In the autumn of 1971, a month into their sophomore year, Marcus Whitmore realized he was in love with Shauna Grey—Shauna, with her bundle of auburn hair and lips that lost none of their pucker when she smiled; Shauna, whom everyone else knew as the girl with the Bible; 

Shauna, with the unabashed stipulation that she introduce her date to her family before going out.

     It had taken several weeks for him to ask until one day at lunch, when she told him about the missionaries who had said they’d seen the devil. Marcus wanted to ask what he was like, but what came out was, “He look anything like me?” He tried not to cringe—she must have thought he was stupid—but after her face tensed up a bit, she laughed, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

     “You don’t have the tail or the pitchfork.”

     “Or the horns.” He crooked his fingers above his ears, feeling amazed at how un-stupid it was with her giggling on the step beside him.

     On the appointed evening, Marcus found himself waiting in the Greys’ living room, its longest wall entirely hidden with books: slim paperbacks, classics with Penguin covers, and several Bibles scattered among the volumes. Marcus pulled out one of the tiny books: The 

Runaway Bunny. Two white rabbits hunkered contentedly in a field of blue and green, and he felt a jolt of relief.

     When he’d begun freshman year, he thought he wanted to be popular. That probably meant having a girlfriend, someone who ran all over town on weekends and smoked pot and said fuck. After a year, he’d acknowledged that he had no desire to have to keep up with someone 

else. It was hard enough, with a father still fighting in Vietnam, to pretend to be cool. But the idea of dating a girl who was even further from the hot molten center of high school life, someone he wasn’t supposed to want, left an electric knot in the base of his stomach.

     His gaze gravitated toward Sunset in Cambodia, On the Streets of L.A., The Hmong. Anyone raised with so many tales of other places must find high school as confining as he did. After high school, he would leave Central Michigan, and when he was out—the word always 

made him think of being sprung from jail—he’d travel the country, studying philosophy and religion.

     One evening, over boxed mashed potatoes and canned green beans, his mother had asked about college. Marcus felt himself slide down in his seat without wanting to. “There’s a whole world to see. I want to do it before college.”

     “In that case,” his mother said, stabbing right through the potatoes and clanking the tines against the plate, “I hope you’ll consider seeing Canada first.”

* * *

     When Shauna came downstairs, she saw Marcus at the near end of the bookshelf, away from the platoon of red-backed books—The Desire of Ages, The Great Controversy—guarding the corner of the living room, their bindings like dried blood. If he picked one up, he would 

realize he could never take her to a movie or a Saturday afternoon football game. He would leave if she didn’t turn him around.

     “Marcus. You’re here.” She breathed again once he’d stepped away from the shelves. Guilt simmered in her stomach, almost making her say a silent apology, but she wasn’t being deceitful, just protective. Sometime she would tell him about Sabbath, about Sister White, about what it 

meant to have a prophet, even a deceased one, who had interpreted the Bible for you, but not now. Marcus was different from everyone else in the public school she’d entered when her father’s job had moved to Michigan, but Marcus had been there much longer than she had. It was a place filled with ugly writings on the bathroom walls and the smell of joints everywhere. Shauna was surprised she’d never seen Satan himself lurking by the lockers. So she would wait until telling Marcus felt safe.

     “I can’t keep a girl waiting.” Marcus’s smile pinched his cheeks, making his face flush. “Ready to go?”

     “Yeah, we don’t want to waste any of our evening.”

     She didn’t like to think about it, especially with Marcus here, but this world wouldn’t last long. At any moment, Jesus would return, taking His followers and annihilating the unrepentant, and this whole place would be engulfed in fire. And she’d been able to warn practically no one. She came home with insults and silence thrumming in her ears. Katelyn came home with friends, with presents of erasers and oranges, with construction-paper crowns for art projects, and Shauna could almost see the stars on Katelyn’s crown increasing while her own stayed blank. In Heaven, some crowns would have many stars, one for each person you led to the Lord, so many that your head could hardly hold it up, and some (hers) would have few.

     Her crown didn’t have to be blank anymore. Father had told her that Marcus’s bookishness meant he was discerning, someone who couldn’t fail to see the truth when it was presented to him. She knew he meant this was her chance to win a soul to Christ, which was 

what she should do—what she wanted to do!—but then she’d think about how a couple strands of Marcus’s hair would flop over his forehead, gently touching the space just above his eyebrow. 

                                                                                                              * * *
     A hand tugged the side of Marcus’s pant leg as he opened the front door. A girl with an arc of freckles across her nose held a book in her hand. “I’m Katelyn. Read me this?” 
     He wanted to leave. He was sure Shauna did, too. But why would Katelyn ask him to read to her now unless it was some kind of test? He let the little girl drag him to the sofa.

     A Jesus with upturned face and red Miss America-style sash glowed on the cover. “‘Look! He is coming,’” Marcus read.

     Katelyn’s hand cupped his. “Who is he?”

     There was a schoolish overlay to her voice, a teachable moment wrapped in a question. He remembered a suited man he’d met in front of Kroger’s a couple years back, a man who thrust his Bible at passersby as if it were an extension of his hand. Marcus saw himself running 

into Katelyn twenty years from now, answering the door and finding her holding a makeup kit or an encyclopedia.

     “That’s Jesus. He’s the one who makes you a good person. And he’s going to take you to heaven one day.”

     Her face scrunched up, lifting her eyebrows. “Are you sure you believe that?”

     “Of course.” Marcus felt like he’d become the salesman, and his stomach kicked with the smarminess he’d exuded. Then Katelyn’s expression loosened, she opened the book, and Marcus exhaled with the good fortune of having, apparently, passed. To his left, the couch sagged, and Shauna was sitting next to him, the slope of the cushions pressing her skirted thigh against his leg. He gripped the book so his fingers wouldn’t find Shauna’s fiery hair the way moths find light bulbs.

                                                                                                             * * *

     Mr. Whitmore was somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, Shauna had heard. She wouldn’t have asked Marcus about it even if they weren’t having dinner at his house. But what did he do all day over there, she thought as she mounted the porch steps, all those days piling atop one another like so many bodies, the stench of the open secrets drifting across the Pacific because there was not enough earth in which to bury them all?

     “Well, hello, Shauna, it’s nice to meet you,” Mrs. Whitmore said, just as Shauna pictured Mr. Whitmore’s hands dripping with blood.

     I’m sorry, she thought. It was quick and perfunctory, automatic at this point. Thinking of Mr. Whitmore like that was uncharitable, and the sorries had to be kept up with. She couldn’t afford a backlog with the Lord on the way at any moment. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Mrs. 

Whitmore.”

     On the dining room table squatted three plated sandwiches, their thick slices of cheddar and tomato poking out through the edges.

“Just some ham and cheese.” Mrs. Whitmore headed for the kitchen. “Nothing fancy, but I’m glad you could come. What can I get you to drink?”

     There was meat in the sandwiches. Meat, as Sister White had written many times, was 

unclean. Shauna would have to eat it or offend her hosts, and whichever she chose would be 

wrong. “Water, please.”

     Marcus’s hand touched the small of her back, and she flushed and sat in the chair he pulled out. Her head cleared, and the sandwich was back, just one giant slab of bread hiding 

     “Marcus’s father is in Vietnam,” Mrs. Whitmore said from the kitchen, “so it’s just the two of us, but he’d much rather be here, especially to meet a girl who’s caught Marcus’s eye.”
     Shauna felt her face heat up. “Oh.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say, which might have been rude. I’m sorry.

     “He’s up to corporal now,” Marcus said.

     “Which is nowhere near high enough to be making any decisions about what’s done over there,” Mrs. Whitmore said, “not that Brady wanted us to be there in the first place, but corporal’s something.”

     Shauna thought of what to say: “Does he get to come home at all?”

     “He’s on furlough once a year.” Mrs. Whitmore was still in the kitchen, where Shauna couldn’t read her face. “We watched the moon landing together. Did you see that? It’s amazing what goes on nowadays in the world—well, the universe, really.”

     Shauna had wanted to watch the moon landing, which she hated admitting, even to herself. Adventist families didn’t watch television, unless it was to keep an eye out for the end of days, but the moon landing didn’t qualify. She flushed again with the memory of what she’d wanted. She wished her wishes needed no policing, which was wrong. I’m sorry. 
     Mrs. Whitmore returned with three mugs of water, sliding one toward Shauna before sitting and biting into her unblessed food.

     “Would you mind if we say grace?” Shauna tried to stop what she knew was coming, but what if they thought she was rude? I’m sorry.

     Mrs. Whitmore covered her mouth and looked down. “Marcus, will you do us the honors?”

     His eyebrows jumped, but he rested his head on his folded hands. “Dear Lord, please bless the food and the hands that have prepared it. Amen.”

     These words, she could tell, rarely left his lips. Somehow (I’m sorry!) she liked him more for it. Lifting the breaded meat lump to her mouth, she bit down, trying not to taste the ham hiding right in the middle, but her tongue found its rough texture as it broke away in threaded pieces. She chased each bite with a confession.
 

                                                                                                       * * *

     The line for the women’s restroom in the ice cream parlor was short, but Marcus knew it took longer for girls. He had barely any idea why. He was used to not knowing things about girls that other guys flung around like extra change into a fountain— how to French kiss, how not to

get her pregnant—but he doubted he was supposed to know about bathrooms.

     Shauna’s face looked brighter when she returned, grinning and sliding into the booth. She looked right at him, something he rarely saw, and picked the dented spoon off the bare table.

     “So,” she said, her spoon probing the hot fudge sundae between them, “what have you been reading lately?” The curve of the spoon emerged dripping with chocolate and half-melted ice cream, but she leaned forward and got it into her mouth.

     “G.K. Chesterton.” He fumbled for his book before remembering he hadn’t brought it. “Orthodoxy.”

     “Chesterton is Orthodox?” Her tongue flicked out and caught a spot of whipped cream lingering on her upper lip.

     He felt his face warming—did he carry his books so frequently that even on a date he expected to have them?—before Shauna’s question surprised him. “Have you read anything of his?"

     She leaned even farther over the table, her spoon diving back under the surface. “I’m not familiar with many non-Adventist theologians.”

      So she was Adventist. He’d wondered what she was, but the answer was just as perplexing, and it might be a mistake to ask. He figured he shouldn’t make a big deal of it. “So who do you read, then? For theology?” After tonight, he would find whomever she named in the library and devour at least one book before next weekend. Shauna brought another bite to her lips, and he had a sudden impression of familiarity, of knowing her more closely than he could have anticipated, appreciating how she scooped up ice cream and theology with naked fervor.

     “Mostly Ellen White,” she said. “I suppose I’m not very well-read when it comes to religion, but my parents have all her books.”

     “She sounds really important.” He took a bite of ice cream to hide the shame he felt at his ignorance.

     “Very. Especially to my family. I have a couple books I’d like to lend you if you’re interested.” Her spoon hovered over the cherry top of the sundae.

     “I’d love that.” He really meant it. He’d have a book to return next weekend—a perfect segue into their next date.

    “Good.” She scooped up the cherry. “And if you have anything for me to read about your beliefs, I’d love to learn more.” Her lips wrapped around the spoon, and he imagined her tongue gliding under the gentle swoop of metal, testing the coldness.

                                                                                                             * * *

     It had been several months since Shauna last saw the devil. Usually he appeared when she was alone, in her room, when it was dark and shadows gave him plenty of cover. He’d often disappear as soon as she caught him loitering at the edge of her vision, but whenever the twisted 

horns rose from the darkened corner just past the nightstand, words abandoned her. Not even I’m sorry could make its way through her brain.

     And now he was here, at the AMF alley, just as Marcus’s fingers overlapped hers on the surface of a bowling ball. The devil was slouched in the corner, looking like a greaser with smoke clouds ringing his head and goat horns rising into the air. One foot pressed against the bottom of the wall, and his arms wrapped so tightly around him that he looked cold. She had never seen him in public.

     But Marcus was much closer than the devil in the corner. Her hand tingled at his touch; the feeling worked its way up her arm and into the rest of her body, into her chest and past her waist. She let go.

     “Whoa.” Marcus swung his free hand up before the ball could hit the floor. “This one too heavy?”

     “I think so.” 

     Bowling alleys were off-limits, she knew—in the eyes of her parents, of the church, of Sister White. They served alcohol; people smoked there. Yet here she was, with Marcus, who’d walked up as if to a store or restaurant or house, who’d held the door for her, whose hand had cupped hers a moment ago. And now, with Marcus only a foot away, the bowling alley was less important than what was happening between them. Eating ice cream together had felt comfortable; this felt exciting.

     “Try this one,” he said. She kept her hands steady as he gave her the ball without letting go. His thumb crept over to her pinkie, touching the middle joint, and then his hand slid over 

hers. The tingling returned, electrifying her spine, and she shivered.

     “Try the holes.” He slipped her fingers inside. “You got it?”

     “I’ve got it.” She sounded more confident than she’d thought she was. Marcus moved her free hand to the bottom of the ball, then let go. It stayed steady as he watched her face, not her grip, little gold flecks in his hazel eyes sparking.

     The devil watched her too, his cramped position unchanging, but she wasn’t sure it was him anymore. It was too dark, and he looked too much like a human being. But it reminded her she hadn’t said a single sorry since they’d come through the door. She’d never gone so long without one. She said one now—thinking of the last ten minutes, projecting an hour into the future, covering everything.

                                                                                                                        * * *

     Shauna hadn’t told Marcus the rest of the story, what Pastor Jeffers had said to the children’s Sabbath school after the missionaries had left: “You know what to do if you ever see the devil?”

     It was the first time she’d heard that question. She felt the pressure as if she were a stove burner cranked up to high, waiting for something to explode. She had gone ten years without considering the matter of a demonic visit. What if he had come before she was ready—a year ago, last week, just a day before now? Perhaps she should say, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” like Jesus had, but maybe it didn’t work if you weren’t God. Maybe if you saw the devil it was already too late.

     “You call on the Lord.” Pastor Jeffers transferred his weight to his heels, as if this settled the matter, as if Satan were an obedient dog being told to sit.

     “What do we say?” Shauna asked. “‘Get thee behind me, Satan’?”

     Pastor Jeffers’s eyes narrowed, the tiniest flicker. “Well, you can always say, ‘Jesus, help me.’ The prayer of a child—”

     “I’d punch his face,” Larry said. A circle of snickers bubbled up around him. Larry never had the right answers—nobody expected him to—but here was Pastor Jeffers, his mouth sneaking up into a grin. “Now, now,” he said, and Shauna knew what he meant: Boys would be boys, and a boy should have a fist cocked in case the devil was on the prowl.
 

                                                                                                                      * * *

     When they left the bowling alley and the hard coldness in the air practically demanded it, Marcus took Shauna’s hand in his. There was no excuse this time, no bowling ball to teach her to grasp, but Shauna wasn’t stopping him.

     “Next part’s up to you.” He watched her face. “We can catch a movie or hang out at my house, listen to music for a couple hours. My mom’s out for ladies’ poker night.”

     “Let’s go to your place. As long as it’s just you and me.” Her eyes shot wide open. “I mean—not that your mom’s a problem—I just thought it’d be nice to spend some time with just you, you know? I didn’t mean to sound rude.”

     “Doesn’t bother me,” he said, but it did, right below the elastic waistband of his boxers. Her fingers were warm in his, and he squeezed. When she looked up, her lips were pursed in a tiny smile that sent a jolt through his stomach. He could see past tonight, past the borrowing and 

returning of her book, into the next date and the next and the next.

     The sky was unclouded and punched through with stars, and Marcus’s arm slipped around Shauna’s waist. They passed the gas station. They passed Mrs. Anderson’s, the Garrisons’, Miss Davis’s. They passed Miranda Duncan on the sidewalk outside Marcus’s house: Hey, you two. Where you off to? Nowhere special. Yeah, me neither. See you at school?  Yep, see you Monday.
 

                                                                                                                    * * *

     Miranda Duncan would be the closest thing the police would have to a witness. She would end their brief interview by saying how Marcus had his hand on Shauna’s back, you know, kind of possessively, like he was steering her toward the house and she didn’t want to go, and she probably went only because the guys always called her a frigid bitch, and the girls did nothing to stop it, and maybe, you know, she thought going into an empty house—empty, he would know his mom was out—would be enough, and for Marcus it wasn’t, and ... you know.

     There wouldn’t be much the police could cull from the speculation, yet it would be the most solid account they would get. The mothers would vouch for their respective children. Mothers of other children would hug them tighter. The school would pick sides until it was torn asunder, which lasted only until graduation, when capped and gowned students, bound for the battlefield or the escape routes of college or Canada, talked of putting aside their differences, finding new identities, moving on. And the adults followed the newly not-children, saying Yes, saying What’s done is done, although what was done was all anybody knew.

                                                                                                                     * * *

     The house was dark when Marcus opened the door and ushered Shauna inside, and for a moment, she wondered if she should have come. A tiny seahorse glowed from the outlet by the armchair. Its spiny head tilted downward, giving it the demure look of someone about to confide 

a secret. It looked harmless, trustworthy.

     “Wanna see my room?” Marcus’s head was lowered like the seahorse’s, and Shauna nodded, dislodging the doubt from her mind.

     Still holding her hand, Marcus took her to a door with a lavender-shaded poster. Shauna’s heart thudded, and she looked away. It didn’t have to be secular if she didn’t see it. It felt like she was trying to deceive herself, and she supposed she should confess, but she shooed the apologies 

away. It was easier in a hall she hadn’t already filled with a thousand sorries. Marcus flicked on the light, and she stepped inside.

     The room was plastered in bright colors from floor to ceiling, the shiny posters of bands she’d never heard. Some faces leered at her; others regarded her coldly. Her chest clutched itself in a protective embrace, and she turned to the room’s furnishings. There were bookshelves full of 

softcovers with cracked spines, a desk whose lamp craned its angled neck like a schoolteacher, a matching dresser and nightstand. She looked away from the navy bedspread.

     A collection of items lay scattered over the top shelf of a shorter bookcase by her elbow: a trophy, several rocks, a jumble of key chains, a stack of LPs next to a record player. She couldn’t look at their titles.

     “What’s this?” She grasped the trophy.

     “Oh, that?” A note of sheepishness soured Marcus’s voice. “Just chess. Nothing special.” He took the trophy from her and set it back in its dust-free square. “Hey, why don’t you pick something out and put it on? I’m just gonna go to the bathroom.”

     He shut the door behind him, and with no one to see her, Shauna sat on the bed. It was soft, the kind of softness a mattress could get when it was old and sagged in the middle, and she lay down, feeling her heart pound, slow yet insistent.

     Nothing had gone wrong. The evening was fun, there were no warning signs, he was even going to read Sister White—but now it felt like her father’s thoughts, her mother’s wishes, and she wanted something that had nothing to do with red-backed books and stars in crowns. Maybe 

when Marcus came back in, after they’d listened to music and talked for a while, he’d try to kiss her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to stop him, even if she should. The entire world was on the other side of that door, and it was shut.

     She stood up—her heart was racing again, and she shouldn’t give Marcus the wrong idea—and went to the stack of LPs. She ticked her fingernail down through the covers, then back up, shutting her eyes and letting her finger catch on one of the albums.
     It was a tangled mess of dull reds and greens and blues intercut with sharp purple veins near the bottom. The colors solidified into a house, a tree, a man in a cloak. The words BLACK SABBATH lurked in the corner. It was a sign—of what, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t know until she heard the album, could she? She set the record on the turntable and slipped the needle into the groove.

     “My name is Lucifer,” she thought she heard. Her heart turned to ice. She couldn’t move. The words lodged in her chest and throbbed. She wanted it gone, this thing that had come from the record player into her very core. It ripped at her insides, hollowing her out.

     And then, standing right by the door, he was there.

     He was much closer and clearer than he’d ever been: bundled in black, horns spiraling higher than ever before. His long forehead sloped down from its widow’s peak to his ridged eyebrows, just like the missionaries said they’d seen.

     And what did Pastor Jeffers say to do? She couldn’t remember. It was gone, the memory leached into the carpet. And now he was here, he was really here, a chuckle shaking up from his mouth and into his eyes. He must know by now she’d lost the script, hadn’t memorized it or the verses that could save her—or Marcus. She tried to call to him, but her voice wouldn’t come—and her breath stopped when she realized she was trying to call the wrong person, that Jesus might not even hear her now.

     “What did you expect?” The devil’s voice was a rattlesnake just before it strikes. Shauna’s feet felt stuck in the carpet. Her fingers wrapped around Marcus’s chess trophy.

     And there was Marcus, coming through the door, breezing right past the devil himself. Marcus didn’t see him. His album had invited the wicked one into his home, and he didn’t even know he was here, smirking behind him. She tried to pray—a plea for help or forgiveness—but nothing came. Jesus might burst from the clouds and wipe out any more time she’d have for sorries, but her mind was clogged, with the record and the devil and Marcus. They were both smiling, Marcus and the devil, both with the left corner of their mouths pinched in, and Shauna didn’t know who was copying whom.

     She had been deceived. Her vision wavered. The room was almost gone—darkening, descending, deepening into a pit of guitars and laughter, a deep chuckle emanating from the corner and bursting over her in waves, shaking out of the devil himself and through Marcus and flooding her ears.

     The devil was right behind him, grasping his shoulders and widening his jaws. She felt the weight of the trophy in her hand just before it rose above them. It slammed into the source of the cackle—once, twice, more than she could count. The laughter changed, gasped, moaned, fell 

silent. The trophy sank, then thumped to the floor. The room brightened and cleared.

     Marcus lay face down, his hands extended above his mussed hair. A dark pool edged its way out from under his head. The devil was gone.

     I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, she thought. The seconds could not contain enough confessions to sweep the blood back into Marcus’s skull, to stop him from buying the record in the first place, to keep the devil out of him.

     Blood coated the base of the trophy, its sharp corners. It was on her shirt, a fine mist of red. It grew thicker around her middle, thicker again on her skirt. It covered her hands. She let the trophy fall to the jungle of shag carpeting, the thud pushing her eardrums like the shout of a 

     Nothing Marcus had done mattered. She had played the song. She had hoisted the trophy. She had called up the devil.

     She turned from Marcus, dropped to her knees, and vomited. Later she would take the Greyhound into Detroit and sneak into Ontario. She would walk and hitchhike her way to Chatham-Kent, where a graying thirty-something woman was looking for an extra waitress. She would move to Toronto when Chatham-Kent seemed too small to permit strangers with unknown stories.

     Now, with the streetlight shining into Marcus’s room through the crack between the curtains, she went to the record player. She expected the needle to be heavy, a weight almost impossible to bear, but it was light in her practiced fingers as it came out of the groove. Her hand 

lingered on the arm of the record player, not wanting to admit how easy it had been.

 

                                                                                                               * * *

     Jill Whitmore looked down at a seven of clubs and a three of diamonds. She would fold and wait for the next hand. It was what people often had to do, whether here or on the other side of the ocean: wait for the next hand.

     She hoped that right now, eight thousand miles away, Brady was shifting between sleeping and waking. It was how she liked thinking of him while he was away, neither giving nor taking gunfire, far from napalm and horror and death. Sleep ensconced him in innocence. It brought him a bit closer to home by making him as carefree as Marcus—Marcus, who loved books and thinking and planning his travels. Someday he’d be in Los Angeles; someday he’d be in Seattle. Maybe someday he’d be an astronaut, one of those men with nothing but manufactured umbilical cords keeping them from drifting off into nothing. He’d have his own oceans and continents to cross, the cord stretching tight and threatening to snap. But for now, the cord filled her hands, its weighty coils relaxed, curling into a spring that wouldn’t launch him just yet.