the parking lot by the time I spotted him. I called for him to wait, but he kept walking. I sprinted past the few remaining churchgoers straggling back to their station wagons and finally caught up with him at a traffic light.
“Why did you do that?” I said, gasping for breath.
He gave me an indifferent look as if I were just another pedestrian waiting to cross. The light turned green and he started walking. I decided I wasn’t going to leave until I got an answer. I came up beside him and repeated the question.
“Stop following me,” he said.
When I refused, he pushed me and I stumbled onto the crosswalk. The cold asphalt stung my palms. A blue minivan honked its horn. Randy grabbed me under the arms and lifted me up.
“It was just something I had to do,” he said. “Will you leave me alone now? I don’t know what you want from me.”
His bluntness surprised me. The fact that he no longer wanted anything to do with me was pretty obvious from his recent behavior, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear. It’s absurd, I know, but all I could think about was the way my heart hummed when he lifted me from the asphalt. In that brief moment, he held me firmly in his arms, and I felt secure.
This time, when he walked away, I didn’t follow. The gray windbreaker he wore seemed inadequate against the cold. I counted the puffs of breath that rose above his red hair as he trudged down the street.
❦
After graduation, I didn’t see Randy again for four years. He got accepted to a high school that designated itself a Math and Science Academy, while I wound up at St. Joe’s. I had a few friends who went to his school and he had a few who went to mine, but our interests and activities didn’t intersect. I heard he gave up football and instead opted for track and lacrosse. As for me, I never played another organized sport and, instead, got involved in theater and the school paper.
I didn’t harbor any negative emotions toward him after what happened, and I wanted to believe that he didn’t hold anything against me either. Part of me hoped I’d get to see him again when we were no longer a pair of self-conscious junior high students. I wanted to see what kind of man he turned out to be.
One weekend during my senior year, I found myself at the mall roaming around a men’s clothing store with friends. Not terribly interested in clothes, I stood near the glass doors that opened onto the mall and was drawn to the brightly lit marquee of a small movie theater across the way. My gaze happened to fall upon a head of auburn hair—a bit longer than when I had last seen it. Of course, I recognized him right away. He was taller than before and had some impressive sideburns for a seventeen-year-old, but he still walked in the same slightly hunched-over way, hands buried deep in his pockets. He was with a sandy-haired wisp of a girl wearing a track jacket that hung off her shoulders like a painter’s smock. Tailing behind them, with his nose in a handheld game, was a boy of about twelve, also with sandy hair. All three stopped in front of the ticket window and Randy counted some bills into the cashier’s tray. When he turned away from the window, he handed the boy a ticket—the kid barely looked up from his video game. Randy kept the girl’s ticket with his own and then put his arm around her shoulders. The track jacket she had on must have been his. Together, they disappeared into the theater.
Seeing him again brought back a lot of strange memories and old feelings. I could almost smell the incense from church and feel the stiff vestment collar against my neck. The specter of Father Nair with his fanatical, trembling hands reaching out from the past. And the kiss—the moment—I preserved within me. I was happy to see, if only from a distance, that he was as good looking and good natured as I remembered. But it didn’t interest me to know, in any further detail, what kind of person he had become because I already knew who he was—or, at least, I already knew the person he had been in my life. He was older now, and he was different. In the same way that I was older and I was different. The Randy I knew existed only as a memory. Our lives had converged for a brief moment and then carried on, separately.
The feelings I had for him didn’t weigh so heavily on my mind anymore. Not like they used to. But sometimes, when I thought of how far away life had taken me from that time, I felt dizzy. As though I were standing on the edge of a great void. And for a time, all I would feel was sorrow because I knew what was there beyond the void was a place I couldn’t get back to.
I joined my friends at the register as they were checking out. One of them grabbed a pen off the counter and signed a receipt for the cashier. I watched the top of the pen make circles in the air as he signed. The image brought me back to an evening four years prior when I sat on Randy’s bed watching him scribble at his desk in an old paperback. Not just any old paperback: Your Guide to Astonishing Success as an Altar Server.
There was once something Randy needed to tell me. I must have always known what it was. But back then I needed something else from him. I needed confirmation that these feelings—powerful enough to roil my insides, to shatter the expectations of what my life was supposed to be—were mutually felt.
It took me four years to accept that I didn’t need anything more from him than what he already gave.
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