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events in my mind. “Yeah, about that.”
    “Runnin’ over me probably slowed you down just enough to make the difference between concussion and coffin.”
    I didn’t say anything. Dust sifted through the beam of the flashlight in front of M’s face.
    “Do you believe in God?” M asked.
    “Of course,” I answered automatically.
    “All the time?”
    “Of course.” I looked at M a little closer. “Don’t you?”
    “Yeah.” M looked away and shone the flashlight to the floor, away from his face. The shadows turned upside down. “But not all the time.”
    “Why not?”
    M turned off the flashlight. The alcove plunged into darkness. We sat in silence. Eventually my eyes adjusted to the thin illumination that penetrated the grimy dormer window from the streetlight. M’s face was a black moon in a blacker night, eyes lost in shadow.
    “Sometimes, there is no God.”
    I squinted in the dark, trying to see his eyes. He turned his head away from me and his eyes came out of shadow, shining. He looked out of the window into the night. I said nothing.
    “Sometimes you pray for somethin’, somethin’ good, but it never happens. Sometimes you pray for somethin’ bad to quit, but it don’t.”
    I said nothing. I rarely bothered God with my problems. Of course I prayed before meals, at least when Mom and Dad were around. And at church. Just the regulation stuff. I had heard of desperate people pleading with God, but I had never done so, probably because I had never been desperate. What did I have to be desperate about? I was only ten years old, for crying out loud!
    M kept his gaze riveted to the window. “But today I saved your life. That should count for somethin’.” He looked back at me, his eyes veiled in shadow again. “You owe me one. Or maybe God owes me one. Maybe there is some special thing for you to do, and I kept you alive so you can do it.”
    This whole thing sounded too hypothetical for me. “Or maybe you just happened to be there. Does it have to be some big reason? Maybe it’s just for no reason. Maybe it just is.”
    M sat still for a long time. “You said you believed in God. All the time.” With fierce deliberation he breathed, “There is a reason.” He switched the light back on and shined it directly in my face. I squinted at him and shielded my eyes with my hand. M turned and walked down the stairs, leaving me in the darkness.
    A long time later, I followed.

CHAPTER FIVE That Christmas something happened that changed my life. I got an AM radio. It was a battery-operated portable, not very big for a milestone, only about the size of a deck of cards. Still, it was an opaque window into another world that didn’t have much in common with mine.
    Each night, when I was forced to quit reading, I would tune in to WLS AM 890 out of Chicago and put the radio under my pillow. I fell asleep to the world-according-to-pop music in all its eclectic glory—from quirky, weird songs like “Auntie Grezelda” to production masterpieces like “Good Vibrations.” I drove my parents crazy by making them turn up the radio whenever Tommy James and the Shondells came on singing “Hanky Panky.” Heidi, Hannah, and I sang along without a clue as to what the song was about.
    Sometimes strange, disturbing images of another world trickled through in lyrics to songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “White Rabbit” —images I didn’t understand, but were all the more fascinating to me because of their elusiveness.
    One weekend we drove down to Kentucky to visit some friends. I was staring out the window as we passed through Cincinnati, looking at all the tall, narrow houses lined up like pastel dominoes waiting for a perverse giant to push the first one. In the downtown traffic we inched past a park. A group of teenagers were hanging around a fountain. They all had long hair, even the guys, and were dressed like they were headed to some kind of psychotic costume party: tie-dyed shirts,