They paused and sang “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Ben thought about God. Hymns like this didn’t do anything to convince Ben of God’s reality, but he loved them anyway. Even if so much of his life had been spent getting the plain cheese at Park Ave. Pizza in the strip near their house, or driving by the sound barriers and sumac along I-84, or at Strawberries looking at CDs, or at TJ Maxx with his mom looking for dress shoes, these hymns seemed to arise from where his real life should have been spent, in the forest or collecting blackberries near the red tobacco barns, and he recognized the rightness of these hymns in a way that made him resent having to experience the tawdry, good-enough things of the 1990s. The hymns felt sewed into the clothes of his personhood, their texture not only the best-feeling on his skin but also emphasizing the plastic fibers of Blockbuster and A Current Affair and Milli Vanilli against his neck. He sang this hymn, quietly yes, but with a pang in his chest.

As Aston went on, the candleglow seemed to induce prayer hypnosis, but Ben hadn’t ever really known what people meant when they said “to pray.” It seemed like sitting in the lap of the grandest imaginable shopping-mall Santa, asking for things.

Ben looked up and imagined the workmen carving all this wood, setting all the glass, hanging the massive doors, moving the bricks from the truck. That work seemed real. It seemed real for a kid his age to lift bricks into a wheelbarrow.

The prayers and the hymns blurred, the light like warm snow. One of the Chapel Wardens approached Aston with a lit taper, and Aston held his candle wick above the flame, then turned and lit the candles of three students and the nearest faculty member. The flame was passed from one to another, and slowly the light spread until it came to Ben, and soon all the candles were lit, a meniscus of light swelling up into the deep space. Ben thought he heard Aston making some metaphor about spreading light. Aston asked them to stand and line up together to walk out, oldest students first. He asked third-formers to remain. He made more comments about discovery and self-discovery.