“Nope,” Jack said. “She’s still as zealous as they come. The way she talks about God sometimes, and faith, it’s like she thinks He lives in the attic or something.” He shrugged. “Look, I might not be religious, but I don’t really have a problem with it. In fact, I think in moderation it might be a good thing. It teaches you values and all. My problem is when it’s taken to extremes, when it makes you choose between knowledge and myth. You know, Pita still takes everything in the Bible as the literal word of God. She doesn’t believe in evolution. She doesn’t believe in the Big Bang. The first time she mentioned the world was made in seven days, I thought she was joking. She was dead serious. I couldn’t get my head around it, and she couldn’t get her head around the fact I didn’t believe this too. We argued, but you can’t get through to her. Even when the proof is right in front of her she refuses to see it. I mean, if humans and other living things existed in their present state since the beginning of time, how do you explain the variety of dogs and horses and other animals we’ve created through selective breeding?” He shrugged. “The neurons that fire together wire together.”

“What do you mean?”

“The more you believe in something, the more that something becomes your reality. It’s probably why Pita’s so into ghosts. Part of it stems from her spirituality. But more, I think, stems from seeing her sister’s ghost, or thinking she did, at such a young age. She’s believed this for so long, that ghosts exist, she can’t change her beliefs. When her Yorkshire terrier died, she buried it in a pet cemetery in Vegas and packed its coffin with all sorts of things that it could use in its afterlife. I felt like we were back two thousand years in Ancient Egypt. And when her father died, she lit one of those candles for him at the bedroom window for a couple of months, every night.”

“That’s not so strange,” Elizaveta said. “Many people do that. Pay respect to dead.”

“Yeah, but Pita would actually sit there in front of it some nights. She said she was praying, but I’m pretty sure she was waiting for her father’s spirit to appear, like her sister’s supposedly did. Anyway, just a heads up. Don’t get sucked into a debate about the supernatural with her. You won’t win. You can’t.”

“I guess that’s why Jesus agreed so easy.”

Jack frowned. “Agreed to what?”

“We’re having séance, Jack.”

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