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seat right now and look at me! They never had.
    But Didi
was
looking at him, openly marveling. The world is round, he'd said. The earth moves around the sun!
    "What is it like?" she asked.
    "It's like being a hypocrite. Everybody treats you like you're a little god, when inside you know you're just ..." He shrugged.
    "Like everybody else."
    He took this in. All he'd wanted was that she wouldn't laugh. She wasn't laughing. "That isn't quite the feeling," he said. "I have some kind of calling, I mean for something special, but just not necessarily the Church."
    "If it's something special, it has to be the Church." She said this so simply. It was an absolute truth of their kind. An absolute cul-de-sac. "I thought about being a nun."
    "You did?"
    "But only as a way to get out of Charlestown. How's that for a noble motive? Talk about unworthy! The religious life is the only way a girl like me gets out of here. The Medical Mission Sisters was what I thought about."
    "But you—"
    She leaned into him. "I decided the Town, with my dippy brother and his friends—no offense—was better than a leper colony in Borneo."
    Terry laughed.
    "Of course what I got, since it
is
my dippy brother and his friends, is a leper colony in the Town."
    And then
she
began to laugh. They both did, at the joke of their impossible situation. Born to be special, but born here. They laughed and laughed. In a few minutes they would not know what had been so funny.
    Finally Terry stood up, and then Didi followed. He said, "Anyway ... now you know my problem."
    "You've got two problems—God and your mother."
    "Guess which one is worse."
    "So just go home and tell her."
    Didi seemed so practical all of a sudden, as if she thought nothing of telling the truth to her mother.
    "And then what? I graduate next month. If I don't go in the seminary ..." His voice trailed off, and once more he lifted his eyes to the city in the distance.
    "You do what the rest of us do. You get a job. Maybe you get a girlfriend."
    "But what about that other feeling, of being called to something else? I think ..." He faced her, feeling rushed now. What had he said? What had he done? When she brought her eyes right back into his, he felt the bolt of his strength again, what he'd needed before. He said, "I think I'd want to go to college. I mean, maybe I would just postpone the seminary, you know what I mean?"
    "That's what you'd say to her?"
    "No. It could be true."
    "Postpone, Terry? What? Giving your life to a God you don't feel worthy of? You don't want to be a priest any more than I want to be a nun. You just want out."
    "I'm not saying that, not yet."
    "Wait a minute, bud. Are you nervous because I said 'girlfriend'?"
    "No. No, that's—"
    "I wasn't talking about me, you stupid shit."
    "Neither was I, Didi."
    She stepped back, feigning incredulity. "You're in high school, Charlie! Do I look like a cradle robber?" She kept backing up, now pointing at him while cupping her mouth with her other hand.
    Terry felt dizzy with confusion. Offending her was the last thing he'd meant to do.
    "Do I look like a church robber?" Didi threw her head back and laughed. Her hair caught the feverish light of sunset and seemed afire for an instant. She made a cackling sound, then turned and minced away, twirling an imaginary cane, her head cocking from side to side. The perfection of her Charlie Chaplin showed him, somehow, the depth of her wound.
    ***
    That night Squire and Terry were lying in their beds against opposite walls of the small room with the slanted ceiling. It had been their room forever.
    "Nick, you awake?"
    Terry was rigid, his hands under his head. He'd been trying to make out the seam in the ceiling where the inclined plane met the horizontal one.
    "Nick?"
    What is this called? he wondered, thinking of the shape of the room. Trapezoid cube? It reminded him of questions on the College Boards. He wondered if he could use the results of the test he'd taken to get into the seminary. Not