“It was okay,” Ruth said, in that way she once had about most everything. She could take it or leave it, her tone seemed to imply, but Marianne thought what she was really saying was that she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to like. Marianne had been that way herself, as a teenager, and for many years she’d seen the process of becoming an adult as about replacing that uncertainty with strong, unyielding opinions. About music. About politics. About books. About art. In that way she was not so different from her sister.

Marianne did not believe in God and had suspected that He did not exist as soon as she noticed how much other people insisted on His existence. In high school Ruth had become one of those people, attending a Baptist church three times a week and eventually dating and becoming engaged to the youth minister there. Their father, a community college philosophy professor who liked conflict on paper but not in real life, insisted that it was a phase, provoked by postponed grief. He’d rebuffed Marianne’s offers to come home, to get involved, and she hadn’t pushed it. “You know how she is,” he’d said.

“That’s the problem with people like you, you don’t believe in anything,” Ruth later claimed, full of certainty, when Marianne tried to talk her out of teenage marriage while their father despaired in his study. “Not God. Not God’s love. Not even love.”

Ruth was wrong to say that Marianne didn’t believe in anything. She believed in things you could see or prove. She believed in science, believed in abortions, believed in the miracle of stem cells. She believed in population control and drug legalization, gun control and public transportation. She believed in generous arts grants and taxes for the rich. She thought everyone should be an organ donor and should have no say in the matter. She thought cats and dogs should be spayed and neutered, and that no one should have children before the age of thirty. She believed in climate change and the electric car, in NPR and PBS, in free speech and online privacy and free lunch and Medicaid. She believed in gay marriage and no marriage. She had no business starting a school for people equally passionate about their own opposing opinions, people who clearly believed in God. Her father said as much, when she told him she was moving to Florida to start an inspirational writing ranch for evangelical Christians.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” was actually what he said.

But at least she was doing something: participating in this world, instead of letting it run over her or leave her behind. Bending it to her needs instead of the opposite.