“I think they had it coming, too,” I told him.

“I’ll be more careful, Adam—maybe there doesn’t need to be a next time,” the little English teacher said.

“I thought we had a system in place—a way to keep you safe,” I said. “You’re easy to recognize, you know—as a man or as a woman. There’s no adult as small as you, Elliot—no one I’ve seen, not around here,” I told him.

“I’ll be more careful—I promise,” Mr. Barlow said. “I had to get your mom’s coat dry-cleaned,” he told me. “It smelled like fish!” We were both laughing when we heard the knock on the door to the dormitory hall; in the context of the moment, the knock made us jump.

“You look okay,” I quickly told him.

The snowshoer sighed. “I know,” he said, disheartened. It was only then I realized how much he hated looking like a man.

I opened the door and admitted Matthew Zimmermann, who was not a resident of Amen Hall. Zimmer looked a little disturbed about something, as usual. He had a note in his hand. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. He’d taken it off the notebook on our door to the dormitory hall. “You must have a Holy Roller in the dorm—a genuine Bible-thumper,” Zim said.

In rather elegant or old-fashioned handwriting, all the note said was “Deuteronomy 22:5.”

“The Bible-thumpers are obnoxious with the shit they hold up at football games,” Zimmer was saying. “They always sit in the end-zone seats, where the TV cameras can find them—John 3:16 is a big one with those end-zone Christians,” Zim told us.

“Everyone has seen that one—I’ve looked it up,” the snowshoer said. He gave a cursory look at the Deuteronomy note, which I’d handed to him. “John 3:16 is, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’—you know, that one,” Mr. Barlow said, handing the note back to me.

“What’s the Deuteronomy say?” I asked the little English teacher.

“God knows—we’ll have to look it up,” Mr. Barlow said, smiling. “It’ll be something worse,” he told us. “The Gospel according to John is Jesus—Jesus says mostly nice things. But Deuteronomy is Moses—Moses is harsh. Moses is full of ‘you shall not’ this and ‘you shall not’ that. Moses lays down the law in an uptight, Old Testament way,” the snowshoer said.

“I’ve been worrying about something,” Zimmermann blurted out, in his 110-pound way.

“Oh, boy—there’s lately been a lot of worrying going around, Zim,” Mr. Barlow said.