Some mornings, instead of taking the bus to school, she would ride in the opposite direction to downtown LA, hopping off at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels perched atop Bunker Hill. She felt comforted by the cathedral’s egalitarian, Southern Californian approach to worship—Catholicism with all its dark cavities filled in and sanded out, designed to welcome the stampeding population of twenty-first-century Los Angeles with its head-spinning diversity of casual footwear. It was light and airy, yet sturdy, a terracotta mesa with such clean lines that it came closer to a modern art museum than a place you went to contemplate your failings. The wooden benches for congregants even came with butt grooves. But Mira’s single favorite thing there wasn’t the enormous tapestry with its multi-ethnic kids in sneakers marching in solidarity behind Boniface and Mother Teresa, nor the chipper tablet in the mausoleum dedicated to “Beloved Dad” from his “Little Buckaroos.” Her favorite thing was the gift shop, which sold a dazzling array of knickknacks and keepsakes, from biblical-themed nail files to statuettes of US Marines with guardian angels looking over their shoulders, sized to sit atop TVs. It was there that she began her collection of sixty-five-cent prayer cards, purchased one at a time like ecumenical trading cards. The twenty she’d amassed were the pride of her shrine, glued to the inner walls of the shoebox like stained-glass panels. There was one of Lazarus, stray pups sniffing at his toes, another of some lady holding up a washcloth embossed with Jesus’s placid visage (“the Holy Face”), but her dearest was the one of a New World saint—Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks, a blessed virgin who, on the card at least, resembled Rosemary to a tee.

In the dark, Mira lit up a semicircle of tea lights. After placing the shoebox chapel behind the menagerie of deities, she opened her palms:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Rosemary pedaled hard. Two weeks with no practice left her winded as she rode up the hill. The body forgot things, got dumb. Every step became an education all over again. Even the seat felt bizarrely foreign, as if molded under someone else’s butt. She was a block from Mr. Z’s house when she realized it was Mira’s lousy old bike that she’d been riding. How could she not have noticed the spastic tassels sprouting from the handlebars? Why was it so freaking dark out tonight?