“Why do you believe in God?” I ask as I get into my car. We’re at the curb in front of the shelter; I’m picking Zenny up at the end of her shift, and I’ve just kissed her senseless and then helped her into the passenger seat.

She drops her backpack with a thump on the floorboard and twists to buckle her seatbelt. “I see you’re not wasting any time in challenging me.” Her voice is mild, a little wry maybe, but when I look over at her, I immediately feel like shit. She looks fucking exhausted, and she smells like cheap tomato sauce and infant formula. The lumpy backpack between her feet is clearly stuffed with textbooks and there are dark smudges under her eyes that speak to how late I kept her up last night.

My dick fusses at me, but I decide the minute we get home that I’m tucking her into bed.

“That was thoughtless of me,” I admit, starting the car and heading the handful of skyscraper-filled blocks home. “I had a weird conversation with my mom tonight, and it’s fucking with my head. But that’s not an excuse.”

“The conversation was about God?”

“Yes. I found a rosary on her table, and I just…” A tight anger fuses in the knob of my throat. I feel like a parent discovering a bag of meth in a teenager’s room. “How could she?” I burst out. “After what happened to us? After what happened to her only daughter?”

Zenny’s quiet for a moment, leaving us with the echoes of my outburst. I try to swallow it down, I try to reel everything back in, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

“How do you think she could?” she finally asks.

“I—wait, what?”

“You asked a rhetorical question, and I’m asking the same question, only not rhetorical. Place yourself in her shoes, with her memories and her life, and then ask yourself how she could pray the rosary again.”

“The thing is that I don’t know,” I say, frustrated. “How can she forgive God for letting that happen? Lizzy loved God so fucking much before she—” I stop, full of the same wounded anger I felt the day after her funeral, when Tyler and I got into my car and her stupid Britney Spears CD had started playing. Neither of us had realized she’d been the last one to drive it, and we’d crawled in—me drunk as fuck and Tyler hung over—and then we’d heard it. The music that Lizzy had loved, had sung badly in the shower, had saved up babysitting money so she could go hear live in concert—it came spilling out of the radio at full volume, and I’d lost it. Just lost it, like a fucking maniac, kicking the shit out of my dash until I’d finally smashed something crucial and made the music stop.

I still can’t listen to Britney Spears. Not without that memory howling up inside me. Not without feeling like I want to tear apart the world with my bare hands.

My baby sister. My annoying, funny, nosy, and earnest baby sister. Gone.

All these years later and it still won’t stop fucking hurting. And it’s God’s fault.

“There’s a story Elie Wiesel tells,” Zenny says, and her voice anchors me back, away from the screaming drunk boy and to the man I am today, and I feel my chest loosen the tiniest bit, my hands relax on the steering wheel. I can breathe again.

“It’s about the Holocaust,” she continues. “Wiesel says in Auschwitz a group of rabbis decided to put God on trial. They charged God with crimes against His creation, and it became a real court, a real case. They found witnesses. They presented evidence.”

In the distance, lightning stitches across the sky and wind buffets the car. There’s going to be a storm. And still I find myself settling, easing to the sound of Zenny’s rich alto, to her story.

“The trial lasts several nights,” she says, “and at the end of it, they find God guilty.”

“Good,” I mutter, as the first drops of rain splatter the windshield.

God is guilty. God deserved this trial.

“And then do you know what the rabbis do next?” Zenny asks, gathering her backpack into her lap as I pull into my parking garage.

“What do they do?”

“They pray.”

I park, turn the car off. And then I turn to look at her.

“They find God guilty and then they pray,” she says again, her eyes and her voice and her everything soft and full of something I don’t understand. But it reminds me of the way I used to feel as a child, falling asleep as a music box chimed the notes of “Jesus Loves Me.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” I ask.

“Just that you can do both, Sean. You can do both.”

* * *

There is some fuss regarding my bossiness about bedtime—Zenny wants to play our new bedroom games and pouts so magnificently after I order her to ready herself for sleep that I almost reconsider—but I only have to look at the exhaustion around her eyes to remember to hold my ground. I ask her, as always, if now is the time she’d like to declare me an asshole and have me back off, but she shakes her head with a huff and stomps off to the bathroom to brush her teeth. But I know I’ve done the right thing when she’s swaying on her feet while she waits for me to get ready.

“Get in bed,” I say after I rinse my mouth. “I’ll be right after you.”

She zombie-shuffles into the bedroom and then I hear a sleepy, happy squeal from her.

“Satin sheets?”

“And satin pillowcases,” I say, changing into a pair of drawstring pants that hang off my hips. She’s not so tired that her eyes don’t gobble up the sight of my bared torso and hips—and again, I almost reconsider Plan Tucking Zenny Into Bed. But her health is more important than fun, and I climb into bed myself to set a good example. She looks disappointed, but the moment I flip off the lights and gather her into my chest, she turns into a sprawl of tired, heavy limbs.

“I can’t believe you got new sheets for me,” she says.

“I’d get new anything for you, Zenny-bug. New everything.”

“Sometimes you are just too smooth,” she says and I know there’s got to be a smile on her face from the tone of her voice. “But it works somehow.”

“All part of the Sean Bell charm, I assure you.”

Her hair tickles against me as she nods, and I stroke her arm until I feel her breathing relax and drop into a steady rhythm.

“Theodicy,” she murmurs dozily.

“Um. What?”

“It’s called theodicy. When people try to explain how God can still be good when bad things happen.”

“Oh. Okay?”

Her lips press against my chest in the sleepiest kiss ever and then she rolls over onto her pillow, wriggling backward into the cradle of my body. Despite the serious God talk, my cock surges happily against her.

“Some people think it’s a bad idea, trying to justify God’s goodness, because it distracts us from what’s important. It tangles us up in intellectual knots, when intellection isn’t the point. We have philosophy for that. Religion is for ritual, for practice. For moral action.”

“So it’s more important to pray than to figure out God? That seems backward to me. How can you pray to something you don’t understand? To something that might not be good?”

“Credo ut intelligam,” Zenny says. “It means: I believe so that I may understand. But believe is a tricky word in English, and so the meaning of the phrase has gotten slanted over time. The Latin credo came from cor dare—to give one’s heart. What St. Anselm was saying was not ‘assent blindly and uncritically to these intellectual positions about a deity,’ but rather that the intellectual positions were less important than the practice of living a moral life or a spiritual life. He was saying, ‘I commit so that I may understand.’ Or ‘I engage with this because it is the kind of thing that can only be understood by engaging with it.’”

I turn this over in my mind.

“Your mother is like St. Anselm,” Zenny goes on after a short, cute yawn. “She’s willing to engage in a spiritual practice while coexisting with a host of complicated ethical and metaphysical questions. A comfort with doubt concurrent with a commitment to living a spiritual life—that’s amazing.”

It occurs to me that it’s Zenny’s goal to live like that. That somehow in the midst of tragedy and impending death, my mom has found a relationship with faith that could make even a nun envious.

It’s a curious thought.

“Tyler’s middle name is Anselm,” I say, apropos of basically nothing, but I don’t have any response to her insights. She’s too smart and I’m still too close to the howling boy kicking his car open in a fit of drunken pain.

“See then?” Zenny murmurs, and I know she’s very close to sleep now. “I bet she already knows all this.”

I snug my little nun in close and stare at the lights outside as she sleeps in a temptingly sweet burrow against me. I think about God on trial and my mother’s rosary until my thoughts blend into unhappy dreams, dreams I can’t remember when I wake the next morning.

* * *

It’s a Saturday, and Zenny has a clinical rotation today—her first—and she has to stop by the shelter afterwards to help with dinner. I practically gnash my teeth in frustration, because after being so twisted up over God and Mom last night and after my (very noble and very stupid) insistence on sleep instead of play last night, my cock is approximately the hardness of a carbon dwarf star, and the gravity of its need is insane. My thoughts, my hand, everything feels like it’s pulling toward my aching organ, and I just want to fuck it all away, I want to ride Zenny until my chest stops hurting and my thoughts are clear again.

But I won’t, not even when I get her back tonight, because of the plan. The stupid fucking plan that I can’t let go of. Although as much as I’d like to fuck her, I am pretty excited about tonight.

We’re going on a date.

I have to call in a favor from Aiden (sigh), but even that can’t dampen my excitement as I get everything ready.

“Sixty dollars,” Aiden’s saying as I finish up a few odds and ends in my home office before I get Zenny from the shelter.

“Sixty? Are you insane?”

“Oh, like you’re not good for it,” Aiden says dismissively. “And are you going to tell me who this girl is or what?”

I think for a minute. Aiden’s not exactly what I would label “trustworthy.” Once, right after college, he promised to help me move a couch into my apartment, and then moved to Belize the next day. (He came back a month later with a sunburn, a fresh hatred of tequila, and a vague story about a girl named Jessica.) Last year, I spent God knows how many hours touring lofts and condos with him, examining minute differences between exposed brick and stained concrete, and then he up and bought a creaky farmhouse in the middle of nowhere without a word.

The nice word for Aiden is spontaneous and the less nice word is flaky, and either way I slice it, I’m not sure that I can trust him with a secret like this. For all I know, he’ll meet another Jessica and somehow end up at the Vatican telling the Pope about Zenny and me.

But also I have this adolescent need to talk about her. I want someone else to know how fucking smart she is, how fucking pretty, how fucking sweet and tart all at once. I want to talk about her contradictions and her layers, I want to talk about the things she dredges up inside me—these old sensory glimpses of churches and rituals—about the version of Sean I remember when I’m around her.

I want to talk about how much I want her, how much I need her, and how much that doesn’t scare me.

“It’s Zenny Iverson,” I say quickly before I can change my mind. “Zenobia. Elijah’s sister.”

A silence yawns on the other end.

“Aiden? You still there?”

He doesn’t answer right away, but when he does, his voice is strangled. “Elijah’s sister?”

“Yes.”

“The nun?”

How does he know about that when even I, Elijah’s best friend, didn’t? “It’s a long story,” I say.

“You’re taking a nun on a date,” Aiden says, as if he’s a teacher laying out a remedial logic problem for a student to solve. “You’re dating a nun.”

“Not…exactly,” I hedge. “It’s complicated.”

“Oh my God,” Aiden says. “Elijah’s going to kill you.”

“Elijah is not going to know,” I say firmly. “Because Zenny and I won’t tell him.”

“But—” Aiden makes a fretting noise.

“There’s no buts, man. It’s not like you’re going to see him to tell him, and no one else is going to tell him, and it’s going to be fine.”

Aiden is still making agitated sputters.

“And anyway, we should be talking about you. I notice you haven’t been raiding my fridge the past few days; I wondered if you’d died or something.”

“I’m just busy,” he says, and there’s a note of evasion in his voice. But with Aiden, evasion is sometimes par for the course. He’s Belize Boy, after all.

“Okay, fine. I won’t pry. Just tell me if you’re dating a nun too.”

That earns me a laugh. “I’m not as bonkers as you.”

“Yet,” I warn, and I do mean it as a joke, but it does come out with a prophetic sort of ring and hangs in the air as we finish making plans for tonight and wrap up the call.