“Did Mary ever die?” Ayanna asked. “Did Jesus bring her back to life?”

“I don’t think so. But he once brought back a friend.”

Ayanna nodded. She went and got another doughnut, this time with sprinkles, and ignored the way her mom raised her eyebrows at a two-doughnut morning.

The adults around them were talking through complaints that ranged from work to neighbors to broken furnaces to whether there was a too-cool clique in a third-grade class that needed to be dealt with to aging parents who refused to stop driving. All the adults, even Ayanna’s mom, were sallow in the fluorescents. A harmony of discontentment that felt hard to ignore, but somehow the adults could do it, maybe even embraced it. Some of the teenagers still seemed alive, laughing, and at one point pretended to crush milk pints on their foreheads. A lot of the moms were following their kids around and saying their names plus no over and over again, even to kids Ayanna was sure were older than her. It was too stimulating. For a while, she looked over the shoulder of a kid playing a video game, feeling calmer and more relaxed from watching him try to escape what looked like an especially dirty haunted house with three characters of indeterminate ages while a large man with a chainsaw chased them. So many khakis and polo shirts or blue slacks with brown shoes or beige sweaters with black pants that it felt like maybe there was a secret message or a pattern happening that she couldn’t make sense of. Maybe it was because no one here had to ever worry about getting mud or blood or rain on them, because here everything was in order.

When she went home that afternoon, Ayanna asked her dad to drive her to the door. They sat together in the early summer heat, didn’t mind their shorts were getting dirty, and watched it. Her dad was writing notes in his small, blobby script. Ayanna hoped to hear the voice again, to figure out what it needed. She wanted the door to open and wanted to hear a voice sing her name. For the first time in her life while looking at it, she didn’t want to obey the rule about waiting until she was seventeen. Ayanna longed to walk through it, to feel the dark grass brushing against her legs, to see the mountains grow ever closer. She wanted to touch the golden rocks, push past the edge of knowledge and peer out unto the exquisite unknown.

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