He walked straight past the holy water as he entered the church on Easter Sunday, reluctantly following his mom and younger sister into ma**. An hour later, he led the family charge out of church, a vessel of emotion currently filled with annoyance and pent up aggression. Still, he didn't want to start a fight with his mom. She wouldn't understand anyway.
***
It stirred in him. As he looked deep into his reflected eyes at the age of four, he could feel it in there. But it felt disconnected. How could he look at his own soul and not see himself in the reflection? It felt alien and he briefly considered whether or not he was an alien before turning off the faucet and drying his hands on the fraying red hand towel.
***
He was glad his older sister had made it home for Easter. She was so good at distracting their parents. The longer the focus stayed off him, the easier it was for him to hold it together. Not only was Nikki great at talking to their parents, she was also the best at keeping secrets.
Nikki had told him over Christmas that she'd become a huge pothead in college. Even he was shocked to learn this. When he was helping her move, she'd disclosed to him that she had become something of an alcoholic as well. He, nor his parents, had seen her take a sip of beer in their lives. Yet Nikki never gave any of this away in the way she talked or in her mannerisms. But that was Nikki, his complete opposite. She could talk to anyone about anything while he could hardly talk to his own roommate for long before feeling the need to escape. His parents knew Nikki without knowing these vital things about her; they knew every detail about whom he hung out with and what they did and what he said in cla** the other day, but they still didn't know him at all.
“What did you think about the homily this morning?” Nikki asked their dad. “It was short and sweet, as it should be. Everyone gets the point of Easter, the priest can put whatever spin he wants on it, but the truth behind it is always the same.”
He felt it rising up. He was going to say something. He knew he shouldn't. It would only upset his parents, but he was still so angry about this morning.
***
“I want to go to a Catholic college,” he wrote in his application essay, “because in my opinion, God is understanding. He must realize that the majority of people only believe what they have been taught by their parents or by their society and so how can an understanding God punish someone for believing in something blindly? It wouldn't be fair to throw someone in Hell because they can't know for sure if what they've believed in their entire life, or part of it, at least, is true. So, I think an understanding God would allow them to go to whatever kind of afterlife they were expecting. If a person believes in reincarnation, then that person will be justly reborn. A Christian will be judged then sent to Heaven or Hell. An atheist will not have anything at all. And an agnostic, well, I'm not sure what God would do with them.
“I don't want to grow too far from the Church. I want to surround myself with it so it can pull me back in.”
***
Mom teared up in the middle of Outback Steakhouse.