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“Oh,” I say. “Well, shit. Knight and Striker aren’t. Striker is fine, and Knight is happy being lazy. And Calix is always busy. So, I just figured I was the only one.”

“It’s like, it was too much all at once, but now it’s not enough. We were in constant danger, always on the run, and now… nothing.”

“Exactly,” I say. I tilt my head to one side. “You ever think about the questions that never got answered.”

“Like?”

“Like our alpha teeth, for instance? Why are ours different than others?”

“Right,” she says. “Kyvelki thought we were, you know, a prophecy or something.”

“How bored do you have to be to want a spearhead a revolution?” I say to her.

“What would that even be like?” she says. “It sounds dangerous, you know? And I’m really over danger, actually, for the rest of mylife.”

22

striker

I USED TObegin every day reading the scriptures in the morning. Sometimes, I’d work my way through stories in the Old Testament, and sometimes I’d read Psalms or Proverbs. Sometimes, I’d read the teachings of Jesus, and I’d always be struck—everytime—at what an inclusive person he was, how he was so, you know, good.

I don’t start again, not for months, after we’re safe and together.

It’s not because I don’t still believe in the bible, or because I don’t want to take comfort in scripture. It’s because I’m worried that I’ll start getting ideas for homilies.

And if I do, there’s nothing to do with those ideas, right?

I’m not a priest anymore, and I can never be a priest, even if the Catholic church decided to get real cool, real fast, with a whole bunch of things that are part of my reality right now. Some Catholics are okay with homosexuality, and I fuck men now and they fuck me. But polyamorous relationships? Not so much. And we’re not married. Basically, no Catholic is cool with people being in a relationship and fucking and notbeing married. And anyway, it doesn’t matter what’s okay for laypeople, I can’t, not as a priest. I’m supposed to be celibate.

So.

I don’t.

I just don’t open a bible for months.

Then, I do, once in a while, and I think I’m safe. I don’t get any ideas, I don’t feel inspired, and there’s no breath of God’s divine word coming through me.

Until one day, it starts.

At this point, to add insult to injury, Arrow is all, “I’m really bored,” and I try to talk him out of it, because I don’t want to be the guy who can’t be satisfied with my life. I say a lot of good stuff, about how we can focus on gratitude and how we can be thankful for what we have and how we can stop craving things we don’t have and…

I can never be a Catholic priest.

Which is kind of fine, though, right, because I was never the strictest of Catholics to begin with. But I liked that about Catholicism, the fact that you had that sort of freedom, freedom of interpretation, a freedom that never seemed present in Protestant traditions, all of whom seemed to split off over super trivial things, like whether or not baptism should be immersion or sprinkling or if God could manage to turn grape juice into his blood or if it had to be wine or—

Just.

None of that is important, in my opinion. It’s all details, and God is too big to be confined by details.

So, I slowly start coming to terms with the fact that being Catholic is a detail.

God’s bigger than the church. The church is an institution that’s been around for thousands of years, and I will always respect the church because of that. There’s something stately about being Catholic. There’s something about the weight ofthose centuries of tradition. There’s something powerful about it.

But God is bigger than that.

And the essence of God?

Can he use a lapsed priest who’s found he’s an alpha and who’s in a polyamorous bisexual relationship? Of course he can. What? Do I think there are limits to God?