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—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.

“Can I ask you a question, Lauren?”

She doesn’t answer, but manages to get this mom-looking woman to take a tract. Lauren says, “Jesus loves you,” to the woman.

“Forget about all the aliens stuff, okay? What I really want to know before I go and never see you again is this—”

“Where are you going?”

I don’t want to tell her that I’m going to kill Asher Beal and myself because it will make her worry about me ending up in hell—which is a real place to her—so I say, “I don’t know why I said that. I’m just being stupid, but I wanted to ask you—”

She says, “Jesus loves you,” to another stranger.

“Do you think that maybe if I were a Christian—like maybe if I were born into a family like yours and was homeschooled and forced to believe that—”

“I’m not forced to believe anything. I believe of my own free will.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But the point I’m trying to make is that if I were more like you, if I believed in God like you do, do you think that maybe you and I could have dated and maybe gotten married and had babies and lived a happily-ever-after sort of life?”

She looks at me like she’s trying to make a decision, and then she says, “You could have that sort of life if you ask God for it. If you give your life to God, He will provide for you in marvelous ways. He promises us that. If He takes care of the sparrows how much more will He take care of us?”

There are a million arguments I could use against her right now, because not everyone who believes in god gets to live in suburbia and have first-world problems like Baback says, and if believing in god could really solve all of my problems and make me feel better, I would definitely do that pronto—everyone would, right?

But I’m not really interested in debunking her theology right now. I’m much more interested in the fact that Lauren’s never been kissed and that I might die without kissing her.

“Just pretend I’m a Christian like you. For argument’s sake. Theoretically. Could we have ended up married and living a regular life? Like maybe in an alternate universe?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

She looks really confused and like she might actually run away from me, so I drop it and say, “I bought you a present,” and start to open my backpack.

“Why did you buy me a present?”

“This may seem weird, but I feel like god told me to buy you this present.” I’m completely lying, but I manage to say it with a serious old-school Hollywood face and I can tell she buys it, mostly because she wants to buy it. “He spoke to me. Told me you had been praying hard. And so he wanted me to give you a sign today.”

Her lips are parted just a little. She doesn’t wear any makeup ever, so she looks natural right now, which I love.

Her breath is slipping in and out of her like a soul yo-yo.

I hand her the little pink box.

“I don’t know that I can accept a present from you, Leonard,” she says, but she’s also staring at the box like she really wants to know what’s inside.

“It’s from god,” I say. “So it’s okay.”

She sucks her lips in between her teeth and then her mittens come off and she’s unwrapping the paper, which makes me so so so happy.

Lauren lifts off the lid and pulls out the silver cross on the silver chain.

“I know how much you love Christianity, so I found this on the Internet. It’s simple enough to go with your style, but—”

She clamps it on around her neck, holds the cross in front of her nose, and gives it a good stare, before tucking it into her shirt. Then she smiles beautifully.

“Did God really tell you to buy this for me?”

“He sure did,” I lie. “I’m really thinking about turning around my life and avoiding hell. Giving my life to Jesus and all the rest. I just have to sort through some issues first, but your dedication, the fact that you stand out here three times a week, the strength of your faith is amazing and really won me over.”

Her eyes open wide and I can tell I’m totally making her day, like she was waiting for some sort of signal from god, some sort of affirmation, and I’m her miracle, so I just keep piling it on, talking about being a changed man, and wanting to live a good life, and spending eternity with her in heaven.

Inside I start to feel terrible, thinking about how disappointed she’ll be when she sees the news tonight—how crushing that will be for her—and I wonder if her faith will be able to withstand it.

I think god is just a fairy tale, but I’m really starting to like the fact that Lauren has faith.

Don’t know why.

It’s weird.

A contradiction, maybe.

Or maybe it’s like wanting little kids to believe in Santa after someone else already ruined it for you, or you just figured out that your parents were Santa after all and the magic of Christmas instantly evaporated. But thinking about my destroying her faith by tricking her and then killing myself really starts to bring me down, until I just can’t lie to her anymore.

“Life can be really hard, you know. It makes it difficult to believe in god sometimes, but I’m trying—for you, and maybe for me too,” I say, and then I just start to fucking cry. I’m not sure why. Man, I bawl and bawl.

She hugs me and I clutch her, sob into her neck that smells like vanilla extract baking inside cookies—so fucking wonderful!

The sad suits and briefcases pass us in droves, but no one even seems to notice us as I drink her up.

“God works in mysterious ways,” she says, and rubs my back all motherly. “This world is a test. It’s hard. But I will continue to pray for you. We could pray together. You could come to church with me. It would help you. My father will help you too.”

She’s saying all of these really nice things, trying to comfort me the only way she knows how, and I love just being on someone’s radar so much that I start kissing her neck and then her mouth. Our tongues touch, and she kisses me back for a fraction of a second—

Her mouth is so warm and wet and mint-y from the gum she’s chewin g and my heart’s pulsing spikes of adrenal ine throug h my veins, which is exciting and animali stic and primal, but maybe not quite what I was expecting, because I thought kissing Lauren would be like the epic kisses in Bogie films, like the string section would kick in and I’d get that swirling feeling Baback’s playing produces, and Lauren would pause to gaze at me and say,“I like that. I’d like more,” just like Bacall says—in that infamo us husky voice—to Bogie in THE BIG SLEEP, and when I kissed her glossy, battles hip-gray lips again, she’d say, “That’s even better,” but instead it’s just the hot sweaty rush of bodies mangli ng when they maybe should n’t be mangli ng—and she tries to push me away, but the rush forces me to hold onto her tight, even though I want to let go, even though I should really LET GO!, so she turns her face from my mouth and yells, “Stop” in this high-pitched squeal that is the comple te antithe sis of Bacall’ s warm, sexy brassy voice and when I keep kissing her cheek and ear, she smashe s my chin with the heel of her hand, jolting my brain back to reality and knocki ng off my Bogart hat in the process.

I stagger backward and then pick up my fedora.

The warm rush freezes into a heavy lump in my chest and suddenly I feel so so shitty—like I need to vomit.

“Is there a problem here?” says this subway rent-a-cop who has magically appeared. He has this dirt moustache that makes him seem about twelve years old. He’s hilarious-looking in his official uniform with the little silver badge. Almost cute. Like a kid wearing a Halloween costume.