Was he okay to drive? Nobody asked, the presumption being that half the drivers would be feeling the effects and half wouldn’t—and at this juncture no one could tell the difference. He climbed into his car along with Ken and the four students whose trips the two of them would be responsible for monitoring and though Ken didn’t say anything about any subject other than baseball the whole way over, Fitz could see that he too was one of the lucky ones. As for the students, he’d forgotten their names the minute he’d been introduced to them, and they all seemed to look alike too, but for the one in the middle of the backseat whose eyes were like black sinkholes and who seemed strung together with wire, everything tightened to the breaking point, even the navy-blue tie he wore like a noose. Okay. Here we go. The car knew the way, the drug subsided and rose again in a roil of foaming waves, Ken talked of nothing but Yastrzemski and the students, clutching their Bibles, never said a word.

For evident reasons, Walter had arranged for their group to be separated from the Good Friday churchgoers, who would be seated in the main chapel in the presence of Reverend Thurman, while they would have the smaller basement chapel to themselves, the sermon to be piped down through the loudspeakers in the corners of the room. They arrived in a convoy of six cars and parked in the spaces reserved for them. Fitz pulled up to the curb with a blast of exhaust and shut down the engine, his shoulders squeezed between the door and the student who’d sat up front with him and Ken. “Well, here we are,” he said, stating the obvious.

In the next moment the doors gaped open and the students climbed out, squinting against the sunlight, while up and down the line, the guides clapped on their dark glasses. He had to smile: this was called experience and if Professor Kellard were here he would have told him as much. What do we gain from experiments? Knowledge. What’s the opposite of innocence? Experience. Simplest thing in the world, Professor. Meanwhile, they were out in the full blast of the sun and everyone’s shadow stood upright as they milled around, trying to gather themselves, and the congregation—all those women in bonnets and pearls, the men in their dark suits and the children polished like apples—climbed the steps to the main chapel and the air grew fulsome with the downward drift of perfume.