If you look at it one way, she said, what we’re exploring now with the group sort of combines both of my worlds. The scientific and the spiritual. Not that you want to call it that, I know.

As a group, we mostly avoided speaking about spiritual matters, as it was clear we were all coming at things with very different frames of reference. One afternoon, a week after the prom party, Nora mentioned how she felt God was communicating with her through The Hum.

I don’t mean like I’m Teresa of Ávila or anything, she said, with a self-conscious laugh.

Saint Nora! Shawn proclaimed.

I mean in the way He communicates with us all the time, she continued. Through sunlight, through the wind, through the smile of a stranger. I really do feel this.

Damian nodded, and said he felt the same way. I know this is something holy, he said, surveying the group as if challenging us to suggest otherwise. Howard said he thought it was important that we treat The Hum as a phenomenon to be explored, and not to try to fit it into our own preexisting belief systems.

But of course we’re going to try to, Nora countered. That’s like when some Christians tell me not to fit evolution into my belief system. Well I’m sorry, you don’t get to choose what you put in, and what you don’t.

Howard pointed out that this was, in fact, the exact opposite scenario. It’s not religion saying disregard science, he said, it’s saying let’s not turn this science, or whatever it is, into religion.

Well as someone with faith, everything is God’s doing, Nora said.

Usually I stayed quiet whenever the conversation veered in that direction. My feeling was: let people make of this what they will, as long as they don’t begin to circumscribe my ability to do the same. So it’s science for some, and divine for others. And industrial white noise for yet others. Whatever it was, it still kept me up at night. My migraines persisted, as did the nosebleeds, though much less frequently. That hadn’t deterred me, though, from welcoming the mystery of The Hum into my life. I had chosen to be the one in control of this new condition, this new awareness, and I wanted to understand it fully. Because if I was not in possession of it, then it was in possession of me.